So many times I’ve seen this kind of approach to engaging in management development and it can be really frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand the need to trade off cash with the ideals of what we could achieve. However, if you are the kind that builds “return on investment” into their programmes as a matter of course, the issue of physical cash should become less of a problem. Here’s why.

In simple terms, if I spend 500k on a piece of kit or an asset to the business, then I’d expect a return of anywhere between 20% and 50% depending on the ability of the kit to earn or save money. If I’m really lucky it may have the ability to generate me double what I put in. So if I invest, say 2k on a person’s development, they should be able to return me maybe 2-3k worth of saving or improvement. Not wholly unreasonable is it?

Now imagine your management development programme is going to develop 130 managers and each one costs you 2k, that’s a huge 260k of investment! That’s a pretty sizable number for a training programme! So, each of your delegates has to improve an aspect of their business area to the tune of 2k and the programme will have paid for itself. In reality some people may save more and some less, but the key thing is that they are saving and improving things, whilst at the same time growing their own capability.

In a recent programme I’ve been working on, the savings from delegates ranged from 10k to 1.2million. The average was around 40k. Given that there were 130 delegates that works out somewhere around the 520k mark. In reality, taking into account actual savings, this client has saved just under 2million from the improvements delegates have made. Now our 260k programme fee doesn’t look like such a large investment!

So, coming back to my topic, many management and leadership development programmes fail because often the client predetermines the budget with no concept of the “return on investment” and often sees it as another training programme. Alternatively, the supplier fails to create a strong mechanism for producing tangible improvement or does it half-heartedly. At the end of these programmes the client is often left with the view that it was a big investment for not much gain, which if managed correctly clearly doesn’t have to be the case.

Oh and I haven’t even talked about all the other intangible improvements which offer additional benefits such as employee satisfaction, retention, sickness, internal promotions and the service your customers get. Why didn’t I mention these things earlier? Well, because this is typically the stuff that the other suppliers focus on instead of the tangible return on investment. Most of which is affected by any number of other projects, initiatives or situations that occur in everyday working.

So, when you are developing your thoughts for a leadership or management programme, understand what you expect the returns should be from the programme and then consider how much you’d be willing to invest to achieve that return. Then you hopefully have a sensible framework with which to engage a supplier.

A fair number of years ago I learned about David Kolb and his concept of the learning cycle. Essentially this concept purports that we all learn in different ways and exhibit a preference for a learning style. The learning cycle is a deceptively simple concept, easy to understand and use.

Add to this the concept developed by John Adair around where we focus our time as leaders and managers and you have the basis for experiential learning.

With corporate team building events it is necessary to create thought provoking activities. This kind of team building activity has characteristics that cause delegates to revert to type and behave as they normally would at work. Now, creating activities that mimic the behaviours and processes used with work is not as straight forward as it seems. After all, we are trying to create a different kind of experience you get from run of the mill fun team building games.

When working on new team building ideas we take time out to imagine ourselves in a workplace context. That way we know what issues and challenges we can creat that are as realistic as we can make them without actually being in the office.

Because of this attention to detail, our activities feel much more akin to worklife.

So, now we have a powerful activity we’re off, or not! You see there is another couple of important factors to get right if you want the learning to make a difference. The activity alone is seldom enough, you need time to reflect and review you team’s performance and decide how you can improve.

Now, having planned and run hundreds of team building events over the years you get to see some familiar sights. Probably the most common is a group who only say nice things about each other and their performance. Another is lots of talking about planks, ropes and coloured blocks. In essence they often end up reviewing how to be better at the activity and missing the point.

This brings up another essential aspect of team building that makes the difference between having a good time and learning something valuable. A first rate facilitator.

A good facilitator really has their work cut out as they have to understand all kinds of business, understand some of the psychology behind how people tick and be able to challenge a group when they need challenging. If you’re not careful you can find yourself working with a facilitator who is little more than a “good time maker” or out to “polish their own ego.

Right, you now have a great activity, a good opportunity for reflection and review and a great, results focused facilitator. Is that enough? Of course not, you need to be able to take what you’ve learnt back to work and do some good with it. This is where pulling it all together in a tailored team building programme with an action plan for work is important.

Okay, so why does all of that make this such a great process co pared to other forms of learning? Experience and skill.

Over the last few years I’ve been more and more involved in modular style leadership and management programme. Quite often I have been brought in to focus on the experiential bit. I can’t tell you how many times the feedback has been the same citing the experiential module as the most eye opening and useful.

For one particular client this approach helped them save over 6 million pounds in project improvements. My most memorable individual started a programme with us basically as a machine, lacking self belief and showing almost no initiative. By the end of the programme he had been promoted and earmarked as “rising talent”. Furthermore, he instigated a business project which saved his company over one hundred thousand pounds.

Experiential team building has shown itself time and again to be the most powerful learning process both for individuals and their respective employers.

Spirit Consulting

There is no doubt that generally people like to know other people’s stuff and keep in touch, however strong or loose the connection might be.  The explosion of sites such as facebook, twitter and linked in have created a media vehicle that is not only instantaneous but is also hugely rich in “interesting” content.

I say “interesting” and I mean it, although there is obviously some filtration of what I deem this to be compared to my 18yr old niece for example.  Nevertheless, my niece and I share a lot of common contacts and we both seem to comment on their information, news and interests.

Now, imagine having a facebook just for your company.  Imagine having a Linked-In set up to develop the networks inside your business.  Hugely beneficial or potentially damaging?

The way I see it (and this is just my view), most of the development of individuals and teams I do with organisations often carries a common performance issue – not enough sharing of best practice and not enough time taken out to maintain working relationships and networks.  Yet, so often I see examples of situations where one person has faced a similar situation or issue to another yet they never thought to share it until it became obvious in a training session or development activity. Why? Because much of the time there is no “desire” or “impetus” to do so.

So how can we change this?  Well, it may require a bit of a leap of faith and some pretty good policy management but I think corporate facebooks and linked-ins present a real opportunity.  An opportunity to make some real leaps and bounds in our corporate networking, sharing of news, knowlegde, support, resource and countless other benefits besides.  We already have things like lotus notes databases and intranet sites that try to do this in a fashion but I haven’t seen a really successful example of one yet.

So, my challenge to you reading this – Do you you of one such system?  Have you seen it in use?  Do you use this within your current organisation?  Is this indeed an opportunity for some budding entrepreneur?

Give your comments, let me know your thoughts and views, get involved.

As a home the midlands offers lots of fantastic places to see and live in.  From the once brewing capital of the world, Burton Upon Trent which in it’s hey day was home to over 700 breweries.  Then there is the Derbyshire peak district with it’s dales, caves and rivers for walking, boating and photographing.  Add to this the fantastic castle at Warwick, Sherwood Forest at Nottingham and the magnificent Chatsworth House and the area becomes a haven to wonderful experiences. 

So what makes it so great for team building?  Most of our clients these days have offices located from one side of the country to the other and from south to north.  So being based in the midlands creates a central location where travelling is balanced and no one feels unfairly treated.

Much of the midlands is sandwiched nicely between the M6 and the M1 which makes it easy to get to from most places.  We have team building venues across the country from Surrey to Edinburgh but our midlands team building venue is slap bang in the middle of the country half way between both motorways and has mainline rail access on the doorstep.

But, is it more cost effective to run your team building locally or travel to one of our venues?  Well, we were recently involved in  a major piece of leadership development work for a company based primarily in the south of the country.   The work involved some 1-2 workshops with a 3-4 day residential element for the experiential learning piece.

We worked out the cost of transporting the team building exercises and staff, venue set up and removal and then compared it to the cost of transporting everyone north to the midlands.  The cost of running the events at the southern based local venue worked out as nearly 50% additional cost.  So the Midlands it was!

Now, if you live in Derby, Nottingham, Birmingham, Stoke or even Leicester or Warwick, our site at Draycott in the Clay is anything from 30mins to 1hr away.  We provide full catering facilities, overnight accommodation and we’ve even got a hot tub to relax your weary bones after a great day’s team build.

So, when you’re next considering a team building event, don’t assume it has to be local.  We can show you that the costs can make it viable.

Creating A PDP That Achieves Something

So, by our title you can assume that we mean the vast majority of PDPs don’t achieve anything, quite right. In my experience most PDPs end up as highly aspirational, one-sided documents which do little to move anything forward. Why is this so? It is because the vast majority of managers still don’t believe in the value of them, pay little attention to them once the annual appraisal review is out of the way and therefore reduce them to one-sided “some day” pieces of paper full of courses and coaching that often fails to materialise.

I have also met many management teams who claim that they take personal development very seriously but who can do little to substantiate this claim without calling on cohorts of HR staff.

So why bother?

Why, because it’s one of the best motivators of employee performance you can get and one of the best business improvement tools available and it’s free!

Let me be clear firstly what I mean by a PDP or Personal Development Plan as they are commonly known. I do not mean those soft and fluffy, nicey nicey, lots and lots of courses type PDPs. I mean the specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, trackable PDPs that link the development of an employee to improving themselves and the business. What do I mean by improving the business? Pounds and pence! Improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality or good old hard cash.

Yes, it really is one of the best mechanisms available for improving your business. But, you need to get it right. Creating a PDP in ten minutes flat probably won’t do much to change anything.

So what are the ingredients of a good PDP?

It is not difficult to create a really good PDP. What tends to be difficult is differentiating between good and bad PDPs. So let us get to the point of making a good PDP. Below we have outlined the key aspects of a PDP and what turns each section into a good element.

Objective Setting

This is the crux of any good PDP, get the objective right and your half way to building an effective PDP. When creating a development objective remember the following key points:

Make it relevant to the business. I have experienced many attempts to enhance PDPs by adding lots of nice to do things like courses in French, Tai Chi, Yoga, Cooking which rarely do anything to build motivation or enhance the business. What is far more valuable is to set a development objective that is geared to helping an individual stretch their ability to do their job much more effectively. Better still, stretch them to be able to do more than their current job and voila you grow your talent organically.

Make the objective specific. The example below is a real copy of an objective taken from a PDP of a middle manager in a FTSE100 company. See if you can guess what’s wrong with it.

“Improve my influencing skills”

Yes, it is lacking in a few areas. Firstly, one could assume from this objective that the manager needs to improve their ability to influence people in all aspects of their role which isn’t actually true. This manager is very effective at influencing her direct reports and within her peer group. The problem area lies more in influencing senior managers. Secondly, the objective doesn’t describe the context of the problem. Is the cause of the development a lack of confidence in verbal communication or is it a lack of evidence and facts supporting the influencing process that’s the problem. Finally, this objective is so broad it has the potential to overwhelm. The individual may not really know where to focus first and may therefore struggle to commit to action.

So the key to making the objective a good one is to ensure that:

·         The objective is specific to the particular problem area.

·         Include the context of the development need

·         Make it something realistic and achievable.

Apply the above and see what it does to our example objective.

“To influence senior managers more effectively by ensuring I have sufficient data and evidence to support my proposals and presentations”

At this stage we are only interested in making the objective give us the best possible start. We have still yet to develop actions and timelines etc.

Creating Actions from Objectives

The next thing to do is create the actions that will lead to the achievement of the overall objective or goal. These actions are in essence are mini objectives. Each should be a step along the path to achieving the major objective. Again these should be SMART in their make up. For a PDP objective you should expect to have around 4-5 actions.

Setting the Timeline

Once you have your objectives and actions in place you should commit them to a timescale. There are a few things to be wary of when setting timescales for your PDP. Don’t create them in isolation of each other. There is a bit of a tendency to end up with timescales that all converge at the same point. Once you’ve set each of the dates go back over them and sense check that they fit together and make it still realistically achievable. Also, take into account any known pieces of work or projects that may have an impact on the individual’s ability to achieve the objectives. There is nothing worse than setting someone objectives that can’t be achieved. Thirdly, you need to diarise regular reviews with the individual. Ideally these should be monthly. Each review gives you the opportunity to check that the PDP objectives are still achievable against the current workload. The PDP is a work in progress and, just as with other business objectives should be reviewed and adapted when needed.

Measures of Success

Now, the most crucial part of all; the measures of success. There is a saying that I have come to love over the years because even though it is simple, it holds the key to great achievement. “Start with the end in mind”.

To produce or build something we must first create the prototype. Our prototype becomes our measure of success. It is the thing we know to be a correct and true representation of what we want to ultimately achieve. It is the end.

So, start with the end for each objective. Define what success will look like. How will the individual be doing things differently once they have developed? Where possible make the measures as tangible as possible. Think of the improvements to targets, efficiency, quality and examine how these can be shown in financial terms. Good, tangible measures help to show that the development is making a difference.

If you implement the above, whether it be on a crude sheet of paper or with the aid of a computer software package, you will see aspects of your business improve. Imagine everyone in your business going into work tomorrow and doing their jobs just 10 mins quicker and getting things 10% more correct the first time. How much would that be worth to your business? Well, you can easily achieve more than this with good well written PDPs.

If you are keen to have a go at implementing the above but are unsure where to start or have some questions that need answering please do give us a call. We’ll be only too pleased help you.

Leadership development is one of the most popular learning and development topics within the training industry and has been for some time. Leadership development can be a hard area to address if employees recognise the need instead of the leaders themselves. After all telling a senior figure in any organisation that they need further development can be pretty career limiting.

Having said this, leadership development needs to be an ongoing exercise, as leaders play an active and vital role in any organisations’ future success. The methods and theory of leadership has evolved over the years and the number of options available to organisations is constantly increasing.

Learning and development is no longer restricted to the teacher-pupil style format and because of this, the levels of complexity when designing development programmes has also increased. The main reason for this increase in complexity is the realisation that a ‘one-size fits all’ approach does not work. The development of leaders depends greatly on our own personalities, our experiences, the client organisation, the context we are working in at the time. All of these aspects are important to integrate and deal with effectively within the development programme for it to be a success.

A good leadership development programme needs to have the right balance of leadership development sessions and supporting activities for all delegates. This gives the delegates the new knowledge they need and an environment in which to practice, which helps transfer the learning to the workplace.

Another aspect that needs consideration is which delivery option is best for your leadership development project. The style of delivery is very important as this helps to set the tone for the development programme. A leadership development programme can be delivered in many ways and some options that are available include a completely bespoke programme, designed completely around the organisations’ needs, a ready-to-run programme, an experiential event or a development award.

Over the past couple of years experiential events and development awards, like the ILM, have become popular methods for developing leaders. The reason for this growing popularity is because experiential events remove all classroom boundaries and allows the delegates’ natural leadership style to be seen and not the one they create.

A development award enables an organisation to get their leadership programme recognised by an accredited body in the field, which can add extra credibility to the programme. There is no right or wrong delivery option as all have different positive aspects.

The key to selecting the best method is by evaluating the delivery option and course content against the proposed leadership development project’s critical success factors. The key though to any leadership development should be its ability to create a new sense of purpose in the delegates that drives performance improvement that is tangible.

Trying to evaluate a person’s improvement in leadership is tough. Why, because so many other factors influence the changes.  In my experience most senior people in organisations aren’t so worried about a scientific evaluation to prove the development works. What they want is some clear indication that things are moving in the right direction and that this can be attributed to changes in leadership approach.

When designing any leadership development programme, you should always focus on what you expect the outcomes to be and identify realistic ways in which you can measure the outcomes.  An example of this would be improvements in your employee survey results for leadership perceptions or improvements in absence and labour turnover that can be linked to changes in leadership style.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of tools such as competency frameworks, psychometrics and 360 feedback for increasing self awareness.  After all, you cannot change what you do not know needs changing!

That’s a pretty alarming figure.  This research covers a lot of reason within the scope of accidents and necessity, such as moving towns and needing to find a job quickly, needing a job that was flexible to fit round children, having had a bad experience and needed to do something different.  All sorts of reasons, but only 7% cited the reason for being in their current job as “it matched the skills I have”…………….hmmm, worrying!

So, what does this have to do with psychometrics and how can they change your life?

I have been using psychometric tests and giving psychometric feedback for a long time on all sorts of applications such as assessment centres, influencing personal development plans, highlighting people with potential and assessing skills.  In each of these situations, the psychometric is being used to identify gaps in the individual against a job they are applying for, currently doing or developing for.  Nearly always, these are assessments about the job fit, from the organisation’s perspective.  Which makes sense, of course and I’m not knocking this approach.  This is part of what we offer as a business.

But, in reality few organisations use psychometrics to any great extent.  Most tend to reserve the use of psychometrics to senior appointments, talent management or graduate recruitment.  Again, these are all about identifying fit with a job.

Now let me ask you a question.  Have you come into contact with someone in your business that you regard as a bit of a muppet, or worse?  They just can’t do the job.  They’re either too slow, too lazy, too fussy.  Maybe they don’t manage their people well enough, can’t deliver projects on time or are not innovative enough.  I am sure, in your mind now, you have the face of someone or at least a name, and maybe not just one either.  Maybe you are thinking about yourself being seen as one of these types of people.

Well I want you to consider, for a moment, psychometrics with a different purpose.

The Diagnostic Psychometric

If you’ve ever seen Harry Potter films, you’ll remember the bit where the sorting hat decided which house wizards and witches would belong to.  Essentially, the sorting hat was a diagnostic aimed at assessing the individual and working out where they would be best suited.

Psychometrics can do the same thing.  Time for a story.

Imagine the situation; Bob is working for an organisation in a “head of engineering role”.  Bob comes to me one day and says he has a problem with one of his team (Stuart).  Apparently Stuart is not managing his workload effectively or his team and is leaving his client’s unhappy about his effectiveness.  So Bob decides he wants to conduct a 360 feedback on Stuart, which surprise surprise confirms this view…………or so the results show!  When Bob, Stuart and I sit down to go through the feedback, it’s not long before I start to get the feeling that Stuart is not entirely at fault.  Sure enough crack’s start to appear in Bob’s management of Stuart, which has helped lead to a breakdown between the two and as a result has affected Stuart’s ability to deliver to his client.  Sure enough Bob has not really managed Stuart properly.  Objectives (to access this link, send us an e-mail and we’ll e-mail you the password to the freestuff area) have been set over e-mail, performance reviews are infrequent if at all and Bob openly talks to Stuart’s client about his lack of ability.  All of which Stuart is aware of and has effectively “switched off”.  As the 360 progresses, I help Stuart to realise that he is in fact part of the problem and has been actively avoiding confrontation with Bob.  This has meant that Stuart doesn’t communicate or manage his interactions with Bob, he doesn’t keep him informed or review his performance regularly.

  About ¾ of the way through, like a lightbulb going on, Stuart realises he has been actively disengaged.  Realising that his disengagement is leading him down a worsening situation (and that Bob has a big affect on his career) he resolves to spend the weekend thinking about how he can sort things out for himself.  After the weekend Stuart returns fresh faced and with a renewed commitment to actively manage Bob to ensure he tries to make the relationship work.  Within two weeks, Stuart seems to be back to his old, capable, happy self.  He has begun making Bob manage him and the client has also commented on the vast improvement in performance. Stuart’s team (who were happy with him anyway) are now happier than before and everything looks good.  So the 360 helped Stuart acted as a diagnostic to influence the conversations and work out what was going wrong………for Stuart!  The issue with Bob was still unresolved!

Malcolm, Bob’s manager approaches me about a month after the 360 between Bob and Stuart.  He asks me to conduct a 360 for Bob, which I do of course.  When it comes time to go through the results, I can tell Bob is uncomfortable.  I try to understand how Bob is feeling about having a 360 done on himself, to which he responds “it feels much less comfortable being this side of the fence”.  Now, I know Bob is worried and I know that he knows something is not quite right.  He also knows that Malcolm is concerned.  So all in all a great atmosphere.  As we go through the results, Bob relaxes down as we talk about things in a casual and conversational way.  Being a Head of Department, Bob is responsible for managing around 20 staff and various technical projects.  The results show that both of these areas have quite differing results to his, with his being much higher than others.  The further we progress, the more Bob opens up until in one summing up he states “I don’t much like people or projects”.  A small but important revelation!

So how did Bob end up in a role that require much of what he doesn’t like?  By accident and necessity!  Bob had originally joined the organisation with the responsibility for looking at technical procedures and reviewing them, rewriting them and introducing new ones.  Essentially this was a job where he would be working on his own, through others, with no one to manage and no direct project accountability.  But, because he was in a senior job and because he did his job very well, when a reorganisation came about, Malcolm saw Bob as having the ability to absorb a larger, more complex role managing people and projects.  Bob being somewhat happy to be thought of so highly agreed to take on the job without really thinking through the implications.  As soon as Bob started the job he began to struggle and was not coping.  Not wanting to appear incapable he started manage the role to fit his strengths.  He turned things into procedures, he introduced a layer of management to avoid people management and direct project association.  Yet all of these aspects of his role were unavoidable and so once again he struggled.

Using Bob’s 360 feedback, we started to understand where the problem had come from and, in typical fashion, what the gaps where in his development.  Malcolm wrote down lots of “stuff” about Bob going on “people management” courses and attending project management training.  In reality I knew this wouldn’t solve the problem.  Fundamentally Bob didn’t want to do this type of work and even with some good skills to help him through, he still wouldn’t be happy.  By the end of Bob’s 360 feedback session I had opened his eyes to why he was struggling, helped him see where his strengths lay and helped him realise he needed to sort things out if he was to survive in his current role.

Sure enough, three weeks later Bob came to me and said he had resigned and had found a job where he was able to work primarily on his own writing technical procedures and reports.  I asked him to keep in touch and let me know how things were going in his new job which he did.  He thanked me for helping him to see that he was unhappy and needed to make a decision in order to change things for the better.  He was now in a role that he enjoyed and as a result was successful again.

The moral of the story part

Now I know that some will read this and say “with the right training and skills development he could have improved and enjoyed developing into the role he had”.  I don’t agree.  Bob fundamentally lacked the desire and interest to be responsible for other people’s work, he hated working under the kind of pressure that projects often require and he was unhappy.  This to me was more about Bob’s fundamental personality makeup than it was about his skill at being able to do something he didn’t want to.

I see this kind of thing happen far too often and I have seen many a good person damaged by trying to make them into something they clearly aren’t.  This is exactly the same situation we see in organisations when someone is promoted to their level of incompetence.  A 360 feedback is one of a number of psychometric based tools that are available to offer what I call a diagnostic process for individuals.

Both Bob and Stuart, through the use of 360 as a diagnostic, where able to understand and change things about the situation they found themselves in.  These changes ultimately led them to a better situation and in turn rewarded them with less stress, greater enjoyment and performance, which impacted their home life for the better.

So often, we fire people from situations we helped them get into, or we reorganise those difficult people out of the business or worse still, we brush the problems under the carpet or move them onto someone else’s department.

Start proactively using psychometrics such as 360 feedback or OPQ32 as a diagnostic for individuals with your business. You’ll soon start to see people making decisions for themselves about their suitability for a role and identifying things they need to change to improve and enjoy their work.  This approach will help you move people into better suited roles, help people move out of the business in a positive and constructive way and most importantly will help to make your business performance more effectively and efficiently.

It’s worth also noting that most psychometric tools will cost you in the region of £50-£150 to complete, assuming you have someone in your business to feedback the results.

At Spirit Consulting Group we offer a wide range of psychometric and 360 feedback tools.  We can also provide you with consultancy on choosing the right psychometrics tools and profiling tools to use dependent upon what you’re looking to achieve. There are also lots of sample psychometric tests available online to help you guage what is right for you. Whether you want personality tests, IQ tests, aptitude tests or other psychometric profiling tools, we can provide them or source them for you.

So, the other week I was running a leadership programme for a client and I had been getting that old familiar sense that there were a few delegates, actively disengaged or sitting back out of character. Now, on most of the programmes I run as a facilitator, there are opportunities for one-to-one feedback with each other and with me or whoever is running the programme. On this particular occasion it gave me a good chance to chat to each of these delegates individually.

I already had some hunches about what was going on for these individuals that I had picked up from their behaviour, the language they used and the way they interacted with the rest of the group at certain times and over certain issues. Being candid, I broached the issues with each of the delegates and sure enough, there were indeed underlying reasons for their behaviour. For one it was simply that they did not believe they were credible to be doing the job they were in because they weren’t from a typical university background like so many peers. This is a relatively straightforward issue to tackle with some coaching and support.

The other two individuals however had quite different anxieties. One was suffering from a lack of progression, feeling passed over, feeling as though time was passing them by and generally fed up. The other had been through some tough times personally, wasn’t convinced they wanted to try and compete and play the politics required in the client’s business and was seriously doubting their position.

What struck me was that both of these individuals must have been feeling the way they did for a reasonably significant amount of time. Both were really unhappy and dissatisfied with the current situation they found themselves in but neither was doing anything about it, just rolling along in the same rut.

So, back to my question. When is it time to stop developing someone?

This company was clearly doing a very admirable thing investing time, effort and money on developing this population of managers, but clearly not all delegates would return the investment made in them going forward. So why are so few organisation’s grown up enough and sensible enough to recognise the point at which we should stop trying to develop someone and help them find a new direction?

Instead we believe that development, or over development, will give them the chance to improve and change. Ok, in some cases this invariably works, more by chance than calculation I suspect. So, do we try and develop someone or performance manage them out of the organisation?

Both of the individual’s mentioned above are highly likely to leave the organisation through dissatisfaction, possibly over promotion and possibly a lack of decent promotion opportunity. There is little that is likely to change their viewpoint as their relationship with the business is pretty poor. Ordinarily these people will be developed or promoted to a point where they either start screwing things up noticably or till the organisation has had enough and starts down the route of performance management i.e. disciplinary. I have seen this situation happen so often during my career and I believe there has to be another way to manage these situations effectively. How? By being grown up and talking about things out in the open.

I have known people in teams I’ve managed who have been unhappy because they are struggling with the demands of their role. For some this has been a capability issue, for others boredom, hunger for promotion that doesn’t exist. In all cases, my connection to my team has allowed me to realise when these situations have occured. I have always tried to build the teams I’ve managed on trusting relationships that are honest and open. This has meant that when people have really had a challenge or problem they’ve been able to talk to me about it without fear of predjudice or reprisal. This is one of the most important aspects of creating an environment for grown up dialogue.

Sometimes people reach a point in time where their role doesn’t fit them anymore or they don’t fit the organisation and at this point it is time to make a change of some sort. It is important to recognise the point at which a very capable person and a very necessary role become mismatched. This does not mean that the individual is now useless and should be performance managed and cast aside like they have some sort of lurgy or deficiency. Treating someone like they are incapable will only damage their view of themselves long term. I have seen very clever and capable people get their confidence smashed by an over ambitious and demanding manager. I have seen personality shifts in people who were once outgoing and energetic and now struggle to find self belief that they are still capable. This thinking then creates a new, but false reference point for many of their choices moving forward.

Creating an environment where grown up conversations can happen and openess is valued can avoid many of these damaging situations. For example, I had someone working for me some years ago who, for a couple of years had done a great job for me. With changes in the nature of the role they found themselves struggling to step up and performance was starting to slip. Through one-to-one reviews I talked to them about the slip in performance and they were honest enough to admit the areas they were struggling with. Between us we knew that this wasn’t a case of going on a course or undergoing coaching, it was a fundamental lack of desire to fulfill the new nature of the role. They were still a very capable individual and I wanted to ensure they stayed believing this of themselves.

I could have easily started down the route of performance managing them out of the business in order to recruit a replacement, but I didn’t. Instead I put a support mechanism in place to help this member of my team begin searching for a suitable new role, whether inside or outside of the organisation. In return I asked them to support me in recruiting the right person to replace them and to do a full handover to get them up to speed. After two months the team member left the business happy and confident having found a new role with another organisation and I had a new team member who was up to speed and a much better fit with the role.

I worked out that the cost of me taking this approach versus me making life hard for them, pushing them out of the organisation and then recruiting someone new and training them was around three times less. As an added bonus, I had parted company with someone who still held the organisation in high regard and would happily return to the business in the future………………..for the right role!

Whether you agree with my methods or not, commercially, it makes more sense and ethically it makes a whole lot of sense.

So, in short, if you want to manage these difficult situations in a grown up way:

1. Be honest and open with your team and encourage them to do the same without fear or reprisal.
2. Take time to ask your team members how they feel they are coping with the role, particularly when you know they are under specific pressures. The more you do this, the more they’ll talk about it.
3. Be honest and genuine with someone when their performance slips and identify the root cause.
4. If it’s something fixable easily, great.  If not, work with them to help them understand it may be time to move on.
5. Create a win-win arrangement.  Support their search for a new role if they, in return, help you replace them.

Follow this 5 step principle and you will find that dealing with performance issues get easier, exiting someone from the role becomes less painful and you leave the individual undamaged and confident for their future.  You will also grow to become a much more valued leader.

I have experienced this need in providing a range of different ways to deliver the same learning.  I had the opportunity to do some work for a friend’s client a few years back but unfortunately couldn’t fit it in around other commitments.  I had, however, spent some time with the client in order to understand their need and determine what solution would best suit the need.  The solution was largely about being able to undertake activities, self review and apply the learning in the next situation.  From my point of view the key to the success of this piece of work was not the activities or reviews, or even the application of the learning to the next activity.  It was about having the right facilitator working with the team to drive and challenge them in the right way.

I put together a programme and earmarked an individual I thought would be great in my place.  My friend decided to use somebody else, much to my protest and rationalised explanation.  My concern was that this other person (whom I knew) did not have the right style of facilitation to support the client.  Anyway, long story short, my friend used her anyway and sure enough the client’s feedback was that she wasn’t anything like as challenging as she needed to be and they got little out of the work.

One solution, but two very different styles which would produce two different sets of outcomes.  Which is right?  In reality it is often a judgement call based on experience, understanding of a client and their team and knowing your capabilities.

There are indeed lots of different ways to develop teams with different styles, from outdoor team activities to weekend retreats designed to bring people closer together.  I have seen teams likened to animal types to understand themselves better, drawing rich pictures from their lives, shouting beliefs at the top of their voices to rid themselves of their limited thinking and I’ve even seen them scared witless on the brink of a breakdown in order to better themselves.

The truth is, any one of these things could work if it is the right approach for the right team of individuals.  Invariably, the more extreme the approach the more mixed the results can be based on people’s personal preferences, phobias and levels of comfort (ah the good ole comfort zone!).

So, on to the real subject of this post, Gallup’s Q12.  If you want to develop a great team and you want something which everyone is going to be able to understand, get involved in and make it link to workplace effectiveness, you could do worse than to utilise the Gallup Q12.

Gallup have been in the survey business for many years and are pretty much the leaders at doing this sort of stuff.  My gripe for many years is that most of these employee survey tools are pretty woolly, have lots of influencing factors that limit the accuracy of the results and are hugely open to interpretation.  Therefore it’s an ok picture of the big areas to focus on, but we shouldn’t use the results as a tablet of stone.

However, Q12 survey has been researched and tested with organisations and Gallup have some pretty compelling evidence that suggests this is one survey tool to take note of.  That for me is what makes this a great tool for thinking about your own team’s development.  Gallup have made tangible links to improved financial performance for those organisations that do well in the Q12 areas.  Having now worked with a number of organisations that have or do use Q12 I believe it is a great vehicle for benchmarking your team and focusing development activity on areas that really can make a tangible difference.

So what is the Q12?

Gallup’s Q12 is a set of core statements that, if an organisation works on and does well in, will be really effective in improving performance financially. Below are the 12 statements.

• Do you know what is expected of you at work?
• Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
• At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
• In the last seven days, have your received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
• At work, do your opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
• Are your associates (fellow employees) commited to doing quality work?
• Do you have a best friend at work?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
• In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Copyright © 1993-1998 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. You may not distribute, modify, transmit, reuse, re-post, or use the Q12® questions for public or commercial purposes, without the written permission of Gallup, Inc.  Gallup® and Q12® are Trademarks of Gallup, Inc.”

As an example of what Q12 claims, if we take the first statement “Do you know what is expected of you at work?”.  Gallup claim that organisations who ensure people understand not only what they are meant to be doing but also how it fits into the overall goal of the business could expect to see up to a 30% improvement in profitability.  Even if your organisation or department say profitability or effieciency savings of half that amount it’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it?

Gallup’s website has lots on information about how to use the Q12 in an organisation but it basically comes down to this.

• Be open to recieving the feedback
• Use it as a starting point to develop your understanding
• Talk about the results openly
• Engage your team in identifying the things that will improve things
• Create an action plan that dovetails into your business plans
• Remember, it’s tool for improving performance not just creating warm fluffy places to work

Alongside using Q12, you will be able to identify other tools and approaches that can help you tackle areas of concern on the Q12 results but remember to make sure not only the solution is right but that the person working with you is right for you too.

Obviously this is just a short snippet about team development and specifically how Q12 can provide a great insight to your team’s development needs.  It’s not intended to go into Q12 in detail.  If you want to know more about the tool, look at Gallup’s website, there is a whole bunch of information there.  If you want to talk to me about how I’ve used Q12 with other team’s then drop me an e-mail.

Likewise, if you have experience of using Q12, including success or pitfalls then please do post a comment for others.

In a knowledge-driven economy, chances are greater than ever that the value you offer comes from making use of expertise. Conventional wisdom will tell you that you get the best from your expertise by deeper learning your field, by keeping up with new developments and understanding the nuances and intricacies of your domain – in short, investing in knowing more.

If desperate for innovation, what is most any leader likely to say?  “Think outside of the box.”

Think about it.

“Out of the Box” is a cliché, a phrase that’s been around for decades. Everyone knows what it means, but it’s hardly a trigger for ideas that are fresh, creative, and original.

If the ‘’box’ is a metaphor for your organization’s experience, ‘out-of-the-box‘ connotes trying to find something that is completely new, totally outside of that experience. It immediately suggests a daunting task, a journey to a complete unknown, a safari. No wonder calls for out-of-the-box thinking are met with resistance. It’s difficult to integrate trips to unknown territory into your regular work, already over-extended – unless of course you are in the safari business.

In helping people to find creative ideas, I encourage people to focus on Edge of the Box thinking – especially if you need ideas with a high potential for useful application.

Edge of the Box thinking is based on viewing the world at the boundaries of your organization and experience, where inside and outside perspectives can be combined, and where fresh ideas most likely will emerge. In today’s knowledge-based world, useful innovation typically arises out of combining core competencies with ideas taken from places outside of your industry or field, but not so far out as to be inaccessible.

Architect Mick Pearce designed the celebrated Eastgate Centre, in Zimbabwe, a shopping and office building that uses only 10% of the energy required for heating and cooling by conventional buildings. In addition to his training in architecture, Pearce had an interest in the amazing structures produced in nature. His remarkable innovations making this energy savings possible arose from the study of how termites keep their mounds at a constant temperature of 87° despite their locations in harsh environments. An anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, helped create major innovations in the field of Family and Marriage Therapy in the 1970’s by suggesting the use of one-way mirrors to observe counseling sessions – something that that would never have occurred to clinicians but made obvious sense to an anthropologist.

Established conventions and ways of thinking create “associative barriers” that inhibit innovative thinking in any given field of endeavor. The perspective of another field or industry, however, does not carry the same thinking conventions and associations. Innovation happens most where fields cross, at what Frans Johansson, in The Medici Effect, calls the Intersection. “When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures,” he writes, “you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas.”

EOB Thinking About How You Run Your Business

Toyota provides a classic example of adopting concepts from another industry. In the post-WWII reconstruction years, Toyota’s executives traveled to the US to get a first-hand view of the automotive industry. They found few surprises in automobile manufacturing, something they already well understood. What captured their fascination, however, were American supermarkets. They were especially intrigued with how supermarkets kept shelves of goods and produce freshly replenished almost as fast as consumers whisked products away. Adopting these principles not only changed how Toyota manufactured automobiles – creating huge gains in quality and profitability leading to Toyota become a world powerhouse – but led to innovations (e.g. lean processing) that are now used across the manufacturing sector.

Thinking about how your business would be run differently by someone from another industry is a great way to generate creative ideas and discover new insights. Disney, in fact, has created a thriving side business of consulting with other businesses to teach them The Disney Way of customer service – in short, how to treat people like guests when they come to your themepark.

EOB Thinking About Who Your Customers Are…or Should Be

Perhaps you can find a market sweet spot by looking just beyond the edge where your industry typically operates. Consider Southwest Airlines, an anomaly of excellent profitability, efficiency, and customer service in an industry suffering on all three counts.

Southwest’s success is not built solely on capturing a share of budget-minded air travelers, but also as an attractive alternative to automobile travel that competes well in terms of economics, time, and relative hassle.

Futurists Ryan Mathews and Watts Wader, in The Deviants Advantage, make a compelling case that tomorrow’s mass markets will come from today’s deviant edge. Free-spirited middle-aged, middle-class weekenders are as likely to buy a Harley as Hells Angels.

Lesson: look beyond the edge and study your non-customers – especially those who are not using any competitor in your industry. Is there something you can offer so they can benefit from your core competencies?

Whether creating new innovations in products or services, structuring your business model, or finding customers and markets – the most likely place to find useful innovation and creative insight is at the edge, where your professional discipline, company boundaries, or industry knowledge intersect with some outside arena or field. You don’t have to journey somewhere far removed from your core, but you do need to get off-center and to the edge. When there, take a thoughtful look at what’s just beyond, and then bring that insight back to your core competency.

You might be surprised how creative, fresh, and valuable your ideas might be at the Edge of the Box.