Chapter Connections

My mother retired years after her 65th birthday. When she did, she took with her well over 30 years of knowledge on the "Proper Way To Get Things Done" - techniques that were a combination of job knowledge and the relationships she had built with vendors and with her coworkers. I'm significantly biased, but those were some pretty big shoes to fill.

A lot has been said about organizational brain drain over the past few years, and a lot of the focus has been on the Baby Boomer generation retiring.  Here's an interesting realization: brain drain doesn't just occur when the Baby Boomers leave -  it occurs when any employee leaves, especially with the rapidity that knowledge is created and altered in today's work environment. When the average length of time an employee holds a job these days is between 2 to 5 years, and as technology and networks shift just as swiftly, organizations need to place a priority on capturing and maintaining all their intellectual capital.

Consider this: what would happen to your department's workflow if your LMS Administrator were to leave?  Or your Training Coordinator?  Let's say only one person on your team is able to facilitate a course -- what happens then that person leaves (our Total Trainer design team can serve as a case study for this last "what if").  These people might be retiring Boomers, but they just as easily can be Gen X'ers or Millenials seeking a different challenge.

Intellectual capital is not limited to one generation, and its importance is not limited to those employees with significant tenure.  While presentations such as Devon Scheef's May 27 Learning Event may be couched as a preventative for the loss of legacy expertise, it would behoove all of us to consider applying her approaches with the mindset that each employee is host to a unique bit of wisdom critical to the operation of the company, and to find a way to build a community that embraces the ready sharing of that wisdom.

When Ferril Onyett and Mazen Albatarseh tackled the challenge of delivering impactful training to 150,000+ employees across the globe, they walked away with a case study that focused more about the analysis of their dispersed workforce needs, and less about the solution. 

Their solution: to train Taco Bell's front line employees, which turns over at an astronomical rate of 140%, the company uses eLearning combined with on-the-job observation.  This shouldn’t surprise us.  Google "training dispersed workforce," and the use of some form of eLearning resource -- be it an online library or an LMS – will appear somewhere on the blog posts and web sites that populate the search results.

What resonated with our members, however, was the approach that Ferril Onyett (Director, People Development and Global Learning) and Mazen Albatarseh (Director of Management Systems and the Customer Engagement team) took to hone their program.  Turns out, they were using eLearning before. It just wasn't effective.

"The most important take away for me was seeing the way that the Taco Bell team had graphed the behaviors/experiences of the customers, the front line workers, the assistant managers, and the managers into one document,” shared Laurie Reinhart. “This helped them clarify exactly what was valuable and what added no value in terms of what the company was requiring of franchisees.”  Laurie appreciated that methodology so much that: “I have adapted and applied their grid-based analysis to the development plan for my own consulting group."

A key component of that grid-based analysis was a focus on Taco-Bell's customers.  Mazen took great care to show that everything, from the training of the front line employees to the training of the restaurant managers, was tied to the customer experience.

Mary MacKey appreciated "how they detailed each step of the process for each level of participation (manager, team member, and customer and showed the relationship among them all) – work as a team.  This was a good reminder to focus on in some current projects."

So if Taco Bell was delivering eLearning before the time period addressed in their case study, and continued to deliver eLearning afterwards, what differed?  Training's focus on the essentials. 

“The response from everyone that there are approximately 1000 acronyms and 200 some-odd amount of things a manager needed to do was a loud cry to how out of control things can become if you don’t look at the big picture," commented Mary.  While neither Mazen nor Ferril did anything to assure us that the number of acronyms had diminished (indeed, Ms. Onyett added a new one during her presentation), they stressed multiple times that the key measurements that both the company and training were focusing on totalled 26. This reduction of information overload most impacted the new hire training program, reducing the time spent in front of eLearning content more than 60%.

Ferril and Mazen’s story showed that the key to training a dispersed workforce has less to do with the solutions you provide than everything else that comes before it.

"Hearing their story reinforced the importance of one's credibility and track record within the organization," said Laurie. "Because they had an established record and enjoyed the confidence of the organization's leadership, they were able to adapt their approach when they needed to do so."

This month's Learning Event topic brought to mind ATD-OC's inaugural Training Manager SIG meeting, in which the Training Director (and department of one) of a local retailer was sharing her challenges in reaching out to a workforce scattered throughout malls and outlet stores across the nation.

First and foremost, the presenter had to rely upon a shifting roster of store managers to deliver her training -- she simply could not be in all stores in a reasonable span of time to deliver the training herself.  Her solution was a "training-in-a-box" deliverable, where each store would receive the training material, along with a manager's facilitation guide.

From this solution came other challenges: consistency, and ensuring learning effectiveness.  

I would imagine Taco Bell's OD department (two of whom will be presenting this Wednesday, April 22) had similar problems, if at a greater scope.  

The management and professional development of geographically dispersed teams has been a growing challenge since the latter half of the previous century.   As technology has lessened the impact business has on a growing organization, as more and more companies have expanded their reach from regional to national to global, communication breaches the spans between teams at the speed of thought.  Yet physical interaction remains limited, and meaningful communication becomes hampered without the most deliberate of asynchronous explanations.

Solutions abound, creating additional challenges of adapting to technology, budgeting time and resources, and the challenge of an ever-changing environment. Do you deliver eLearning to ensure a consistent message is shared across the organization?  Do you rely upon web meetings to help facilitate that interpersonal dialogue that eLearning lacks? Do you collaborate in the cloud? Or do you rely upon your organization’s leaders to deliver the “Training In A Box” packages that you design?

From what I gather from the description of ATD-OC's April 22 lunchtime Learning Event, there's no one way. The training team at Taco Bell continuously adapts its strategies to figure out the right blend of e-learning, virtual sessions, and classroom training (yes, there's still a place for classroom training).   It'll be interesting to learn more about their methodology of when to shift gears, of identifying which blend works for which team. 

Who wants to ask them about including informal/social learning tools into the mix?

Coaching is a process. This was one of the key take-aways from last month's Learning Event, which was part experiential learning, part best practices identification, and a little bit of lecture. It was also an opportunity to observe coaching in action -- presenter Steve VerBurg did an admirable job gathering the pooled knowledge of the ATD-OC attendees and transforming them into learning opportunities for everyone involved.

Which was a key lesson of the session. Knowledge, Steve shared, consists of about 15% of what the coach is responsible for. The remaining 85% consists of skills and attitude. The inspirational coaches with whom we each have worked, or are working, have displayed characteristics that focused on skills and attitude more than on knowledge. Dr. Cynthia Boccara took that message to heart: "I'm 'Dr. Data' - I love knowledge. I'm finding that it's an impediment to me. I get locked in that analysis and more data and research. And I see myself spinning, and I keep thinking that I need to know more. This [session] is one more reinforcement that it's not the knowledge, it's the attitude and application that actually creates the success."

"Steve VerBurg aptly pointed out that Attitude is the one component that leaders and trainers have within their control," shared Brenda Wells. "And that so many of the skills and competencies that we wish to exploit positively begin with the proper Attitude: patience, mentorship, empowerment, trust, credibility, to name only a few." Steve shared a few key models with the group that evening, but the key take-aways seemed to come from the participants' analyses of how to apply those models. "I am always impressed with the amount of experience and wisdom in the room," shared Brenda. "Besides the amazing number of insightful and helpful tips offered to gain performance improvement, the spirit of collaboration and support was clearly present."
That sharing came in the culminate activity of the evening, where Steve presented five categories of coaching techniques, and challenged us to share what we've experienced that would fit into those categories. We've posted the images to the right -- click on each image to see the details (we're particularly proud of how we were able to include ATD-OC as a coaching resource -- ask us how in the comments, if you'd like more details behind these lists!). As you can see from the list, the methods by which a leader can coach an employee are plentiful.  Our attendees would point out, however, that those techniques fit within 2, perhaps 3 of the seven coaching process steps, and by themselves would not succeed in improving employee performance.   Michele Schwab appreciated the Coaching Process Model.  "It breaks down a very big process," she said.  "I believe many of us walked away from the session understanding that each step is important to achieving better results."  Perhaps an equally important:  "I can easily reference the nice clean structure [of the coaching process] during future coaching or "coaching the coach" opportunities."

If you attended our March Learning Event, and would like to add your thoughts to what you learned, we look forward to your comments. 

We also look forward to seeing you at our April Learning Event, which addresses "Training A Dispersed Workforce."  In a business world that continues to adapt and adjust to a global market, with large organizations spread across the nation and the world, the challenges of training both new and existing employees goes beyond the typical issues experienced in a single classroom.  Our presenters Ferril Onyett and Mazen Albatarseh will share Taco Bell best practices to managing this tension and remain agile and responsive to a rapidly evolving business climate.

See you there!

Laurie Reinhart led ATD-OC's Structured Networking topic for March, asking: Who was the professional coach who most inspired you? What did he or she do that impacted your performance?

Bucky Elkins

“I had a manager at Disney who allowed me to be creative and do my own kind of thing. He provided guidance, but then would ask us to come up with what we needed to do. It was very eye-opening, and actually, I think it led the down this path to where I am now."

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"My UCLA gymnastics coach, who taught me: ‘Everything we have in life is a choice, and our choice produces emotion, and our emotion produces action.’ So if we want to act a certain way, we have to choose our thoughts.”

Stephanie Lang

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Jeffrey Hansler

“The sales manager who asked me on my first day: "What are you going to do? What's your plan?" And he sat down and did nothing more than ask me questions all morning. And from that we developed a plan."

1. An Executive Steering Committee that included the COO, CAO and a couple of Vice Presidents
2. A Core Coalition of 12 people that included supervisors
3. An Adjunct Coalition of 23 employees interested in contributing to the change
   

"The manager’s challenge is to build individual capabilities at the same time he or she encourages individuals to tackle new challenges that build their competencies in preparation for the future." from the  Dale Carnegie Training whitepaper: Talent Management.  

If your company's performance review period is like mine, you're just wrapping up your mid-year reviews. And if you're company's like mine, you're realizing that performance management is still driven primarily by deadlines.

Maybe you've grown accustomed to that.

"Coaching is a small part of the job description for most managers. Nearly half spend less than 10% of their time coaching others." reported Forbes.com back in 2010.  Wonder if that number's gone up in the past four years, or down, or remained about the same.

Coaching is widely recognized as an important component of performance management.  Articles in Forbes, Inc., and Harvard Business Review (to name a few) all study how strong performers can grow and improve when coaching is done well, and the impact of coaching when done poorly or not at all.

Just as equally recognized: effective performance management requires ongoing coaching discussions.  

The Dale Carnegie Perspective: "Most development occurs on the job and in the context of work activities. It is not limited to off-the-job training."

This perspective is evident in Dale Carnegie's Growth and Change cycle. It's a little different than the performance management cycle you may have shared with your managers when kicking off another "performance year," but it similarly establishes an accountability between manager and employee for the employee's development.  It also points out where most performance management stops -- at least until new goals are set.

You can learn more about Dale Carnegie's Growth and Change Cycle at this month's ATD-OC Learning Event.

"The future is not given. Especially in this time of globalization and the network revolution, behavior at the individual level will be the key factor in shaping the evolution of the entire human species. Just as one particle can alter macroscopic organization in nature, so the role of individuals is more important now than ever in society." Ilya Prigogine, 2000

In preparation for this month's Learning Event, presenter Denise Lamonte begins by asking: "Is your organizational change effort failing because the wrong people are leading it?" She goes on to suggest that the people with the titles are not necessarily the right drivers of organizational change, other individuals are.

Denise won't be quoting Belgian physical chemists, but will be referring to the research conducted by Dr. John Kotter, a best-selling author and authority on leadership and change. Dr. Kotter identified an 8-Step Process for leading change, one step of which is assemble a group of the right individuals with the power and energy to lead and support a collaborative change effort -- or, building a guiding coalition. 

This session will draw from Denise's real experiences in building a guiding coalition at St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare, and promises to be an insightful exploration of Dr. Kotter's process for successful organizational change.

 

Are you a manager involved in a project that will likely create some organizational change? Do you, yourself, wish to change the world? Join us over lunch this Wednesday, February 25.