LEADING THOUGHTS

If it takes a village to raise a child, then perhaps it takes co-workers to help trainees shine.

Management development experts have long known that organizations get the most out of their training dollars when employees are supported before, during, and after training. Few organizations, however, actually follow this advice.

Models of training effectiveness focus on program design, trainee characteristics, and workplace environment as the key factors that determine transfer of learning. By contrast, Harry J. Martin (Cleveland State University) wanted to study the context in which employees apply and transfer the knowledge and skills learned, specifically the role of workplace climate and peer support.

(Workplace climate includes factors such as adequate resources, cues that remind trainees of what they have learned, opportunities to apply skills, barriers and constraints to transfer, and consequences for using training on the job.)

FACTOID: It is estimated that only 10 to 40 percent of learning transfers to the job.

Martin focused on 237 managers of a manufacturing company in the midwest U.S. who completed a comprehensive training program. He devised a global measure of workplace climate for each of the 12 divisions in which the employees worked and used performance ratings of the participants to measure the level of training transfer.

Martin found that trainees in a division with a more favorable climate and those enjoying greater peer support showed greater improvement. Even better, in terms of transferring learnings, peer support overcame or lessened the effects of a negative office environment.

“The results of this study suggest that follow-up programs should be designed to address both the immediate and general organizational environments,” Martin reports in Human Resource Development Quarterly. “Care must be taken to help ensure that peers and immediate supervisors help trainees put the skills to work. Co-workers could provide general encouragement or be involved in more structured activities such as the peer meetings employed in this study.”

“Workplace Climate and Peer Support as Determinants of Training Transfer,” by Harry J. Martin; Human Resource Development Quarterly (Vol. 21 No. 1 Spring 2010; pp. 87-104)

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Organizational development and change management more than ever before are being linked to learning and talent development, according to a report recently published by the UK-based CIPD.

“It is clear that organizational development and design will become increasingly important as organizations seek to change, innovate and to link learning to organizational goals,” according to CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey report. But the report also noted that “practitioners are less involved in discussing the design, delivery and impact of learning with other managers. This alignment issue is a key one as L&TD seeks to build its reputation and impact.”

The survey found that for 46 percent of respondents, the major organizational change affecting learning and talent development in the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organizational development, and performance management to drive change. For 37 percent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

Other findings from the CIPD survey:

• As a result of the economic downturn, learning and talent development is becoming more focused on value and impact; in other words, doing more with less. “It will be particularly important for professionals to ensure that their L&TD activities are even more closely aligned with business strategy and to be able to assess the return on investment generated.”
• Almost 60 percent of organizations undertake talent management activities. Among these, half rate such activities as “effective” and only 3 percent consider them “very effective.” The three most effective activities to manage talent are coaching (39 percent), in-house development programmes (32 percent), and high-potential development schemes (31 percent).
• The three most common ways to evaluate talent management activities: feedback from line managers (42 percent); rretention of those identified as high-potential (35 percent); and  anecdotal observation of change (35 percent).
• In terms of leadership skills, the main gaps identified by employers were performance management (setting standards for performance and dealing with under-performance) and leading and managing change.
• Internships are growing in popularity, partly because employers want to provide a lifeline for talented young people. The results are encouraging. “The fact that a third of firms report higher productivity as a result of their internships is particularly encouraging, given that many interns are new to the workplace and are still in the process of learning new skills.”

About 86 percent of responding organizations (623) had headquarters in the UK and the remainder (101) were based outside the UK.

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Alas the “glass ceiling” is one of those sad facts of modern organizational life that knows no national boundaries.  Doesn’t matter the country: despite rising female labour participation rates, women can’t seem to crack senior management ranks.

There are the usual reasons: the lack of transparency around promotion policies; work-family conflict; the old boys’ network; and the lack of visibly successful female role models. In her study of female managers in Ireland, Christine Cross (U Limerick) found similar dynamics at play but also what she calls an under-appreciated phenomenon: that “visibility” or being known to the senior management team is a crucial “career progression strategy.”

It is a strategy for which women of a certain age are ill-equipped, Cross says. “The age during which women are most often taking time out of their career for childbirth coincides with the time they are most active in seeking promotion,” she writes in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal. “As a consequence of taking maternity leave, a woman’s absence from the organisation directly impacts her visibility in organisational life. This study highlights that where women are away from the office for these extended periods, they believe, because of their absence, they are ‘forgotten about’ by the senior management team.”

Cross’s conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with 30 female managers from across a wide range of industry sectors in Ireland. The women in the study also observed that men in their organizations overtly engaged in self-generated visibility, a strategy the female respondents did not want to employ.

Hmm. . . do you buy that?

I have seen the way some men network and it’s not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they are doing it, just to get in with the ‘in crowd’. People talk about them behind their backs about how they are always smoozing up to the most senior people, and there is this one guy who is really junior, but wants to hang out with the ‘big boys’. But it’s working for him, even though we are all saying he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s making a laughing stock of himself.
—Retail store manager quoted by Cross

“Barriers to the executive suite: evidence from Ireland”, by Christine Cross; Leadership & Organization Development Journal (Vol. 31 No. 2, 2010, pp. 104-119)

photo credit: Let Ideas Compete

One of my favourite interviews over the past few months was an exchange between Tim Brown, IDEO CEO, and Art Kleiner, author of The Age of Heretics. The Q&A in strategy+business focused on “design thinking” — why it leads to better innovation and how to encourage it in our organizations.

In the genius versus process innovation debate, Brown falls on the side of process. His point is that you don’t have to be creative to practise “design thinking,” which he defines as a combination of intuition and rational thought.

Here are the landmarks along the path of design thinking”:

• Produce the design brief: What question will you address?
• Observe the world in new ways: It’s not a question of getting a great idea  out of your head. “The wonderful ideas come from noticing things and exposing yourself to the world in different ways.” The more you observe, Brown says, the more interesting your questions become.
• Find a systematic process for developing your insights. That might involve deliberate discussions on what comes out of your initial rough of thinking.
• Visualize your ideas. That means taking the time to make prototypes and redesign based on what you learn. According to Brown, “We need to get much more comfortable with building to learn, that is, making things to figure out what they should be, rather than to show how good they are.” Key indicator: how often are your senior managers looking at rough prototypes to see how ideas are evolving?

In his Q&A, Brown references examples from Amtrak, Virgin Airways, Shimano, IDEA, and Bank of America.

The Thought Leader Interview: Tim Brown, by Art Kleiner; strategy+business (Issue 56, Autumn 2009)

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In the journal Global Business and Organizational Excellence, Stephen Wehrenberg offers an insider perspective on an enterprise change management initiative at the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard provides an interesting case study. It is admirably flexible when facing operational issues; leaders have to adapt to changing situations. But the Coast Guard is as rigid as they come when non-operational changes are needed.

Wehrenberg, director of HR strategy and executive development for the Coast Guard, offers a number of reasons for resistance to change: autonomy at low levels; accountability for results with less attention to process; high degree of leader turnover; and a feeling of “change saturation.”

Wehrenberg and his team designed a “stealth” strategy to build local participation and earn some wins in order to gain broad adoption at the unit level. They also adopted a portfolio change management approach to help senior leaders prioritize initiatives. And they employed the Project Change Triangle Assessment to evaluate strength in three areas critical to change: executive sponsorship, project management discipline, and change management discipline.

The change management process at the Coast Guard is ongoing so there is more to this case study that needs to be written. But it is still a worthwhile read for those planning change in large, culturally complex organizations.

“The Coast Guard Charts a Course for Enterprise Change Management,” by Stephen Wehrenberg; Global Business and Organizational Excellence (pp. 17-31, November/December 2009)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

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Four of every 10 employers in the U.S. profess to be concerned that the aging of the workforce will have a negative impact on their business over the next three years. But it might be all hand wringing and no action: the same survey found that two-thirds have not analyzed the demographics of their workforce and 77 percent have not analyzed the projected retirement dates of their employees.

So what do you make of that seemingly mixed message? According to the Sloan Center on Aging and Work, the unit that gathered the data as part of its Strategic Talent Management Study, part of the answer lies in the tight financial circumstances in which many organizations find themselves.

Researchers at Sloan dug deep into their survey of 696 U.S. organizations and identified four different employer groups:

• “Lower pressured employers” anticipate a positive or neutral impact from the aging of the workforce and are not suffering from the economy (24 percent of the sample).
• “Economically pressured employers” aren’t concerned about an aging workforce but are struggling to keep up in the economy (36 percent).
• “Age-pressured employers” are really worried about the aging workforce but are in decent financial shape (12 percent).
• “Age/economically pressured employers” are stuck in the worst of both worlds (28 percent).

The Sloan report builds the case for organizations to conduct a rigorous assessment of their workforce demographics, projected retirement dates, and future skills needs. The report includes a handy chart outlining workforce planning considerations for employers, depending on where they sit on the “pressure” scale.

Download a copy of the report here or email me at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com.

photo credit: AMANITO

Although working women are piling up educational credentials and experience, in far too many organizations they are still butting up against a glass ceiling. These invisible barriers to upward mobility can come in various forms: lack of mentoring of women, gender stereotyping, and views that men make more effective leaders. In the U.S., women holding the titles of chairman, CEO, COO, and executive vice president remain at about 7 percent of the population of executives.

While many possible causes of the glass ceiling have been studied, one overlooked area is managers’ perceptions of women’s work and family demands. Researchers Jenny M. Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon (U of Illinois at Chicago) designed a study to test two ideas: whether managers view women as having more difficulty than men executing their work roles due to family responsibilities; and whether women, based on this perception, are viewed as less suitable for promotion. The study was based on a sample of 126 female subordinates and 52 male and female managers from one midwestern-U.S. division of a Fortune 100 transportation firm.

The result was conclusive: “Even though female employees actually reported slightly less family-work conflict than their male counterparts,” the researchers write in the Academy of Management Journal, “their managers still perceived them as having greater family-work conflict, a perception that had significant implications for women’s organizational advancement.” (These biases held for both male and female managers.) Because of these perceptions, managers rated women lower on job and organizational fit and performance.

“We have uncovered a critical dimension of the social role expectations that play a key role in the upward progress of female workers,” the researchers write. “Furthermore, we feel that such stereotyping is quite significant, with strong ramifications for people and organizations, given that these perceptions affect important managerial decisions.”

If these results are a true reflection of what is going on in organizations, there are a couple of practical implications.

One, to reduce or eliminate the impact of gender on managers’ perceptions of family-work conflict, managers must be made aware of their potential to stereotype. This is not simply a male-female issue. As the investigators note, “Male managers have been said to be gatekeepers of the upper echelons of management, yet we found that female managers held family-work conflict stereotypes about female subordinates as well.”

Two, women who participate in company-sponsored programs that assist employees with managing family-work conflict may be signaling to their managers that they need help balancing home and work domains. Given prevailing stereotypes, this would likely kill their opportunities to be promoted.

Bosses’ perceptions of family-work conflict and women’s promotability: Glass ceiling effects,” by Jenny M Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon; Academy of Management Journal (2009, Vol. 52, No. 5, 939–957)

photo credit: Sal Petruzelli Marino

If you were to identify the 10 most important skills that leaders must have and compare it to the 10 skills that leaders actually possess, how closely would those two lists overlap?

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) set out to answer that question in a study involving 2,200 leaders from 15 organizations, conducted between 2006 and 2008. The CCL’s conclusion: there is an alarming leadership gap or deficit.

In the CCL survey, seven leadership skills are consistently viewed as most important now and in the future:

• Leading people
• Strategic planning
• Managing change
• Inspiring commitment
• Resourcefulness
• Doing whatever it takes
• Being a quick learner

Of the top five needed skills, only resourcefulness is considered a top 10 skill. The four most important future skills “are among the weakest competencies for today’s leaders,” the report concluded. Other areas where there is a significant gap between the needed and existing skills levels are: employee development, balancing work and personal life, and decisiveness.

“These data show that many leaders’ strengths are not in areas that are most important for success,” the report concludes.

For a copy of the report, send me at email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

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