Right One for the Right Job !!! Simple Story to Illustrate Competencies

Competencies differentiate the average from the superior.  In a key sense they are distinguishing.  Given endless time and endless means everything under the sun can be called a competency but you need to be realistic and  practical.   Read this story that I often used to clarify the concept.

There lived a lumberjack near the bank of the river. The river had thick woods with tall trees on one side and the lumberjack would cut trees (the tall variety) and float them across the river to the other side where it would then be transported for further processing.  

When he cut the trees the lumberjack had to know how tall the tree was before he began to cut it down.  To measure the height he often relied on a squirrel.  Each time he wanted to measure the height of the tree he would tie a string to the tail of the squirrel and up it went to the tree top.   With the length of the string pulled up he estimated the height of the tree.  Every thing was going well and his squirrel had perfected the art of climbing trees and getting the lumberjack the estimate of height.

Soon the lumberjacks demand for trees went up and the squirrel was not able to complete the task for the day.  

A friend gifted the lumberjack a turtle and so he struck up an idea.  He started training the turtle to climb the trees, and the turtle would climb up few feet and slip down and try again and so on till finally it learnt how to climb the tree.    Lo the lumberjack started using both the squirrel and turtle to measure the heights of trees.  He managed his business for a few months like this.  He assessed his squirrel was the ace  performer and the turtle the struggling one. 

One summer the river started drying up and many parts got shallow and logs would get stuck if the river bed was too shallow so now he needed to assess the depth of the water before he could fell the log into the water at any spot.   He now had to chose between the ace and struggling one to measure the depth of water, he remembered the ace performer.... but alas the choice was obvious.

The squirrel could do nothing but stare at the water lest it drowned.   But the turtle went in ... Bingo.... and  came back with the depth being measured by the length of the string it pulled down to the bed of the river.   

Now the lumber jack understood each one's worth.  The squirrel was best when it came to climbing trees,  the turtle was best in the water.    No amount of training would make the squirrel faster at measuring the depth of the water.

So the lesson we learn is that there is a right person for the right job.  This is what competency is all about.  You can spend hours and hours and finally the turtle will be able to accomplish what the squirrel did or vice versa, but the cost and effort of doing it would be different. The question is how do you do it best,  most optimally both effectively as well as efficiently.   That is what we call as distinguishing.

The squirrel's competency is in climbing and the turtles competency is in swimming.  Both can do each others' job but swimming cannot be a competency for the squirrel nor can climbing trees be the competency for a turtle.   

So next time you think of competency remember first principle, get the right person for the job.   That's the starting point.  Competencies are defined in context.... what may be a competency in one context is not so in another.....  There are many other facets of a competency that we'll explore in the months to come.

The Quest for Delivering Lasting Change?

There is a saying that goes like this.... "Put a Changed Man Into an Unchanged Context and he eventually goes back to his old ways of doing things".  

 This is a paradox for trainers.  General quest for trainers is to see change come about. Their role is that of a change agent.  However the lasting change does not come by because of the above.   Which means... The trainers should understand the context from which the trainee (who you expected to change) came from and eventually went back to.  

Understanding the context and seeing that in light of the training is very important.  Therefore the role of the trainer is also to collaborate with the owner of the context (here it is the line manager)  to understand stumbling blocks as well as enablers for the desired change.  

For e.g. you wanted to make people more proactive through a training program.  However the situation on the ground once the trainee went back (here it is say one of the operations floor for customer X) was one where any hint at addressing something which was not raised as an issue by the client or any other stakeholder is not welcome and looked at with suspicion is a sure shot recipe for the trainee going back to old ways.   Why rake up issues, why search for embers to burn your feet... these are the kind of manifestations of feedback.

So what do you do?  Trainers can pass the baton to designers and say the context should be taken care of during design.  Yes but the product you create is what gets back to action in the context... (in example above it is the operations for Customer X) and it is in the trainers interest to work with the managers or leaders in the floor of operations for Customer X to see how people are encourage for being proactive.   The managers need to be sensitized that one has to encourage, reward, cajole people to be proactive just in case they have been so used to not being proactive and waiting for fires to be doused.

Operationally using Kurt Lewins - Force Field Analysis helps in identifying barriers to change and resisting forces and as a group the Trainers can work with leaders to eliminate the opposing forces.   Thereby it becomes a much easier task for trainers to achieve their goals of bringing about lasting change once the context issues have been addressed to facilitate changed behaviors. 

#Life # Reflections

Life's Car has no automatic version. You will surely need those ABC Controls.  to stay on track......Always Be Calm.

In Life When GPS Signal seems lost or is taking you on wrong track, Don't turn back.... Chart a New Course Towards Your Destination

 Don't fret and burst your emotions when you face a roadblock,..rather...... Let your spirit burst...like a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor.

 Every idea in waiting is like America before Columbus.

 What, you know you know not matters more than what, you know you know.

 Our learning journey would be much better if only we checked back as oftenas we do with our smart phones.

 The mind like the computer needs a recycle bin to junk away the useless thoughts.  And keep purging the bin every now and then !!!

 When true friends meet after years its only the alphabets in their namesthat matter and not those before and after.

OTHER POSTS 

Doing Away With Bell: What to Do?

Now Don't Junk the Degree Please

Problem Solving Versus Problem Elimination

Now Don't Junk That Degree Please.... !!!

In the last two days I  was surprised to read the buzz in social networking and messengers like Whats App around the fact that Ernst & Young decided to dump their degree classification criteria at college entry level hiring.  But the way it was interpreted based on news reports is very different...Looks as if you no longer need a degree to get into E&Y.  And already this decision  (interpretation of no need for degree) is getting huge thumbs up in Social Media forums.

This goes to show how naive people can be and how quickly they start jumping to conclusions and also how something like this becomes a thing everyone's thinking of copying without even understanding.

The biggest shocker came when I read and hear seasoned professionals  praising the decision and Yo !!! They are already advocating removing entry criteria of having a degree for entry level jobs.   Ranging from "I told you, there was no need for fancy degrees"... to "Yes there's not an iota of evidence that there is a correlation between college degree and success." and ....  You know "Bill Gates, didn't have one, See how successful he was".   Soon pundits will be competing with each other to see how they can do away with criteria of having a degree as an entry level job requirement.  

Don't jump to conclusions so soon.  Read between the lines.... For all you know...and read... E&Y is not doing away with criteria that college degree is needed to get an entry level position.  Probably  they are only doing away with the tougher filter criteria when applying for an entry level job.... for which  you need minimum number of A or B grades in the subjects learnt at college degree program to qualify to participate in their selection program.   It is like saying lower the eligibility from 60% (or 50%) cut off scores and just allow them to apply for your job even if they just cleared their degree program.  Although it looks misleading (even a tweet on the web page of the company says it scraps away requirements of degree for a job) I would guess they are not really doing away with need to have a degree.

There will be "experts" who will say "Why do you even need a degree?,  See Bill Gates didn't have one"  But the question is how many people like Bill Gates do you find every day in life.   These are exceptions.  If Bill Gates or Dhirubhai Ambani did not have degrees so what... they were surrounded by people who had degrees and college education.  You don't come across people with these stories every day in the bus or at the street corner.  Both Bill Gates and Dhirubhai Ambani had teams and teams of highly qualified degree holders who helped them run their organizations. They were visionaries and inspirational and that's what made them what they are, not the fact that they did not have a college degree.

Now the E&Y story and the buzz it created  raises the key question again... "Is A College Degree Really Needed as entry criteria for a job position at entry level".   In a manner of saying it means,  do you need a degree to take up a job in an organization.  I belong to the category of Aye Sayers.  College degrees are meant to provide holistic, all rounded personality development,  provide knowledge and understanding in a certain field of study and prepare the students to take up careers.   They are supposed to make a well developed person and not just an intelligent person with no understanding of  social realities,  appreciation of arts, society and philosophy and so on.  Probably the reason why E&Y Decided to delink the minimum performance criteria in the degree was due to the fact that they found little correlation between "performance" and "college grades".   Following can explain that...

a) Success in career =/=  Success in exams.   Life success is dependent on whole lot of factors beyond just grades (which are dependent on mental ability in most cases of curriculum design).  

b)Education has become very competitive and lucrative field.   Colleges want to avoid detaining students  hence majority pass out of college even though they don't really deserve to.  Holding back students for non performance is proving expensive for the colleges. They also face the risk of litigation by the affected students.  So there can be little evidence of those who succeed in school only succeeding in real life.   They start a new race altogether (see next point)

c) College curriculum is getting distant from reality of industrial and organizational practice and so people are finding it difficult to cope and the best students find themselves outwitted in the rat race in organizations. 

d) People see that whether you slog and perform at the really top end of the class or you just enjoy your way through college and clear the bar by cats whiskers distance from the cut off point for graduating you still end up going to work starting off at the same level as the direct fit with jobs is very low. So every one starts off on ground zero when it comes to work organizations.   Then starts the new race.

e)Also the main aim of a college degree is not to just prepare you for a job.  It aims to prepare you for a life, a good way of living, understanding, being and relating with people in our lives.  Hence maybe a poorly balanced output.

So lets not get carried away even if some organization may do away with the criteria of a degree.  Remember today's  solutions are tomorrows problems. Imagine if you employee people without a college degree what will your customer (who's paying for the work you are doing)  pay you for a job that is now done by non graduates , which was earlier done by graduates.   More OR Less... That's the Question?

The larger question is for educationists,  management thinkers from schools and colleges who need to wonder how they would address this issue of  lack of any seeming relation between what degree scores you have and how you do in your job at work.  Otherwise degrees will be just like the tickets that take you to the destination but you would need a visa stamp to enter it.

Tribute to Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick

This is a tribute to Dr. Don Kirkpatrick who passed away on 9 May 2014 at the age of 90.   He had served, most of his active working life, as a Professor at University of Wisconsin Madison.   A thought leader and a pioneer in the field of training he conceptualized a model of training management and the framework which stays relevant even after more than six decades since it was first made known to the managerial profession.  

Every HR professional would have come across this term called "Kirkpatrick's 4 Level of Training Effectiveness" sometime in their careers and many would have used it to delve into aspects of whether the lessons from learning interventions were taken back to the workplace and used in the context for which it was meant.   Kirkpatrick model of measuring learning effectiveness at four levels.  Put a trained person or a changed person (in our case) into the same context and the chances are there is a reversible reaction and he or she goes back to the old ways.  Therefore learning becomes ineffective.    So the model of 4 levels of learning evaluation goes into looking at down stream impact and that was the major shift in assessment of training delivered.

Today the world of work is not longer what it was in the 1950's and a far cry from what it was even in the 1990's.   But the relevance of the model still remains.   Whether it was class room learning or self learning or group learning techniques the stages model still remains a primary way of looking at application of the learning. 


Normally most people associate ROI with Kirkpatrick's model but this was not what he proposed.  The concept of ROI came from other proponents and is generally something like water on ducks back for those who are not numerically inclined.  Also when the scale of change is large and difficult to measure the concept of ROI beats people to a corner.  To overcome this I have used something called the VOI (Value of Investment) concept which is all about what value you expect the change to bring to your organization and as long as you are able to articulate that and check out whether it is bearing fruit you are good on your judgment for the investment.  More on this in a later post.

Humor: Selling to the CEO

Here's something to tickle your wits !!!

A very smart sales guy was put in charge of selling the new Learning Management System developed by SmartCo.   He was a street smart sales guy so his boss asked him to sell to the CEO's directly.  

One day he went to a CEO of a big organization.  His pitch went on for about fifteen minutes about this feature and that feature and this new functionality and newer module and so on.  He saw the CEO was not getting impressed as much as he expected. 

Finally he remembered his boss telling him about the "punch lines" that help you close the sale and so he started off

"Sir,  given all else,  If you chose our LMS,  apart from all the best expert technology, features and productivity gains and benefits you will have one fantastic benefit.... you can cut down your HR team size by 50%"

Suddenly it seemed the CEO's eyes went rolling up and he seemed very excited.

"Wow" remarked the CEO... "Are you sure of the last bit on the HR Team size".

SalesMan:   "Yes Sir"

..

 CEO:  "In that case I'll buy two LMS'es  ".