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)

photo credit: gritphilm

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.

photo credit: Limmud

A couple of articles in the International Journal of Productivity and Performance offer signposts for managers wanting to get more out of performance management systems (PMS) such as the balanced scorecard. And there are likely plenty of you out there. By some estimates, the failure rate of PMS implementation is around 70 percent.

In their project, Andre A. de Waal and Harold Counet (Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands) asked, What problems can organizations expect to encounter when implementing PMS? To answer that, they conducted a literature review and tested the validity and relevance of what they learned with a panel of 31 performance management experts from eight countries.

De Waal and Counet discovered that while practitioners and experts/academics may differ somewhat on why a typical PMS runs into trouble, both groups point to the lack of management commitment as a crucial reason for failure.

Top Five Problems Implementing PMS According to Practitioners:

1. The organization does not have a performance management culture
2. Lack of management commitment
3. Management puts low priority on the PMS implementation
4. The organization does not see benefit from the PMS
5. The PMS has a low priority or its use is abandoned after a change of management

Top Five Problems Implementing PMS According to Academics:

1. The current information and computer technology system does not support the PMS adequately
2. The organization is in an unstable phase
3. The PMS has a low priority or its use s abandoned after a change in management
4. Lack of management commitment
5. The organization does not have a performance management culture

De Waal and Counet conclude: “The results indicate the crucial role commitment – on all levels of the organization – plays in achieving a successful PMS, and the importance of management being a role model in consequently, consistently and visibly to the organization using performance management. In short, the research results in reinforcing that important adage: forewarned is forearmed!”

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Between 2002 and 2004, de Waal did great work identifying 20 behavioural factors that determine whether or not performance management systems were being used successfully. Elzinga (Shell Int. Exploration and Production), Albronda, and Kluijtmans (Open U of The Netherlands) took de Waal’s work one step further by determining which of the behavioural factors are more important than others.

The three researchers replicated de Waal’s study of four Dutch organizations in the private and public sectors. Their pattern matching anaylsis identified the following seven behavioural factors as most important:

• Managers realize the importance of key performance indicators to their performance
• Managers accept the need for performance management
• Managers have earlier (positive) experiences with performance management
• Managers’ frames of reference contain similar key performance indicators (KPI)
• Managers are involved in making the analyses
• Managers do not experience KPIs as threatening
• Managers clearly see the promoter using PMS

And these are the behavioural factors that are the least important in successfully implementing and sustaining a PMS:

• Managers have been involved in decision making about the project start time
• Managers work in a stable, relatively tranquil environment
• Managers are actively communicating about the PMS project
• Managers are involved in defining KPIs
• Managers do have insight into the relationship between strategy and KPIs
• Managers are involved in making the KPI report layout
• Managers use the KPIs that match their responsibility area

“Lessons learned from performance management systems implementations,” by
Andre A. de Waal and Harold Counet; International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management (Vol. 58 No. 4, 2009, pp. 367-390)

“Behavioral factors influencing performance management systems’ use,” by Taco Elzinga, Be Albronda, and Frits Kluijtmans; International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management (Vol. 58 No. 6, 2009, pp. 508-522)

photo credit: Jinho.Jung

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

photo credit: KyleZOA

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

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

photo credit: splityarn

In this video clip, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra discusses perceptions of women being relatively weak at “envisioning,” essentially the ability to articulate a vision of the future and translating it into a strategic direction.

Ibara’s study is based on 360-degree evaluations of some 2,000 male and female managers. Prevailing wisdom is that there is a bias against female managers, who are generally rated less favourably than their male counterparts. Not so fast: Ibarra found that women score higher than men on many measures (such as communication, emotional intelligence, feedback) except for one: envisioning.

Yes, this is perception and not reality, but “when it comes to senior management,” she points out, “perception is reality.” (3:15 mark)

At the 4:00 mark, Ibarra says it is possible the way in which women arrive at a new vision is simply different than the process used by men (consensus versus going to the mountaintop), and that this organic process is not as evident.

At 6:10, she wonders if some women prefer to stick to the facts rather than striking out with a bold vision because they are often in a more vulnerable position in organizations.

And at 8:50, she talks about the “identity trap” in which men and women often find themselves: being pigeon-holed as an expert in one area. One way to escape this trap is to get out of the office to enlarge your perspectives with your network and do some “pattern recognition” in other areas. (11:24).

Goodman and Beenen from Carnegie Mellon University recently developed the concept of an “organizational learning contract.” The key is the first word: organizational. Their learning contract creates shared and specific expectations among students, faculty, and educational administrators concerning learning outcomes, learning environments, and the educational assessment system.

Goodman and Beenen developed the contract specifically for university management schools, and you can guess why: schools are under continued pressure to be relevant and deliver value to their “customers.” But it is intriguing to consider how their model can be applied to a non-academic organization. If you are truly committed to building a learning organization, writing this into a contract with each employee is one powerful way of getting your point across.

There are three basic elements to Goodman and Beenen’s organizational learning contract:
1. Learning outcomes. These are specific, explicitly communicated, and developed with the organization in mind.
2. Learning environments. What types of learning environments will be used to ensure the various outcomes.
3. Learning systems. How the contract will be implemented, outcomes measured, and curriculum redesigned.

The authors say organization-level learning contracts build in accountability, are a force for integration, and can be used as diagnostic tools to identify learning gaps or mismatched expectations. This is quite a radical concept for business schools but is no less valuable for non-academic organizations.

Organization Learning Contracts and Management Education; Paul Goodman and Gerard Beenen; Academy of Management Learning & Education (2008, vol. 7, no. 4, 521-534)