Would You Work for You?
by Sam Geist
This article focuses on recognizing and mastering becoming the kind of leader you would want to work for. It concentrates on five specific areas:
- Knowing yourself: It¹s the essence of leadership. Suggestions to become an inspiring, empathetic leader are given, as are 10 principles to better understand human behavior, examples of compassionate leadership, and building a trusting relationship.
- Knowing your people: It¹s a strategic imperative. The article includes a discussion about providing opportunity by training, a good place to work, a sense of personal achievement, rewards to staff, and motivating leadership.
- Knowing your skills: Highlights managing time effectively. Discussed are external time, internal time, and self-time; how to handle interruptions; and delegating effectively.
- Knowing how to communicate: Effective communication is both verbal and nonverbal. Emphasis here is given to the latter, which includes body language, physical space, personal attributes, speech, and vocal cues.
- Knowing how to move forward: Setting goals moves the enterprise forward. Five steps for setting specific, measurable, and achievable goals include creating a plan, setting specific goals, setting realistic goals, specifying a time frame, and asking goal-setting questions.
To become the leader that you and others would want to work for is a never-ending quest that requires ongoing, consistent execution.
Doesn’t Everybody Need Fluency?
by Carl Binder, PhD
Fluency, that combination of quality plus speed that characterizes competent performance, is the true definition of mastery. Without including a time dimension in our measures, we cannot distinguish between hesitant, beginner’s, and expert levels of performance. In fact, we are trapped in a percentage-correct box because of our own histories of accuracy-only evaluation in education and training, while those in athletics, the performing arts, and many other areas of human activity understand about and its implications. Summarizing the author’s 30 years of research and development, a range of applications, and many everyday examples, this article concludes that everybody needs fluency, and that performance development programs that ignore this fact leave behind an enormous potential for improving learning and performance.
Fostering the Work Motivation of Individuals and Teams
by Richard E. Clark, CPT
Solid evidence supports claims that motivational programs can increase the quality and quantity of performance from 20% to 40%. Motivation can solve three types of performance problems: 1) people are refusing to change; and/or 2) allowing themselves to be distracted and not persist at a key task; and/or 3) treating a novel task as familiar, making mistakes but not taking responsibility because of overconfidence. Everyone is motivated to do or value whatever they believe will make us effective or successful. The challenge is to find ways to support the great variety of different individual and cultural beliefs held by different people about success and what makes them effective at work. However, there are universal demotivators and positive strategies that tend to motivate everyone, despite our different beliefs and values. After describing a number of general strategies for fostering individual motivation, the article focuses on the unique motivational issues faced by teams and how to overcome them.
Getting to Business
by Jim Fuller
The practice of performance consulting has demonstrated the ability to obtain significant and sustainable improvement in business results. Despite its record of significant business and performance impact, performance consulting is still a tough sell. Why would business leaders and organization managers resist the implementation of a practice that is so inherently good for the organization that they oversee?
This article examines some of the barriers that the performance consultant faces when selling an organization on HPT such as establishing credibility, learning the language of the business, and demonstrating the ability to run the HPT function as a business. The article also explores some of the strategies that can be employed to eliminate or reduce the barriers.
Redefining E-Learning
by Marc J. Rosenberg, PhD
The excitement about e-learning has recently been replaced with a more cautious and wary perspective. Some feel that e-learning has been oversold. Some are alarmed about the upfront investment necessary to get it going. Still others, who have been moderately successful, are asking themselves, “Is that all there is?” This article proposes that for e-learning to be successful, especially in a time of greater cost control and even higher expectations, it must be redefined. E-learning must move beyond simply e-training toward a wider array of solutions, from performance support to knowledge management. A redefined e-learning strategy is one that carefully balances the instructional needs of employees with their informational needs. There are signs that the profession is recognizing this. There are more efforts to integrate online courseware with knowledge systems, communities of practice, access to experts, and well-designed information repositories. The implications and benefits of this new view are examined, and a case is made for a much broader definition of e-learning than we have embraced to date.
And Then a Miracle Occurs! Ensuring the Successful Implementation
of Enterprisewide EPSS and E-Learning From Day One
by Deborah L. Stone, CPT and Steven W. Villachica, PhD, CPT
We’ve all heard horror stories about failed EPSS/e-learning implementation efforts. To ensure successful enterprisewide deployment, begin planning implementation from Day One via the following steps:
- Adopt a big-tent EPSS/e-learning approach: Create integrated, hybrid solutions that provide what people need, when they need it, in the form they need it.
- Align EPSS/e-learning with business drivers, business objectives, performance gaps, and performance requirements: EPSS/e-learning efforts should be driven by business objectives and performance requirements that lead to measurable results.
- Commit to a conscientious change management effort: Effective change management lies at the heart of successful implementation and needs to begin on Day One. Providing the time, buy-in, and EPSS/e-learning readiness for change to occur can make the difference between successful deployment and a CD sitting unused on someone’s shelf.
- Use strategies and processes to create enterprisewide EPSS/e-learning solutions: Effective development methodologies based on rapid application development can facilitate conscientious change management while providing trustworthy development metrics, lowering costs, shrinking schedules, and improving quality.
Push-Back Leadership
by Toby J. Tetenbaum, PhD, and Hilary Tetenbaum, MS
This article describes push-back leadership, a new model of leadership based on the work of Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linksky. The model argues that the two key roles of the leader are to give the work back to people and to keep them working within a “healthy” range of disequilibrium that generates creativity and innovation. As the leader pushes against the workers to mobilize them to solve organizational problems, the leader must expect the workers to push back to restore equilibrium and to solve the problems for them. Tactics for leaders to both elevate and reduce disequilibrium are presented, as are techniques to keep from being brought down in this difficult-to-orchestrate new leadership model.
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