Leadership in Action: Become an Undercover Boss with Leadership Training from aptivate

The new television show "Undercover Boss" allows the audience to ride along as CEOs pose as frontline employees to find out what things are really like in their own companies. Through the magic of television editing, we see good people working hard for their companies, although sometimes a procedure breaks down here and there. The real story in organizations, however, could prove to be much different.

A new Towers Perrin Global Workforce study, "Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance," shows the complex nature of what actually goes on in most organizations.

The study reveals that employees do care about their work, and they want to learn and grow. They also want stability and security, and with the right opportunities and resources, they'll commit to a company. Although these are positive, there is a downside: The global workforce is not as engaged as they must be in order to drive results.

The Current State of the Workplace
The Towers Perrin study shows that four out of 10 employees surveyed said they were either "disenchanted" or "disengaged" --- which means they are not working to their true potential because they don't have any motivational connections to the organization.

Gallup polls spanning 1989 to 2009 show that 85 to 94 percent of respondents said they were completely or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. The Conference Board reports workers' job satisfaction dropped sharply from 1987 to 2009:
• Interest in their work decreased 18.9 percent.
• Job security decreased 16.5 percent.
• Interest in the people at work decreased 11.6 percent.
• Satisfaction with supervisors decreased 9.5 percent.
These results further define the underlying problem growing in the workplace: The growing disconnection for employees and their employer is exacerbated by layoffs, budget cuts and continued uncertainty. Employee confidence in long-term career opportunities has dwindled.

The Towers Perrin study defines engagement as "employees' willingness and ability to contribute to company success" and measures employee engagement based on three dimensions:

• Rational: How well employees understand their roles and responsibilities
• Emotional: How much passion and energy employees bring to their work
• Motivational: How well employees perform in their roles

The engagement gap is the difference between employee effort and the organization's ability to garner this effort from the bulk of the workforce.

Disengaged leaders stand in the way and are unable to recognize the changes needed to align with emerging workforce circumstances. Turning leadership into action requires focused training of an organization's leaders, so they can develop a culture that cares about the employees while understanding the importance of performance.

Author Michael Beer, in his book High Commitment, High Performance Management, indicates six leadership barriers:
• Unclear strategy, priorities and values
• Leaders who have a hands-off leadership style
• Ineffective leadership team that doesn't spend time on strategic and people issues
• Poor coordination and collaboration for value-creating activities, preventing effective execution
• Inadequate leadership development
• Closed vertical communication with employees about values strategies and priorities

Improving the State of Your Organization
Essentially, strong leaders can make a difference in motivating and engaging the workforce. This requires them to go "undercover" to really understand employee's needs, values and motivation, ensuring that they are performing the right tasks in the correct way for the proper business outcomes.

Furthermore, a highly trained and engaged leadership team can shape the work environment and culture aligned with business strategies, goals and priorities. This is what you will find as you close the gap: a better performing organization. Become the undercover boss and train your leaders. Put them in action and close the engagement gap with courses from aptivate.

Aptivate’s Leadership courses, along with coaching, can help build strong, actionable leaders. Leaders learn to maintain team member self-esteem while managing, evaluating performance, improving work habits and resolving issues. They also learn to listen to employees and involve team members in decision-making and problem-solving to motivate employees.

If you’d like to sample one of our leadership courses, contact us and we’ll send you the complete kit, including the Leader’s Guide, the Participant’s Guides, the PowerPoint, as well as any job aids and activities. These are ready for you to customize with your logo and to adapt to your organization as needed.

Reinvent Partnerships

Innovation has changed the way we communicate, that is clear. The question now is; how will your organization maximize the benefits of new technology to reinvent, redefine, and recharge existing relationships?

If you are not sure, take a look at a company that is...Avon.

Avon is embarking on a massive, multi-year overhaul of the way it manages its
nearly 6 million sales representatives around the world. In the past, Sales
Leaders - who help manage reps but are not employees of the company - mainly
checked in with the salespeople through face-to-face meetings and phone calls.
Next month, Avon will begin to equip 150,000 sales leaders with a cloud-based
computing system accessible via smartphones and PCs. The technology will keep them much more up-to-date on the sales of each rep, and it will alert them when reps haven't placed an order recently or when they have payments overdue to the
company. The idea is to increase the sales and efficiency of Avonís distribution system. BusinessWeek June 15 2009 Pg 43c

This decision by Avon is monumental because it completely reinvents their communication paradigms. I know that word paradigm sounds like a buzzword, but it’s not. You see, by embracing the new tools for communication, Avon had to walk away from durable, long-lasting belief systems.

What was so compelling about all these new gadgets?
In a word: EFFICIENCY – The ability to optimize communication, reduce overall effort, and enhance the accuracy of field reporting would cause any organization to do a double-take. The reason this kind of efficiency is different from previous generations is because it is a people-centric revision. Mechanical efficiencies still occur all the time, laptops get faster, light bulbs last longer. Yet, overall how humans have interacted has not had as big a shift as social networking since the original telephone was rented – yes rented – as a piece of heavy equipment, complete with scheduled maintenance.

What matters not is how you choose to dive in, it just matters that you dive in soon. Take a look at how the world of social networking has exploded in less than five years. To see this image more clearly and up close click here.

The Conversation Prism found at www.theconversationprism.com

This image captures the many ways communication has changed, rapidly. When you consider innovation related to your existing partnerships, you should consider how you are communicating with them. In the learning and development profession the biggest shift has been how something like Twitter can be used to support, follow-up on, and coach employees from a distance – all in just 140 characters.

Why does this matter?
These changes matter because they shift the way people interact with other people, even while using an intermediary device such as a smartphone or PDA. While technology may get the headline, it’s people that are making the headlines possible through ever more interaction. The idea "we succeed together" is at the core of seeing innovation as a global perspective. By recognizing new ways of collaboration we can activate partnerships that do more than benefit one organization - they can benefit many organizations, and in turn benefit many people.

Management Innovation

Today I want to share an interview from www.management-issues.com because it goes right to the heart of where innovation in human performance, leadership, and management is often overlooked. As technology moves ahead at an ever faster pace the reason for technology to evolve faster than human interaction models is rather simple: it is easier to look at, revise, and change things outside ourselves than to change ourselves.

Inanimate objects are not filled with the beliefs, opinions, emotions, and paradigms each person carries with them. This is what makes management innovation an area of focus that offers exciting opportunities to propel an organization far ahead of competitors in a relatively short time.

Imagine your organization placing a focus on the ‘how’ of management practices, making it their sole area of innovation focus for just one year, ceasing all other R&D – what might happen?

Consider this article as you dream up new ways to lead, train, and manage employee groups in your organization.

Gary Hamel is visiting professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, and director of the Woodside Institute. California-based Hamel is also a consultant to a number of major companies, and chairman and founder of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company.

The Economist called Hamel “the world’s reigning strategy guru.” Peter
Senge of MIT describes him as “the most influential thinker on strategy in the Western world.”

Since 1985, Hamel has published 13 articles in the
Harvard Business Review. Four of his articles have received the prestigious McKinsey prize for excellence. He is the most reprinted author in the history of the Harvard Business Review. Hamel has also written several cover stories for Fortune magazine. He is co-author of Competing for the Future and, more recently, Leading the Revolution (2000).

Des Dearlove spoke to Hamel at London Business School where he is opening a laboratory for management innovation.

What is “management innovation”?
Management innovation is innovation in management principles and processes that ultimately changes the practice of what managers do, and how they do it. It is different from operational innovation; which is about how the work of transforming inputs into outputs actually gets done.

How is it different?
Think of a company as a set of business processes that turn inputs into outputs. Business processes that turn labor and capital into services and products, for example. It is the business processes that govern the work flow. Things such as logistic systems, order processing, call centers, customer support, and manufacturing.

Surrounding the work of transforming inputs to outputs, however, is
everything the managers do: pulling resources together, setting priorities, building teams, nurturing relationships, and forming partnerships. And it is innovation within this sphere that I’m interested in.

Could you give an example of management innovation in the workplace?

Toyota’s lean manufacturing. At one level, you can say that lean manufacturing is predominately an operational innovation. But what sits a level or two above the operational changes is the radical management idea that there could be a positive return on investment through using the problem-solving skills of your employees.

A few decades ago, if there was an efficiency or quality problem in the business, companies sent in staff xperts. They studied the system, and then rewrote the standard operating procedures. And the employees
were asked to conform to those procedures.

The idea that a company would actually give its employees the
responsibility for making those changes, that was just unthinkable. So, what looks like a purely operational innovation through one lens, actually turns out to stem from a radical new management principle.

How do you encourage management innovation in a firm?
In a big company you can’t change what managers do in any direct way. You can only change it by changing the processes
that govern their work.

Look at domestic appliance firm Whirlpool. The company has trained thousands of people to be innovators; they have many great new ideas. The challenge for the company is that the people running the core brands, like Kitchen Aid, Whirlpool, and other international brands; those people really are not very interested in this innovation.

Why is that?
They do not want to put engineering or marketing resources behind these new ideas. It is easier for them to crank one more dollar of earnings out of doing exactly what they are already doing. Whirlpool acknowledged that while it had created a supply of innovative ideas, it had not created a corresponding demand from the senior executives to nurture those ideas. So the organization implemented a number of measures to remedy the
situation. For a start it earmarked 15 per cent of its capital budget for
projects that were truly innovative.

What effect did that have?
It sent a very clear message to individual managers: if you do not bring us
innovative projects then we will starve you of capital. Wall Street, the City, the financial markets, these hold Whirlpool to certain standards for growth, for margins, and other metrics. So why shouldn’t the organization apply metrics to its managers to encourage them to develop innovative management practices.

How important is management innovation?
If you look at a hundred year period of industrial history, and
typically it is management innovation that has allowed organizations to reach new performance thresholds — more than any other kind of innovation. The challenge is instilling management innovation
into organizations. Often, the technology you need to do new things is there long before you change the management processes in a way that allows you to use that technology.

So management innovation lags behind technology
innovation?
Look at something like Open Source development. It is made
possible by communication technology, collaborative technology. Technology has made it easy for people to collaborate.
Yet much of the technology used, such as the internet or Lotus notes, has been around for sometime.

The technology is available, yet, in many companies, it has done little to change the way power and information is distributed. Most companies are exploiting the web in ways that build on existing practice, moving more information to the center, for example. They celebrate the fact that we have the global, digital dashboard. Now an organization can tell how many widgets it sold in Pyongyang the previous day.

Organizations use the new technology to reinforce the
old management habits?
Yes. But eventually a company like Google, or an organization like the Open Source movement, breaks those habits and through management innovation uses the technology to allow things to be done in a different way.

In your research, looking back through management
history, what important management innovations have you identified?
Brand management is a good example. By 1929, Proctor and Gamble was already codifying its brand management knowledge. It recognized that, as you moved into a mass consumer society, the mere ability to produce a product and distribute it, would become less and less important to the consumer.

Before this simply making something that was 99.9 per cent pure, was a manufacturing marvel in itself. What Proctor and Gamble could see was that, increasingly, competition would encompass more than the physical attributes of the product, and the ability to deliver it, but it would include intangible aspects as well. What used to be brand management has
today mushroomed into corporate image consultants, managing IP, and a host of other things. But the whole thread of how to create value out of non-physical, intangible things starts with Proctor and Gamble. They were the pioneers. Although I suspect Unilever might have something to say about that.

I understand you are opening a management
innovation lab?
The management innovation lab is an experiment in itself. For the sake of simplicity, there are two hypotheses.

The first is that we can invent a methodology that will allow us to be much more purposeful about management innovation, and that will allow us to dramatically accelerate the evolution of management itself.

The second hypothesis is that we can help organizations learn how to experiment with new management principles and processes in ways that won’t disrupt current success. In the same way that companies experiment with a new product, or with a new technology in a lab, we
can bring that same experimental mindset to management itself.

Will there be a physical lab?
The London Business School has given us a dedicated space. It is a setting that is built to encourage management innovation, to
encourage the creative questions, to encourage learning from other disciplines, to allow really close experimental partnerships between what I would call scholar inventors, and progressive organizations.

When you consider the ability to innovate in how you work WITH people, you radically alter the purpose and scope of innovation. By reaching out to the people inside the organization you will inspire them to reach out the people beyond the organization. This is more than word of mouth, it is about creating a working environment that is so effective and powerful, every employee is compelled to sing its praises. This type of innovation will outlast even the most advanced widget, no matter what it is.

Check out our instructor-led training courses on how to create an environment of innovation in your organization. These courses are ready to download, print, and train.

Four Types of Innovation - 90 minutes
People Make Innovation Possible - 90 minutes
Reinvent Partnerships Through Innovation - 90 minutes

Management Innovation

Today I want to share an interview from www.management-issues.com because it goes right to the heart of where innovation in human performance, leadership, and management is often overlooked. As technology moves ahead at an ever faster pace the reason for technology to evolve faster than human interaction models is rather simple: it is easier to look at, revise, and change things outside ourselves than to change ourselves.

Inanimate objects are not filled with the beliefs, opinions, emotions, and paradigms each person carries with them. This is what makes management innovation an area of focus that offers exciting opportunities to propel an organization far ahead of competitors in a relatively short time.

Imagine your organization placing a focus on the ‘how’ of management practices, making it their sole area of innovation focus for just one year, ceasing all other R&D – what might happen?

Consider this article as you dream up new ways to lead, train, and manage employee groups in your organization.

Gary Hamel is visiting professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, and director of the Woodside Institute. California-based Hamel is also a consultant to a number of major companies, and chairman and founder of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company.

The Economist called Hamel “the world’s reigning strategy guru.” Peter Senge of MIT describes him as “the most influential thinker on strategy in the Western world.”

Since 1985, Hamel has published 13 articles in the Harvard Business Review. Four of his articles have received the prestigious McKinsey prize for excellence. He is the most reprinted author in the history of the Harvard Business Review. Hamel has also written several cover stories for Fortune magazine. He is co-author of Competing for the Future and, more recently, Leading the Revolution (2000).

Des Dearlove spoke to Hamel at London Business School where he is opening a laboratory for management innovation.

What is “management innovation”?
Management innovation is innovation in management principles and processes that ultimately changes the practice of what
managers do, and how they do it. It is different from operational innovation; which is about how the work of transforming inputs into outputs actually gets done.

How is it different?
Think of a company as a set of business processes that turn inputs into outputs. Business processes that turn labor and
capital into services and products, for example. It is the business processes that govern the work flow. Things such as logistic systems, order processing, call centers, customer support, and manufacturing.

Surrounding the work of transforming inputs to outputs, however, is everything the managers do: pulling resources together, setting priorities, building teams, nurturing
relationships, and forming partnerships. And it is innovation within this sphere that I’m interested in.

Could you give an example of management innovation in the workplace?
Toyota’s lean manufacturing. At one level, you
can say that lean manufacturing is predominately an operational innovation. But what sits a level or two above the operational changes is the radical management idea that there could be a positive return on investment through using the
problem-solving skills of your employees.

A few decades ago, if there was an efficiency or quality problem in the business, companies sent in staff xperts. They studied the system, and then rewrote the standard operating procedures. And the employees were asked to conform to those procedures.

The idea that a company would actually give its employees the
responsibility for making those changes, that was just unthinkable. So, what looks like a purely operational innovation through one lens, actually turns out to stem from a radical new management principle.

How do you encourage management innovation in a firm?
In a big company you can’t change what managers do in any direct way. You can only change it by changing the processes
that govern their work.

Look at domestic appliance firm Whirlpool. The company has trained thousands of people to be innovators; they have many great new ideas. The challenge for the company is that the people running the core brands, like Kitchen Aid, Whirlpool, and other international brands; those people really are not very interested in this innovation.

Why is that?
They do not want to put engineering or marketing resources behind these new ideas. It is easier for them to crank one more dollar of earnings out of doing exactly what they are already doing. Whirlpool acknowledged that while it had created a supply of innovative ideas, it had not created a corresponding demand from the senior executives to nurture those ideas. So the organization implemented a number of measures to remedy the situation. For a start it earmarked 15 per cent of its capital budget for projects that were truly innovative.

What effect did that have?
It sent a very clear message to individual managers: if you do not bring us innovative projects then we will starve you of capital. Wall Street, the City, the financial markets, these hold
Whirlpool to certain standards for growth, for margins, and other metrics. So why shouldn’t the organization apply metrics to its managers to encourage them to develop innovative management practices.

How important is management innovation?
If you look at a hundred year period of industrial history, and
typically it is management innovation that has allowed organizations to reach new performance thresholds — more than any other kind of innovation. The challenge is instilling management innovation into organizations. Often, the
technology you need to do new things is there long before you change the management processes in a way that allows you to use that technology.

So management innovation lags behind technology innovation?
Look at something like Open Source development. It is made possible by communication technology, collaborative technology. Technology has made it easy for people to collaborate.
Yet much of the technology used, such as the internet or Lotus notes, has been around for sometime.

The technology is available, yet, in many companies, it has done little to change the way power and information is distributed. Most companies are exploiting the web in ways that build on
existing practice, moving more information to the center, for example. They celebrate the fact that we have the global, digital dashboard. Now an organization can tell how many widgets it sold in Pyongyang the previous day.

Organizations use the new technology to reinforce the old management habits?
Yes. But eventually a company like Google, or an organization like the Open Source movement, breaks those habits and through management innovation uses the technology to allow things to be done in a different way.

In your research, looking back through management history, what important management innovations have you identified?
Brand management is a good example. By 1929, Proctor and Gamble was already codifying its brand management
knowledge. It recognized that, as you moved into a mass consumer society, the mere ability to produce a product and distribute it, would become less and less important to the consumer.

Before this simply making something that was 99.9 per cent pure, was a manufacturing marvel in itself. What Proctor and
Gamble could see was that, increasingly, competition would encompass more than the physical attributes of the product, and the ability to deliver it, but it would include intangible aspects as well. What used to be brand management has
today mushroomed into corporate image consultants, managing IP, and a host of other things. But the whole thread of how to create value out of non-physical, intangible things starts with Proctor and Gamble. They were the pioneers. Although I suspect Unilever might have something to say about that.

I understand you are opening a management innovation lab?
The management innovation lab is an experiment in itself. For the sake of simplicity, there are two hypotheses.

The first is that we can invent a methodology that will
allow us to be much more purposeful about management innovation, and that will allow us to dramatically accelerate the evolution of management itself.

The second hypothesis is that we can help organizations learn how to experiment with new management principles and processes in ways that won’t disrupt current success. In the same way that companies experiment with a new product, or with a new technology in a lab, we can bring that same experimental mindset to management itself.

Will there be a physical lab?
The London Business School has given us a dedicated space. It is a setting that is built to encourage management innovation, to encourage the creative questions, to encourage learning from other disciplines, to allow really close experimental partnerships between what I would call scholar inventors, and progressive
organizations.

When you consider the ability to innovate in how you work WITH people, you radically alter the purpose and scope of innovation. By reaching out to the people inside the organization you will inspire them to reach out the people beyond the organization. This is more than word of mouth, it is about creating a working environment that is so effective and powerful, every employee is compelled to sing its praises. This type of innovation will outlast even the most advanced widget, no matter what it is.

Check out our instructor-led training courses on how to create an environment of innovation in your organization. These courses are ready to download, print, and train.

Four Types of Innovation - 90 minutes

People Make Innovation Possible - 90 minutes

Reinvent Partnerships Through Innovation - 90 minutes

How to Tell a Story
Story-telling is an ancient art, an art that has always had a place in learning and development. Whether the classroom is for children or adults a story paints a picture more easily than a series of PowerPoint slides.
The key to telling a great story in the adult learning environment is to connect the story with valuable learning points after the story is complete. To bring this to a finer point I will tell you a story about consensus.

THE STORY: When I was about eight years old I lived in San Diego, and in the summer I would play with two of my little friends, Connie and Chris. One day while we were walking along the neighborhood sidewalk we began to talk about the
weather. At the time it was very sunny, and warm, there was a slight breeze and you could hear other children in playing in backyards. Connie said she liked it best when it was very hot and sunny. Chris said she liked it best when there was a
breeze. I said I liked it best when the sun was shining and it was warm, with a breeze to make just a little bit cooler. We walked in silence for a few minutes, then we all agreed that warm with a breeze was best...we had come to consensus
about the weather. This is the first ‘grown-up’ conversation I recall having as a little girl; and many more soon followed.

What happened in this story is simple, and easy to understand. How might it connect to a training session about compromise and consensus?

While you think of a story you might tell, here are guidelines to be sure it provides value to adult learners.

• 
  Can you tell your story in 1 to 3 minutes?


• 
  Does your story have a clear beginning, middle, and end?


• 
  Is the story easily applied to an adult learning situation?


• 
  Can the story be easily re-told by someone else who would like to make the same point?


• 
  Is the story personal enough to give it a sincere quality that drives perceived value?

If you can answer in the affirmative to these five questions you may have a story that is ready for prime-time. The key is to connect the story to the lesson you are teaching, while also addressing the elements listed here.

So let’s apply this story to the adult world.

ADULT LEARNING POINT: In this story three people have a different view, and the freedom to express that view is easily accessible. After each person has taken a turn speaking there is a pause for consideration. After the pause, a general
consensus was reached that met in the middle of two extremes. The final outcome was an agreed upon perspective that was inclusive of all the ideas presented.

Picture your next meeting with several people, and imagine the results that are possible with a little listening, silent reflection, and compromise. After all, we are in this together, and we know that we can accomplish anything.

It’s the 21st Century Right?

Lately there is a lot of talk about change, and yet at the same time there seems to be little evidence to suggest we are living in the 21st Century. For the record, we are. So where’s the proof? Cars don’t fly yet, we aren’t taking vacations on the moon, and people are still trying to set the clock on the VCR… no wait, DVD player.

“In this 2002 post by Keith A. Malo for BNET Business Networks he shares the following insight: Traditional Focus In A Challenged Time – The business climate in the United States in the early 21st century will undoubtedly be classified as a time of great challenge. During this period the economic prosperity of the 1990s evaporated before our eyes. In place came daily headlines and nonstop 24-hour cable newscasts focused on the impact of terrorism in America, accounting scandal after accounting scandal, fluctuating stock values, workforce downsizing (or right sizing, depending on your perspective), and debates on whether or not the United States experienced an economic recession. The President of the United States referred to this period as a “hangover” from the 1990s.”

He goes on to report…

“In a survey with business leaders across the United States, the AchieveGlobal research team found that business Leaders continued to place great levels of importance on classical business issues. Specifically, respondents reported that recruiting quality individuals, improving staff productivity, and managing retention and/or turnover were the three most important concerns to the success of their organization.”

It can be hard to tell sometimes, but things are changing, and in the learning and development world the changes are from many directions. Here is a look at five factors affecting how and why what you teach to adult learners in your organization can no longer be another copy of last-seasons goods.

“Globalization: Yes, I know you have heard this one before yet it is still true. How learning is created, managed, and provided is affected by the audience expansion that is part of globalization. The idea that we can focus on just a local audience is no longer applies, instead we have micro-audiences for a single message. One company with location across the country, or the globe must tailor the message, refine examples, and make the content relevant to a broader group than ever before.”

“Social Networking: The largest shift in how people related to one another and information has come in the form of social networking. Regardless of the organization, employees can quickly access peer review, support, and expertise from a laptop or a smart-phone. This changes how information is valued in during any training session by taking away the mystery of the information via the internet and merging it with the influential power of our own peer groups. While sharing information has always taken place, how we are doing it, and how quickly it is changing now more than ever. Consider the idea Poken as featured in the SWSX Music, Film, and Interactive event in Austin Texas.”

“Life-Long Learning: In a 1998 report from Confintea V to the World Conference on Higher Education it was noted “The transformation to genuine lifelong learning institutions requires a holistic approach which a) supports the institution becoming a lifelong learning community itself; b) integrates academic, financial and administrative elements; c) provides structures which are responsible for organizational, staff, student and curriculum development and community engagement; and d) aligns the various supportive structures such as academic information systems, library provision and learning technologies to the new mission of universities in learning societies.” The learning society is no longer limited to a college campus; in fact workplace learning transfers to personal space rapidly, by text message, email, and numerous other outlets.”

“Technology: The dot-com bubble may have burst, and the tech boom along with it, however it’s replacement has been a feverish pace of innovation, in pursuit of the next best thing. While E-Learning has waxed and waned in overall popularity, it the goal of reducing costs is giving it a push, for better or worse. The best way to respond to a trend away from lengthy instructional design toward e-learning automation is to ensure targeted training presents a bite-sized solution in partnership with in-class and in-person collaboration.”

“Generational Changes: Consider this statement; the increasing use of social media may create the perfect storm for learners to start taking charge of training offerings and let-me-get-it-myself content. One of my young Twitter followers recently said, “I’ve been online a long time. I really don’t know what the traditional classroom looks like anymore.” At this moment, every seven seconds a baby-boomer turns 60. When the Industrial Revolution forged an era of efficient systems for assembly and production a linear learning model was ideal. Not anymore; with changes in how people relate to their own generation, and the generation of others at an all time high, the landscape has never been more diverse across all employee groups.”

So, it’s the 21st Century and things have changed, and will keep changing. The key to addressing all these changes and the ones ahead is a very 21st Century word: Hybrid. You see, the only way to give credit to the past while advancing the cause of futuristic technologies is to create hybrid systems and methods that address your audience in the most relevant way possible.

Here’s One Example of an Hybrid Learning Experience: During training use a social tool, such as Twitter to start a discussion during break. After the session is complete, invite participants to join a Facebook page about the session topic. During the session, instead of referring to pauses in the session as ‘breaks’ perhaps call them ‘Socials’ and have participants stand up, mingle, and play music to changes the atmosphere of the room. Use these 10 minutes to meet participants, and talk casually. During another ‘Social’ ask the oldest and the youngest people in the room to share their thoughts on the subject being taught and lead a brief discussion to build connection between generations.

When is Training the Right Investment?

Effective training takes right application, at the right time.
Often, training and development initiatives fall short of expectations. This is usually caused by the poor application of training resources. While it is proven that training delivers bottom-line results in the form of increased job satisfaction, reduced attrition, and greater performance these results are only achieved when it is clear that training was the best tool for improving performance.

Performance Gap Analysis
Improving performance requires a clear understanding of the gaps that occur, and why they are present. Determining the best course of action for raising performance starts with two simple questions:
1. Is the performance gap a lack of skill or knowledge? – Yes or No?
2. If life suddenly were dependent on performing well, would the gap still exist? – Yes or No?
If you answered…
• Yes to question 1: The employee would like to perform yet is unable to do so, which is a genuine skill gap.
• No to question 2: The employee knows how to perform and isn’t, indicating a skill gap is not the problem.
These two questions are a great place to start assessing which actions would best support improved performance.

If the employee is unable to do the job as desired, and before starting training…
• Consider a Job Aid: While training is a positive choice, it may be more than is necessary. If there is a skill gap caused by infrequent practice, training may need to take the form of a simple performance support tool or ‘job aid’ which can support improved performance when people are focused on the task at hand.
• Review Feedback Channels: When feedback is insufficient an employee cannot quickly and accurately gauge their performance, and adjust accordingly.
By considering these two simple options to address an actual skill gap, you ensure any training you do provide is based on core challenges by eliminating missing steps or consistent feedback as causes of lower performance.

Get Ready for Training
If you conclude an employee does have a specific skill gap then training becomes the right action at the right time. Before you begin consider how other changes may provide a long-term benefit by asking:
1. Can the job be simplified?
2. Can the skill requirements be changed?

Robert F. Mager and Peter Pipe write in their book Analyzing Performance Problems:
“There’s one universal alternative that may be simpler and less expensive than any solution so far proposed. It’s changing the job — changing the skill requirements to meet the skills available. An example of changing the job:
• If instead of requiring someone to remember a sequence of steps, you provide a checklist to which the person can refer any time he or she wants to know what to do next, you have changed the job. You have simplified it, and presumably it can now be handled by someone with fewer capabilities.
As an example, the captain of a jetliner, no matter how wise he or she may be, must have a checklist to ensure all steps are covered in the pre-flight inspection. There’s nothing unprofessional about using such an aid; in fact, the unprofessional person is the one who tries to get away without using the checklist.
The more complex the job, or the more critical it is that it be performed correctly, the stronger the argument for introducing a performance aid rather than expecting people to be “fully trained.”

Consider Using Competency Guides
Our goal at aptivate is to provide cost-effective training materials that are easily put to use by our clients. Even with that goal in mind, we know the best training is the right training, which is why we created Competency Guides in the aptivate. They’re a great way to identify specific training materials that connect with the behavior changes you want to create in your organization. We believe with a little planning, and a few simple questions, you’ll be able to choose the right training material for the challenge ahead.

Make Sure Training Adds Up to Performance
The importance of choosing the right training at the right time is about ensuring there is value gained by your efforts. We know training is an excellent way to empower teams and improve performance. We also know great training is aligned with realistic goals. If you are responsible for training and development in an organization, it is critical you take time up front to assess how and why training is the best solution. This may seem like it puts you in a position to devalue training, in fact it does the exact opposite. By building a track record of using the right tools at the right time, you increase the credibility of all training in the organization. At the same time you’ll keep costs down while improving performance at the same time, a true win-win for everyone.