Don't be a Know-it-All
Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) has said: "being alearn-it-all is better than being a know-it-all."
Unfortunately, a lot of people truly do NOT know how tolearn.
In the 21st century, people are more reactionary than thoughtful, reasoned, and contemplative. This is a "tide" that will damage business' future viability, very, very soon.
Future-Proofing Your Organization
Very few organizations are doing anything to skill-up their younger workers in leadership skills. That's going to come back and bite them in the very near future.
The Learning Leader as Change Agent
Guest post contributed by
Holly Burkett
Managing change and cultural transformation is among the top challenges facing executives and the one area in which they’re most likely to partner with learning leaders and talent managers.
Today's Leadership Challenges
More than ever before, organizations need leaders who can anticipate and react to the nature and speed of change; act decisively without always having clear direction or certainty; navigate through complexity, chaos, and confusion; and maintain effectiveness despite constant surprises and a lack of predictability. Yet few business leaders rate themselves as "highly effective" at managing change, most work for an organization with no change strategy in place, and most have no designated person to lead change efforts.
Given these challenges, how can L&D help?
Leverage leadership development. Leadership development remains a key strategy for building change capability. Developing collective change capabilities across all levels has more impact than simply focusing upon mid or senior-level managers. Effective development methods include the combined use of self-reflection exercises, coaching, mentoring, stretch assignments, action learning, and simulations in which participants are placed in real-world scenarios and roles where they must lead change. Development approaches should be contextualized and customized to fit the capabilities required of specific change roles, including:
- changesponsors (those who lead change strategy)
- changemanagers (those who facilitate change in their operational areas)
- changeproject members (those who plan, design, and implement the change plan)
- changeagents (those who advocate for change efforts, make the changes relevant to theirneeds, and contribute to successful outcomes)
Developing collective change capabilities across all levels has
more impact than simply focusing upon mid or senior-level managers.
Keep in mind that change capability is about more than stand-alone, one-and-done leadership development programs, however. It is about nurturing change responsiveness and resiliency throughout an entire organization so that it is fully embedded within an organization’s culture and DNA.
Integrate change capabilities. Effectivedevelopment includes the integrated use of tools thatassess, develop, and reward change capabilities duringrecruiting, performance management, and career development, includingsuccession planning. Other enabling mechanisms like change networks,change academies, or communities of practice can help align change-readinessand responsiveness with employees’ daily work practices.
Manage change capacity. While change capability is a skill, ability, or mindset that can be developed or improved, change capacity relates to the ability of individuals and organizations to accommodate new change demands. Change fatigue is one of the biggest barriers to employees’ overall capacity to adopt or adapt to change. Change fatigue sets in when people feel pressured to make too many transitions at once or when change initiatives have been poorly thought through, rolled out too fast, or put in place without adequate preparation. An integrated, well-planned change strategy is meaningless if an organization lacks the capacity to execute it. In reality, capacity is finite; people can only do so much and there are only so many people to do the work.
As change agents, learning leaders must sensitize senior leaders to the risk of frenetic, disorganized change that goes beyond what individuals or teams can manage. Best practices include the use of a vetting process where proposed change projects are subjected to rigorous “war room” screenings by key stakeholders and then prioritized according to their importance to business strategy, financial impact, and the probability of success.
As change agents, learning leaders must sensitize senior leaders to the risk of frenetic,
disorganized change that goes beyond what individuals or teams can manage.
Final Thoughts. The pressures for change are real, change is here to stay, and organizations are looking to L&D for help in gaining the confidence and skills needed to navigate in a business climate of constant disruption. While the effort may seem daunting, we have a responsibility to step up and embrace our role as change agents with the goal of helping an organization transform itself for the better. This means positioning learning and performance initiatives within the context of broader change. It also means integrating the discipline of change management into our own mindsets and skill-sets so that we can leverage learning as a catalyst for innovation, change, and high performance.
About the Author
Holly Burkett, PhD, SPHR is principal of Evaluation Works, a performance consultancy in Davis, CA. For over 20 years, she’s helped diverse public and private sector clients develop resilient learning and performance capabilities that create high engagement and operational excellence. Author of the award-winning book “Learning for the Long Run: 7 Practices for Sustaining a Resilient Learning Organization,” she is a sought-after speaker, coach, and workshop facilitator. Learn more at: http://hollyburkett.com/
Do your people work in silos?
One of the greatest detriments to businesses being able to function at a high level is our insistence on keeping people in silos. Start in marketing? Stay in marketing. Start in finance? Stay in finance. We need to prepare EVERYONE to lead. Right now. We have limited time remaining.
No More One-and-Done Classes
If you are ONLY holding training classes, you aren't really getting at how learning works...
Wise words from Anne Frank
Challenge for today: Ask "why" at least three times. Open up the possibilities. Don't accept the status quo. Look for what's next.
Your Most Skilled Leaders Are Leaving
For decades, companies have been able to hire leaders away from other companies; but with the Boomers leaving corporate America at a rate of 6,000 people a day... that's all about to change.
Is your company prepared? Who is in your leadership pipeline?
Can One Employee Take Your Company Down?
Your company is doing great work. It is creating jobs where they didn't exist before... you are contributing to the betterment of society... have you considered whether or not one employee could bring that all to a screeching halt?
Since February of 2017, with the recording of Travis Kalanick's (former CEO of Uber) poor behavior as he berated an Uber driver, displayed all across America, there have been frequent episodes of bad behavior demonstrated by numerous corporate leaders. In just the last month we've seen:
Adam Neumann, the CEO of WeWork was forced to step down after the filing of the company's pre-IPO paperwork shone a light on suspect financial dealings which ultimately benefitted Mr. Neumann to the tune of millions of dollars. The IPO was withdrawn, the company has laid off over 4000 employees, and its estimated value dropped 40 billion in the blink of an eye. See more here.
The Houston Astros baseball team fired their assistant General Manager for verbally attacking 3 female reporters after a pennant win in October. In addition to a social media onslaught faulting the organization and how it handled the incident (initially accusing one reporter of fabricating the incident and then taking 3 days to admit to it and holding the AGM accountable), the team will be fined by Major League Baseball, and the way that the incident was handled is now inviting scrutiny of the company's culture, which will result in further public relations embarrassment and could see the departure of many others in leadership positions in the organization. This incident, and the stress it caused the whole organization, may have just cost the team the 2019 World Series. See more here.
The CEO of McDonald's resigned this past week, saying this: "Given the values of the company, I agree with the board that it is time for me to move on." The values of the company? The values, that as CEO, he was most-responsible for upholding? See more here.
Now, you might argue that these are people in positions of power and it is often the case that with power comes the belief that you are above "following the rules." But a leader is also responsible for the "unwritten rule" that he or she sets the acceptable behaviors and culture of an organization through their example.
When Does It Start?
We cannot assume that only those in the "higher echelon" are behaving badly (and costing their companies money as well as reputation). Think of the myriad of "little" ethical violations that occur in companies daily: taking home office supplies, failing to report a breakdown in product or process because "it's not my job," refusing to cooperate with another department or colleague, giving a customer favorable terms over other customers, the list could go on and on. At what point does a "little" ethical violation bloom into something that is egregious and damaging to your company financially or reputationally?
These types of incidents are precisely the reason why The Training Doctor created its Leadership From Day One development approach. By developing leadership behaviors such as ethics, decision making, and self-management early in one's career, incidents like these should not occur down the line. If all of your employees are immersed in a culture that supports the good of all (the company, its employees and customers), you'll make a bigger impact on the world and sleep better at night.
Are you at risk?
As a business owner, do you presume that your employees are behaving ethically? Do you know your organization's culpability from actions committed by your employees? Especially your senior/leader employees who have more of a "platform" to do harm to the company?
It is never, never too soon to start developing leadership characteristics in your workforce. Don't wait until you've already promoted someone to a leadership role to start to foster the skills they need to lead themselves as well as others; it is harder to rewire behavior than it is to develop it from the start. When you start leadership development early in your employee's careers, it becomes an ingrained and reflexive behavior as they move up through the ranks.
Go to our contact us page if you'd like help establishing a leadership development program that starts with everybody. Today.
Convenience Over Quality
We'll modify this sentiment and say "easy of use at the expense of thinking."
❔ Do you know someone who is so reliant on their GPS that they couldn't return to a destination a day or two later, without it?
❔ Do you know someone who gets their news by scrolling through Facebook, rather than reading a newspaper? (I had a conversation with someone last week who did not know what Brexit was!)
❔ What else have you observed as an example of ease-of-use vs. quality or applied thinking? Please share in comments ⬇️
Truly Learning Requires Multiple Exposures to Content
How many times do you give employees training on the same topic? If you answer "more than once" I'll be shocked. How long did it take you to learn to ride a bike? Drive a car? Log in to your voicemail?
Moving from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence takes many, many exposures, but for some reason, in training, we take the one-and-done approach.
Need to learn to coach your employees? Take this four-hour class! Want to improve your close-rate on sales calls? Here's a 40-minute online tutorial!
Giving folks exposure to information is NOT training. (I don't have to tell you that.) Yet that's how most training is conducted.
In Failure is Growth...
So many people are afraid to fail - will people laugh at me, judge me, pity me? But we learn more from our failures than our successes. And no one is good at everything they do, the first time out. So what, exactly, are you afraid of? Learning?
First-rate intelligence
It's an important skill/attribute that someone in a #leadership position MUST possess. There is so much information coming at us each day (each hour!) that it is truly important to be able to take it all in, "measure" it, reason through it, and make a decision.
Promoting Within
When you promote someone to a leadership role - they know your history and culture and have a sense of loyalty to the organization that you won't find in an external hire.
Case Study: Wells Fargo - how long can you ignore ethics?
Here are some "interesting" facts as a result of Wells Fargo's abuse of customers:
- Fake accounts: 2 million +
- Fines: $185 Million
- Fired: 5300 managers
- Resigned: Two CEO's, John Stumpf and his successor Tim Sloan
- Legal fees: $40 – $50 million per quarter (gosh, if you only gave us that money for professional development - oh the places we could go!)
- Branch closings: 400 by 2019
So many questions! If you use this case study in a discussion with your leadership tip you'll contemplate questions such as:
Was it fair that 5000+ low-level managers were fired or should only the senior executives have been held accountable?
Warning signs – such as customers failing to fund the accounts they “recently opened” – were evident but ignored. What kinds of early warning systems are in place in your organization? How are they monitored?
You can access the complete case study - suitable for printing, here.
Top 8 (useful) Things I Learned in 2018
About two years ago I started keeping a Word document on mycomputer of Things I Learned. Irealized that I learn so many great things each week – that enrich my worklife, or make it easier – and often I forget them just as quickly as I learnedthem. To ensure that doesn’t happen toofrequently, I started keeping this document, parsed by month because I canoften remember when I learnedsomething, (such as, that webinar onLinkedIn I took back in the spring)even if the actual “what” has escaped me long ago.
One of the things I really love about the list is going back over it and refreshing my memory of great tips, tools and techniques I’ve learned in the last year. I often find myself saying, “Oh yeah! Why did I stop using / doing that?”
Here is my Top 8 list of things (culled from over 12 pages of stuff!)I learned in 2018 – I hope you get value from them as well.
- Google Forms – allows you to create all sorts of things like surveys and registration forms and then lets you put a URL to them in an email as a way to promote or invite. Also allows you to download responses in
an .xls format which is very useful. - Grouping in PowerPoint – I consider myself fairly adept at PowerPoint but just in the last year I learned that you can click on multiple elements (images, text boxes, etc.) by holding down CTRL and clicking each – to enable all the animations to occur at once. Goodbye “start with previous.” Such a time saver!
- Royalty free music from www.audiojungle.net and www.artlist.io – both allow you to search both by genre or mood, which is helpful. (Note: As a result, The Training Doctor has its own theme music now!)
- Free stock photos at https://Burst.shopify.com and https://Unsplash.com (with photo credit) - very edgy and engaging - useful for social media posts.
- Persona Generator – helps you to “nail down” who your buyer is so that you can craft advertising specific to that “individual.”
- The
center for American Progress www.americanprogress.org. Great articles andinsight / research on learning, K-12, post-secondary, etc. - When recording videos, add 2 – 3 seconds between concepts – it seems like an eternity to you but not to the listener and it is super helpful for editing (like adding a slide or image to support the concept).
- Trello.com – a project management tool (free) that works like my brain does (it’s very visual, allows you to make “notes” and move them around, assign to others, etc.).
Goodbye numerous Excel spreadsheets!