The Performance Improvement Blog

Year in Review in Learning - 2018

As I usually do at this time of year, I’ve selected five blog posts from the past year that seem to have had the most interest from readers. With the publication of my new book, Minds at Work: Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy, I have continued to focus my blog posts on a manager’s role in supporting continuous learning for all employees in the workplace. And I have examined an employee’s responsibility for continuous learning in the Knowledge Economy. But I have also been influenced by current events and what a hostile work environment does to individuals, teams, and organizations. Here are the five blog posts I've selected with a short selection from each.

1) This Is What I Believe About Learning in Organizations

I wrote:

The Purpose of Business is Learning

Yes, the purpose of business is to make a profit, retain customers, be sustainable, satisfy shareholders, and, for some, make a difference in the community. But none of this is possible without learning. At its core, any high performing organization is about learning; continually using new information to become smarter, better, and more effective.

This post was selected by Jane Hart for her 30 Favorite Blog Posts and Articles of 2018. She published the list in her magazine, Modern Workplace Learning Magazine, under the title, “Jane Hart’s Pick of the Year”.

2) This Is What I Believe About Learning in Organizations

eLearningLearning featured another part of this post. eLearningLearning wrote: …let's revisit @sjgill's fascinating dive into the realities of modern #corporatetraining, and the essential nature of a #learningculture.

I wrote:

Work is No Longer Work. The nature of work is changing. This world is one in which humans no longer make things or fix things or sell things or provide basic services. Work has become mind-intensive instead of hand-intensive.

3) Learning in a Managing Minds Company

This post was selected for the “2018 eLearning Learning MVP Awards”. The post is a selection from our new book, Minds at Work. We wrote:

Learning independently. In a company that manages minds, people need to take responsibility for learning what they need to know and do. This means that they need to be aware of what they’re doing now and what they may be called upon to do in the future. They need to know what is relevant for them to learn and be empowered to learn what is necessary today and in preparation for tomorrow. They need to understand that what they learn will help the company meet its business goals. They must be able to develop and maintain their own learning plans and portfolios, and be prepared to act as teachers and mentors for other people in the company. Independent learners are capable of successfully meeting the requirements of learning projects they choose, whether it’s completion and a passing grade, measures of competency, or an actual project deliverable.

 

 

 

4) Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy – The Podcast

Listen to my conversation with David Grebow and Andi Simon as we explore changes in work, management, and learning. In the podcast, David says:

For the first time in history, in the last 50 years, most people have been using their minds to produce work. We no longer need to manage hands; we have no choice but to restructure our organizations and change our approach to management and learning to reflect this historic change. In this mind-intensive knowledge economy, we must learn to manage minds to get the smartest, most creative, and most innovative results.

Podcast: Stephen_Gill_and_David_Grebow_-_Edited (1)

 

5) Short Course on Evaluation of Training and Learning in Knowledge Economy

I was asked by LAD Global, in partnership with the Singapore Training and Development Association, to make a short course on evaluation of training and learning available online, for free. This blog post announces the course and provides the links.

I explain the purpose of the course:

My emphasis in this course is on using measurement and evaluation for learning. Much of evaluation in organizations today is still focused on formal training programs and limited to Kirkpatrick’s “level one”. In other words, L&D professionals are using “smile sheets” that measure immediate reaction to classroom instruction, collected at the end of training. Of course, we all are curious about what participants think of our programs and us as trainers. Great to know for marketing purposes…But this information is not particularly helpful to the organization.

This Is What I Believe About Learning in Organizations

Work is No Longer Work 

The nature of work is changing. This world is one in which humans no longer make things or fix things or sell things or provide basic services. Work has become mind-intensive instead of hand-intensive. People are no longer being judged on the basis of how hard they work or how much they produce. Work is no longer about simply doing a job; it’s about becoming adapting to new jobs, new technology, new ways of
working with others, and anticipating the unanticipated. Automation, robotics, and AI are eliminating tasks that had been mundane, routine, monotonous, and, in some cases, dangerous. Now tasks done by humans are being enhanced by the Internet, providing the collective knowledge of the world at their fingertips. This is a future in which workers are smarter, more agile, and more innovative. The skilled worker today wants a different kind of experience. People realize they need interpersonal skills, creativity, reasoning, and empathy. As globalization increases and communities become more diverse, the competitive advantage of any organization will be its collective knowledge and its expanded expertise. In the past, people tolerated poor work conditions and didn’t expect much from their leaders, but now people want to be treated fairly and respected for their contributions. People want meaningfulness and joyful workplaces.  For all of these reasons, the fundamental nature of work is being transformed. 

 

The Purpose of Business is Learning

Yes, the purpose of business is to make a profit, retain customers, be sustainable, satisfy shareholders, and, for some, make a difference in the community. But none of this is possible without learning. At its core, any high performing organization is about learning; continually using new information to become smarter, better, and more effective. Every industry is faced with disruption, whether it is aviation, health care, manufacturing, mobility, hospitality, retail, education, philanthropy, etc. To survive and thrive today, industries need innovation which is essentially about learning. Innovation is how to use products and services in new ways that rapidly respond to changing market demands and create new products and services. Companies must learn more deeply about their customers and markets. They must learn how to build an organization that becomes increasingly effective in achieving its goals, learn how to use new technology to improve efficiency and safety, and learn how to compete with every new technological and competitive threat. Whether learning how to operate a machine, learning how to make decisions in a team, learning how to function more effectively as an organization, the organization must learn continuously to adapt for success.

 

Training Is Not Learning

Training is not and never has been enough. Organizations waste billions of dollars per year on training. Data indicates that less than 20% of participants apply learning from formal training programs. Unfortunately, companies continue to spend most of their employee development budget and most of their time and effort on training programs and systems tracking training activities. Companies continue to emphasize training with little payoff while these programs are more costly and less effective than other kinds of learning interventions. We know that people learn most from their co-workers and from on-the-job experience, yet we invest the most in formal, training programs. Consider the alternatives: just-in-time e-learning (desktop and mobile), coaching, mentoring, simulations, on-demand video, and experiential-learning. And in some situations people might learn best from the workflow, through action-learning conversations, through self-directed experiences, or from apprentice and internship assignments. Traditional, formal training programs are often almost never the best solution to a performance deficit.

 

Manager’s Role is People

The biggest barrier to learning in organizations are the beliefs and attitudes of managers and leaders. If they have a fixed mindset, people are not likely to learn. And if they are not invested in people succeeding, if they worry that they will be “found out”, if they come to work in fear, then managers will prevent other people from learning. Managers are the catalysts and gatekeepers to learning, so if they don’t open that gate, employees will not have access to knowledge. To be effective gatekeepers, managers MUST set expectations for learning, show people how to learn, provide opportunities for learning in the workplace, structure opportunities for application of learning, and communicate feedback for improvement. Managers are key to employee engagement and retention. Managers must be committed to developing people and, in particular, growing future leaders. Managers must learn how to learn and help employees learn how to learn. Learning is always about managers creating an environment of openness and trust among relationships. The most important role of a manager (and leader) is the learning and development of its employees.

 

It’s the Culture

Learning is not the result of a program; it is ingrained in the culture of an organization. A learning culture is expressed in the assumptions, values, environment, and behaviors of the organization. To learn, people must have a growth mindset. Learning must be valued and advocated throughout the organization. Learning must be reflected in the routines and rituals of employees. The physical setting must create an environment that supports learning. Asking questions, giving feedback, and encouraging debate and alternate viewpoints, must be the routine activity of the organization. This is even more powerful when its leaders and managers ask questions, listen deeply, and follow-up with action. Sharing successes and failures are done openly and without disapproval. Employees tell stories to draw lessons and learn from their experiences. Action-learning is essentially part of how people do their work. Managers encourage their direct reports to acquire new knowledge and skills and apply that learning throughout the organization. They advocate for collaboration in teams that promote psychological safety. The work environment is one of respect and trust and transparency. People do not feel harassed, teased, and bullied. They are not ignored and marginalized.  Importantly, people are deeply listened to each other. Feedback is considered an opportunity to develop and grow; an occasion for learning. A learning culture is all of this and more. An organization that is creating and maintaining a learning culture, is truly ready to compete in the world today!

Photo by Brxxto on Unsplash

Sexism and Harassment Are Rampant in the Workplace

BRUSSELS — For the first time, a Belgian criminal court has convicted a man of “sexism in the public space,” for verbally abusing a female police officer who tried to question him after he was seen jaywalking.

The New York Times article goes on to explain Belgium’s definition of “sexism” :

Sexism, according to the law, is defined as “every gesture or deed” that is “clearly meant to express contempt of a person based on sex,” or considers a person inferior based on sex, or reduces a person solely to a sexual dimension, and which “gravely affects the dignity of that person as a result.” Violation of the law can lead to a prison sentence of up to one year and a fine of up to €10,000.

Can you imagine if that law was applied to U.S. workplaces. I’m afraid our prisons would be filled to capacity with sexist male managers and our courts would be rolling in fines. It’s my experience that sexism, as defined by Belgian law, is rampant in companies across America.

But don’t take my word for it. The Kapor Center for Social Impact, with the help of Harris Poll, surveyed people who had left jobs in the tech industry. They found that a workplace that tolerated sexual harassment, bullying, stereotyping, microaggressions, and other types of discriminatory behavior, contributed significantly to people leaving these companies. This was particularly true for men and women of color. They found that:

78% of employees reported experiencing some form of unfair behavior or treatment; Women from all backgrounds experienced/observed significantly more unfairness than men and unfairness was more pronounced in tech companies than non-tech companies.

CareerBuilder and The Harris Poll conducted a survey in which 12 percent of all workers (not only tech) reported sexual harassment in the workplace. Given that the percentage of people who actually report these incidents is quite low (28% according to this survey) and that “sexual harassment” is only one form of inappropriate and intimidating behavior, we can assume that the actual number of incidents of these kinds of behaviors is much higher.

The Kapor Center makes the case that discriminatory behavior in the workplace is costly for companies. The Kapor Center estimates that a culture of unfairness and mistreatment costs the tech industry 16 billion dollars per year. That’s just employee turnover costs. They argue that reputational costs should be considered, also. Once the word spreads that a company has a hostile work environment, it is harder to recruit new employees and that reputation affects business partners and customers.No doubt! The Weinstein Company, once a leader in Hollywood movie production, is now apparently in financial free fall, all starting with the revelation of allegations that suggest a culture within the company that tolerated sexual harassment, bullying, and worse.

However, we should also keep in mind that even in workplaces of low turnover, a hostile environment is just plain wrong. Everybody deserves respect. Nobody should come to work fearful. As Rich Sheridan, author of Joy, Inc., says,

...if fear is systematically removed, then people start to feel safe around each other and their leaders. Trust begins to form, and collaboration emerges and finally teamwork. True teamwork, not just an org chart with tee shirts. People gain productivity and quality through collaboration. Then innovation, imagination, invention and creativity emerge. 

The incidents and high profile firings that make the news, are not one-offs. As we can see from the research, discrimination, especially towards women and people of color, can be found in most companies and in every industry. All companies need to take a look in the mirror and take stock of the policies, activities, and manager behavior that could be contributing to a hostile workplace.

Search for the Agile Learner

Modern organizations need agile learners. Given the pace of change due to technology, globalization, workforce diversity, and hyper-competition, people need to continually acquire and apply new knowledge, skills, and values at a rate unheard of in previous eras. As we explain in our new book, Minds at Work: Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy, simple and routine jobs are being replaced by automation and robots. Even more complex tasks are beginning to be done my artificial intelligence (AI). Soon all workers will need to be smarter and more adaptable than ever. The most successful employees will be those who embrace the change and seek out learning when, where, and how they learn best. In other words, they must be agile learners.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, at least three definitions of learning agility are being used in the field. Each is worth considering. One has to do with openness to experience, another has to do with adaptability to change, and a third has to do with the range of methods one uses to acquire new information and abilities.

In Learning About Learning Agility, a white paper from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Center for Creative Leadership, the authors argue that agile learners are life-long learners. They write that agile learners…

…show the willingness and ability to learn throughout their careers, if not their entire lives…Learning-agile individuals seek opportunities for growth and are able to process these opportunities in order to learn. They are open to new experiences, seek challenges, and are willing to introduce new ideas and question “norms”. Moreover, they are able to remain present in challenging situations, performing and adapting “on the fly”. Finally, learning-agile individuals understand that experience alone does not guarantee learning; they take time to reflect, seeking to understand why things happen, in addition to what happened.

The authors make the point that we usually judge people based on what they have done and what they already know when another, maybe better indicator of success is how well they learn. This is a profound observation because it flies in the face of standard recruiting and selection practices. Do we throw out the resume and observe how people behave in novel situations instead?

Vicki Swisher, with Korn Ferry International, in a webcast says that organizations with learning-agile leaders succeed more than other organizations. These leaders adapt their leadership style and actions to the changing internal and external environments of their organizations. Agility, according to Swisher is about having the flexibility to change given the circumstances.

This kind of learning agility is most needed when leaders are under pressure to respond quickly and decisively. We know that when people are under stress they become less mindful, their perception of options becomes restricted, and they often make the most expedient and safest, rather than best, choice. Agile leaders are able to step back from these pressure situations, engage with others in a way that helps them see the range of possibilities, and make choices that are best for the organization.

Elliott Masie suggests a third definition of learning agility. This is the ability of people to find the information they need when they need it, to use a wide range of methods of learning (technology, social, practice, etc.), and turn that information into the knowledge and skills they need to be effective in the situation. Being an agile learner by this definition means being able to sift through all of the sources of information that we have at our fingertips (literally), evaluate what is useful and what is not, and apply that information to solving problems and improving performance of self, teams, and our organizations.

Year In Review - 2017

As I usually do at this time of year, I’ve selected five blog posts from the past year that seem to have had the most interest from readers. With the publication of my new book, Minds at Work: Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy, I have continued to focus my blog posts on a manager’s role in supporting continuous learning for all employees in the workplace. And I have examined an employee’s responsibility for continuous learning in the Knowledge Economy. But I have also been influenced by current events and what a hostile work environment does to individuals, teams, and organizations. Here are the five blog posts I've selected with a short piece from each:

The Future of Learning is Not Training – January 25, 2017

The future is no longer about looking for continuity with the past and choosing shinier versions of existing technologies and trends. Sometimes there needs to be a disruptive idea that lights up the crystal ball and makes us look at the future in a new way. We believe that future starts with a simple prediction: We will transition training and learning from a managing hands world to one in which we are managing minds. And managers will be at the center.

Becoming a Learning Culture: Competing in an Age of Disruption – February 17, 2017

The only thing holding companies back from learning at the speed of change is their organizational culture which, for many, is a barrier to learning. Most companies have a training culture, not a learning culture. This emphasis on formal training is a barrier to learning and change. In a training culture, responsibility for employee learning resides with instructors and training managers. In that kind of culture, trainers (under the direction of a CLO) drive learning…Whereas in a learning culture, responsibility for learning resides with each employee, each team, and each manager. In that kind of culture, employees, with the help of their managers, seek out the knowledge and skills they need, when and where that knowledge and those skills are needed.

Hire Learners for the Knowledge Economy – July 6, 2017

Companies today need learners. In the Agricultural Economy, a strong back was enough. In the Industrial Economy, a set of good hands was enough. But in the Knowledge Economy, companies need people who can develop their minds…The Knowledge Economy needs people who are self-directed learners, who know how to get the information and skills they need when and where they need them, who can think critically in terms of evaluating the accuracy and usefulness of this information, and who can learn from both successes and failures.

Closing the Skills Gap by Improving Corporate Culture – July 20, 2017

Why would people want to work in an organization and do their best in an organization where they are not respected, where they are not trusted, where they do not have an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills for which they thought they were hired, where there is little opportunity to learn and grow, where the performance goals are not clear, where they are chastised for trying something new when it doesn’t work out, where they are discouraged from collaborating with people in other units of the company, where they receive feedback only once a year at a perfunctory performance review meeting, and where pay and benefits are awarded unfairly?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Sexual Harassment Has No Place in the Knowledge Economy – October 27, 2017

Creating and maintaining a harassment-free work culture is not easy given that the default behavior in most organizations is to marginalize and exclude women from power and from the central decision-making processes of the business. Requiring employees to complete a course in diversity does little to change that culture. Leaders (men and women) must model respectful behavior throughout each day, coach people in this behavior on a continuous basis, and discipline people who choose to be disrespectful. Managing for success in the modern workplace means creating and maintaining an environment of inclusion, collaboration, cooperation, and, most of all, mutual respect.

Training Isn't the Answer

Every day, it seems, another high profile case of sexual harassment comes to light. And then there are the many workplace complaints of sexual harassment that are no less harmful to women but, perpetrated by mid-level managers, don’t get the same attention as the one’s involving celebrities and CEOs. The experience of women working in Ford Motor factories, as reported by Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn in The New York Times, makes us aware that a hostile workplace is not unusual and can be created by managers at all levels of an organization. Clearly, sexual harassment and a hostile work environment are a pervasive problem.

However, the answer to eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace and creating a climate supportive of all employees regardless of gender, race, age, background, etc. is not more training. Most companies have been offering training since the 1990s, primarily in order to manage their risk of liability. A ruling by the Supreme Court in 1998 lent support to the widely held belief that offering training to educate employees about sexual harassment and providing a grievance procedure would shield companies from liability.

Training alone will not and cannot create a fearless work environment nor can training prevent sexual harassment. First of all, formal training programs have never had much impact on behavior in the workplace. On average, less than 20% of participants in training programs apply learning back on the job. There are many reasons for this, such as: poor training; lack of preparation for training; unreasonable expectations; forgetting content; lack of support from managers; lack of opportunity to apply new knowledge and skills in the short term; and little or no support from the CEO.

Secondly, even if the individual learner has changed in some significant way during training, the workplace culture is still the same. A hostile work environment with a long history of demeaning talk, threatening actions, and violence toward women will undermine learning from even the most outstanding training program. If people attend the training without a clear understanding of how the information relates to their jobs and they have low expectations, a manager that doesn’t care, no opportunity to apply what they know, and no accountability for their behavior and improving the work environment, then we can’t expect them to change.

Without getting into all of the psychological and social reasons why men behave badly, let’s just say that companies need to create a culture of respect and dignity for every single human being in the workplace. This is not only the right thing to do (that should be enough reason) but it’s also essential for business success.

Employees in the past, industrial economy only knew command-and-control leadership. They were expected to do what they were told and discouraged from thinking. These organizations were all about control and power and loyalty. Those values at the top of the hierarchy get translated into managers and co-workers exerting power over the most vulnerable employees throughout the pyramid.

In the current, knowledge economy, this kind of management no longer works. Given the rapid change due to technology, globalization, diversity in the workforce, and hyper-competition, people have to be continually learning, collaborating with others, working in teams, and being creative and innovative. Nobody can do this in a hostile work environment. If you come to work every day fearful of how you will be treated and simply trying to endure, you will not be able to contribute to creating the kind of company that will survive and thrive in the 21rst Century. Employees deserve better!

Managers Need Empathy in the Digital Age

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. -George Bernard Shaw                                   

Early in my career, as a university professor, I was responsible for training and developing counselors for work in schools, colleges, and community agencies. An essential competency that we helped counselors develop was communicating empathy to a client. Not easy to do but absolutely necessary for helping another person learn how to achieve self-awareness and make the personal decisions that will improve their lives.

I’m pleased to see that empathy is being recognized as a vital manager competency in the workplace. One might think that in this age of automation and robots, that the quality of human interaction and mutual understanding are becoming less important. Actually, the opposite is true. With much of the routine work being done by machines, people are being freed up to do knowledge work which requires more and higher quality interpersonal interaction than ever. Norbert Schwieters and Bob Moritz write that the tenth principle for leading the next industrial revolution is “Put Humanity Before Machines.”

David Grebow and I have called this the historical shift from “managing hands” to “managing minds.” The manager’s job today is less about producing things and more about developing people so that they can collaborate with others to apply creativity and innovation to the fast pace of technological change, globalization, and a diverse and multi-generational workforce. And in order to facilitate development of people with this capacity, managers need to help people learn, and this requires empathy.

Empathy is not an easy competency to learn. Let’s look at a definition:

…the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the "heart" of another.

This ability is often characterized as walking in another person’s shoes. In the workplace, empathy is when a manager or co-worker communicates this deep level of understanding to another person so that the person feels like he or she is being understood, that somebody cares about her, that she is not alone, and that the she has the level of self-understanding needed to make good decisions.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is communicating how we would feel if we were in that person’s situation. When we make statements such as, “I know what you mean. I know how you feel. I had the same thing happen to me and this is what I did,” we are expressing sympathy, not empathy. Humans are generally pretty good at sympathy.

Empathy is another matter. Empathy means suspending the judgmental conversation we all constantly have with ourselves in our heads (“To really listen, you must first be silent.”), listening intently to the meaning and feelings behind the words (and nonverbal cues) that someone is saying or writing, and then communicating what is being heard back to that person for further clarification and validation. This is a quality of interpersonal exchange unlike anything that is typical of normal conversation. It’s the difference between advocacy and inquiry.

Empathy can be learned. First of all, you must believe in the ability of people to learn and grow from reflecting on their own experiences. Then you must listen deeply to the other person and ask yourself, “What does he really mean by what he is saying? How does he truly feel about his situation? Is he confident or scared, happy or sad, engaged or detached? What can I say that will help us check out if I’m hearing him accurately?

So when people talk about the need for more empathy in companies, they need to be aware of the challenge. People can learn to be more empathic, but it takes coaching and practice, as with any skill that is worth learning.

Wanted: Collaboration; Communication; and Teamwork

The ability to collaborate, communicate, and work effectively in teams are some of the competencies most in demand by employers today. However, companies are not preparing people adequately for these
mutually cooperative functions. Susan Adams writes this in Forbes:

Can you work well on a team, make decisions and solve problems? Those are the skills employers most want when they are deciding which new college graduates to hire. The next-most-important skill: ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization. Employers also want new hires to have technical knowledge related to the job, but that’s not nearly as important as good teamwork, decision-making and communication skills, and the ability to plan and prioritize work.

Sodexo’s 2017 Global Workplace Trends Report summarizes research that points to collaboration and teamwork as critical to the workplace today. The report explains the critical importance of organizations having agility and that the key to agility is having common goals and working in teams to achieve those goals. The authors write:

An agile mindset embraced by management fosters adoption throughout an organization; once adopted, agility yields benefits both inside and outside. To get there, businesses can set their sights on three principal characteristics:

1. A common orientation toward organizational goals
2. An emphasis on teamwork
3. A principle of adaptive performance

The Sodexo report points out that teamwork has been important for a long time but that now employees across organizations and across generations must be committed to collaborating for the purpose of flexibility, adaptability, and speed, characteristics of any successful, 21rst Century organization.

In the Knowledge Economy, cross-functional teamwork is how work gets done. It's no longer about managing hands, as was the case in the Industrial Economy; today it's about managing minds. That means helping people become more competent, capable, and engaged in contributing to the success of the organization. It’s about maximizing the collective intelligence of people which is why work is done in teams more now than ever.

Workplaces are being designed to facilitate collaboration and teamwork. Open spaces, flexible work areas, and smart offices are all contributing to a culture that supports work in teams as needed. This is quite a change from the Industrial Economy standard of private offices for executives and cubicles for everyone else.

However, even with this awareness that much of the work that needs to be done today needs to be done in teams, we don’t do a very good job of preparing people for this role. Pulling people out of the workplace for training in teamwork, is not the best way to learn about collaboration and teamwork in our fast-paced world. Part of the problem is the way leaders think about learning in organizations. As Elizabeth Doty writes in strategy+business:

"...leaders tend to think of learning too narrowly — equating it with training, mentoring, or “constructive feedback” during performance reviews. But all of these are inputs that may or may not correlate with the results we want to create...If you want to accelerate learning on your team, first engage them in a meaningful challenge, then design a feedback system that enables them to learn naturally, every day."

The Economist warns us about the downside to collaboration. When it is not done well, attempts at collaboration can eat up precious time trying to connect with others and meetings can be a waste of time. True! But this is why people need help developing their collaboration and communication skills, so that they minimize unproductive communication and maximize productive collaboration and teamwork.

Training departments can explain the need and lay the groundwork for good communication, collaboration, and teamwork skills, but it is up to managers to help employees hone these abilities in the context of the workplace. Managers need to create ways (with the help of learning professionals) of developing good collaboration and teamwork in their work groups. These are learnable abilities that require a continuous process of feedback and reflection.

Being Human in an Automated Workplace

Agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, cooperation, communication, teamwork, risk-taking, networking, compassion, empathy, inclusiveness, knowing how to learn…these are the abilities needed by people in the automated workplace. The operational abilities sought after in the previous economy are no longer high on the list.

According to McKinsey, “…as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be
automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.” This portends a future where people must take on a different role than they had in the Industrial Economy. No longer will people be needed to make things, operate things, fix things, or move things.

A McKinsey Global Institute Report says:

Recent developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have put us on the cusp of a new automation age. Robots and computers can not only perform a range of routine physical work activities better and more cheaply than humans, but they are also increasingly capable of accomplishing activities that include cognitive capabilities once considered too difficult to automate successfully, such as making tacit judgments, sensing emotion, or even driving. Automation will change the daily work activities of everyone, from miners and landscapers to commercial bankers, fashion designers, welders, and CEOs.

However, that doesn’t mean that humans are out of a job. It’s what David Grebow and I have called the shift from “hands” to “minds”. The emphasis is on being smart rather than how well you do a specific job. Workers in the digital workplace need to continuously learn, helping their organizations adjust to the dramatic changes brought on by technology, globalization, multi-generational workforce, and, according to Tom Friedman, climate change and population growth. Workers need to use their collective intelligence to design innovative solutions to the challenges of the day and the future.

The kind of work people need to do requires much more human to human interaction. Success depends on strong interpersonal relationships. Claire Cain Miller, in an article for The New York Times, writes:

The problem, at least for now, is not that there isn’t enough work — there is, but it is very different from the kind of work technology is displacing. Manufacturing and warehousing jobs are shrinking, while jobs that provide services (health care, child care, elder care, education, food) are growing. 

Being creative and innovative, which can’t be automated (so far), are essential to stave off competition. Competition can come from anywhere on the globe and at any time. Nobody is safe. From manufacturing to health care to education, every organization has competitors that can do better at speed and cost. Companies will have to compete on creativity and the customer experience. Take Tesla, for example. Although competing with historic brands, this rapidly growing auto company has found a niche among people who want an electric vehicle and high status.

Also needed is the human-robot interaction to ensure that we are doing the right things for the right reasons and in the right way. It will be easy to make everything faster, cheaper, and higher quality. But is that what we should be doing? What is the environmental and social impact of the business? Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should. We need humans to ask these questions. We can’t rely on robots for the questions or the answers.

Email: Lost in Translation

Lost in the so-called "Email Scandal" surrounding Hillary Clinton's campaign for President is the fact that email is a terrible way to communicate anything other than names, dates, and times (just the facts!). Anything else can be easily misinterpreted. 

Farhad Manjoo addresses this problem with regard to the apparent hacking of Clinton campaign email and the taken-out-of-context message from Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign's communication director. In a New York Times column, Manjoo writes: 

...there’s something even more pernicious than weak security here. The deeper problem with email is that it has never quite settled on a social mode. An email can be as formal as a legal letter or as tossed off as drive-by insult. This invites confusion. For instance, in context, Ms. Palmieri’s “Take the money!!” doesn’t sound so bad — it looks like a quick, half-cheeky way to end an overlong discussion. If it were said on a phone call or an instant message, “Take the money” would have sounded like an entirely normal way to end the conversation.

In 2008, one of my blog posts addressed this email problem in business communication. I wrote:

Email appears to be replacing the telephone and even meetings (heaven forbid!) as the primary mode of communication, especially in global companies. This is causing miscommunication to be the norm rather than the exception. Non-verbal behavior is an essential element of face-to-face communication, but, obviously, totally absent in email communication. In her blog post “Why Email Humor Falls Flat (and What to Do About it), Jessica Stillman cited research reported in an article in Psychology Today that found that sarcasm and humor were communicated in email messages only about half the time. She concluded:

Email strips us of the smiles, widened eyes and posture signals that help us convey our meaning and mood, while leaving intact our conviction that we’re being perfectly clear.

One commenter to the blog post wrote:

As a manger of several extremely competent senior professionals on a virtual global team where email is the main mode of GTD, I spend more time managing the impact of email misunderstandings than any other single thing.

When email is the only mode of communication between two people, the danger of miscommunication is even more serious. In research conducted by Janice Nadler at Northwestern University, email negotiations between law students were much more likely to end in agreement when the negotiations were preceded by a getting-to-know-you telephone conversation. Without voice contact much is lost in building rapport, without which there is a tendency to make negative assumptions about what is in or not in email messages.

I find that even simple comments in email can be interpreted in many different ways by the receiver. Take for example the statement, “I think you handled that well.” The sender knows exactly what he means. You, on the other hand, can understand this in different ways depending on which word you put the accent and what meaning you attribute to that accent. If you put the emphasis on “I”, you might say to yourself that he thinks I handled the situation well but nobody else thinks so. If you put the emphasis on “think”, you might say to yourself that he’s not sure if I handled it well. If you put the emphasis on “you”, you might say to yourself that I handled it well but nobody else handled it well. If you put the emphasis on handled, you might think that he thinks I manipulated the situation for personal gain. If you put the emphasis on “that”, it might be interpreted as sarcasm. And if you put the emphasis on “well”, you might wonder if “well” is good enough. In face-to-face and phone communication you hear the word emphasis and tone of the statement.

This might sound like an extreme over-analysis of a short, innocuous sentence, but in the hurried, stressful environment of a workplace, this is the kind of instantaneous interpretation that occurs. And in a global environment, language and culture increase the likelihood of this kind of interpretation leading to miscommunication with possibly dire consequences.

The use of email as the principal mode of communication in business, government, and politics has increased since I wrote that post six years ago.  At the same time, hacking and Freedom of Information Act requests in the U.S. have exposed more and more private email to public scrutiny. I can only surmise that many people are being misunderstood and unfairly maligned because of this still popular way to send messages.