Content about Management

March 30, 2012
Dispelling the Myths of Creating a Winning Corporate Culture

Avoidance—and even outright denial—of the need to make corporate culture development a “Mission Critical Objective” lies in five common myths that destroy the impetus for any organized effort to create, build, and nurture a winning corporate culture.

By Joseph Gianni, President and CEO, 2logical

Few would deny the majestic power of a winning corporate culture. When the odds are stacked against the success of a mission critical corporate objective, a strong corporate culture can persevere through all kinds of challenges and setbacks—and make, well, even the impossible…possible.

Even in the most turbulent market conditions, a strong corporate culture can shorten the recovery time from minor or major setbacks by as much as tenfold, when compared to an organization lacking the “right stuff.”

March 19, 2012
How OD and CoPs Influence Performance

There is never one correct method to follow in prescribing training and/or performance interventions. A variety of solutions can be implemented based on knowledge sharing and a company’s organizational structure. Here’s a look at how Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Organizational Design (OD) influence employee performance.

By Alexandra Harocopos

There is never one correct method to follow in prescribing training and/or performance interventions. A variety of solutions can be implemented based on knowledge sharing and a company’s organizational structure. The best solution is figuring out what works well for your project and your organization. This article will examine how Organizational Design (OD) contributes to performance. It will focus specifically on the influence of knowledge sharing through Communities of Practice (CoPs).

What Is a CoP?

March 16, 2012
Corporate Training: Are Managers Born or Made?

Managers with a growth mindset are more committed to their employees’ development, and to their own, according to Carol S. Dweck, author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” They give a great deal more developmental coaching, they notice improvement in employees’ performance, and they welcome critiques from their employees, she writes. “Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers.”

By Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Millions of dollars and thousands of hours are spent each year trying to teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees and give them effective feedback. Yet much of this training is ineffective, and many leaders and mangers remain poor coaches. Is that because this can’t be trained? No, that’s not the reason. Research sheds light on why corporate training often fails.

March 13, 2012
Case Study: New Hire Scorecards at Discover Financial Services

Some organizations need specific scorecards that focus on the performance of an individual training program and the performance of learners as they make the transition from the classroom to the workplace. That’s the situation faced by the Training Center of Excellence at Discover Financial Services for the New Hire Program in its call centers. This case study describes that challenge and the solution the training team at Discover devised.

As balanced scorecards have become increasingly common tools used to manage entire businesses, many training and development professionals have tried to adapt them for use in our profession. For example, ASTD developed its Workplace Learning and Performance Scorecard in 2006, and Ajay Pangarkar and Teresa Kirkwood published their Trainer’s Balanced Scorecard in 2009.

March 12, 2012
Engaged Leadership’s Role in Organizational Safety and Success

Where there is a culture of leadership engagement—where leaders are seen as plugged in and responsive to their employees; where employees feel their leaders are concerned with their everyday activities, personal well-being, and overall security—those are the places where you see engaged employees on every level.

By Bill Whitmore, Chairman, President, and CEO, AlliedBarton Security Services

There’s a direct connection between engaged leadership, workplace security, and organizational success, regardless of your product or service. Psychologist Abraham Maslow identified safety and security as among the most basic human needs on the road to self-actualization—achieving one’s full potential. It, therefore, follows that if your employees don’t feel safe and secure, they’re not going to do the best job for you.

February 28, 2012
Core Competencies: Setting Training Up for Failure?

Letting the Training department assume responsibility for core competencies sets you up for failure. You’re not in a position to implement organizational strategies. What you can do is provide a direct link between the core competencies your organization has chosen and your department’s specific training offerings in terms of employee competence.

By Dan Cooper, CEO, ej4.com

When it comes to training, the “competence” word gets thrown around a lot. The assumption is that everyone knows what it means, but that often isn’t the case. You need to make sure you know which of two definitions you’re talking about, and what the training department is signing up for.

Core Competence

February 28, 2012
Tips to Re-engage Your Team

Almost everyone in the workplace has been “doing more with less” for a long time. Yet productivity has risen 2.3 percent annually during these tough times as fewer employees accomplish miracles by working more hours and taking on bigger workloads. Is it possible to get higher productivity without burning people out?

By Carl Eidson, Ph.D., Vice President, Business Development, Wilson Learning

February 24, 2012
Learning: How Change Management Is Done

While most senior executives realize learning is critical to achieving meaningful change, many don’t realize what it takes to achieve the level of learning necessary to make the difference between success and failure. True change can only be achieved through a process of targeted learning that does two things: sells the desired change to the people who have to make it happen; and teaches those people (and gets them to adopt) the new behaviors required to make the change happen.

By Sue Kennedy, Chris Musselwhite, and Tammie Plouffe, Discovery Learning Inc.          

Despite decades of research on change management, almost 70 percent of organizational change efforts fail. John Kotter, Harvard professor and change management guru, says they fail because organizations don’t take the holistic approach required to achieve and maintain change.

February 24, 2012
Learning: How Change Management Is Done

While most senior executives realize learning is critical to achieving meaningful change, many don’t realize what it takes to achieve the level of learning necessary to make the difference between success and failure. True change can only be achieved through a process of targeted learning that does two things: sells the desired change to the people who have to make it happen; and teaches those people (and gets them to adopt) the new behaviors required to make the change happen.

 

By Sue Kennedy, Chris Musselwhite, and Tammie Plouffe, Discovery Learning Inc.          

February 23, 2012
A Unified Vision for Talent Management

A holistic approach to Talent Management would be to put all these functions— Recruiting, L&D, OD, Talent Management/Development, Content Management (Knowledge), and Performance Management—under one roof and have it report to the C-suite. Some will say that many of these functions already exist under one area, usually HR, but is there a unified vision and an integration of how and why all these units work together?

By Richard Lynell

February 23, 2012
A Unified Vision for Talent Management

A holistic approach to Talent Management would be to put all these functions— Recruiting, L&D, OD, Talent Management/Development, Content Management (Knowledge), and Performance Management—under one roof and have it report to the C-suite. Some will say that many of these functions already exist under one area, usually HR, but is there a unified vision and an integration of how and why all these units work together?

 

By Richard Lynell

February 21, 2012
Best Practices and Outstanding Initiatives

Trainingeditors recognize innovative and successful learning and development programs and practices submitted in the 2012 Training Top 125 application.

BEST PRACTICES

Edward Jones: Practice Makes Perfect (Sales Training)

Each month, Edward Jones hires more than 150 new recruits with little financial background, then trains them to serve clients well. This organic growth is achieved through extensive training, including coaching by veterans, online study, virtual classes, weeklong stints of classroom training, and recorded role-play.

February 21, 2012
The Battle for Great Talent

Heidrick & Struggles recently commissioned a survey in partnership with The Economistof more than 400 CEOs globally to tell us about their attitudes on hiring prospects for the future. The survey results, along with other data and input from global economists, formed the basis of the Heidrick & Struggles Global Talent Index, which shows that the demand for talent across the globe is outstripping supply.

By Judy Braun,VP, Global Talent Development, Heidrick & Struggles

Human Resources (HR) executives know all too well that despite continued high unemployment, one of the major risks to a business is the difficulty in locating and attracting the right talent. When it comes to shaping the future health of a business, the ongoing practice of retaining and hiring top talent is crucial. Recent research from Heidrick & Struggles supports the idea that as the economy improves, competition to find and keep this top talent will only become fiercer.

February 20, 2012
How-To: Motivate, Engage, and Involve Your Team

It is no easy task to motivate, engage, and involve your team, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Even today’s most prominent business tycoons admit the most difficult part of their job is managing and leading their people. But there are a few strategies you can employ to improve the engagement of your team and, in turn, your bottom line.

By Brad Karsh

It is no easy task to motivate, engage, and involve your team, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Even today’s most prominent business tycoons admit the most difficult part of their job is managing and leading their people. Take the late Steve Jobs, for instance. Jobs obviously made extraordinary contributions at Apple, but he spoke openly about his struggles in his role as CEO. Jobs learned from mistakes, and his analogy for what builds strong businesses was spot on:

February 20, 2012
Soapbox: ROE: Demonstration of Training Value

Return on expectations (ROE) is a foolproof way to show the value of training in the terms desired by key stakeholders. ROE demonstrates the degree to which training initiatives satisfy the expectations of key business stakeholders.

Return on expectations (ROE) is a foolproof way to show the value of training in the terms desired by key stakeholders. ROE demonstrates the degree to which training initiatives satisfy the expectations of key business stakeholders. Assumptions that may assist training professionals include:

  • Key stakeholders are high-level managers or executives.
  • Stakeholder expectations primarily include the accomplishment of the organization’s highest-level goals and mission.

Figure 1: The Kirkpatrick Model

February 20, 2012
The Main Drivers of Employee Engagement

There are two types of employee engagement—emotional commitment and rational commitment —with emotional commitment being four times more powerful than rational commitment in driving employee effort. Employees stay with their organizations when they believe it is in their self-interest (rational commitment). But they exert discretionary effort when they believe in the value of their job, their team, and their organization (emotional commitment).

By Dr. Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, Founder of Quality & Equality Ltd., and Linda Holbeche, former Research and Policy Director, CIPD

February 10, 2012
Conference Highlight: The Performance Consulting Model

One way to implement nationwide training to improve customer service scores.

 

Training 2012 Conference & Expo speaker Gabriel Urrea offers a case study on improving customer service satisfaction.

Challenge: “Our customer service scores are not going in the right direction so we need nationwide training as soon as possible.”

January 26, 2012
Conference Highlight: CSI: Project Management

Organizational forensics reveals six reasons project management fails.

 

Training 2012 Conference & Expo speaker Lou Russell outlines the top six reasons she has seen project management suffer.

January 26, 2012
Leadership Training that Makes a Difference

The gift of great leadership can seem magical. The underlying theory is not. The key is to focus on mindful leadership development. To be intentional about process, content, and outcomes—to take leaders on a deeply personal journey that starts with a courageous look inside to reflect on their humanity and a fresh look outside to connect with other leaders to solve thorny and complex organizational problems.

By Rosaria Hawkins, PhD, and Filomena Warihay, Ph.D.

Leadership training is no small investment. The Leadership Development Fact Book reports an average annual expenditure of $500,000 per company on leadership development activities. The annual per participant cost of leadership training runs between $2,000 and $ 7,500 per person. For large corporations, that amounts to millions of dollars.

January 20, 2012
Performance Management: The New Rules

When people think about performance management (PM), what usually comes to mind is the formal HR system for conducting appraisals. More than 50 years of research have been devoted to designing the perfect formal PM system. Unfortunately, these attempts have failed to produce a PM system that managers and employees consistently view as working well and that yields the positive outcomes expected from PM. So here are three new rules of PM to help get back on track.

By Elaine D. Pulakos, President, and Rose Mueller-Hanson, Manager, Leadership and Organizational Consulting Group, PDRI, an SHL Company

January 20, 2012
Podcast: Insights on Manager Led Development of Employees

In this podcast, Corporate Leadership Council Director Kimberly Shells shares more Council research findings and discusses how manager-led development can help managers drive employee performance and development.

Only 45 percent of managers are effective at developing their direct reports. Research shows, however, that managers who ARE effective can improve staff performance by 25 percent and significantly increase retention/commitment. So, what makes the difference? Quite simply, manager-led development. Managers who deliberately help employees maximize the learning potential of every project while connecting them with proper training and other development opportunities offer the winning development combination.

January 19, 2012
3 Leadership Lessons for 2012

Occupy Wall Street—a movement that consciously chose not to have “someone in charge”—taught us more than the fact that people are angry about the increasing disparities between the rich and the poor. The global protests are a fascinating case study in leadership at a time when the world needed it more than ever, whether in politics, social entrepreneurism, or business.

By John Elsey, President and CEO, Forum Corporation

Occupy Wall Street—a movement that consciously chose not to have “someone in charge”—taught us more than the fact that people are angry about the increasing disparities between the rich and the poor. As the CEO of a leadership development company, I found the global protests to be a fascinating case study in leadership at a time when the world needed it more than ever, whether in politics, social entrepreneurism, or business.

January 18, 2012
Leadership Development Tool Kit

In “The Trainer’s Handbook of Leadership Development,” Karen Lawson, Ph.D., CSP, presents a practical, easy-to-use leadership development tool kit easily adaptable for both group and individual application. The book also provides resources and methods for addressing “difficult-to-teach” leadership traits such as empathy, agility, authenticity, resilience, and trustworthiness.

January 17, 2012
Building a Bridge to the Life You Want

Do you enjoy your job? Is your mind active and fully engaged? Are you physically healthy? Are your finances solid? Are your relationships inspiring and supportive? Now think about the bridge that led you to your current position. “Strategy for You” by Rich Horvathis intended to provide you with a five-step plan for creating a bridge to the life you want.

By Rich Horwath

Think about where you are today. Do you enjoy your job? Is your mind active and fully engaged? Are you physically healthy? Are your finances solid? Are your relationships inspiring and supportive? Now think about the bridge that led you to your current position. Was it planned and well thought-out, or was it more similar to Alaska’s infamous Gravina Island Bridge, often referred to as the $398 million “bridge to nowhere”?

January 13, 2012
The Agony and the Ecstasy—Building Innovation Capability

Many firms fail at innovation because they lack the right management capability in the areas of discovery skills, execution skills, and leadership behaviors. The good news is that while innovation is a difficult capability to develop, it can be done.

By Peter Mulford, Executive Vice President, BTS

Does your organization have the managerial know-how to innovate? If so, do your managers know the behaviors they must change in order to cultivate a culture of innovation?

For most companies, in our experience, the answer is no. And the problem is neither a lack of resources nor of creativity itself, but of management capability—specifically, the capability to convert new ideas into value creation. The good news is that building innovation capability is not easy, but it can be done. Here’s how.