My son – he’s four – has been going to a great daycare this summer.  They organize some kind of learning around theme days.  Last week they chose pirate days.  I’m not sure what they learned, but he brought home a little plastic compass.  Apparently you need compass on the bounding main.  I was leaving for work the next day.  I said goodbye and he offered me the compass.

“Here, Daddy,” he said.  “Take this with you so you always know which way is North.”  You know how that turns your heart to loving mush.  But he didn’t want me to get lost and knew that pirates use a compass to find their way on the open sea.  I was delivering training to new managers that day.  I started class by assuring them, “Thanks to my son, we can”t get lost, no matter what happens, because I have a compass and I know where I’m going.”

Not a verbatim account, but that’s what I heard.

We are all our own leaders

Every day the demands on the job threaten to distract us from the few simple good things we’re aiming at.  Thanks to a four year old, I’m reminded of the two most important principles to live and work by, no matter what you do or what level you’ve achieved in the organization.

Principles for being your own leader (Thanks to Cap’n Jack)

• Stick to the heading the leads to your destination.

• Be a pirate!

As you know, we’ve been looking for an instructional designer and trainer who, I can see more clearly, needs to be an “intrapreneur.”  They are hard to find.  Thank you for all the things I’ve learned about current state of your skills and experience.   Or maybe what I have really learned is that instructional designers value the product of their work but find it very difficult to describe the skills they exercise.  As a result, I see that I’d want to develop a set of skills and abilities in the talented person we find.  I don’t think a a lead instructional designer or trainer is really capable without them.

Focus on results

You have undoubtedly created great training for some proprietary software, the performance management system, some internal training function or [fill in the program here]. It’s complete, well-designed, and a great-looking final product. What did that training do for the business? Any other successes you think you achieved are irrelevant without an answer to that question.  Around here, we aim at that goal every day and deal with reality as we must.

Focus on needs

Nobody needs training programs, or meetings, or to be educated about what you can do for them. They need to be able to do their work. You are here to equip people to do their work. They need to clearly see that your efforts are leading to that result. If you are not focusing on others’ needs, you’re not doing the right work.

Ask questions

I can see that when you’re given a design and development project, you ask a lot of questions. Good questions. Don’t wait for the assignment. Take nothing for granted. You don’t know the way the organization works.  You don’t understand enough about the business.  You cannot extrapolate. Start by asking people their perspectives and use them to form a set of hypotheses about how the organization works. I haven’t even mentioned training or performance yet. Neither should you.

Move the work ahead…

…by solving problems and trying different approaches. Past and current obstacles serve to illustrate one thing: how you reframe relationships and adapt your approach so that you get results. Is momentum flagging? You should recognize it, identify the source, and try to change the dynamic. This is the most important use of your imagination at work. Sure, I can advise you, but this is a critical job skill.

Do the things that matter

Quick, what did you accomplish this week? Why does that matter? Can we measure it or can others tell you did it? If not, you probably spent too much time on that. Sure we all have bad weeks. Don’t allow yourself to have two of them in a row.

Strive to make sense of things…

…and confirm it with those you work with. See, “Ask questions,” above. Then reflect what you’re learning to those around you who are effective and successful.

You’re succeeding when people respect your work

And that means that people are not going to like everything you say or propose to do. (I’m not talking about being a jerk for a higher purpose. Don’t make me stop this car….) But if it addresses their needs (see “Focus on needs”), they’ll forgive you for making them uncomfortable for a time or engaging in work that stretches them and you.

Are you interviewing for a job in the next few weeks? Hmmm. Wouldn’t it be super if you described – in a planned, concrete, and specific anecdote – how you’d demonstrated these abilities? Yes! Yes it would be super.

Maybe the best part of the exercise was that it allowed me to to include all the aspirational qualities that the right person could exercise in this role. I know, it’s a lot.  But they are certainly the things that keep me going strong.

Let me know how you’d improve this or if you’re interested in striving for “better living though performance-based training” and whole lot more.  And if you want to see the official posting, click this.

You are a SENIOR TRAINING SPECIALIST…

…who is eager to bring better living through performance-based training, which you do by practicing instructional design, program development, and delivering instructor-led training. What really jazzes you up is the chance to tie learning to strategic objectives. It gives work a real sense of meaning and value.

Then again, your feet are solidly on the ground. In fact, nobody knows better than you that day to day, you are constantly working to influence others and make steady progress toward more effective training for the right target audiences. Meanwhile, you are quickly mastering the business content and dynamics of the area you serve, even though that content is devilishly complicated and not well documented. It’s not, but if it were rocket science, you’d persist in learning it, not just for training, but to be a partner to front-line managers. When you have a free moment, it continues to bother your conscience that the effect of training isn’t measured more often. But you patiently look for opportunities to define performance so that you can measure learning. And you continue to propose realistic ways to measure learned whenever the opportunity arises.

You have worked in a number of different groups, cultures, and subcultures. You relish the challenge of learning a new culture, but you try to stay attentive so that you never fully assimilate. You’ve have developed an ability to interpret and appropriately raise issues that will make you and your work effective: how ready are these folks for change, how much will debate and dissent be valued, how much should I compromise, how much should I try to educate folks, and how much should I change my vocabulary so that we can understand one another better.

You adapt yourself to most settings in which you need to work while staying true to your goals. You look for opportunities to raise the standards of performance and training without judging the current state of affairs to be inadequate and benighted. In fact, more often than not, you discover that you need to learn more if you’re going to be excel at this work in this context. You assign yourself and challenge yourself to learn those things.

You believe that you can make a difference. You’ve had some success doing so in a number of places you’ve worked. You stick to your own high standards most of the time, even if leadership is not there to back you up. You have your sights set on what this organization can look like when it’s a very high performing organization. So while you may feel daily setbacks sharply, you bounce back. You are eager to work with those who have a similar vision. You work to influence those who don’t share that vision, aiming to raise their sights through practical, concrete actions and initiatives whenever you get the chance.

1. This is an area with poorly defined standards (and someone should step in and define them)
2. We recognize that what have been doing up to now hasn’t been quite good enough (and someone needs to address that after all)

Both are good instincts.  The first is what any organization owes the people who make it up:  To be clear about the expectations of people doing the work.  The second reflects a desire to turn a critical eye to pretty-good work that is getting done, despite the obstacles, thanks to the loyal effort of dedicated people.  But overall, it’s clear that the overall record isn’t great and certainly isn’t consistent.  In many cases, that work is difficult, too.

But the discussion of certification leads to making many things clear that have been hidden.  Where I work, the path someone takes to get a solid answer to an exceptional situation depends on who that person knows, how they ask the question, and what they are trying to achieve.  It’s a reasonable path.  It may not be repeatable for others, though it can become The Right Way for the person who discovered it.

Certification charges a group to review standards and practices, which means that The Right Way may become a not-best practice.  At a minimum, years of experience are called into question.  Maybe what those folks have been doing is great.  If  the certification group is doing its work, it will question all the acquired practice that experience taught its best people, share the best ones, and correct the outdated or wrong.  And that’s going to feel like a whole new brand of betrayal, since the organization did an incomplete job preparing those in target roles to do better.  Steel yourself  for grief, which always starts with anger and denial.  Enlist leaders in reiterating that the examination is important, and that what appears to be wrong is not the fault of the people that certification focuses on.

It's not their fault. It's your responsibility.

The problem certification addresses is a problem leaders created

The target audience for certification is not at fault for the organization’s shortcomings to date.  They’ve been doing their best in the face of unclear objectives, diffuse accountabilities, incomplete oversight, variable application of policies and procedures, and other pains in the neck they’ll be glad to sound off about.  It’s not their fault that the organization can’t get consistent results on whatever measure that shows off those shortcomings. If you feel the twitching of defensiveness – “But they’re not doing everything they should do!  They should know this stuff!” – take a pill.

The fault lies with leaders and they need to say so.  Whatever “the organization” has not done is what leaders did not do.  When the organization asks someone to be certified, it expects them to make a personal commitment.  A substantial certification places responsibility for  development and achievement in candidates’ hands.  So a certification program must solve the problem leaders and the organization identified and provide what leaders haven’t offered yet: clear policy and practices, clear problem-resolution process, clear standards, support for learning and performance on the job, clear lines of accountability, and a clear sense of how leaders value certification.

I’m working with a couple of teams to propose a set of program options for certification with one group – we’re the training, HR, management cabal.  And with a group of senior experts in an area, I’m participating as a team member to recommend a certification system for people in a range of roles.

Why?

“Certification” means that a group has taken responsibility for attesting that a person is skilled at the level of standards set by the group.  So, if the certifying body thinks that taking a twenty-question multiple choice test is sufficient to stamp an individual “certified,” they may.  CPAs and Certified Financial Planners undergo rigorous preparation and a grueling test before to demonstrate that they have achieved certification proficiency.  While there are many common conceptions of certification, it means whatever the certifying body says it means.

Raising the standards of learning, practice, and self-regulation

So if an organization, say mine, is going to certify people in some domain or role, it will (should) spend plenty of time determining what certification means to it and the people in it.  But like all certifications, it is commonly intended to raise the standards of preparation for work in that field, increase the professionalism of people of the field, and make proficiency a self-conscious goal of people practicing in that field. In layman’s terms: higher standards for learning, practice, and self-regulation.

Isn’t training enough?

Training is typically designed to achieve day to day proficiency.  If you think training can’t do enough for people some area, give the training department friendly shakedown.   Because for most jobs, training can provide enough preparation and development most of the time.  Certification, therefore,  must go beyond training by a good deal.  And teams creating certification should bring to the surface the fact that they are addressing other organizational goals:  training is broken or inadequate, oversight is insufficient, inspectors and auditors look at processes and practices with concern, authority is distributed (and being conferred on individuals in certification), to name a few possibilities.

Where training is short, certification is long.  That is, if last years training courses aren’t working for your people, wash them out and redesign, rebuild, restructure.  The costs are real, but lower than certification.  The decision-making over a certification that’s worth having will take some months.  The standard-setting process and the work involved in developing a fair and robust evaluation of certification candidates is significant.  A couple of managing and adjudicating bodies need to be set up and committed for a period.  One group establishes and keeps the operation running.   The other evaluates the evaluation, judges any interpretive questions in the evaluation, and is responsible for conferring the certification.  The members will likely set policy and determine the re-certification plan.  Certification is long in the sense that it will require momentum, and without it the certification wont continue to be credible.  And that is somebody’s work.

The hard, good work

Imagine certification at your company.  You take a course of study, including company training and some continuing ed. courses at the local college.  You  rotate through some job shadowing assignments and do a four-week internship in a department you work with all the time but which, frankly, no one understands well.  You do a project, you manage a discussion thread on the intranet, and you prepare for some kind of evaluation.  (I’ll have more to say about evaluations later.)

When you think about taking that evaluation, is the first thing that goes through your mind, “Am I prepared?”  I hope so.  Because the hard good work in any certification program is to define what you – and your people – will have gotten out of each of those interesting, broadening activities.  It’s all going to be on the evaluation.  Doing anything less is a set-up, if you’re the one in the program, or whitewash, if you’re the proposing and running the certification.

Best climate profile?  You tell me

Until the discussion shifts to “us” and “the profile we want,” managers are distancing themselves from using climate as a measure of performance and change.   The best climate profile is the one that makes it possible to achieve strategic objectives. I know, too conceptual, so try this:  We need to make working here serve our market strategy.  Managers who don’t buy the current strategy will balk and blame.  They’re probably right to do so.

Climate opens a discussion about why some people don’t have a good experience working here.  This is the thread that leads back to all your strategic decisions:  Did we recruit the right people, are they trained and skilled in the right way, do we have systems that support the strategy?  Do we have a strategy?  Is it clear?

The day to day agenda of how for improving climate dimensions is focused on changing how people work toward a goal.  The leaders among managers will ask, “Are we sure we know where we are going?”  Be sure you tell them if you know.  And it you don’t know, decide.

Conclusions

• Trying to influence climate raises questions of strategic direction and leadership
• To begin to influence climate dimensions, determine the primary objective the organization will serve right now. Don’t get bogged down in a big, hairy analysis project and PowerPoint-writing charrette.  Sit in a room and pick an objective to focus on.  You can’t do everything and you know it.
• Pick two climate dimensions you want to influence.  For example, “We’ll work to raise the bar on pressure to achieve higher standards and sense of responsibility in the work by X (amount) by (a date).”  Treat it as a hypothesis you’re testing (see “Best climate?” above, right?).

Climate is not really about happiness

Climate…

• Objectively reflects what people experience at work.  So first, it’s information you can only guess at today.  And you really do want to know what’s inside your team’s heads.
• Measures six dimensions of work that directly relate to people’s motivation and performance.  You don’t need a decoder ring to figure out what to do next.
• Measures the way leaders and managers are creating “the experience of work here.”  You don’t need to look somewhere else.  You can change climate.

Side note about leadership and managing

While managers should lead and most leaders also manage, they’re not the same capabilities.  I’m cribbing from John Kotter.  Leaders address and chart a course through complexity to achieve a set of objectives.  That means adapting to constant change.  Managers bring order and consistency to work so that it achieves those objectives.  That also means adapting to constant change.  This is not a caste distinction.  The organization needs as much of both as it can get.  But when we talk about climate, I’ll say “managers” and mean everyone who leads and manages.  Because they’re the ones who create climate, change climate, and are responsible for what it’s like to work around here.

Climate dimensions make sense

The power of climate lies in the way it readily makes sense.  People tend to be motivated by their work along these six dimensions (6D):

• Structure and clarity
• Standards
• Responsibility
• Recognition
• Teamwork or support
• Commitment

Even before I describe what these might mean, it’s not hard to see that giving people the right degree of responsibility for their work could be motivating, especially if you’ve recruited people who are motivated by a sense of autonomy.  Right away, ideas about how to give people still more responsibility as a reward for their growing expertise come to mind.  That leads to envisoning ways to make sure the standards for greater responsibility are clear, stated objectively, and then offered to anyone who will strive to meet higher standards of performance.

Remember that the first use of climate is to measure what it’s like “around here” today.  Low scores aren’t indicators that people aren’t happy.  (You’ve read survey results like those.  Do you really want to spend your time on making people happy?)  Climate scores show what to focus on.

But it is managers’ responsibility to exercise expertise and judgment to determine the right tactics.  They decide how much is enough of, say, teamwork and pressure to achieve high standards.  The objective is not to make people happy, but to help them be effective, and ensure that they can expect to be effective.  You may make them happy as well.

If you were given the list above and told to manage your people using only these six dimensions as tools, what would be left out?

So for example, focus on responsibility.  Where would the work and the experience of work improve if your people could exercise more autonomy and take responsibility for it?

First, my colleague and a mentor, Michael Maginn.  When I told Mike a story about how challenging it is to face change constructively, we sound found ourselves discussing motivation and leadership.  Those themes pointed him toward my new favorite thinker and synthesizer of big ideas, Robert Stringer.

With George Litwin, Stringer measured types and characteristics of motivation.  They identified what would become six “dimensions,” the social science term for what you and I would call buckets.  In each bucket is a set of perceptions about the organization that describe subjective experience.  They then developed a survey that uncovers those perceptions.  It gets what people feel out in the open.  With enough data, it’s possible to express how strongly people feel about “what it’s like to work here” on a relative scale.

But the purpose of uncovering people’s feelings is not to help them feel better about working here.  The subjective experience of work is predictive of a number of important features that are effective:  ability to recruit strong candidates, ability to retain the best people, the extent to which people will engage with the work and make a commitment to the organization.

If you’ve been following the popular literature on employee engagement, you’ll know that the biggest difference between engaged and disengaged employees are:

• Whether motivation is triggered by the objectives set out for them and by the experience of trying to acheive them.
• Whether they are committed to the organization, which ripples far beyond work in what they say about the organization, whether others should join, whether people should do business with the organization, and whether it is on the right track.

What’s thrilling about Stringer (and his precursors and colleagues – more on them later) is that they have researched issues of motivation and identified many of the causal influences on it for more than forty years.  Engagement is just the current word for it.  (“Motivating employees” still sounds like thank you luncheons with the boss, attaboys, and at worst, a sophisticated psychic cattle prod.)

Undoubtedly there’s value in recognition and much has been learned since the first studies were carried out.  In fact, Stringers Leadership and Organizational Climate is only a few years old.  But the ideas have been tested and have stood up.  I hope they never become as catchy and popular as “engagement,” which will suffer under the weight of expectations placed on it.  I can easily see how climate is the thing you forget about once you’re factored its dimensions into the way you measure, manage, and lead the organization.

• Changing the weather (tag: climate)
• Certifying specialists’ skills (tag: certification)
• Setting high performance standards through training (tag: training->performance)
• Redefining work as performance (tag: measure_performance)

(You should be able to follow these stories by watching out for the tags.  My goal is to reflect on each of these efforts week in and week out to learn from experience and make sense of it if I can.)

Except for training, where the project is squarely on my desk, the most important fact about about these projects is that someone else is leading them.  I respect these people and what they are trying to accomplish.  I also do not think they’d describe those efforts as I have.  They may not recognize yet how challenging the projects will become.  However, they’re right to think that this work can solve problems. By persisting, they’re also right to think they’ll have impact on the way we work that could be felt for many years.

Everyone talks about it but no one does anything to change it

Changing the weather is code.  But you knew that.  I mean “climate” which is how industrial psychologists since the 1960s have distinguished organizational culture from something more local and subjective.  Culture is slow-moving and conservative. It might compare with the changing surface of the earth.  Change, yes, but day to day, it’s imperceptible.

Climate, or to make it still more accessible, “the prevailing weather around here,” attempts to capture how people exerience work.  People who make up the organization are likely not aware of many aspect of culture.  But if you ask them, “What’s it like to work here?  How does it compare with last year?” they are sure to have a perception to share.

The only reason to try to change the weather is that a little more sun, or a little more snow might trigger people’s inner motivations and harness them in ways that make the work better and the experience of it more rewarding.

“Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

Peter Drucker