LEADING THOUGHTS

I’m a big fan of management thinker Meg Wheatley. Actually, to describe Wheatley as a management thinker doesn’t quite do her justice. Since the early 1990s, she has been researching and writing about organizational learning, change management, and spiritually grounded leadership. But she’s also devoted a considerable amount of energy to building heathy communities both in organizations and in impoverished locales.

Of late, Wheatley has been writing about how to persevere in the face of adversity and how to shift thinking in the midst of difficult circumstances, both timely skills.

So I was eager to read the recent conversation between Wheatley and the sharp-thinking Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business. They don’t disappoint.

Wheatley says that it is a difficult time for leaders to be innovative, and that there is little time in modern organizations for reflection and learning what works and doesn’t work.

“For me, community — people working together and knowing that others are there to support them — is a critically important but largely invisible resource. . . But community is hard to find in most organizations. Not only do many leaders deny that this capacity is important, but they’re actually destroying it through their current management approaches.”

Such as? Whteatley says she many forward-thinking business leaders are being driven by their boards and bosses to implement continuous cutbacks and produce more results with fewer resources.

“Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.”

When you’re lost, Wheatley says, the solution is to admit it and call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map, people from all levels of the organization.

Kleiner pushes Wheatley to explain her view that the only leaders who succeed are those who practise a spiritual discipline. Wheatly doesn’t back down, though she makes clear that, by “spiritual discipline,” she doesn’t mean a religious practice per se but rather “some regular activity that leads you to reflect on your struggles and challenges in a larger context.” That might be meditation, time in a natural space, or even Alcoholics Anonymous. Her point is that leaders must engage in some practice that pushes them out of the perception that they are the centre of the universe.

You can find the original article here (registration may be required)

Joint union-management training is unusual in North America, and it’s not hard to figure out why. On the continuum of union-management relations—from confrontation through armed truce, working harmony, and cooperation—a great many relationships sit on the cantankerous side. And for the few joint training programs that sprout as promising shoots, many are soon cut down because union members perceive that their leadership is too cozy with management and not looking after worker interests.

On the other hand, the benefits of jointly training managers and shop stewards are tantalizing. The promise lies in increasing boundary-spanning knowledge, reducing the friction that can lead to high grievance costs or work stoppages, and finding shared ways of meeting change head on.

Read the article I wrote for Queen’s University IRC on joint union-management training at ENMAX Power Corporation.

You’ve been managing knowledge workers for a few years now and you’re still flummoxed about how to wring more productivity from these colleagues without wringing their necks. Do you get rid of the foosball table? Pay them extra to come into work on time? Spike their java with Red Bull?

How about starting by reducing the barriers that get in the way of productive interaction and collaboration with colleagues. Matson (McKinsey) and Prusak (Institute for Knowledge Management) advise organizations to look here for answers because knowledge workers spend a great deal of time interacting with other knowledge workers.

Matson’s and Prusak’s research shows that half of all interactions are constrained by one of five barriers.

1 and 2. Physical and technical barriers: geographic distance or lack of tools for locating the right people. Workaround — Communities of practice supported by online tools to help workers find colleagues with useful information.

3. Social/cultural barriers: rigid hierarchies that discourage sharing. Workaround — Organization-specific case studies discussed in small groups to promote a better understanding of company culture; incorporating knowledge sharing in performance reviews.

4. Contextual barriers: difficulty translating knowledge widely. Workaround — Rotate employees across teams and divisions; stage creative forums where specialists can learn about other specialists’ projects.

5. Time barriers: perceived lack of time to interact. Workaround — Identify employees that knowledge workers need to interact with and on what topics.

“Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers,” by Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak; McKinsey Quarterly (September 2010)

A Conference Board of Canada study provides some welcome data on literacy and basic skills in the workplace.

Literacy in the workplace means the ability to understand instructions and read and apply printed information, among other basic skills. A workforce with a deficit in these skills will see lower productivity, higher health and safety costs, and more prevalent problems with product and service quality.

The Conference Board’s survey of employers, workers, union representatives, and providers of services to immigrants and Aboriginal groups shows that despite the importance placed on literacy skills in the workplace, training to build these skills is not often available through the workplace. Specifically,

• Forty-five percent of employer respondents and 55.6 percent of worker respondents said  training in the workplace to improve the ability to “listen to instructions” is never, or only seldom, available.
• Fifty-six percent of employer respondents and 58 percent of worker respondents indicated that training in the workplace to improve the ability to read printed information is never, or only seldom, offered.

According to the Conference Board survey, the biggest challenge resulting from workplace literacy training is the scheduling or reorganizing of work. Measuring success and determining the return on investment were other obstacles reported.

On the positive side, those organizations that offer workplace literacy programs see a boost in performance:

• More than 60 percent reported that productivity and the quality of products/services were improved.
• Fifty-eight percent of respondents said health and safety and workplace communications were improved.

The Conference Board survey also revealed a mismatch in perceptions between employers and workers. Employers in the survey, for example, reported a much higher level of confidence in workers’ understanding of health and safety policies than did any other responding group.

• Sixty-four percent of employer respondents said they felt that health and safety policies were understood fully or to a large extent, while 50 percent of responding labour representatives and 40 percent of workers agreed.

This mismatch has potentially significant consequences. “Because employers are already confident,” the report concluded, “they are unlikely to see the need to provide training to upgrade workers knowledge and understanding of the health and safety policies of the workplace.”

The Conference Board report includes the analysis of 10 Canadian workplace literacy and learning programs, particularly relating to their impacts on workplace health and safety.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You: Literacy’s Impact on Workplace Health and Safety, by Alison Campbell; The Conference Board of Canada (July 2010)

Besides being a good friend of Leading Thoughts, Nick Nissley is Executive Director of The Banff Centre’s leadership development unit and a well-respected thinker in the area of arts-based management education.

Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.

If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.

Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.

At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.

At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.

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

According to social network theory, people on average are only a few connections away from the information they seek. But in large organizations, this theory falls apart: some employees clearly have longer search paths than others in locating the knowledge they require. Is this simply because they have an inferior network?

Not really, say researchers from INSEAD and Apple University. Singh, Hansen, and Podolny suggest there are two dynamics at play. One, employees who belong to the periphery of an organization — women and those with lower tenure or poor connectedness to experts — have limited awareness of who knows what in an organization and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. Two, when these employees do seek information, they tend to contact colleagues like themselves who are also outliers.

The researchers say employees on the periphery need to cross social boundaries to discover “who knows what,” and that their managers have a role in making this happen.

“We speculate that reliance on interpersonal networks remains crucial when a firm’s knowledge cannot be easily codified and stored in databases, when it changes
quickly (making it difficult to keep track of who knows what), and when it is distributed across people who are not official experts,” the researchers write in their working paper The World is Not Small for Everyone. “This calls for managers to recognize that formal IT systems are rarely substitutes for inter-personal networks. The implication is that managers need to help members on the periphery develop their networks.”

“The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations”, by Jasjit Singh, Morten T. Hansen, and Joel M. Podolny; INSEAD working paper 2009/49/ST/EFE

photo credit: Sambhu Sankar