The messy business of learning to become a leader

I have spent today, as I often do, working with a group of team leaders on the practices of feedback and coaching.

Running workshops for managers who work in commercial organisations is always interesting.  Managers are hungry for hints and tips that will help them solve pressing performance issues.  

Of course, providing hints and tips makes sense.  If there is knowledge that can be shared that will help improve performance then why not? However, what I notice, and indeed concerns me, is the extent to which this approach to learning, especially management learning, attempts to reduce it to a set of instrumental steps.  

This need for certainty in managerial practice is fed by the organisations that sponsor and commission management development.  Organisations want managers who are competent to, inter alia, manage performance, give feedback and establish a coaching culture that fosters personal responsibility.  They too are looking for instrumental approaches that will solve organisational performance needs.  The analogy that I've used before is the notion of learning as a garage refit - “remove a group of managers/team members from the workplace, repair or fit higher performance parts as instructed, lubricate if necessary and return to service.”

Knowing vs Becoming

I came across an interesting reflection about the vulnerability of learning in this blog from elearnspace.  What interested me was the way it drew attention to the distinctions between knowing and becoming and, in the writers view, a deficit in practices that encourage learners to explore their vulnerabilities and to notice how they are 'becoming' whatever it is they are learning to become.  Of interest was the extent to which this was not about the content but on the challenges of learning.

Roman roads or woodpaths

This reminded me of my blog in November 2011, based on the above title, in which I explored the issues of learning practices that were concerned with providing clear cut 'Roman roads' to knowledge compared with the messier notion of 'woodpaths' that meander and involve getting lost but which also produce useful learning about what works and what doesn't.

Back to today

And so coming back to what I noticed about my work with the group today.  The models that underpin practice in feedback and coaching are freely available  - A.I.D, Skill/Will, GROW, for example, can be easily acquired.  The challenge is in their application and in becoming somebody who can give feedback well and facilitate others learning.

For me it comes down to a choice about who is in control of the learning; the teacher or the learner.  In my own 'becoming' as a management developer and understanding how managers learn the most important role that I can play is to do everything I can to put the learner in control.  On skills based topics like today I favour the use of learner-generated scenarios over prescribed role plays.  There are risks with this approach, principally that the teacher/facilitator has no control over the scenarios and, consequently, the 'take aways'.  But, if I listen to the feedback, the managers tell me that they prefer this over the alternative prescribed approaches.

It's messier but it's also a deeper learning experience.

Trends in Human Resource Development - piccolo, econimo, rapido

Some years ago I was working with an organisation development consultant on a programme for operations managers.  His mantra was piccolo, econimo, rapido or, in other words, what could be done in small steps, cheaply and quickly to make something happen.  Working in a large and slow moving organisation at the time, the notion felt rather pioneering.  I had become quite stuck with the idea that learning had to be planned and organised, like a military operation.  The result was that the quality of what was done was usually good, but at the expense of being too slow in the eyes of the client.  The idea of piccolo, econimo, rapido made a big difference - it helped change perceptions of the training department from slow and unresponsive to an enabler of workplace performance, in tune with the pace of the business.  

Followers of this blog will know that I like to muse about what's happening in human resource development and, perhaps, the notion of piccolo, econimo, rapido captures something of the trends that are taking place right now in learning.  I talked to a group of undergraduates at Durham Business School in March about trends in HRD and this post is a summary and reflection of some the key things we talked about.

  

Encouraging independence

Access to powerful search engines means that we can now find most information that we want, when we want it and for free, thus bypassing the traditional gatekeepers.  This means that, most of the time, we can get answers to our time-bound and situation-bound questions without the need for a traditional intermediary like a training department.

In my own practice, I am an active user of online networks to access new ideas.  Whilst it's possible that I might be part of a user group that's paying more attention to these networks and their value, it seems to me that it is only a matter of when, rather than if, this openness will have an impact on formal training.     

In my work with leaders, I often point to ideas and information that I've found on the web, which post-date the production of any course materials, and leave the participants to make their own notes and actions, outside the course, to find them for themselves. For me it's an example of some simple steps, taken in the context of a formal learning setting, which can stimulate and encourage independence.

  

Single use learning - immediate and disposable

At the Learning and Skills Exhibition 2014 I saw an interesting example of coaching using online tools like Skype.

Although this is a formal development process it does give us a glimpse of what's possible, quickly and cheaply, with tools like Skype when applied to workplace learning - the ability to coach people over distance, the ability to give people information or support and encouragement, the ability to get groups of people in different locations, from different divisions, different countries or different companies together quickly.

It's not difficult to imagine a situation where somebody has just heard that a colleague has got some good techniques for selling a product and they then get everybody onto a Skype call to demonstrate the techniques, talk about it, record it, turn it into a conversation that other people can listen to and then do it.  The focus is on performance and practice rather than getting into the whole cycle of developing a formal piece of learning. 

'Enlighten us, but make it quick'

Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that has been held in around 100 cities worldwide, organised by volunteers, at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format.  The tagline is 'enlighten us, but make it quick'.  Each speaker is allocated five minutes of presentation time and is accompanied by 20 presentation slides. During the presentations, each slide is displayed for 15 seconds and then automatically advanced.  To see examples follow these links Ignite Cardiff  Ignite Showreel

Reflections on format having seen it in action? Positives: lots of content in a short space of time, redundancy for the listener is minimised, encourages presenters to practise because the slides' advance is uncontrollable. Negatives - creates tension for the speaker  - when I have seen this format in practice I noticed that several of the presenters rushed and on many occasions were waiting for the next slide to advance; it creates tension for the listener - I found myself paying a lot of attention to anticipating the next slide than necessarily concentrating on the speaker.

But it is a great example of the small, cheap and quick concept.  It's got some rough edges, for sure, but I loved the energy that it creates and there are lots of practical learning benefits for both the giver and the receiver.  

Energy, engagement and exploration

‘The New Science of Building Great Teams’ appeared in Harvard Business Review April 2012, p61-70.

I'm very interested in the research done at MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory and Sociometric Solutions on what differentiates great teams.  Their approach captures data to measure 1) how team members contribute to a team as a whole (Energy) 2) how team members communicate with one another (Engagement) and 3) how teams communicate with one another (Exploration).  It's most startling and interesting claim is that productive teams have certain data signatures - a mix of the energy, engagement and exploration practices - that are so consistent that they can predict a team's success simply by looking at the data without ever meeting its members.  Their data gathering processes are hard to replicate in everyday practice, however, keeping small, cheap and quick in mind, a lot could be done with a digital video camera, a tally sheet and some interviews. 

Conclusion

In no sense am I making a singular pitch for learning to always be small, cheap and quick.  Some of my best and deepest learning has come from the hard graft of working on my own, researching, reading, note taking and writing.   

However, in the workplace setting, it is time, or the lack of it, which is the greatest barrier to learning. Piccolo, Econimo, Rapido is a useful principle to work with to deliver results.  

Business leadership in Africa

One of the things that I'm actively working on at the moment is a learning expedition to Africa. These expeditions are about learning in context by visiting a country and learning, through discovery and reflection, about business practice. 

The expedition will be based in Accra, Ghana and will focus on business leadership. We will meet with business leaders, university faculty, government ministers, students and NGOs to find out the strategies, business models and leadership approaches that are being used to take advantage of Africa's rising economic growth.

What's different about doing business in Africa?

I've spent the past seven years shuttling between the UK and Nigeria working on a contract with one of the oil majors.  Apart from some rather obvious differences between working in, say, London or Paris, compared to Lagos, which are about the weather and the traffic, the day-to-day business practices are, on the surface at least, quite familiar. But if you stand back a little and observe what's going on you find, just as you would in any business, a texture to how things get done that reflects the cultural norms of that place.  It's tempting for international businesses to assume that their practices can be applied unproblematically but to make this assumption is both naive and disrespectful.

Here is an example of what I mean in this piece written by the African journalist, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani for the BBC - Letter from Africa: Doing business in Nigeria

In it there is a great example of how a foreign mobile phone company applied an international standard in its Nigerian call centres of ending a call with the question "Is there anything else I can do for you?" The problem they encountered was that the majority of Nigerians were not used to rejecting a blank cheque.  

"Whenever you asked them that question, they automatically assumed that they must request something else - almost like when diners at a buffet feel compelled to keep stuffing their bellies because the tureens are not yet empty.

And so, the conversations between customer service staff and Nigerian customers never seemed to end. Each time staff attempted to conclude by once again asking the question, another round of requests began. Sometimes, the customers would invite their nearby family and friends to the phone, in case anyone had a problem that might need sorting out."

The solution to the problem was simple: with the exception of premium customers, calls were concluded with a simple "Thank you for calling".

What should you expect on the learning expedition?

The approach that we are taking is to provide a diverse range of interactions that will expose participants to the economic, social and political practices.  We will, for example, be collaborating with a Ghanaian business technology incubator to run a 'hackathon' on business issues presented by the participants.  In another example, participants will be working with vendors in a typical African street market to sell mobile phones to customers. The bottom line is about learning in the field from practitioners.  We will meet in a classroom each day but this will be to facilitate the individual and collective learning that is emerging from the experience.

Want to know more?

Africa is changing and the leadership it needs is changing too.  Many organisations, wherever they are based, know they need to have executives who will be leaders in Africa.

If you want to know more please contact me on john@gtnworld.net or +44 7748 984628 

Learning online - 'playing to strengths'

I came across this blog post from the Smart Work Company which provided a useful list of benefits that derive from participating in open online conversations.  In fact, the blog makes an interesting point about reflective conversations, developed online, might be offering an alternative approach to business education.  

• Extending the informal relationships that people have always needed for fun, social support and learning
• Letting us discover who knows what
• Enabling us to ask our network for recommendations
• Providing opportunities to find serendipitous and timely information
• Helping us to make sense of and see patterns in flows of information
• Helping us to practise disagreeing without being disagreeable
• Helping us to practise asking questions, thinking critically and learning to challenge the status quo
• Building our social capital — being known for our expertise, helpfulness and quality and influence of our network connection
• Enabling us to self-organise
• Letting us experiment
• Letting us bounce ideas off each other
• Giving us the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by others
• Having playful conversations
• Giving us courage and emotional support when we are fearful or overwhelmed by doing something new

It's a good list and it reflects my own experience of using social media, websites, blogs and so on as the means of facilitating my learning. But like any list there are some things that I would give more priority to than others which, I guess, reflects a lot about what I find useful, who I am and how I interact with others, regardless of the medium of communication.

My sense is that what learning online in doing is nurturing the strengths that each of us already has.  For example, if we find it useful to make notes about what we are learning - I do - then writing a blog plays well to this. Or if you are already strong at bouncing ideas off others - I'm not - then forums and chat rooms work in the same way just at greater scale and provide access a wider net of people. 


So my point is this: working and learning online amplifies what it is we are already doing and have always been doing be that writing or asking questions or providing feedback or observing or sense-making or thinking critically, etc.  What we should be doing is noticing and taking seriously what it is that we are good at and then participating in the online environment in ways that play to these strengths.  In so doing, we will be honing our strengths and practising 21C ways of working.  

Here are my suggestions for getting started...

Strength	Method	Online tool
Note-taking/writing/ critical thinking	Blogging	Blogger, Wordpress
	Microblogging	Twitter
Bouncing ideas of each other	Join and participate in social or business forums	Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+
	Microblogging	Twitter
Building informal relationships	Join and participate in social or business forums	Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+
Helping others	Set up or participate in online forums	LinkedIn special interest groups Google+ Yammer/Socialcast/Jive/Ning
	Share slide presentations	SlideShare
	Making short ‘how to’ videos	YouTube
Working collaboratively	Sharing and creating documents or presentations	Google Drive/Docs

    


   

Experiments in organisation and the implications for management

There have been a number of articles and blogs published recently discussing the implications for management and management structures in the internet age. Here are a couple of links that I've been following:

Do we still need managers from the HR Zone blog that talks about the potential implications for management of the announcement by Zappos, the US online retailer, to abolish its reporting hierarchy and job titles. In its place is a self-organising model called Holacracy. The rationale is that this will help the company to become more adaptive to change and improve employee engagement, as individuals take on more responsibility for their own work.

Haier and higher from The Economist describes the attempts to transform the world’s biggest appliance-maker into a nimble internet-age firm. The firm has organised itself into 2000 self-managed teams that include responsibilities for P&L and rewarding performance.

It's too early to say whether either of these approaches will work or how they will adapt. Of greater importance is what they are pointing towards in terms of the practice of management and, perhaps, a much more fundamental disruption of how we think about this notion.
 

Whilst modern management as both a theorectical study and as a practice is a 20th century phenomenom, in truth management practices have been present long before these things became codified in the way they are now, e.g the building of the pyramids, the exploitation of slaves, the deployment of armies have all required the organisation of labour to achieve a desired outcome.


So what might this mean for the future role of managers?

In my blog Do manager's matter - using data to make the case I highlighted the analysis done by Google as to what employees wanted from their managers. Somewhat surprisingly, to my mind at least, was how conventional the results were: a good coach, empowering, results orientated and so on.
 

My hunch is that what constitutes good management practice, whether viewed from traditional management theory or a manager's perspective or from an employee's simply reverts to the status quo. It also reinforces a number of taken-for-granteds about management: that good management is about applying a set of generalised attributes and a fallacious separation between the work of managers and employees. However plausible, the attributes are too neat; they do not describe the interactional work that's taking place minute by minute between, say, the manager and their employees. If we were to look at the work of management or leadership what we would discover would not be generalisable or concrete but ephemeral and in a constant state of flux.  
 

The moves by Zappos and Haier to experiment with how they organise work is interesting on a number of levels.
 

• First, they are bold attempts to break away from traditional approaches of organisation. The internet age is changing the ways in which we connect with each other so why not experiment with radical approaches to organisation too?
• Second, they appear to be placing much greater emphasis on co-operation to get things done and less on the artificial distinctions between people at different levels in a hierarchy. 
• Third, they are pointing towards something that Henry Mintzberg has been writing about for some years and that is the need for less leadership and more community-ship. Here is his quote from a piece in the FT in 2006:

 

Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.

What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert. This obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.

And with this, let us get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality. Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community. We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.

  Mintzberg, H. (2006) 'Community-ship is the answer'. Business Education Supplement, Financial Times 23rd October 2006: 8

Conclusion

Whether what's happening at Zappos or Haier will work is not the point. Of more importance is what emerges from these experiments. As I have written about on many occasions before, what should be of interest to practitioners, management developers, coaches and so on is the study and understanding of the intricate workings of meaning making between people. These experiments, if studied, may help brush away the legacies of hierarchy and to look instead at how people are working together.

 

 

  

Learning and Skills Exhibition 2014

I went to the Learning and Skills Exhibition at Olympia this year.  It is a popular event that's co-located with the Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference and both days were very busy.

The exhibition is free to enter and there were a large number of seminars running in parallel across 10 open theatre areas.  These were being run by commerical training providers and although this meant that they included a certain amount of 'selling', by and large, I found the content well presented and a good way of taking the pulse about what's going on in the L&D market.  It was also a great networking event.  I bumped into a lot of people both on the stands and as attendees and had some interesting chats with old and new contacts.

The things that I saw which interested me were...

Social learning using user-generated video

Fuse Universal and Phones4U gave a lively presentation about the use of user-generated video to help develop sales effectiveness.  The video link that I've added does a good job in making the case for this type of social learning.  What I can't find online is the video that was shown at the conference,  produced by one of Phones4U's frontline sales people.   It was creative, full of energy and contained lots of context-specific content with sales tips and tricks.   

Online Coaching Development

The University of Cambridge's Institute of Contunuing Education (ICE) presented their online approach to coach development.  The title of the presentation was 'Can you really learn coaching skills online?'

Given that this was a presentation about their online learning programme, then the answer was 'yes' of course.  What really interested me was the analysis from research done with students about their levels of discomfort with self-disclosure in discussions.  The continuum was from: working 1:1 with another person face-to-face (most comfortable) through working in trios, groups of up to 5, groups of 6 or more to online (least comfortable); the results were just over 70% for 1:1 to about 20% for online working.

What impressed me was that the presenter acknowledged the virtue of workshop-based coach development but also pointed towards an alternative approach using online methods.  The course uses Skype to create a 'bubble' for paired coach/coachee practice with the facilitator also present providing verbal feedback, through the Skype channel, to the trainee coach.    The rest of the learning group/set could listen to the conversation through headphones and were invisible to the coaching pair.  They were able to add their written feedback about the coaching practice. 

The point in all of this is that if you want to develop coaching skills and you can get along to a traditional workshop then this approach has a lot going for it.  But not everybody can work this way and the online model demonstrated a compellling alternative that replicated the 1:1 'safe space' for self-disclosure using Skype and also encouraged good deep learning processes from those observing through the written feedback process; an additional benefit being to the trainee coach of a permanent and reviewable record of the feedback for continuing reflection and learning.  

Ignite

Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that has been held in around 100 cities worldwide, organised by volunteers, at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format.  The tagline is '...enlighten us, but make it quick'.  Each speaker is allocated five minutes of presentation time and is accompanied by 20 presentation slides. During the presentations, each slide is displayed for 15 seconds and then automatically advanced.  To see examples follow these links Ignite Cardiff  Ignite Showreel

At the session I saw there were 6 speakers and the topics covered were: The best training event ever - NHS Couch to 5k programme, Skills@School, Life as a Digital Apprentice, Avoiding the Mariah Carey Syndrome, Being Your Best Self and The Baloney Detection Kit - Bertram Forer's Personality Test.

Reflections about format? Positives: lots of content in a short space of time, redundancy for the listener is minimised, encourages presenters to practice because the slides' advance is uncontrollable. Negatives - creates tension for the speaker  - I noticed that several of the presenters rushed and on many occasions were waiting for the next slide to advance; creates tension for the listener - I found myself paying a lot of attention to anticipating the next slide than necessarily concentrating on the speaker.

Overall, I thought that this was an interesting idea that has value as a learning process both for the presenter and the listener. 

   
     

Do managers matter? - using data to make the case

Over the past few months I've been commenting on leadership behaviours blog link and the qualities of effective managers blog link.  And so I read with interest the piece in the December 2013 edition of HBR 'How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management' by David A. Garvin. (Reprint R1312D)

What's interesting about this piece is not so much the conclusions reached about what Google's best managers do, but the ways in which these were validated by employee research.

Do managers matter?

In an organisation dedicated to being a company built by engineers for engineers, there was an instinctive belief that management might be more destructive than beneficial; a distraction from the real work of problem solving.  Indeed, so uncertain were they about the value of managers, they experimented with a completely flat organisation, eliminating engineering managers.  The experiment lasted only a few months when too many people were going to the CEO with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts and other nitty-gritty issues.  And then there were the contributions that managers made to communicating company strategy and policy, prioritising resources, facilitating career development, etc.

What do good managers do?

Here's the list developed from studying, coding and processing qualitative comments from thousands of employee surveys, performance reviews and submissions for the organisaton's great manager award. 

1. Is a good coach
2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage
3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members' success and personal well-being
4. Is productive and results-oriented
5. Is a good communicator - listens and shares information
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advsie the team

No surprises but the list resonated because it was based on Google data.  The behaviours emerged from what was already happening and working, bottom-up.  This contrasts starkly with the top-down approach on which I have commented previously. 

Things that I noticed...

Small incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful

Through the application of statistical techniques, the researchers were able to show how even small differences in manager performance against the eight behaviours reduced employee turnover and improved retention as well as greater satisfaction in areas like innovation, work-life balance and career development.

A common language and agenda for improvement

The behaviours served three important functions:

1. A shared vocabulary for discussing management.  The behaviours primarily describe leaders of small and medium sized teams and are especially relevant to first and second level management.
2. Clear guidelines for how to improve it - through use of verbatim examples of best practices from the survey participants
3. Encapsulated the full range of management responsibilites; from strategy development to delivering results

Practice-based learning

Google has put in place practice-based training, e.g. 'hands-on' exercises based on the actual things that managers need to do, plus piloting online Google Hangout sessions so that managers from around the world can participate and panel discussions featuring high-scoring managers from each function.

Understanding management...going deeper into the data

Google has taken a very interesting step towards using data to understand what managers do and what effect differences in relative performance have on a range of employee measures, most of which are intangible. But, as the article admits, the causal relationships between employee satisfaction and the bottom-line are difficult to establish.

As I have written about on several previous occasions, management work remains understudied.  Even Google's approach here misses and glosses over the detail of the intricate interactional work that takes place second by second in the workplace.  Ethnographic methods that observe managers working would provide a rich source of new information, something that Google themselves recognise and the research team have started to do.  The work by Sociometric Solutions at MIT is showing how technology can help get at this data (featured in the April 2012 edition of HBR 'The New Science of Building Great Teams' pages 59-70).  And maybe what will eventually be possible are other tools that can show not only generalised behavioural characteristics but detailed interactional data maps - see my Mapping social settings blog for further observations about this.