MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Thanks for the vote!

MindLeaders is a finalist for a 2009 “Best of Elearning!” Award and we’re just so excited about it. Of course, part of the thrill is that the Best of Elearning awards are the only reader’s choice awards in the market. That makes the honor extra special to us. We appreciate all those readers who took the time to nominate us, and are so happy that we have had a positive impact on your learning experience. Thanks for the vote! (And keep taking those courses!)

As long as I have you here, we’d like to know what topics you’d like to hear more about. We want to make sure this blog (and any other content) we create is addressing your interests. So don’t be shy! Leave a comment and let us know what topics you’d like to hear more about. You could even point us to posts from the last year that you’ve found to be particularly helpful. We appreciate the feedback!

Leadership Mastery Demands Experience

Leadership development programs utilize many different tools to help build future leaders. Everything from courses to workshops to books can help the beginner begin to establish some level of competence. The trick is moving from competence to mastery. In this month’s issue of Leadership Excellence Kim Lamoureux argues leadership mastery is only attained through experience. Thus companies who wish to create a team of exceptional leaders will establish ways to accelerate learning experiences.

Creating experiential learning opportunities for leaders isn’t a quick and easy solution. (And throwing a new leader into the role with a “sink or swim” attitude isn’t what we’re talking about.) Lamoureux suggests three methods for incorporating learning experiences into your leadership development program.

1. Simulations – Lamoureux’s examples center on in-person simulations where a team role plays different situations. However, online simulations and decision trees can provide this element as well. As usual, a blended approach will likely yield the best results.
2. Job Rotation – Many companies choose the best and brightest for their rotation programs. Rotating members through different jobs provides quick experience and a broad base of knowledge to draw on when making business decisions. It also allows management to see the relative strengths and weaknesses of participants and choose roles that fit them well for permanent placements.
3. Action Learning – Action learning uses small teams to work on and solve business problems. I see this as more of a leadership practice approach. A bit more involved than a couple hour role play simulation but not as long-term as a two year job rotation. The team is assigned a business problem project and then leaders are evaluated on ability to perform under pressure, define recommendations, deliver solutions, and how well the team functioned as a group.

I particularly like the action learning approach. Maybe it’s because I worked in project management for so long, but projects are good crucibles for molding talent. Projects allow for fixed-deadlines and show how well people behave themselves when under pressure to deliver results. It also gives people a framework to work within that they are familiar with while trying to learn new skills.

While these three methods are great suggestions, I’m sure there are other effective techniques to give young leaders some good learning experiences. What other experience-based activities have you seen in leadership development? Were they effective?

The Golden Rule of Training

Is the recession over? It may be too early to say, but there are some signs of recovery. Unfortunately employment isn’t one of those things. Employment recovery lags since employers don’t want to add headcount prematurely. But even in this atmosphere there are some interesting trends that everyone should pay attention to. An annual study from Robert Half International and CareerBuilder.com found that:

• Over half of employers polled planned to hire full-time employees in the next year. About 4 in 10 will hire contract workers, project workers, or part-time employees.
• 4 in 10 employers expect the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to create jobs for their organizations over the next couple of years.
• 6 in 10 employers are willing to negotiate with qualified candidates for higher compensation.

The last finding is perhaps the most surprising, since you’d expect employers to be less willing to negotiate with an abundant labor pool. The problem with the abundant labor pool is that there is still a shortage of skilled workers. Employers who participated in the study reported that over 40 percent of the resumes they receive are from unqualified candidates.

This is good news for qualified candidates and a mixed bag for employers. Employers who take care of their employees, provide fair compensation, and adequate opportunities for development will differentiate themselves from those who don’t. There’s also a warning shot for organizations that are cutting benefits and piling on the work with the attitude that employees “should be happy to have a job.”

• More than half of polled employees plan to make a career change or go back to school when the economy improves.
• A Monster.com poll found that 89 percent of employees would consider switching jobs.

The current labor market may lull managers into thinking that their actions don’t matter since immediate impact isn’t felt in turnover and retention numbers. But employees will remember how they were treated during this tough time and actions now will either ignite the desire to leave or retain talent. And guess who will hit the door first? That’s right. It’s the high performers.

The Golden Rule still applies. Treat others fairly and with respect. And for employers there is also a Golden Rule of Training. Give employees opportunities to grow and they’ll perform better and stick around longer. That same study showed that 20 percent of employees hoped for better benefits as a retention tool. At the top of the wishlist? Tuition reimbursement or subsidized training.

Be Smart with Your Human Capital Management Practices

Aberdeen Group has released a research report called Intelligent Human Capital Management: Workforce Analytics Drive Profit and Performance. First let’s state the obvious. Despite the recession, the importance of Human Capital Management (HCM) is increasing. But while more and more companies are aware of the importance of HCM, they also realize that not all HCM practices are created equally.

To get the best bang for the buck, you must have metrics. And as we all know, it is very difficult to get everything in place to make data-driven decisions when it comes to people and their performance levels. However, it is something that best-in-class companies do, and do well. Other best-in-class practices include:

·     Integrating HR, talent management, and other organizational data to see future and current needs (break down those information silos).

·     Training leaders on how to use analytics and reporting systems.

·     Creating standardized HCM metrics (what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done).

·     Making reports available down to the line manager level (don’t keep that information at the top of the organizational chart).

·     Improving processes so that data is accurate and timely (and available for decision making).

Bottom line: Good HCM requires collaboration between many different areas of the organization – HR, IT, line managers and strategic leaders. Unless your organization fosters collaboration between these groups, uses a system that everyone is trained on, and implements appropriate workforce metrics HCM is unlikely to give the performance gains that it could.

What do you think? Is there enough collaboration between HR, IT, and management in your organization to foster strong HCM practices?

Separate your social media updates by audience

We're in the awkward teenage phase of social media and putting information about ourselves online. Everything feels new, and people are terrified and flummoxed by the idea of becoming searchable.

• "You mean that if a future team member Googles me they might find my latest recipes?"
• "How can these college kids put party pictures of themselves online? What will happen when they look for a job later?"

In our office, there's a fun video on YouTube of our chief accountant boogying at his daughter's wedding reception. (I'll be kind and won't share the name or link.) It hasn't hurt his ability to crunch the numbers one bit. Coworkers get a kick out of it and like him better for it.

In ten years (maybe even five), our worries are going to seem silly. Everyone will be able to Google up a photo or two of their boss, coworker, and client in their swimwear or with a drink in their hand. The lines are blurring between work life and the rest of our lives: we're all going to be considered whole people, and it won't hurt our professional credibility. Before long, the people who have no personal lives online will be the strange ones. ("What's she hiding?")

Until then, just like any kind of socializing at work, common sense must prevail, and while we're in these awkward teenage years we have to deal with them. By all means, get out there online and get involved with the social networks. Online information is here to stay, and we'll only learn how to use it well by trying it out. Each of these sites has a different audience, and the best plan right now is to remember that things you share should be geared for each site's listeners. Here's what I mean on some of the most common social networks out there:

Site	Audience	Content
LinkedIn	Public (mostly). Google-able. Business and professional connections of all types.	LinkedIn is the place where you put on your best business clothes - it's designed that way and wants to stay that way. No option here for photos and videos (except for your profile picture - and you should use that!). This site's purpose and the content you'll put on it is pretty cut and dried.
Twitter	Public. Google-able. Industry and areas-of-interest leaders. Anyone you want to listen to, and those who want to listen to you.	Twitter is all about who you listen to. Think about that as you tweet: go for high impact content that says something about who you are and what you're involved in. Twitter is kind of like a cocktail reception at a networking event - you won't have much time to talk, and everything you say, whether small talk or deep insight, will make a fleeting impression.
YouTube, Flickr, etc.	Public, Google-able. The whole world is watching and searching.	Have a ball here, but remember that everything you post is public. Personally, I share lots of travel and animal photography, but I don't put up family photos or videos. Not for fear of my professional credibility, but just to protect my family's privacy. (Which I'm sure will also be outmoded someday, but I'm willing to be a pioneer myself, not for my family.)
Facebook	Walled garden, and this is the key difference! In Facebook, you have tight control over your privacy settings. Only your approved friends, family, and contacts will see what you post. You can have even more precise control by assigning your Facebook friends into groups and then determining what each group can see.	Go wild. Post those embarrassing videos and photos: falling on your face in a kick line, mooning your arch-rival sports team, your high school prom fashion faux pas. Keep in mind that anything that gets committed to the Internet could someday find its way into the wild, so I don't recommend doing anything completely irretrievable, but this is where you can let those crazy awkward teenage experiments run rampant.

That's the system I currently use when I have a new status update or tidbit of information in my hands and I'm deciding where I want to share it. What do you do? Any other social networks you think should be on this list?

The Irish Learning Alliance and MindLeaders at the CLO Symposium

How many of you out there knew that MindLeaders is an Irish owned company? I see a few of you raising your hands out there, but for the rest of you indeed we are! Two years ago we were acquired by the Irish elearning company ThirdForce (www.thirdforce.com) and this relationship has allowed us to be more innovative in our thinking and practices.

One highly positive addition that we get now that we are Irish is to be part of the Irish Learning Alliance (http://www.irishlearningalliance.net/) a consortium of companies that are on the forefront of innovation and technology in the learning space. MindLeaders is a proud member under our parent company ThirdForce.

Recently MindLeaders Director of Marketing, Philip Payne (me) represented as an ILA member at the Chief Learning Officer Symposium held at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs (tough job but someone had to do it). The ILA gave an energizing presentation of where the research is headed and how companies can utilize our findings and engage with the consortium. If anyone would like a copy of the presentation or to learn more, just email me at ppayne@mindleaders.com.

 

• Left: Me
• Middle: Sharon Claffey-Kaliouby - Enterprise Ireland Senior Vice-President of Learning
• Right: Jonny Parkes – Chairman, Irish Learning Alliance
• (not in photo) Glenn Kenny, VP of Business Development, Interactive Services (www.interactiveservices.com)

Manufacturers Need Talent Management Too

When you hear about the need for talent management, manufacturing isn’t typically the first industry that springs to mind. Yet a new study commissioned by Deloitte, The Manufacturing Institute and Oracle highlights the need for new talent management strategies within the manufacturing sector. The study was conducted in May 2009 and an article at ReliablePlant.com summarizes some key findings, including:

• The most profitable manufacturers rank employing a top-notch workforce high on the priority list.
• Many companies still rely on traditional tactics when managing and developing employees, though these tactics may not be as effective as newer methods.
• Nearly 1/3 of companies reported a moderate to serious shortage of skilled workers, even in a recession.
• Talent management practices must be embraced by all levels of the organization to be truly effective.
• Moving talent management from an HR focus to the lines of business enabled a greater ability to align individual efforts with business objectives.
• Effective talent management led to improvements in employee contribution, satisfaction and retention.

Now more than ever, manufacturing (and other sectors) can differentiate and improve performance by adopting effective talent management companies. They are tough to copy and they lead to greater employee engagement and higher performance levels.

 

The report, People & Profitability – A Time for Change is available for download at http://www.deloitte.com/us/peoplemanagementpractices.

Field notes from the HR Technology '09 Conference

I attended the HR Technology Conference & Exposition this week and really enjoyed the chance to soak up some great thoughts and meet a lot of people doing really interesting things in their businesses.

In no particular order, here are some of the most interesting themes and ideas I heard this week that might be great takeaways:

• In the Expo Halls, lots of companies are talking about tracking and reporting on people, but very few are talking about how to train them and how to meet their day-to-day learning and social/informal learning networking needs. Analysts in one of the panels touched on this as the two "bookends" of talent management. Since I come from the learning bookend, I'd love to see us get some more weight on that side of the equation.

• According to Bersin & Associate's new study on Talent Management customer experiences, two of the best things you can do when you're deciding on a talent management vendor (and I think this applies to learning management systems, too) are:
• Check with the vendor that they've handled your kind of situation before. As they put it in the conference session, "You don't want to be a test case."
• Talk to some current clients, and ask them whether the final product matched up with what they were promised by sales. This can be one of the biggest determinants of satisfaction with your vendor.

• In the panel of leading industry analysts, one of the big themes that they talked about was the importance for Human Resources and other talent management/learning & development leaders to be able to talk in terms of business and hard numbers. I wish I remembered who it was, but someone in the discussions said that we "need to stop feeling guilty about not supplying analytics and just do it." It was a clarion call to read some books or take some courses in business basics and statistics and start applying it to our jobs every day.

• In the session about Creating a Private Social Network for your business, Kris Dunn gave the best one-sentence suggestion for a social media policy that I’ve heard: just tell everyone that when participating online in public or private, they’re responsible for everything in the employee handbook. Simple and to the point.

• Don Tapscott, during his keynote address about the Net Generation and the attitudes they're bringing to the workplace, presented this formula as a summary of the way that the newest entrants into the workforce see the world: "Work = Collaboration = Learning = Fun". None of these components are separate, they should be tied together intrinsically. Whether they are in your office will be one of the determinants of whether young workers will come to and stay in your organization, and it sounds to me like a darned fine recipe for all of us.

Did you attend HR Tech? Are you one of the people I talked with while I was there? Any favorite takeaway, "ah-ha" moments that you'd like to share?

What is Talent Management Worth?

Apparently not much, if some data that Taleo shared at its annual user conference is any indication. Brian Summer attended the conference and posted the following data points on his ZDNet blog.

• $47,000 average salary for an American worker
• $12,000 average yearly ERP expenses on a per worker basis
• $10 average yearly talent management expenses on a per worker basis

Let’s just look at those numbers again. If these are right, the average company is spending the equivalent of 25% of the average worker’s salary on ERP programs, while a pittance (a fraction of 1%) is spent on talent management programs. And I’d have to argue that the average worker doesn’t even see that much benefit since those dollars aren’t allocated evenly across most organizations.

Are these numbers surprising? Unfortunately I have to agree with Brian that they are not. Most employee development and talent management programs suffer from poor funding. As many of our white papers have noted, most programs to purchase equipment (and I’d put ERP software in that category even though it’s not physical equipment) are better planned and funded than basic employee development and talent management functions.

For example, even though companies say that they believe that performance management drives successful outcomes, a mere 11% provide ongoing feedback and measurement against stated corporate goals. Performance management is still bogged down in the outmoded annual review process and prevents organizations from realigning employee goals to changing company objectives throughout the year. Why? Perhaps because annual reviews, completed on paper or word documents (which for all practical purposes is the same) fits nicely into that $10 per year expense. Now I’m not one to say that throwing money at a problem is always the solution, but given the figures there does seem to be room to spend a little more to better align and utilize the talent within an organization.

Thankfully all is not lost. According to a new Bersin and Associates study, the market for integrated talent management solutions is growing, even in this recession. So companies know they have a problem and are trying to correct course.

What do you think? Does talent management receive the same time and funding as ERP upgrades and maintenance at your organization? Should it?

What if Learning Was Free?

A few weeks ago Seth Godin blogged that if TV ads were free, people would have learned to do advertising by simply doing it. Without that barrier to entry, people would just do advertising instead of talking about it and obsessing about it because it’s expensive.

Harold Jarche picked up on the parallels that can be drawn with corporate learning.  Instructional design systems and curriculum development is expensive. It takes time and energy. And once created, no one wants to do it again, or make significant changes to it.

Technology is removing barriers to entry in every industry and discipline. Internet technologies make distributing information to lots of people cheap. Want to engage with a community and ask for their feedback? Consider a focused blog directed at that audience. Want to build a collaborative group? Enter social media platforms. Didn’t get the results you wanted? Try, try again. After all, in the brave new world of technology learning really can be free.

But here’s the trick. You’ll have to let go of some control. You’ll have to facilitate and be a conduit, rather than a director. This can be scary, but it can work. Need proof? Take the Work Literacy site which helps teach Web 2.0 technology to learning professionals. Cost to develop: Zero. Time to create: A week. Content updates: Courtesy of participants. So there’s the proof that it can work. (Check out the site, it’s got some great content.)

Oh and get out there and start experimenting! If it doesn’t work the way you’d hoped, try something else. But stop waiting. The time is now.

What do you think? How has technology removed the barriers to entry for learning? Are you experimenting enough?