training, development, and organizational effectiveness

That’s what a recent study cited in this New York Times article on the value of introversion said.  That’s confirmation of what you already know if you’re an introvert. The most interesting thing about the piece was the fact that it was written now and moved onto the list of most emailed stories within 24 hours. That study concluded that introverts listen well and are more willing to incorporate the ideas of team members.

For introverts – whether you’re also shy or very adaptive in social situations – casual observation seems to show that we’re not well equipped for the always-on 21st century.  They (well, “we”) do best with time to reflect and think.  They seek ways to square inner and outer experiences.  And they need to restore themselves with periods of less input.  That doesn’t sound like the roller derby of tweeting, doing, selling, and relentless opportunity-seeking at a pace to scoop the competition.   It sounds like the extroverts have the advantage.

Maybe not.  Introverts bring focus, depth of attention, and a capability for creativity, which may be an outgrowth of the first two.   And if introverts listen, in part because we are engaged in that inner and outer experience comparison, we’re especially capable at collaborating with others.  Productive collaboration may be the job skill of this century.  Has the introverts’ time really come?

What’s your experience as an introvert in this extroverted century?  How do you offer valuable differences to colleagues and teams?  How do you create advantage as an introvert?

You’re going to learn a lot here

The Web Producer will have the opportunity to improve the utility, operations, quality, and reach of MIT Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) web sites under the direction of the Training and Communications Manager.  The Web Producer is responsible for maintaining and enhancing three OSP web sites (two public and one internal) in collaboration with OSP Staff.  The ideal candidate is a technically versatile individual contributor and a strong project manager who has outstanding writing, editing, and influence skills.

The Web Producer is responsible for identifying, defining, and improving processes that ensure that all sites remain effective for users: current, accurate, and easy to use.  He/she develops and manages web content: writing, editing, and proofreading as needed.  He/she analyzes user behaviors, identifying and developing opportunities for new content  and other forms of digital outreach.

The requirements

Must possess demonstrated superior editorial, written, and oral communication skills.  Demonstrated understanding of website design, management, and online production processes required.  Proven project management skills and compulsive attention to detail; able to excel in a deadline driven environment, and able to manage multiple projects simultaneously with minimal guidance. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills essential. Must be able to work independently and as part of a team, and interact collegially with a wide variety of individuals. Some facility with design, layout, and database management software required.

Comment to contact me.

You are reading a previously unpublished entry written August 11, 2010.

The Boss buys the climate idea

November 2009:  At the heart of “the climate idea” is notion that climate dimensions are a model for managing and leading.  So they offer a method for and measuring managers performance.  The problem the Boss faced is that after repeated invitations to change, fervent exhortations to change, and even some modest efforts to demonstrate that performance matters to you and your job, very little had changed.  What the Boss saw in organizational climate was a way to establish measures and hold people accountable for performance.  One way of looking at the state of affairs is that people were not changing because they were not carrying out, and not being held accountable for carrying out, day-to-day management and leadership responsibilities.

I learned about this idea from my pal and mentor Mike Maginn.  Without his sage advice, we might have taken a more piecemeal approach to looking for Archimedes’ lever.

Senior leaders learn about the idea

April 2010 The Boss and I gingerly introduced the climate idea to the senior management team.  We began the discussion with them where we began that discussion with Mike and among ourselves.  In August 2009, a survey of staff to identify issues of readiness to change delivered a load of complaints and frustration about management and leadership.  It hung in the air, and from where I sat, went on stinking up the place.  Few saw the messages in it as urgent pleas or indictments.  The main messages were that leadership doesn’t lead, leaders don’t communicate, and too much is expected of us.  If you know your climate dimensions, you’ll hear feedback about standards, structure/clarity, and perhaps, recognition.

The senior leaders read our text and in a group meeting, completed my version of the Rohrschak test:  What do you think our climate profile looks like? Interestingly, they rated their teams high in structure/clarity and standards and moderately low on the others, with responsibility being the lowest.  They envisioned that Teamwork and Commitment would be higher.  Weeks of discussions followed, all of which amounted to natural reactions to getting used to the idea.  Just as we planned to T-boned by the need to develop a plan for other efforts.  The projects that flow out of that plan promise to define much of our work for two years or more.  With the day to day work, they are our lab for using climate to focus action, especially by leaders and managers.  By the time we returned to climate in June, senior managers found little to object to and much to hope for in using climate to frame how we manage work and people.

Once you get used to the idea that we have many ways to communicate with different degrees of focus, perspective, and in different time scales using social media, the question, “What is social media good for?” evaporates.  The more interesting, and valuable, inquiry is, “What do people at work need that they’re not getting enough of?”   Here are three further reflections from the ASTD day-long conference, Learning 2.0: Don’t Get Left Behind.

Tools don’t matter

Because we all have challenging day jobs, some people were relieved to finally ask, What good is Twitter, really?  It’s a good question.  After talking about approaches to using it, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yammer, wiki, blog, [insert your platform here] all day, it became clear that you can use them all to foster relationships for and about learning.  The purpose and ingenuity that learning pros bring to them is the defining value of each.  Experiment, measure, refine, persist, and let it teach you what it can do well in your context.

Link social learning to motivation

Social media takes effort from everyone involved except the lurkers.  To get a foothold as a useful tool, online norms and conventions should reflect the motivations of community members.  The great news is that we already know something about their motivations: they value achievement, affiliation, influence, expertise, team cohesion and support, innovation. Use these motivations to lure them to participate.

In my organization, there is a strong desire for a definitive answer to new, gray-area cases.  For social media interactions to work, we suspect that people need to know whether the current discussion of the case is more or less done: How baked is our cake?  And what are the issues in play that make it only 60 percent done?

Social media interactions produce emergent qualities

Communities are organizations – or maybe better – organisms in a constant state of development, deterioration, and renewal.  The vitality of the communities will emerge as people begin to feel they trust each other and start hinting – or demanding – that the community could do more.  Without taking ownership from community members, there’s opportunity to breathe life into these emergent properties by skillful facilitation.  To detect these emerging qualities, we’ll have to listen, test hypotheses without rushing to solutions, and keep responsibility for running the community in the community.

As a final observation, no one at the conference talked about using social media to promote their elearning.  No one mentioned elearning from the podium or over coffee.  Does that tell us something?  It’s a hypothesis worth testing.

How to create the next phase of social learning?  Take on simple initiatives, stay focused on measurable and purposeful results, be persistent. That is the practical take away from a day spent with the more than 200 people who attended the ASTD New England chapters’ day-long conference Learning 2.0: Don’t Get Left Behind on April 29.

The well-run event was free of technology-wow boosterism.  But the keynote speakers raised provocative questions about business and demographic trends that are likely to affect learning and development folks.  Twitter is not the answer, even though that summary judgment would fit in a tweet.

By far, the other learning and development pros who attended were the best source of practical ideas. Over coffee, one described how she’d challenged sales people to invite clients to join a company LinkedIn group for those who’d attended (or would attend) client training.  If I got the story right, she is creating a user group, but one that this director can listen in on.  It allows her to take the pulse of those clients: their issues, worries, questions, and ideas.  She communicates with them about follow on training and other news.  Clearly, sales leads will arise, too.  She described the group as an ongoing experiment, but her ideas fit the needs and goals of her group today.  Her persistence is creating value out of the experiment.

Action Research:  No social media were harmed in the making of…

Our experiments have been similarly limited and focused.  The BTP (see other posts about that) brings together learners from across the organization, people who rarely work together.  We’ve established an online commmunity where they can share materials, ask questions, and discuss issues.  It’s easier to offer that shared experience than to actually create it.

We are still learning to use the tools, which don’t deliver all they seem to promise.  One word for disappointment:  wiki.  Lesson:  It’s hard to make a wiki social.  Further contributing to barriers is human nature: 90-9-1 holds true.  Only one percent of people are active creators of content.  Confirming that has been an important lesson of the experiment.

To acheive greater participation, facilitators and training pros will need to become  community gadflies and provocateurs.  Nevertheless, these experiments are setting expectations among learners and, we believe, influencing their view of how and where learning takes place.

This post is part of a series on learning from the Big Training Program (BTP) classes.  See the other posts on BTP

Though it’s a bit of a high wire act, we ask people to bring their problems to class.  Hang on for a little geek speak: we do this by bringing the whole system into the room.  Throughout the program, team leaders, subject matter experts and business process owners come to discuss what they do and what it means to the work that participants are responsible for.  We’re building a richer mental model of ways the work fits together.  So when we talk about problem solving, it’s clear that it requires a broad partnership among many people.

We can’t address all the problems people bring to the BTP.  But facilitators like me and my colleague ensure that participants are learning by bringing two important things to light when we talk about their cases.  First, that there is a typical or standard way to address the situations that participants face.   Exceptions lead people to question whether policies and procedures are a reliable source of guidance.  (“Guidance,” incidentally, is how we describe “what we expect you to do” while allowing for the fact that local application may need to be adapted.)  So we like to review the ways that difficult cases are non-standard.

Highlighting exceptions shows that the problem is not with the policy, per se, but that the policy doesn’t account for the exception.  This discussion can help cut anxiety about the ambiguity that one-offs can raise.  Wherever possible, we review the way the system of work – inputs, impacts, dependencies, and uses of information – looks like from the perspective of different players in the process to be sure that solving the problem in one department isn’t shifting the problem, amplified, to another one.

Second, we winnow from the discussion those characteristics that make the participants’ situation an exception.  For example, foreign currency denominated awards.  While everyone works hard to ensure that awards are negotiated in US dollars, the Euro or another currency is periodically the negotiated currency instead.   Systems use US dollars, so budget, planning, and forecasting all take on additional complications.  Managing the impact of currency conversion, and even determining a schedule of conversion dates, layer an ever changing administrative burden on to projects, usually the responsibility of the folks in BTP.  Further, because participants work in an environment in which consistency of administrative procedure is very important, they are right to be concerned about “the right way.”

Facilitators are there help identify methods that departments use to address exceptions, the problems that can develop and how to avoid them, and the extent to which administrative consistency is required.  This last learning is often the most important.  Participants interpret from the organization’s high-compliance environment the same standards that are applied to other procedures should be applied here.  We do all we can to clarify the right standards, and the principles that underlie them, and distinguish them from rules that don’t apply in the situations.

We don’t address all the problems that participants bring to class.  We often wonder ourselves whether we have really gotten to the bottom of the issue.  Hovering over discussions is the question, “Shouldn’t there be a comprehensive, centralized solution?”  For the moment, we can only say, “The reason you have so much responsibility for the exceptions is that no one else has all the information to make the decision as well as you.  That is why it is so important to collaborate with partners, who have heard and seen other cases and can help you get the right results.”

A little exasperation at this point sparks some initial ideas about common needs across departments and ideas for a central solution.  Which, for reasons of time, we encourage people to continue later over a beverage of their choice.  But I tell them to make it a stiff one, because they’re embarking on a widespread change effort.

Training needs to be founded on clear objectives.  Without them, the experience is something else: a meeting, brainstorming, diagnosing a problem, identifying issues, and sometimes, just venting.  In the Big Training Program I’ve mentioned before (the BTP), experience is proving that we’re offering a seminar guided by some broad and noble goals.  It’s a better program for it.

For background, the BTP was planned as a comprehensive review of the role and responsibilities of folks who head day-to-day operations in most departments.  That means they oversee financial management and many aspects of compliance in spending about half the revenue here.

Efforts to create activities that reflect a common experience of the work have been thwarted by the very different local organizations, projects, and funding sources.  These differences make it impratical to create more than a few scenarios that realistically reflect their work.

The facts are the facts

The fact that can’t be wished away is that the people in the target audience have too little in common to practice a set of procedures or prescriptive decision-making.  The BTP is accommodating all these differences by featuring them as a learning opportunity.  Folks will reflect on their own experience to extract lessons, rather than as a problem to solve.  And problem solving is what these folks excel at.  The facilitator’s challenge is to manage the learning in such a way that cohort members don’t feel dissatisfied because they don’t solve the problem once and for all.

While we secretly aim to achieve clear learning objectives throughout the BTP, in fact, we’re not solving a performance problem or creating the conditions for performance.  We’re supporting decision-making and focusing on the critical features of good results. That makes the BTP less rules-driven than envisioned.  It  makes the learning less predictable.  It’s a great, if sometimes wild, ride.

More on how we do this and learners’ discomfort next time.

“I believed … that a leader could operate as successfully as a kind of advisor to the organization.  I thought I could avoid being a “boss.”  Unconsciously, I suspect, I hoped to duck the unpleasant necessity of making difficult decisions, taking responsibility for one course of action among many uncertain alternatives, of making mistakes and taking the consequences.  I thought that maybe I could operate so that everyone would like me…I couldn’t have been more wrong.  It took a couple years, but I finally began to realized that a leaders cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for what happens to his organization.” [Emphasis mine]

From “On Leadership” by Douglas McGregor, quoted in Productive Workplaces Revisited by Marvin R. Weisbord.

Making climate the managers’ agenda

The Boss, with support from two senior managers who have teams of three to five managers  each and therefore will have the most responsibility for driving climate results, agreed to present the climate idea to all managers.

The first discussion was intended to be an introduction, overview, and an opportunity to recognize our role – I’m a manager, too – in creating climate.  To make the case that we should do introduce another set of concepts for working together now, the Boss began with a restatement of negative staff feedback (that is, survey results from August 2009 and confirming input from a December 2009 focus group with all staff).  Using that information as a statement of the problem, she introduced climate as a way to focus on changing the experience of work in our group through disciplined management practice.  I summarized where the climate idea came from and why it’s a fit for the group’s needs.

Specifically, climate is the right framework because t’s research-based, but practical, flexible, and measurable.  We will be able to evaluate whether manager’s actions affect climate.   Climate allows us to focus on a manageable number of dimensions (only six).  On the face of it, those dimensions reflect values we all want and would like to produce in the workplace.  Because we suspected that ours is a climate with a low sense of individual responsibility (and a high sense of collective responsibility), prescribing how managers should manage was likely to take away their responsibility for identifying and putting solutions in place.  Climate places responsibility, accountability, and action squarely on a managers.  We wrapped this part of the meeting by discussing the climate dimension definitions, which I’d pared to a simple statement for each that, in spite of being subject to interpretation, were easy to understand.

Then I led the “climate Rohrschak test” by asking:

What do you think our climate profile looks like?

Introduction, then integration

Integration is what a friend calls “appropriating” the idea:  you mull it, restate it in your own terms, test its limits, imagine applying it, and inevitably, doubt it.  This is where people’s sense of possibility and closely held assumptions come to light.

A small group loudly represented what can only be called the status quo.  (No judgment intended.  After all, what if they’re right that breaking a fragile system may make it impossible to repair?)  Here’s what I heard them say:  our priorities are set by others, primarily by deadlines that neither we nor our clients can influence; as a manager I don’t have much control over circumstances, work, or the way people on my team work; that’s “the nature of our work.”  That’s all true, unless we do have control over more than these assumptions permit.  That is the work of the next few months.

Let’s do a survey

One surprising result of the meeting was that many people wanted to take a baseline reading and learn the climate profile of the organization.  This is great news.

This is a previously unpublished entry written in September 2010.

July 2010 The senior leadership group agreed it was time to bring the rest of the managers into the discussion of organizational climate and what it can do for us.   Their reaction to the idea and the ambiguity of doing an estimate of climate was, “Let’s do the survey.”  Honestly, I didn’t see this coming.  But I’d underestimated their desire for data.

A little background

In 2009, the survey feedback – largely focused readiness for change – in which we learned that people were anxious, frustrated, and justifiably critical of management, we also uncovered a fair amount of distrust of managers.  Only 50 percent of the relatively small group responded to that survey.  By December 2009, when I’d been on the job for about four months, we wanted to confirm the results and focus them.  The survey asked a lot of open-ended questions and it was proving a challenge to know what were the central messages and which were outliers.

The focus group began with a review of themes from the survey posted on flipcharts.  We narrowed the topics and then we asked managers to step out of the room.  At this writing, there is still a lot of sensitivity about whether it is safe to give managers honest feedback about how they manage, our work, and work life.  It was even stronger then.  We made an agreement that we would report the results to managers at the end of the meeting.  But people would not be associated with their individual comments.  To minimize the venting, which would naturally take place, we focused on two kinds of responses to the topics: what’s getting in the way and what can we do about it.  What we heard was a loud and fairly clear endorsement of the main themes of the survey.

• We have many, varied demands and expectations on us – the amount of work and the manner of doing the work – it feels like an impossible task to meet them all.  Managers don’t do enough to set expectations, manage the relative priority of those expectations, or back us up with clients.
• We don’t really understand where our office is going.  We don’t hear enough about what leaders are discussing, planning, focusing on, which would give us perspective on how our work plays a role and is more or less aligned with that direction.  What do you all talk about in those meetings and what does it have to do with us?
• We don’t feel that the workload is balanced and fair.  Some people don’t do as much work as others and are not held accountable.  When people are good at their jobs, they are rewarded with more work, not more compensation or recognition or opportunities for professional development.

Those messages, as I like to say, are a very big deal.  Not only did we review them with managers at the end of the meeting, I wrote it all up and gave everyone a copy.  In other words, “this really happened.”

Even if managers didn’t have them in the forefront of their thinking, I’d have expected that folks would be reluctant to ask for feedback in a more structured way.

But you learn something new every day.  What did I learn?  Stuff that looks like data is more welcome than a story told in narrative in some cultures.  Ours is one.