Helping Small and Medium-sized Businesses to Prepare for the Next-Era of Leadership
Free 4-day Event
Every business - small to supersized - has changed significantly since the start of 2020.
Leadership teams are turned upside down.
Companies are being forced to downsize, right-size, and sometimes capsize.
Your company’s future depends on having strong a leadership plan in place as you adapt to the workforce that lies ahead.
We are here to help, with a series of leadership conversations. All FREE.
Meet with fellow business people, hear from experts with long tenures in developing organizational leaders, ask the questions you need answered.
Check out our roster of speakers
Patricia Carl
June 3 3:00 pm EST
Re-imagining / Redesigning Your Leadership Team
Patricia Carl has 20+ years’ experience in Human Resource leadership for both private and public companies, across multiple industries. As President of Highland Performance Solutions, she coaches and consults with executives in order to help them build high-performing teams.
Lee Eisenstaedt
June 10 3:00 pm EST
What Skills Are Needed in the Next 3 - 5 Years?
Lee has been the Chief Operating Officer of a number of top companies included 22 years with the SC Johnson family of companies in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Lee has authored four books, co-authored one, and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com
Jeff Harmon
June 17 3:00 pm EST
The 5C Method to Create Sustainable and Scalable Leadership Development
Jeff Harmon has over 20 years of experience building relationships to equip and mobilize leaders to achieve their most important goals.
He helps company leaders to identify their strengths as well as the strengths of their team.
He is the author of “Become a Better Leader, 10 Minutes at a Time.”
Nanette Miner, Ed.D.
June 24 3:00 pm EST
Creating a Master Plan for Leadership Development
Dr. Nanette Miner founded The Training Doctor in 1991 to help organizations to grow and thrive by a developing worker capabilities. She is on a mission to help organizations to sustain their success through developing their future leaders from the moment they walk in the door.
Leaders Lack Critical Coaching Skills
In a recent study, Driving Workplace Performance Through High-Quality Conversations, Develop Dimensions International's (DDI) analysis of thousands of assessments confirmed that experienced leaders lack critical coaching skills, including:
99% are not effective at checking their understanding of a situation before moving on to address an issue
More than 50% are not effective at encouraging involvement from others
89% are not effective in demonstrating interpersonal diplomacy
Also 89% are not effective in conveying performance expectations and facilitating clear agreement
95% are not effective at openly disclosing and sharing their thoughts and feelings with others
The research also identified an increase in reactive coaching (providing advice after the fact) and a lack of proactive coaching (offering assistance before someone takes on a difficult task or assignment)
Jim Concelman, Vice President, Leadership Development, DDI
Why You Don't Want to Train Your Employees
There are plenty of surveys of late indicating that training is crucial to employee engagement and retention - but there are also plenty of reasons why you don't necessarily want to do training. Here are just a few of those reasons:
When memorization is a waste of time
Either mental or muscle memorization. For instance, if your content changes too quickly, or is used too infrequently. The Training Doctor once worked with a client for whom we were assisting in implementing a new, computer-based financial program. One of the tasks that this program would conduct was end-of-year issuance of W2's. We were implementing and training on the software in the summer months - there was no reason to teach people how to do the steps involved with processing W2's when there would not be a need to conduct that task for at least another five months. In this case a "job aid" (reference material) was much more appropriate.
When there is no immediate way to apply the new knowledge or skills on the job
Adults want their learning to be relevant to their real life and immediately applicable. This is not only an internal need but also a practical approach; if individuals don't have the ability to apply their new knowledge or skills on the job immediately, it simply fritters away.
A large, independent, broadcast organization which was switching to Microsoft Outlook for its email platform concocted the idea of conducting training before the software was ever loaded on people's computers. The IT-trainer visited one floor of the organization per-day and gathered people together in the conference room to conduct a demonstration of how Outlook would work "someday when you got it on your computer."
As the training progressed up the 11 or 12 stories of the company headquarters, attendance at the "training" dwindled, and the IT department wondered why. Answer: because nobody was able to apply that knowledge on the job in an immediate way, so why bother to attend the training?
When facts and figures won't change behavior
Very often training consists of providing information and techniques to individuals with the expectation that they will practice them on the job. Too often, however, actual implementation on the job eludes the learner.
For example, teaching customer service standards is not the same as embodying them. A standard of always answering the phone by the 3rd ring may not make much of an impression when it is delivered as a "rule" during training. However, out on the call-center floor, when a new hire sees his fellow employees always answering the phone by the third ring, or making arrangements for backup when they are overwhelmed and know that they won't be able to answer the phone by the third ring, is a much more powerful "training" than ensuring that people have memorized a rule.
While it may seem odd for an organization which is in the business of designing training to tell you that you may not want to do training, there are often valid reasons for bypassing a training option when you want your employee's behaviors or beliefs to change.
Before designing or delivering training, think through: is this the right time? is this the right method? You might find yourself saving a lot of time and being much more effective in your role!
Training: Free? Money Maker? Or Gift of the organization?
In an article in SHRM's HR Magazine in May 2015, an interview with the VP of Organizational Development and Chief Talent Officer at Hospira, Inc., Pamela Puryear, revealed an interesting approach to learning and development: employee-teams can apply for a grant from the Training Department to meet a learning and development need in their business unit.
Accessing Employee Training through your local College or University
Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of an interview published in December 2012.
Miner: Another way that you can provide employee training and not do it yourself is to take advantage of colleges, universities or community colleges that are in your local area. Many people don't realize the wealth of information and the wealth of training opportunities that exist in their local colleges. They think of a college as a formal degree granting institution, but every college has a continuing education division which offers loads of professional development topics such as PowerPoint or supervisory skills.
I have a colleague that runs the Continuing Education division of a university near me. He's making money hand over fist by teaching lean manufacturing techniques to local manufacturers. Small manufacturers in our area who need the training and don't want to develop it themselves - don't have the savvy, don't have the time, don't have the money to develop it themselves - but it would benefit their business to learn about lean manufacturing techniques. So he created this whole week-long curriculum and his classes are always filled by individuals from the local manufacturing community.
That's one of the benefits of using a local university. It's not cost effective to develop training yourself if you only have one or two individuals who need a particular topic. You can buy customized training for an individual. If you have a Director of Operations that needs to learn about lean manufacturing techniques, you can send him to the university for that kind of training and not have to develop it yourself.
Local colleges are very cost effective - you can spend $79 for a short course or maybe $1000 for a week long course, which is much cheaper than you would ever be able to develop training yourself. And it's right in your backyard, so it really doesn't disrupt your worker’s life.
In addition to the Continuing Ed division, almost every community college has a Business and Industry division, but it might be called something different in your local area. In our local area I know we refer to it as the Business and Industry division. That division is actually a consulting-type division that is tasked with providing training to the local community. They do offer courses very similar to what the Continuing Ed division might offer, but in addition they will send facilitators to you if you have critical mass. So if you have 12 people who need to learn Microsoft Office 2010 and you have enough people, they'll send a facilitator to you. Not only do you not have to develop the training, you don't even have to send your people off to the local college - they'll send the instructor to you!
In addition, what's really beneficial about the Business and Industry division is that they will sometimes customize an offering for you. For instance, I had a client that wanted to teach their employees coaching skills. The “off the shelf” product that the local business and industry division offered wasn't geared toward my client’s industry, which was retail. They felt their employees wouldn’t really grasp it or identify with the concepts if it wasn't more specific to the retail industry. So they asked the Business and Industry division of their local Community College to tweak it, which they did for a minimal fee.
You can also ask your local college or university to develop a course or curriculum specifically for you. One of the most incredible examples that I have witnessed is a community college that developed a new hire data processing training curriculum for a local insurance company. The school opened a new division of the community college – in a small office building - right next to where the insurance company was located. Everybody who got hired by this insurance company went right to the community college for their first month of training. So, basically, the college was the de facto data-entry training program for the insurance company and the insurance company didn't have to do anything other than pay a monthly bill. They didn't have to design a curriculum, they didn't have to provide the facilities, they didn't have to provide the instructor - it was incredible.
So look to the resources that are right in your own backyard because a lot of times they're just there - ready to help you.
T/D: It sounds like even if you're a small or one-person training department you shouldn't feel overwhelmed by all your training responsibilities - 99% of the time the training's already happening informally or it's available in your backyard. All you have to do is take advantage of it.
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Dr. Nanette Miner has been an instructional designer for over two decades. She is President and Managing Consultant for The Training Doctor which specializes in working with subject matter experts to take the knowledge from their heads and design learning in such a way that others can adopt and implement the training immediately. She is also the author of The Accidental Trainer and co-author of Tailored Learning: Designing a Blend that Fits.
1 Day a Week Dealing with Poor Performers?
Managers spend nearly 17 percent of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That’s nearly a full day a week that could have been spent being productive!
This is a pretty shocking statistic. We have to wonder what role training plays in this. Can the managers categorize the poor performance? Is it the same for everyone? Unique to each individual? Is it knowledge, skill or personality that contributes to poor performance? Are people with inadequate skills hired-in to begin with and training fails to bring them up to an acceptable level? Did they have the appropriate skill(s) at one time, but then they diminished over time? Could ongoing performance support have prevented that?
The Training Doctor would LOVE to do a follow-on study with the same managers polled for the Robert Half report to find the answers to these questions.
Look BEYOND the training - if you want it to be successful
According to Robert Brinkerhoff, training events alone typically result in only 15% of transfer of learning to on the job behavior. So if you truly want your participants to be successful on the job, after training, you need to think beyond the training event itself.
There must be processes or systems in place that reinforce, monitor, encourage , or reward the performance of those things you consider to be critical on the job behaviors. We spend much of our time as trainers, worried about Level 1 and Level 2 outcomes (did the trainees like the training in the short-term and did the trainees leave with more knowledge than they came with) but not enough time on whether or not the trainees are implementing their new skills and knowledge on the job.
Before you start any training program, start with the end in mind, because the training will only contribute 15% to the success of your initiative. Be especially analytical of what you expect to see people doing differently on the job and how you expect them to be successful on the job. Very seldom will someone have the initiative or the time or the thorough understanding to be able to transfer what they learned in a class to their real work responsibilities.
Quotable: Dr. Roth Tartell
Clearly, much of what the leader needs to do to increase employee engagement levels can be shaped through learning.
Learning professionals have a responsibility to their organizations to ensure that perspectives and approaches critical to successful engagement are built in to curricula, incorporated into developmental plans, and then included in the talent discussions that shape the future leaders of the organization.
Quotable: Dr. Roth Tartel is Learning and Development Manager - North America for GE Capital Real Estate