Centralized or Decentralized Succession Planning?

One of the important strategic decisions you'll have to make when determining how to approach your succession planning is whether you want the execution of it to be centralized or decentralized.

Centralized

If you choose the centralized route, HR will be the hub of the succession planning. They will know who is in the pipeline, they will oversee or even prescribe the professional development that those people will need in order to be prepared, they will sign people up for classes, send them to conferences, hire them coaches, and make sure that they are progressing along a career path and/or a learning path.

Decentralized

In the decentralized approach, all of those responsibilities just listed will be taken on by every department head, whatever title you want to give that (manager, director, VP, etc.).  In the decentralized approach, each individual department will plan their own succession pipeline and keep HR in the loop. HR will not have individual sightlines into each department’s or each individual’s succession plan. Instead, HR will be kept apprised of the plan and act as a consultant to the department head.

The role of HR is very different in the centralized versus decentralized approach. In the decentralized approach HR is more of an advisor to each individual department, as opposed to owning the process and making sure that the company, as a whole, has succession planning in place.

Example

If a department head says “I want my folks to have more industry knowledge,” HR would say, “OK, give me a week and I'll come back with a couple of options that might fit your goals.” What HR won't do is assess where people stand now, what development they need, or be involved in the development process in any way other than an advisory role.

HR’s Responsibility

The responsibility that HR has when the process is decentralized is that HR has to make sure that all department heads know what they're doing.

·        Do they know how to plan a career trajectory?

·        Do they know how to delegate?

·        Do they know how to identify special projects or stretch assignments?

·        Do they know how to coach?

·        Do they know how to teach their people how to coach?

·        Are they willing to let people go from their department in order to advance their career and make a more well-rounded contributor to the organization?

The centralized versus decentralized decision depends on how your organization prefers to manage the process and how much time and dedication you think your individual department heads will give to the process. Also, consider if a department head leaves, will the next leader be on board with this responsibility?

Warning: There is one glaring problem when succession planning is decentralized, and that is: if a particular department just drops the ball. HR may not be apprised of the fact that there may be a big gap in the succession pipeline of a particular department. In the centralized scenario, HR will make sure that every spoke in your company hub has a succession plan in place, and people are progressing through that plan.

Interleaving + Succession Planning

Interleaving is actually a term used in education: It is a process whereby students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study, in order to improve their learning. For example: when learning about Italy, the math segment might teach about how to calculate the angle of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The history segment might teach about Italy’s alliance with Germany during WWII, and the health segment might teach about the people who live in “blues.”

The way that I like to think of interleaving is similar to this piece of fabric where you have multiple colors that are intertwined with one another, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. They all work together simultaneously to make one pattern.

Similarly, succession planning isn't a standalone.

It includes career paths that you create for every role and every department in your organization so that people know where their careers can go and what they can achieve in your organization.

As well as learning paths that are cobbled on top of - or done in conjunction with - career paths. So not only do people know where their career will go, but they also know what learning or accomplishments they have to achieve in order to hit all of those career milestones.

And it includes performance appraisals. What are you rewarding people for?

And regular performance appraisal conversations tie all of these things together.

Do your managers know how to have worthwhile performance conversations? Are they asking, “Where do you see yourself in five years? What would you like to learn more about, in this organization? Is there a job you'd like to move to, laterally?” These are questions that generally aren't heard in performance appraisal conversations because most performance appraisal conversations look backward rather than looking forward.

And again, when it comes to succession planning, all of these things are done simultaneously. They aren’t done consecutively, they don’t build upon one another, they are interwoven.  You're doing all of these things simultaneously, which bolsters your pipeline of future employees.

I often say that succession planning isn't hard, but it is time-consuming and quite tedious. You have to maintain extraordinary attention to detail because there are so many moving parts that have to function on their own as well as intertwined with one another. And the organization has to support all of these things simultaneously.

The reason that I use the term interleaving when talking about succession planning (and I’m probably the only person who does!) is because it is a perfect descriptor of the intertwining of the different “threads” that organizations must define and then commit to support in the long term, in order to ensure they have capable and ready future leaders in their pipeline.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

The Difference Between Emotional Intelligence and Self-Management

Wow, wow, wow.

In the last month, my head is just spinning from all of the poor decisions accomplished, trusted, leaders in business have been making.  It’s a great time to explain the difference between emotional intelligence and self-management.

LOADS of companies espouse emotional intelligence (EI) as an important leadership quality, but you can plainly see by the illustration that EI alone does not ensure good decision making?  EI has to be coupled with self-management.

EI is not only understanding what “makes you tick” and working to mitigate behaviors that might be offensive or get you into trouble (such as a quick temper) it also requires that you recognize the emotional and mental state of others and act appropriately in social situations. EI is a component of self-management.

Self-management requires self-restraint, thoughtful responses (sometimes no response), and “decorum” which is a word my mother used all the time and which I never hear anymore.

We can use road rage as an example of EI vs. self-management. See if you can label each of the options below, correctly.

Recently, in the area where I live, a young woman was stopped in her car at a stoplight. When the light turned green she didn’t take off quickly enough for the man in the pickup truck behind her. He could have:

A.     Waited patiently – really how much longer could she sit there unaware?

B.     Honked quickly – a polite “yoohoo” to pay attention

C.      Laid on his horn – impolitely showing his displeasure at how she was impacting him

D.     Put his bumper up against hers and pushed her down the roadway for .25 of a mile

Which did you label EI? (Answer: B)

Which did you label EI PLUS self-management? (Answer: A)

Which option was a big FAIL? (Answer: D)

 In case you’re wondering, the pickup truck driver chose D.  He’s now charged with attempted murder as well as various vehicular violations.

The thing I have observed with poor self-management is that the ramifications are huge. When you observe someone with poor EI you might think s/he is “uncouth.” It’s the kind of person to whom you say, “Read the room.”  But poor self-management often results in irreversible harm – certainly to the person who lacks self-management and often to others surrounding him or her.

In the illustration for this article, we have high-ranking business executives (all from the C-suite) who have had affairs (sometimes with each other), berated employees, spied on former employees, and posted shocking things to social media. If they are doing it – imagine what the “rank and file” employees are doing.

It’s time to make self-management the skill we teach everyone in our organizations. It’s not like EI – it’s not enough to know about it. We all must be able to practice self-management or companies will have to continually spend their time and money mitigating bad behavior and collateral damage.

The 3 C’s of Leadership Development

With record numbers of people quitting their jobs, the mass exodus of Baby Boomers, and the current report that more than 10% of all leadership positions in organizations are currently vacant, there is an urgent demand for leadership development in all kinds of industries.

From the kinds of inquiries we get each week, we’ve realized that most organizations are not approaching leadership development in a strategic way. They are looking for coaching or courses without a real plan for how they will roll them out, what they expect the benefit to be, or who is ultimately responsible for them.

Here are the three C’s of leadership development which are necessary BEFORE you actually begin any development approach:

1.      Culture

2.      Communication

3.      Coaching

Note: It may take a year or more to get these things in place, but it is time well-spent if you want your leadership development efforts to be successful.

1.  Culture

For decades organizations in the US have had a “top-down” culture. There are natural progressions from individual contributor, to manager of others, to leaders of departments, divisions and more.  For organizations to be successful going forward, however, leadership is less of a position and more of a capability.

This is a significant change in thinking, in practice, and in organizational culture. And organization’s (and society for that matter) do not change their cultures quickly.

The leader’s role now is to develop others. The perspective must shift to “How far can this person go? What can I help him/her achieve?” rather than “What skills do they currently have and do they serve a specific purpose?”

The pandemic has brought this shift to light more quickly. With so many individuals working from home without direct “supervision,” everyone is essentially leading themselves; and for everyone to be successful (the individual and the organization as a whole) they need the ability to grow their capabilities in many ways, with their leader’s support.

Bottom line: Organizations need to shift their culture from control-and-command to guide-and-support.

2.  Communication

The next critical practice is communicating - not only communicating the shift in culture but constantly, loudly, reinforcing it. The shift in thinking and practice must cascade from the top of the organization to the bottom. Not only do managers need to know what is expected of them, but employees need to know what to expect of their managers.

This is not a fast process. Much like in marketing, where the maxim is that someone needs to hear or see your ad at least 7 times before it even “registers,” you’ll need to keep communicating the role of the leader is to develop his/her employees.

Additionally, you’ll need to explain why this shift is happening. When everyone does better, the organization itself does better. Increased capabilities means increased creativity, productivity, and agility – all of which contribute to increased profitability. When individuals are supported to grow within a company, it is easier to retain (and recruit) employees.  You pick the “positioning” which would work best for your organization and stick to it.

Bottom line: Expect to explain and reiterate your message over the course of a few years. There is a quote from (former) President Obama in which he stated his biggest surprise about being president was how much he had to repeat himself.

3.  Coaching

Coaching is a skill that needs to be imbued in all managers because it is the only way that a culture of developing others will come to fruition. BUT FIRST the organization must commit to a culture of developing every employee to be able to do their best work (#1), then that commitment must be communicated and reinforced (#2), and finally, the skills to fulfill the commitment can be taught to the managers who will actually make it happen.

Coaching is a time-intensive approach to managing because it requires really getting to know one’s employees and investing time in regular 1:1 conversations with each individual. By developing deeper and more personal relationships with one’s employees, you begin to understand who is more analytical and who is more social…which leads you to be able to identify “perfect fit” roles and development opportunities for them. If you have children you get this concept – every child has a different personality, different skills, different passions, different things that make them “tick.” You only know this because you spend so much time with them. And, because you want the best for them, you help them to pursue and develop their capabilities.

Bottom line: It is the managers in your organization who will truly develop your future leaders – not classes or curriculums.

For companies to be successful in the fourth industrial revolution, it is imperative that “leadership capabilities” are present throughout the organization; this will only come to fruition through an intentional culture of developing others and a reskilling of today’s managers to be proficient in coaching.  

Note: This article first appeared on LinkedIn 12/10/21

The Future is Here

Our 2017 book - Future-Proofing Your Organization by Teaching Thinking Skills has just been updated and re-released. Read the new introductory chapter, below!

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As I write this update, it is July 2021. A LOT of things have changed since this book first came out in 2017. Most of these changes have occurred in only the last 18 months, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Interestingly, as I re-read the book in preparation for writing this update, I realized that while the content is still 100% spot-on and needed little updating, what HAS changed is the urgency behind our need to improve the skills and capabilities of employees if our organizations want to survive the 21st century. What was predicted to take until 2030 to materialize was compressed into a single year – 2020.

Here is a look at why things have become more urgent.

Mass changes in labor statistics happen very rarely. This is one of those times.

The above quote is from an October 2020 blog piece from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The article goes on to say, “We are moving from a ‘one manager, one office, 9-5’ world to a ‘fluid, team-based, work-from-anywhere, always-on’ world,” which, in my interpretation, means we need to be confident that our employees are capable of working independently, making intelligent decisions and working with others that they cannot see and perhaps will never meet.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, many companies laid off large swaths of their workforces. As the economy recovers, companies will be hiring experienced individuals with unknown thinking skills or younger workers who lack the kind of work experience that enables critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving. Not only will learning and professional development become more critical than it has been in the last twenty years, but companies will need to develop career paths that show new employees “the future” of working with that organization.

Generational Shift

One of the premises discussed in the this book (circa 2017) is that the US Census prediction that all of the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) would be out of the workplace by 2030 leaving a large leadership void in most organizations given that Gen X (born 1964 and 1980) generally have not been given leadership roles or appropriate leadership development. The Boomer population is so large that most leadership roles in organizations are claimed by Boomers (as they got there first), and many of those Boomers have stayed on past what is considered a “traditional” retirement age, sometimes working well into their 70s - leaving few leadership vacancies or opportunities for Gen X.

The pandemic changed that dynamic nearly immediately. Boomers quickly reassessed their priorities and accelerated their retirement plans. According to Pew Research Center analysis published in November 2020, the number of Boomer-age retirements between September of 2019 and September of 2020 was 3.2 million, up significantly from the 2 million per year that had been holding steady since 2011.

This leaves an immediate and massive void in leadership. The people who had held leadership roles the longest and have the most years of institutional knowledge, wisdom, and experience are gone. 

Increase in Technology Use (in Professional Roles)

Another extraordinary development that arose from the pandemic was the widespread and nearly immediate adoption of technology to keep people connected remotely.  Platforms such as Zoom, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and more, suddenly came to the fore, although the technology has been around for decades. Personally, I’ve been using WebEx since 2002.

While the adoption of synchronous technology means people can continue to work while isolated in their homes, it also means that critical thought and creativity may suffer when there is no one there to bounce ideas off of or debate with.  Humans are collaborative.  We learn faster and make better decisions when we are doing it with others. Lapses in ethics, which one would never dream of when peers are in proximity, become less black-and-white when working in isolation.

And again, how will we teach Gen Z about business protocol if their interactions with peers occur solely online during meetings with tiny boxes that frame people’s faces? How will we coach them to do better work if we cannot see how they are doing their work?

Another concern brought about by technology is that artificial intelligence (AI) is barreling towards us and far from the fear of it eliminating jobs, it’s more likely that we will be able to attain higher-order outcomes through the use of AI.  Higher-order outcomes are things such as strategizing, creating, and evaluating… things that AI cannot do.  I highly recommend picking up a copy of Margie Meacham’s book: AI in Talent Development which gives great insight into the shifts that will occur in the workplace thanks to AI. At the heart of allowing the humans to do higher-order work, however, is that they must be capable of thinking at more critical and expansive levels than what we have expected from the vast majority of workers in the last 50 years.

Our need to teach thinking skills is urgent.

Career Paths

Prior to the pandemic, unemployment was very low for quite a long time, giving employees the upper hand in the labor market. Companies were so desperate to fill open positions that people were able to easily move from job to job. One reason that Millennials are known to “job hop” is because they value professional development* over other “perks” like pay and flexible schedules. Since few employers have viewed or offered professional development as a business strategy, it has forced Millennials to move to a new employer simply to learn something new.

This is a luxury that neither the employer nor the worker can enjoy any longer.

Not only will the companies who want to retain workers need to implement professional development strategies, but the wisest ones will integrate professional development with career paths, so that when a recruit interviews with your company they not only know the job they will be accepting, but the ones that are possible 3 and 5 and 10 years down the road should they stay with your organization. This will require companies to create career paths that show how professional development leads to increased responsibility and leadership roles.

According to Rachel Carlson, CEO of Guild Education, professional development attracts 25% higher qualified applicants and contributes measurably to retention. “Companies that build careers will be the defining companies for Millennials and Gen Z. For the future.”

* This is something that Gen Z reports is important to them as well, but they haven’t been in the workforce long enough for us to see if this is true.

People Skills are the Domain of… People

Look at the diagram in Chapter 8. It depicts the five learning domains needed for a well-rounded businessperson to develop the thinking skills necessary to be an effective and respected leader in your organization. None of the five can be performed by robots or AI technology.

In October of 2020, the World Economic Forum published their “Future of Jobs Report,” a biennial fiver-year projection of the skills and capabilities that will be needed by employees in order for their organizations to remain viable. (In other words, your folks better have these skills by 2025). 12 of the 15 top skills described in the 2020 report were personal or interpersonal skills. People skills.

As I mentioned above, when rote tasks are accomplished via technology, it is only higher order skills and interpersonal skills that remain the domain of the employee.  Unfortunately, after a decade-plus of technology usage – both personally and in our workplaces – we, as a society, have diminished our interpersonal skills. Many of our employees lack the ability to make eye contact, engage in small talk, or constructively deal with conflict. So, in addition to teaching thinking skills and business acumen (see below), organizations will need to redouble their efforts to teach people skills such as communicating verbally and in written form, dealing with conflict, giving and receiving feedback and many, many more.

Check out Chapter 6 for my take on the importance of utilizing mentors and coaches in this regard.

World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report, Oct. 2020 - Employee Skills Needed for 2025

Business Acumen

One of the things I didn’t spend too much time on in the first edition of the book was the importance of developing business acumen, although you’ll find it has equal weight in the diagram in Chapter 8.

Too many people know how to do their job, but not how their job impacts the organization or how their organization fits within their industry as a whole. If we want to build a pipeline of capable businesspeople, they need to understand how the business works. This is business acumen.

This lack of knowledge and sense of being and integral part of a whole is going to be exacerbated by the WFH (work from home) culture, especially as it pertains to young Gen Z workers.  A junior accountant is never going to see the trucks coming to the loading dock, or the lab-coated R+D scientists developing the next iteration of your product, if they are sitting at home working on spreadsheets. If their focus is solely on their job, it become interchangeable with any other junior accountant job at any other company. I predict this will lead to high levels of turnover at the entry level and will detrimentally impact critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and risk taking (which are all informed by business acumen) as well as greatly impact your leadership pipeline.

I’ll conclude this chapter by reiterating a line you’ll find in Chapter 8: Businesses have spent years parsing employee development down to the bare minimum and now must change the mindset to one of providing maximum capability for growth and success in the long term.  This was a critical need in 2017 when the book was first published and now it is both critical and urgent. 

Pivot, Pivot, Pirouette

The Training Doctor is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year!

We were founded in June of 1991, during a recession (the best time to start a business it turns out); and through the decades, as you might imagine, we’ve had to pivot a few times to keep up with industry changes and trends.

We thought we’d share a peek into our time capsule. 

At our start, we weren’t even called The Training Doctor – at first we were named Business Visions Consultants or BVC for short (dreams of IBM dancing in our heads). Why did we change our name? You try to say either of those things (the full company name or the abbreviation) when answering the phone. They are both completely unintelligible.

PIVOT

Also at our start, we were focused on contract facilitation for various organizations in the Northeast such as school systems, insurance companies, casinos, and state agencies. After four years in business and one particularly grueling, year-long, facilitation gig teaching supervisory skills using a million-dollar curriculum our client had purchased from a well-known leadership development company who shall go unnamed because it was sooo b a d (suffice it to say, they are no longer in business), we commenced our FIRST PIVOT and decided that there were a lot of great facilitators around but NOT a lot of great training designers and we would be better suited to focusing solely on instructional design. 

For the next 20 years our sole offering was to design custom curriculums for our clients and hand it back to them for delivery. This was typically because the work our clients did was either very technical or proprietary, and they needed something custom designed for them. Since our expertise is in how adults learn, and particularly how adults in the workplace learn (where behavior change is the expected outcome), we had the pleasure of working in all sorts of industries and for companies you have never heard of like a cheese processing plant in New Jersey, a startup medical company founded by one of the original founders of WebMD in Atlanta,

a 15-store kitchen wares retailer in Connecticut (think Williams Sonoma, but on a much smaller scale) that was doubling its number of retail outlets in one year, the precursor to VMware in Massachusetts, a twenty-year-old, UK-based, global insurance broker that had never had a training department before, and many, many more. If you are interested, you can go to our home page and see some of the logos of the more recognizable companies.

During this time we crisscrossed the US speaking at many industry conferences which were focused on training, adult learning, human resources, and organizational development, helping others to learn how to take knowledge from SME’s heads and turn it into a curriculum, how to design fair and legally valid tests administered post-training, and how to ensure you are designing a training program that actually gets at the root of a performance problem, not just a symptom. Additionally, we had two books published – how to be a successful one-person training department since many of our clients were just that, and how to design a blended learning approach to workplace training.

PIVOT

It was also during this time that we completed our SECOND PIVOT into Virtual Instructor Led Training, or vILT.  While the focus on instructional design stayed true, the delivery mechanism changed. Throughout the nineties and first few years of this century the only option was classroom-based training. But with the advent of the internet and computers at every desk, and the development of WebEx (which was the front-runner in synchronously delivered training, followed by many others), we saw the potential for global companies to embrace the use of vILT to cut costs and still provide high-quality training in a “classroom” environment.

From about 2002 to 2015 The Training Doctor specialized in designing virtual instructor-led training curriculums for many Fortune 500 organizations that had global footprints. This became the expertise we were most known for since designing engaging, interactive, online learning to a group of people who are all sitting alone at their desks is no easy feat. Especially when the end goal is to get those people to change their behavior as a result of participating.

Virtual Instructor-Led Training is the format that pulled together all our history and skills: facilitation, design, adult learning theory + radio and television training (because as hard as it is to design for vILT, it’s even harder to be the facilitator).

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As an aside, you might be interested in learning about the pivot we DIDN’T make - which was NOT giving the time of day to eLearning which was all the rage in the late nineties. eLearning – in our opinion – is not effective for learners or clients, for a number of reasons: it’s largely self-study and we know that most people are not self-directed… there is no one to ask questions of… back in the 90’s and early 2000’s it was very linear and real-life is not linear, so it wasn’t teaching “real world”… the completion rates are abysmal… adults are collaborative learners and there is no collaboration with a computer… the cost and time to “program” are astronomical… and the maintenance to ensure content is up-to-date can be cumbersome or neglected. vILT overcomes all of these faults, which is why we embraced this form of learning via computer.

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PIROUETTE

Our last pivot was more of a pirouette which occurred in 2015. We now focus solely on the design of leadership development to help organizations to develop leadership pipelines and bring their future leaders “up” from within. Throughout our 15+ years of designing custom curriculums via vILT two topics were consistent: sales and leadership. And what we saw large, well monied, reputable organizations doing in the realm of leadership was wrong, completely wrong. And we were PART OF THE PROBLEM.

You cannot teach someone to be a coach in a 2-hour coaching course with a breakout for roleplay. You cannot teach someone to be emotionally intelligent in a class.  It’s impossible to learn to manage stakeholders if people aren’t out in the organization interacting with their stakeholders learning what their values and needs are.

Yes, there is a time and place for classroom (or eLearning) – such as when learning facts, underlying rules, and how-to, but leadership is a behavior and changing people’s behavior is an experiential process done over time and approached in many ways.

Now, in our 30th year, we are committed to forestalling the leadership development crisis that companies have fallen victim to over the last few decades. Our exclusive focus (and passion) is helping small to medium-sized organizations to create a leadership pipeline by having a development strategy that starts when an employee walks in the door. Some of our unique techniques include experiential learning, job visitations, mixed cohorts of learners, and other proven development strategies that you won’t find in “off the shelf” leadership development or a one-and-done course. 

If you think we can assist your organization – please give us a call or you can download an overview of our process here.

The ROI of Leadership Development

Last year I invested in an up-and-coming technology company. In less than one year, the stock rose 201%. WHAT?!  Where else can you get that kind of return-on-investment in such a short period of time?  I know of one other place…

Here’s my hot “stock tip” for business owners: Invest in leadership development.

Every dollar you invest will return 300% - 500%, nearly immediately – here’s how.

There are three distinct ways that leadership development pays back the organization:

1.      Reduced turnover and greater retention

2.      Easier recruiting

3.      Leadership benchstrength

Let’s take a look at these in a little more depth.

Reduced Turnover and Greater Retention

With the exodus of Boomers from the workforce, there will be a rapid rise in leadership roles fulfilled by Millennials. What’s important for every employer to know about this group of employees is that they value professional development above money and titles. They are most excited about continually learning and advancing their career.  By initiating a leadership development program in your organization you minimize the risk of losing an employee who will leave simply to learn something new.

Another advantage of providing a steady stream of professional development is that it increases productivity. As people learn more and are more capable, they can produce better outcomes and work with others in the organization more cooperatively, which leads to higher productivity.

A 10% increase in productivity can increae the profits of most organizations by 50%

Peter Drucker

Finally, employees are more committed to an organization when that organization provides professional development and a career path.

Easier Recruiting

One of the most expensive activities for any company is the recruiting and hiring process. Recent data from SHRM has determined that it can cost anywhere from $3000 to fill an hourly worker’s role, to as much as two-times the salary of an executive to replace that individual. Since so few organizations provide well thought-out professional development, it is seen as a real perk by employees and potential employees – lessening the need for recruiting efforts and costs. Oftentimes organizations that embrace professional development are listed in their local “best places to work,” lists – which is worth more than any advertisement to attract quality workers.

Leadership Benchstrength

 As mentioned at the start of this article, Millennials will be moving up the corporate ladder sooner than expected (the US Census had predicted that the Boomers would be out of the workforce by 2030, simply based on their age, but the pandemic has accelerated that exodus by a decade) and will not have the years on the job to learn organically as the Boomers have. There must be a purposeful and concerted approach to develop your next generation of leaders’ skills such as decision making, problem-solving, teaming, risk management, stakeholder management, and a myriad of others.

By having a group of prepared individuals at the ready, organizational leaders can sleep better at night knowing that there will be continuity in performance and culture as younger professionals step into leadership roles.

Leadership is not the nebulous topic that most people make it out to be. It is a skill that can be taught - but it must be taught over time, which is counter to the typical methodology for leadership development in the last fifty years.  There are significant benefits for forward-thinking organizations that provide leadership development as discussed above; any one of which can save a company tens of thousands of dollars a year. Smart investors (aka business owners) will make the minimal investment today in order to reap amazing return on investment in both the short and long-term.

Guest Blog: Leadership is Not a Title – It’s a Conduct

Linking leadership behavior to a job title is a misconception. You do not need a title to behave in a way that is admirable by all.

Leadership is not linked to a job role, a function, a department or an industry. Everyone should adopt leadership behavior and conduct themselves in a just, honest and supportive manner. Leadership cannot be claimed neither, it is awarded to you by those around you.

There are many examples of good leadership vs bad leadership.

Let me share an old war story of a general and his soldiers. Legend has it that a man riding on a horseback came up on a battlefield and saw exhausted soldiers digging defense trenches while their commanding officer barked orders and threatened punishment if they did not complete the job in time.

The man on horseback asked the commander why he was not helping the soldiers dig if the work was that important, to which the commander replied: “I’m in charge! The men do as I tell them. Help them yourself if you feel so strongly about it”.

To the surprised of everyone, the man dismounted from his horse and helped the soldiers dig side by side until the job was completed. He then congratulated the soldiers for a job well done and approached the puzzled commander. The man said: “Next time your rank prevents you from supporting your men, you are to notify top command and they will provide a more permanent solution”. Upon a closer look, the commander recognized the man as General George Washington

Take a moment to imagine with me that kind of leadership replicated throughout an organization. What type of organization will it be? What would it feel like to work in such an organization and do business with its employees?

A successful organization is one where all employees embrace and breath the same leadership air into their lungs, regardless of job titles. For this to happen, the board of directors and executives need to walk the leadership talk.

We cannot expect an individual to excel in all leadership competencies from day one. Rather, skills are developed over time, as a leader continues to strengthen their leadership muscle.

Guest blog, penned by Awatif Yahya, founder of AWE Horizons, LLC

No Time to Prepare for This Leadership Crisis

In a recent TV interview I watched, with the president of Delta Airlines, he was talking about how the airline has managed to not lay off any workers in this economic downturn. And the “solution” was that 20% of employees have taken early retirement throughout the summer.

So who are those 20%? Clearly older generations. Who's eligible for early retirement, but Boomers and maybe some Gen X, depending on how long they've been with the company. This is a serious problem for organizations. I know they have to downsize. I know they have to conserve funds right now, but this is going to have an incredible boomerang effect when they need to ramp up again, when the economy turns. When the business climate turns and companies start to ramp up their offerings again, there are going to be so few leaders left in organizations.

It's a real concern. It's a real concern for business owners, managers, the people who were left in the ranks at organizations, because the question is “who is left to run the companies?”

If the Boomers are gone, if the older generation Gen Xers are gone, the people who have the history of the company, the culture of the company, years of experience and knowledge within that company... if those folks are gone, who is left to run the organization?

Now clearly there are younger generations, younger people in the organization. But do they have the knowledge and the skills the older generations do? Will they have the same leadership abilities as the folks who are leaving the organization? This is something that keeps me up at night. I worry for the state of American businesses. This is something that was supposed to happen in 2030 - according to the US Census - all the Boomers would be out of the workforce by 2030.

It worried me then when it was a 2030 deadline, but at least companies had time to prepare. There's no time. The Boomers and some older Gen Xers are leaving organizations - voluntarily or not - and there's a much younger cadre of individuals left in organizations who will have to step up, into leadership positions, whether they have leadership skills or not.

Mentoring - Now More Than Ever

Note: This article was originally published on Forbes.com

The workplace has changed drastically in the last few months; I don’t have to tell you that. People are figuring out how to manage their time, maintain personal connection and remain productive, all while working remotely. One crucial item that has fallen by the wayside is professional development – especially the development of future leaders.

Leadership skills development is most successful when it is an immersive and visceral experience. Therefore, most leadership development programs are dependent on in-person meetings and collaborative activities with others in the organization. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to teach the soft skills required of a leader via an impersonal online learning experience.

Some organizations are beginning to grapple with how to have the same success via an online format, since, for the foreseeable future that is all that is available to us. Other organizations would rather take a “gap year” in leadership development and wait for the return to their normal development activities.

An immediate solution

One thing that can be done immediately, and with great success, is to embrace mentoring.

Mentoring is the cheapest and most effective method for developing future leaders. It has always surprised me how few organizations employ it.  All it takes is time and a little bit of structure.

One benefit of most business professionals working from home is that it is easier to schedule time to work together and to work with others across the organization. You don’t have to find an open conference room, or even be in the same building or state to work with a mentor who can help you to develop your career.

With all meetings conducted online these days, the playing field has been leveled. A younger colleague can be invited to sit in on a management meeting, a sales call, or a performance review to listen and learn with less scrutiny about why they are there. “I’ve invited Shonda to sit in today,” is less concerning and more comfortable than a clearly junior person showing up to an in-person meeting. After the meeting, the mentor and mentee can discuss what occurred, why the mentor made the decisions that they did, or took control of the conversation when they did, and what might happen next with pros and cons.

Mentoring: is a system of semi-structured guidance whereby one person shares their knowledge, skills and experience to assist others to progress in their own lives and careers

Because of the convenience of meeting remotely, there are more opportunities for mentoring and learning conversations. Again, all it takes is time and a bit of structure. Here are some suggested steps to start mentoring in your organization if it’s unlikely the workplace will reopen soon:

• Assign all leaders the responsibility for mentoring 1 – 3 younger colleagues. Managers might be required to mentor one individual while senior leaders such as directors or VP’s could accommodate up to three.

• Require at least two meetings a week. One meeting is a 1:1 between mentor and mentee to ask questions and receive coaching, and the other is a meeting to which the mentee is invited to listen and learn.  The 1:1 meetings can be as short as 15-minutes. What’s important is to have a consistent dialogue based on what is currently happening in the wider organization.

• The mentor must be tasked with asking open-ended questions more than giving advice and guidance. What do you think should be our next move? Is more instructional than What I’d do next is…

• Each individual – mentor and mentee – needs to keep a journal so that they can see the progress made over time. This is also a place for the mentee to reflect on what they’ve learned (because the best growth comes from reflection and introspection) and jot down questions for their next 1:1 meeting.

If Needed, Start with Training

If your organization has never utilized mentoring, the best place to start is with training to define the role of a mentor. Most individuals in leadership positions are comfortable with assessing situations and giving answers, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you want a mentor to do. A mentor’s role is to listen, facilitate, and gently guide an up-and-coming colleague. So, it is important to learn the role’s expectations and how to tamp one’s natural instincts as a manager / leader. This is a little easier when the mentor and mentee are in different disciplines such as finance and research; when the two are from different disciplines the conversation stays at a higher level of business knowledge as opposed to the brass tacks of the work being done.

If your organization DOES have a mentoring process in place, this HBR article offers excellent advice on how to shift the mentor’s role from in-person to online meetings, how to validate feelings of uncertainty and overwhelm, and how to authentically share one’s own experiences.

Until professional development as we know it is able to resume in-person, purposeful mentoring relationships are the best approach for developing future leaders. An added bonus is that the mentees will form stronger bonds with the organization, have higher job satisfaction, and perceive greater support from the organization[1], which are all vitally important when one is working from home, alone.

If you would like help developing leadership pipelines in your organization, please get in touch with us, at The Training Doctor. We can help to future-proof your organization. 843.647.6304

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20401322/

Three Keys to Develop Leadership Skills - for Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Developing leadership skills is often an afterthought at small and medium-sized companies.

When companies start-up, and then launch into growth, there is little time to think about how the company will sustain itself long-term – survival is the immediate focus. Once things are humming along smoothly, many company founders begin to relax their control and would like to enjoy the fruits of their labor but then realize there are few other leaders in the organization because they haven’t thought to groom them.

Thus begins a period of attempting to promote leaders from within or hiring potential leaders from outside the organization; rarely does either approach work well.  When potential leaders – who have not been groomed to ascend in the organization – are promoted, they often lack the full complement of skills needed to lead because the owner / founder has been filling the decision-making role(s) for so long.  As a point of pride, rarely does a newly appointed leader admit they are in over their head or ask for more support from the owner / founder. Instead, these leaders often leave within the first year of their appointment.

When more fully capable leaders are brought in from outside the organization, they may find they are butting heads with the owner / founder because they are introducing new ways of working – informed from their external experience. Leaders brought in from outside the organization often fail faster than internal candidates, frequently leaving organizations in a matter of months. A 2019 study conducted by PriceWaterhouse Coopers found that successors to long-serving CEOs have short tenures and are often forced out of office. (Here is a recent example from AutoNation who replaced an “outsider” CEO after only four months.)

Every small or medium-sized business owner / founder should have a needlepoint sampler in their office that reads “The true mark of my success is to be able to walk away from this business and for it to continue to thrive.”  Adopting that mindset early on enables future leaders to be brought up from within the organization. This is the best scenario because they have organizational knowledge and relationships with others in the organization.

If you hope to exit your business without having to sell or close it, here are three ways to ensure you build a capable leadership pipeline.

First, begin leadership development earlier rather than later. Think of youngsters who begin T-ball at age five. There is no telling who among them will be a star athlete come high school or who will go on to a college or professional career; but rarely will one begin softball / baseball as a high schooler and go on to great success. When the skills and responsibilities are taught early and practiced for a decade or more, it is more apparent who is capable of further success.

Second, include everyone in leadership development opportunities. Don’t presume to know who among your workers will be a future leader – assume everyone will be. This will ensure you are more egalitarian about leadership development and, in the long run, will help your organization the most. Central to this approach is ensuring that there is a mix of learners in every offering. For example, a course on feedback skills should include individuals from all departments and all levels within the organization. This comingling nurtures relationships among everyone in the organization (a key capability of a leader) and enables every one – in every role – to be capable of giving back to the organization. Continuing with the sports analogy, when every new player is nurtured with the assumption that they are capable of becoming a stellar athlete, some will demonstrate a natural talent or drive to move to the “senior-leader team,” but everyone on the team will have increased their capabilities.

As an example, consider Tom Brady’s career vs. Johnny Manziel’s. One was a ninth-round draft pick and the other a Heisman Trophy winner. One went on to a stellar career and one flamed out after two seasons in the NFL.  Presuming who will be a leader is often a losing proposition – in sports and in business. 

Finally, don’t make the development of leadership skills another “thing” people have to do. Integrate skills development with real-world responsibilities. For instance, if a department holds weekly meetings, rotate the responsibility for facilitating the meeting. Why must the leader of the meeting always be the manager? Everyone should be able to follow an agenda, keep conversations on-topic, summarize decisions, and make sure action items are claimed.  This type of development ensures that when one does become a leader, they already possess the ability to manage a meeting.  There are a myriad of other skills which can be developed in this way, without an onerous (and often contrived) training process.  

In order to develop the skills of your organization’s future leaders, make a list of the ten skills you feel are critical to success, such as communication, an understanding of financials, customer service, etc., and identify ways to work the development of these skills into everyday work responsibilities. Assume everyone has the ability to lead, start early in people’s careers, and do formal training in mixed groups so that people can build relationships throughout the organization. These simple but important steps will help to ensure a ready and capable leadership pipeline for any organization.

Note: This article was previously published by Forbes.com.

Succession Planning? Start Here.

Many organizations are facing an impending loss ofleadership as the last of the Boomers are getting ready to leave the workforce.With the start of a new decade upon us, now is the time to plan for the next generationof leaders. But where to start? If your company does not have a leadershipdevelopment program in place, or if you haven’t really given much thought to howyour company will make an orderly transfer of leadership responsibility, 2020is the year to focus on this critical planning.

Below, I’ve outlined the first three steps in successionplanning. So as not to get overwhelmed, address them slowly over the next sixto twelve months and your organization will be ready to smoothly transfer thereins of leadership as the Boomers in your company begin to retire.

Step 1 - Consider who is next in line for leadership 

The outcome of this step is to determine where you want toconcentrate your leadership development efforts in order to achieve the most ROI.Do you want to concentrate your efforts on those who have been with yourorganization the longest and therefore understand its inner workings andculture? Or do you want to concentrate on younger generations who are lookingfor professional development as a primaryperk of employment and who may be with your organization longer, as aresult?

To gain better insight, take a look at who you presently employand what generational cohort they belong to. Currently there are fourgenerations in the workforce, the Boomers, Gen X, the Millennials and Gen Z whoare just entering the workforce. It is logical to assume that Gen X, being thenext generation after the Boomers, would be next in line to lead in yourorganization, but there aren’tenough of them. In addition, in a recent study conducted by TheConference Board, of data collected from over 25,000 leaders acrossindustries, it was determined that Gen X have been stymied from moving up thecorporate ladder by Boomers who have stayed on the job longer than previousgenerations. What this means is that there are a number of generations in yourworkforce who have not been indoctrinated into leadership development orleadership roles.

Determining where to apply development efforts is a criticalfirst step in determining your company’s leadership pipeline.

Step 2 - Determine What Skills Your Future Leaders Need

Once you determine who you’ll want to develop (as anaside, I advocate developing everyone as if they were going to be afuture leader; a rising tide lifts all boats, after all) you’ll need to identifywhat skills they will need to support your organization in the future.

To accomplish this, there are three sources of data you’llwant to collect and consider:

 1 Look at the jobdescriptions of each of your current leadership roles to determine what skills areidentified as necessary in today’s environment. This is just a baseline, as weknow that today’s business environment is accelerating and changing at a pacenever experienced before and what your organization needs today may not be whatit needs tomorrow. Be sure to identify leadership skills and behaviors, such asmanaging a team of five or fiscal responsibility, and not job tasks such asmonthly reporting. If possible, “read between the lines.” For instance the taskof “standardize procedures to improve efficiency” really means having theleadership abilities of analyzing, forecasting, and planning.

2 Pay attention to what industry experts and yourprofessional association are doing in the realm of the “future of work” andwhat is predicted for your industry. Some of the current concerns includeartificial intelligence and robotics, consumer pressures (suchas related to the environment), and changing buying habits – all of whichwill require your company to adapt. What do you need to start training yourfuture leaders for, today?

3 Hold one-on-one interviews and ask your current leaderswhat prepared them for the role they hold today. Most often you’ll learn thatformal development is not credited as much as mentorship, on the job learning,and a wide array of experiences.  Theseinsights will help you to decide the best course of leadership development, foryour organization, going forward. For example, you could put four future-leaders through an off-site leadership development program or you might chooseto institute a job rotation program for everyone at your company. The twooptions might cost the same amount, but will return vastly different results.  You’ll want to thoughtfully consider howpeople truly learn leadership in your organization.

Note: Be very concerned if the majority of responsesare, “I learned it at my previous job,” because that means you are doingnothing to develop leaders in your organization and are instead relying onother companies to develop them and hoping you can then hire them away. That“strategy” puts your company in a very precarious position; the topic ofanother article entirely.

Step 3 – Consider How You Will Develop Leadership Skills

Once you have identified the skills that should be developedin your future leaders, you’ll need to determine how to get them those skills.  Creating a formalized leadership developmentprogram is a time consuming and arduous process – which is why most companiesforego it and instead cross their fingers and hope their future leaders will“appear” when needed.

Sending people out for leadership development can be cost-prohibitive and because of that, the number of individuals that get developed is generally far fewer than is needed by any organization. A smart option for most companies is to mete leadership development out to everyone, through easy-to-implement activities such as reading groups or lunch-and-learns, and on-the-job projects such as a multi-discipline initiative. Over time, small and consistent development opportunities will build the leadership skills your organization needs and alleviate succession planning concerns.

Once you have considered and acted upon these first three steps in succession planning, you’ll be well on your way to ensuring that your company has a leadership pipeline capable of continuing excellent work despite a rapidly changing business environment.

Note: This article was first published by Training Industry Magazine.

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. 

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.

Encourage Contrarian Thinking

Very often leaders are emboldened by people who are in agreement with their ideas.

• That sounds great! I'll get right on it.

• Brilliant idea! No way we can lose this one.

• This will really knock the competition on their arse.

The employee you REALLY want on your team is the one that says, "Hold up! I see three ways this can go sideways. Did we think this through? Did we ask for input from customers (nod to New Coke), vendors (hello State of NC), or our employees (here's looking at you, Google).

As a consultant, I believe that part of what you pay me for is my ability to "see the other side;" to bring questions and alternative perspectives to your organization. When I worked as an employee my approach was always to ask, "How can I break this?" much like testing a new software... what if I did this? or this? or this pressure is applied?

Contrarian thinkers - and similarly, devil's advocates - aren't negative for the sake of being negative; they are thinking ahead to the future and to ramifications of your, or your company's, actions.

If you are a leader and a developer of future leaders, here are three ways to encourage contrarian thinkers:

1. Always have two meetings: Don't make decisions at the first discussion of a new idea. Simply have an open discussion about the idea (new product, new process, new hire) and allow a few days for people to think about it. You might even want to charge your attendees with coming to meeting #2 with at least one "argument" against the idea. This process will prevent ideas from becoming run-away before they've been thoroughly vetted. Yes, it will take more time to make decisions, but they will be good (or at least better) decisions.

2. When addressing your followers, always ask, "What am I missing?" This is especially important to ask of people on the front-line. They are the ones who are actually doing the work and have a pulse on what customers, vendors, and fellow employees are thinking and feeling.

3. Praise those who come forward with their opposing views. When you ask the "what am I missing?" question, always thank the person who offers their negative outlook. Your job is not to argue the opposing view, but to give it consideration. You might even ask open-ended questions to gather more information, such as "do you have an example you could share?" or ask of the group, "have others seen this same phenomenon?"

By engaging in a conversation, purposefully asking for opposing views, and thanking the contrarian for offering their insight, you are encouraging others to do so in the future; which means you are building a stronger company and a community of forward-thinking employees which helps your organization to foresee and mitigate potential risk.

NOTE: This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-risk-part-3-nanette-miner-ed-d-/

You Need a Leadership Development Program that Starts at Day 1 - and here's why

We wait too long to start leadership development. A 2016 meta-analysis of leadership development programs determined that most leadership development begins at age 46 AND leadership development almost always begins after someone is appointed to a leadership role. That makes little sense. Wouldn't you rather have an employee that learns feedback skills or problem-solving or strategy at the start of their career, rather than at the end?

There are a number of other approaches to as-we-do-it-today leadership development that are illogical - here is a sampling, with the rationale for a "better way."

• Leadership development programs are generally short-term (one week, 10 months) and generic - leaving the individual to figure out how their new knowledge and skills apply to the work that they are doing.
  • You want a development strategy that integrates work with learning and outputs.

• To be cost-effective, companies generally are selective about whom they will send through leadership development - sacrificing hundreds of capable individuals for the development of a few. Do you really want only a few people in your organization to be fully capable in their roles?
  • When leadership skills are integrated with regular activities and duties – starting on day 1 – the costs are minimal and absorbed daily, you don't need a "special event."

• As leadership development is currently administered...ROI is iffy. If your organization has 15 individuals, in 10 different disciplines, who have gone through leadership development this year - how do you associate their output with the learning?
  • When the learning process is integrated with every worker's role and responsibilities, you can easily connect output to increased knowledge and skill through various measure of productivity.

100% ROI 

Whenever I ask business owners and managers this question they are always a bit dumbfounded at the logic of it: Would you rather increase the capabilities and competencies of 15% of your employees? Or raise 100% of your employee's skills by 15%?

If every employee made better decisions, took responsibility for problem-solving, communicated better with their colleagues and other departments, understood who their stakeholders were... and more "leadership skills"... the efficiency and productivity of your company would be boundless.

But that "training" needs to begin on the first day they walk in the door. Your company should have a 3- or 5- or 10-year plan for the development of every employee. It should include skills building in the role they were hired for as well as broader, more business-acumen topics like risk, finance, and strategy.

And most importantly - it should include exposure to all areas of the business. Too many poor decisions are made because HR doesn't understand Ops, or Marketing doesn't understand Finance. When individuals understand the "big picture" of how your company operates - and they make relationships with people in other functions - companies run more smoothly, efficiently, and profitably. But they need to develop those skills at the start of their career, not the end.

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.

Activities to Boost Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is something we usually squash down in corporate America – you get more done if you keep your head down and follow the established path.

But creative thinking is how we come up with new and better ways of doing our work. Here are 3 exercises to enable you to think in more creative ways. You can use them alone or with your team.

✔ 21 What Ifs

Writing is something I do on a daily basis, so writer’s block comes with the territory. When you find yourself blocked or at an impasse in your work, let go of “rules” or “outcomes” and brainstorm 21 What Ifs? It will get your creative juices flowing again and often you’ll find the “answer” you were looking for.

✔ 21 What Ifs?

For example: I am trying to find a descriptive and compelling title for my podcast…

• What if it were for children?

• What if it were for aliens?

• What if it was something grown / farmed?

• What if it were a color?

• What if people said it to invite someone else to marry them?

• What if it were something you could buy at a store?

• What if it had a taste?

✔ Explore Analogous Fields

On your way home from work tonight, look at the businesses along your drive / route and just pick one randomly – fast food, nursery, car repair, gym, florist – then go home and write a list of 10 ways this company is just like yours. Then do the reverse - 10 ways it is entirely different from yours. (In a thinking curriculum [with a group], we’d do this in a different way, but this is a great solo activity that gets largely the same results.) We tend to think we are so special, so specialized, that we miss out on great opportunities by NOT looking beyond the end of our nose.

Alternatives of the exercise include:

• 10 ways your skills could improve the (observed) company

• 10 ways your skills could put the (observed) company out of business

• 10 one-to-one comparisons of your skills and the (observed) business, such as: my skill in making cold calls is like a growing plant in that…

✔ Stop Being so Literal

There are many objects in our daily life which we know the function of and that saves us a lot of time and has a lot of utility. We don’t pick up a pen each day and ask “What the heck is this? What does it do?” BUT that focus on the literal can also be a hindrance to our seeing possibilities.

A pen can also be a lever, an easel, a plug for a hole, used as a utensil, and so much more.

As a way to get creative juices going, alone or with your team, randomly choose an object from your desk or surroundings and imagine other uses for it. If you’re working on a new project, stop and ask, “Why are we going down this path? Is there another, alternative, path? Are there dual paths? Once we get to the end, is there more than one way to monetize or utilize that end?”

Examples:

• Post it notes were invented as a byproduct of trying to develop a stronger industrial glue.

• Slinkys (the toy) were invented as a byproduct of developing industrial springs.

So stop being so literal and look for the possibilities.

= = = =

Originally published on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/activities-boost-creative-thinking-nanette-miner-ed-d-/?published=t

Thinking Skills and Teaming Skills go Hand-in-Hand

The sheer complexity of business today means that no one person can know it all or be in command of it all. With the global marketplace, the importance and reliance on technology, and the imperative for innovation, cross-functional teams are the only way to develop viable business solutions. Learning to be a contributing member of a team is so critical that Carter Cast, former CEO of Walmart.com, deems it one of only two reasons for career derailment - the other being a lack of self-awareness.

There is a misguided assumption that teaming comes naturally. 

Oftentimes organizations provide team building events, such as experiential activities (rope climbing) or retreats (three days off-site) which are designed to enhance interpersonal relationships. But these types of events are not related to the work itself.

Teaching individuals how to work together as a team is a different outcome (see Team Capabilities, below) and requires learning team skills in the context of conducting team work. Being a contributing member of a team is as much about the personal contribution of one's role, as the functional role.

The capabilities listed below don't come together overnight. They require multiple exposures to team assignments and projects, and to be truly successful they require an understanding of the various functions of a business and how each contributes to the overall organization.   This is just a short list - you can find the full list in the Future-Proofing book. Collaboration and Cooperation - knowing how your work fits in to the larger-whole means you make decisions based on the impact to others / the organization.

Communication - expressing  ideas as well as feelings AND being open to receiving communication demonstrates the ability to "make sense" of information and people.

Sharing credit - being able to share credit demonstrates an ability to see one's role in perspective and demonstrates leadership.

Promoting understanding - being open to new or conflicting ideas, asking for more information, allowing "unpopular" sentiment to be heard and valued all stretch one's thinking abilities,

Appreciating diversity - well-developed thinkers appreciate that almost everything can be seen from multiple angles and that more diverse ideas bring about better outcomes.

Moderating conflict - the ability to resolve conflict without anger or resentment demonstrates a mature thought process and commitment to the greater good.

Putting a group of people together does not make them "a team."  Teaming skills are developed through the give and take of team-related work over the course of months and sometimes years.

Who "Gets" Leadership Development?

Why Not Everyone?

A question we are frequently asked - and frequently wrestle with in conjunction with new clients is - who "gets" to attend thinking skills / leadership development? It's a tough question to answer because on the one hand, the logical answer is "everyone."  Why wouldn't you want everyone in the organization to work smarter, make good decisions, understand the vision and mission of your organization, etc.? On the other hand, unless you are a small company of 150 people or less, that would be a prohibitively expensive endeavor. So the tough question is - how do we make the cut? Who makes the cut? Here are some "arguments" - none is "the best."

Argument #1

As stated in the headline - why not everyone?  Simple things - not full blown curriculums - could be enmeshed in everyday work responsibilities (much like Google's now defunct 20% time). Sending a business / industry article out each week via email, or leaving copies of it on the lunch tables, can help to ensure everyone has the same industry knowledge. By leaving articles on the lunch tables, spontaneous discussions can begin about the content and merits of the article. Managers can hold short, 20 minute, meetings two days after the articles are issued asking for feedback or questions about the article. 

To help managers, the department that issues the article can include 3 or 4 discussion questions they'd like the employees to focus on. This article sharing can be rotated throughout the organization. Much like "it's your week for carpool," it could be "your week for article sharing." 

Let's say your company works in manufacturing or healthcare - while there are plenty of articles about the industry itself, there are department-specific articles as well - manufacturing operations, healthcare marketing, etc.

This is just one small and easily do-able activity that can be rolled out throughout the organization. Why not increase the knowledge and capabilities of all your employees?

Argument #2

Focus on leaders in the organization.  We've spent so many years making individuals experts (through training) in their fields that they often don't have a big picture view of their organization or their role.  Sales Managers often don't appreciate the need for profitability which is a finance-department focus.  Charge nurses often don't appreciate customer service which is an operations (and accreditation) focus. By directly impacting the thinking skills and thereby the leadership skills of leaders in an organization there will be an immediate and beneficial impact on the departments that they run and the individuals that they manage.

Argument #3

Include all new hires - starting now.  If everyone who joins your organization is indoctrinated into a thinking curriculum from day one, they will grow in to your (smartest) future leaders. Over  a planned development process of 3 years, 5 years, or 20 years, you will have an organization chock-full of individuals who not only understand how the organization is run (because they will have had linear exposure to the organization), but they will also be knowledgeable and skilled in critical business topics such as communication, teamwork, risk management, continuous improvement, fiscal management and much, much more.

Because they have been brought-up in cohorts (The Training Doctor's branded design), they will have relationships and the ability to communicate with other departments and individuals in other disciplines.

The choice for every individual company will be different. Increase everyone's skills just a little bit?  Deep dive for leaders who will return the most immediate ROI? Or plan a long-tail approach to enmesh employees in "lifetime" development to create a leadership pipeline?