Enabling Change that Lasts, That Should be the Focus in Training

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

Very relevant for trainers and training fraternity.  General quest for trainers is to see change come about based on the inputs during a training intervention.  Thus they see their role as that of driving change.  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. 

Training is not an event. It is a process. It does not end at the exit of the classroom session.  The designers, managers and trainers should work together to ensure that there is sufficient focus on right context for individual to perform in changed context.

Don't Miss the Woods for the Trees: Performance Management can drive right Behaviors

One objective of a good performance management framework is to drive the right kind of behaviors within various organizational entities.   How does this happen? By Setting Targets and Goals with qualifiers. Yes, the word qualifiers is to circumvent the proverbial  "fallen between the cracks"

It is important to emphasize both "how" and "why" aspects when setting goals and not just the focus on "what"

Take for example the highest achiever of sales in Pharma Co (name is irrelevant).  Here was Monty the highest grosser on sales.  For eight quarters he clocked over 40% growth each quarter and was the star salesman two years in a row.  About 9 months later when a new drug was launched by the competition the skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.    Mohan used his smooth talking skills and network with stockists to off take and store more than they needed and the inventory went piling up finally leading to zero off take in two quarters when things got tough.

We don’t need to mention the fake invoice generation by “unscrupulous” employees to show higher sales.  This happens in various industries and google your way to “Billing Scams”

So if you are looking for good behaviors aligned to your organizations value system then you need to ensure the “desired behaviors” are brought into focus.  

This can be done through combination of the Performance Management and the Competency System.   The PMS should focus on the goals the “how” and “why” along with the “what”.   The managers should ensure that they anticipate how things can “Go Wrong” and discuss these with their teams in the process of setting goals.   

The competency framework should ensure that the behaviors of the competencies (managerial and leadership) do cover behavioral aspects of “how” apart from defining the core job related behaviors of the given role.

Focusing on just numbers,  targets and deliverables you might end up like the proverbial  missing the woods for the trees.

Need to Look Beyond Empowerment

Empowerment has been something close to the heart of HR professionals for several decades now ...probably since F.W.Taylor's times in these modern times.  However as change became more enveloping and dramatic and as the command and control structures in organizations gave way to more flexible structures and models, employees were... empowered and given more autonomy and freedom.  

But...it is not enough to empower individual employees.  You need two other conditions for the end results (organization effectiveness and innovation) that you would want to  pursue as a consequence of empowering people. First, you need creation of "practices that drive empowerment" and "an environment for empowerment".  Remember for example "Trust" creates and environment that motivates and drives engagement and resultant discretionary behaviors.

This is why great leaders who drove empowerment and created a wonderful organization at one organization end up failures in some other organization.  They could not drive the other two conditions to sufficiency although they would have driven the philosophy of empowering individuals.  

 As I have said in an earlier post "Context is key" and it is in this connection that "practices" and "environment" play a key role.  When practices are present that drive empowerment the relationship between them is positive however that positive relationship only gets strengthened when you have "the empowering environment".

Empowering environment is all about building trust by having the right kind of rewards that drive and encourage empowerment, giving the autonomy where people need,  giving them freedom to make decisions,  not making it look like a crime when someone commits a mistake  [Enabling Risk Taking Behaviors, See Earlier Post on this ] but rather encourage learning from the mistakes, and finally communicating these aspects of your culture.

Empowering practices include things like delegating authority (give them not just responsibility but also authority),  giving right feedback in performance processes and Employee Involvement in Decision making. (yes this last one is a practice which actually manifests in how you feel as an employee..)

Today empowerment is here to stay.  Whether it is giving employees a voice or a say in key policy decisions or allowing them flexibility in deciding some elements of their compensation structure or even deciding what time they come and what time they leave office.... as well as making substantive contribution in decisions of relevance to the businesses they operated in organizations have done a lot to provide the much needed empowerment.   

Focus is More Relevant than Effort !!!

A student went to a Zen master and said, “I am devoted and keen to study your martial art system. Tell me Sir, How long will it take me to master it?

The teacher looked at him casually and remarked “About Ten Years”

“But I want to master it faster than that, I will work very hard, practice twice the number of hours per day... and also slog at night" and "Sir, Then how long will it take me?”

The teacher thought for a moment and said “Twenty Years”

Simple lesson, it takes time to master something. It is not the quantum of time rather the focus and attention that we can pay that makes the difference in how much skill or knowledge gets accumulated.  

The more one focuses on the task the better is the learning.  If you tend to push through you are bound to undermine the learning. 

There is an optimal speed at which we can learn, understand and synthesize knowledge and we can get more adept at it but short circuiting it in something new we seek to learn will not help the learning any more than walking around with a dictionary makes you an expert in English language. 

Read more about the power of Focus and How It Makes a Difference in What we Do and What Gets Done.   Basically what gets focus gets attention and eventually gets done.  Read Here

When Opportunity Knocks !!

They say opportunities come knocking. Not once... but.. several times.  But we often ignore them or overlook them. As Winston Churchill said "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity while the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

This can happen only when we are aware of the opportunity. So, coming from a positivist school, I believe the world is not full of pessimists.  Then the question is why do people miss opportunities. 

First the problem of not being able to identify opportunities.  Reason can be explained as unawareness.  Did you remember someone you knew saying " I could have taken the Design Course.. but ....." or"I could easily have done engineering.....' but  or I was up for a top modeling assignment but chose medicine.... imagine what life could have been today OR the more common one among investors "I was about to invest in XYX stock.... only if I did I could have been millionaire like my friend."   One of the  most common mistakes made by students who get into the wrong course (they dislike after joining) or graduates getting into wrong jobs (hate the profession)  is they did not do enough homework preparing to understand what it meant. Most often doing some home work or some kind of scrutiny would have helped make better decisions. 

The other point about missing out opportunity is being overly cautious.    We fear taking risks, fear the unknown, fear not being able to make it, fear the hard work and thus ... miss out the opportunity.    Thus you end up giving a let go to something that you should have seized.  I remember one person telling me that he got into IIT Mumbai in the 1970's but did not go as it was too far and he preferred staying at his village and studying in a college nearby but.. the real reason when we explored more was about the fear of going to the city and competing with the boys there. 

Another reason especially among those who are talented, gifted or have some strength they never capitalized is their inherent lethargy.   Left to themselves they would prefer to chill, enjoy life as it comes and no one was there to push them to the wall and drive them.  So it is mostly talent wasted kind of situations that fall in this category. 

Next think of the dreams you had but never converted to reality.   To give wings to dreams you should have a plan.  Lack of Planning  is another way one has missed opportunities.  By the time the race had to be run you were still working on the equipment and missed the race.   

In human relationships we can often hear someone say "if only I could have made up with him / her.. Now he's no longer here..." .  This happens when we don't mend relationships or build broken bridges with someone while they are there with us but regret it later when they moved away to something new and no longer are with us or when they unfortunately pass away from this world.

In all probability you find that when people are old and enter the evening of their lives they often speak about what they did not do.... the missed opportunities. But I think being aware of how one can avoid the chance of categorizing the wrong one's and regretting them is something we should understand.   We will discuss a very simple framework in a later post.

Contextualization and Substantive Composition Key to Successful Practices

When it comes to organizational practices we seem to live in a copy cat world.  Human Resource is one such domain where similar sounding (Yes resoundingly the apt word can only be sounding...) practices abound across the organizations.  There is  strong tendency to look at what others are doing, emulate them, follow what they do and think that we would achieve success. So if you take a dozen processes in an organization you would find they resonate across different organizations in the industry.  However there are two things to keep in mind.   First is about “contextualization” and second is about “Substantive composition”

Contextualization is about understanding the scope and context in which the process, the tool or the framework you have adopted or implemented.   Take for example that most companies have a performance management system.   How much is it contextualized.  What does performance mean in the industry. Do you need a separate framework for sales versus the consultants, or will incentives work.  How much should you bank on deferred compensation.

Second one is about substantive composition. How you implement in your specific organization is more of a cultural thing.  They way your people do performance discussions, the reliance of managers in career development framework,  the coaching tendency of your managerial staff and other leaders,  the way rewards and recognition is valued when delivered all of these are cultural.

I can give my whole process manual for performance management in my organization to a competitor but sadly it can never be implemented the way it was done in my organization. It can be copied but it can't be implemented for the same outcomes.    Our HR practices and systems are not 'freely mobile' for implementation outcomes and if they were so then every industry entity say (in IT for example) would have implemented the same kind of  processes (yes they do have similar looking one's) and would have reaped similar benefits.  But this is far from true as seen over past 2 decades.

In conclusion remember....
"It is not the form that your HR systems and processes take that makes the difference and lets them stand apart --rather it is the substance behind the form that the systems and processes take makes them so". 

Without Bell, Will It Be Another Road Hell !!!

Today's Solution,  Tomorrow's Problem.  

Peculiar are the ways in which organization change things without understanding the real issues, the real problems they are trying to address and then live with a whole new set of problems down the line.  

The same is to come with Big Bell.   The Normal Curve or Bell Curve approach to manage organizations came about for two reasons...

a) Do away with a small fraction of non performers each year and replace them with stars

b) Next year you should have more stars and less non performers and in the long run you don't have any poor or non performers

Oh La, this never happens.  Why? 

The assumption is flawed.  Here is a way to look at it. Your individual performance (of employees) will be randomly distributed (like a bell curve) if you hired them at random from a crowd of talent.  However organizations work on deliberate attempts to source, select and bring on their talent to their turf.  So fundamentally performance cannot be randomly distributed when selection is deliberate attempt to hire people who are good in the population. .

Furthermore if your work was about doing some sorting exercise or widget breaking exercise where everyone is doing same kind of work and same standards apply then you can expect work outcomes to have a normal distribution.  When buckets of work effort are non comparable or when team effort is determining outcomes then what normal are we talking about. 

The problem was GE brought in Bell Curve for axing non performers, good for them. Everyone tried to copy but remember you can never develop sustained advantage from any system unless you understand the substance behind the form.   So many organizations tried to follow and voila....... everyone was using bell curve.

Then came more problems,  people who were paying out rewards found it a good way to easily segregate people and dish out salaries and increments.  But that was also a flawed assumption. They were creating tomorrows problems.  Real pay differentiation should be skill differences (capabilities) and resultant impact created for business.  When you cant' do this you find the easy way out.  Use something else which really does not do its job well   (the bell curve)

Now everyone's talking about Doing Away With the Bell Curve.   This is the seed for tomorrow's problem. The idea behind the bell curve was that you did a fair discussion elaborated to your team why A was different from B, and B was different from C in a convincing manner giving feedback twice in a six month period and finally when outcomes came no one felt he or she was a victim of the system that was unfair.

If companies were really sure their bell curve worked then the best thing to do was to put up on the notice board (intranet that so many have, or the notice board) highlight all the A banders with their achievements.   Who would deny such open culture and when people see what was delivered for an A there would never be a complaint.    Today all agenda's are hidden... Managers dont' want to give feedback.  They just pass it as another HR bungling by bringing in the normal curve and escape the questions they cannot answer.   Don't you remember the most quoted line after the Great Dictator ..... "You were great but ... we have a normal curve so you were pushed down"

Now doing away with Bell has become a fashion because Cisco's and Big Co's Did it but what is that you will do after Bell Curve is abandoned is not even simulated in the mind.  If you really need to give up the bell curve ask the following

a) How will you award increases.   If you think you will leave it to managers of teams to decide you are in for a great .... challenge.  Managers will come back saying give me a spread, or  they will end up playing GOD.   The problem will be attrition due to unfair managers.  If they become socialists distributing increases evenly you will end up losing your best talent to competition as your best performers will become average salaried people within 2 to 3  years.

b) How To Make them Give Better Feedback and Improve Appraisals:   This was always the case, but how will that change happen.  It needs deliberate attempts to understand what is meant by excellent versus what is mediocre in each and every work function.   Then be ready for your compensation teams to start groping in the dark how to distribute merit increase, how to compare jobs and how to make people happy with the rewards system.

c) How will you promote people.   Today it is generally based on High Performance as a lag indicator compared to similar groups.  The down side of doing away with Relative forced Ranking is having  a good way to identify potential that is scientific and predicts performance rather than scuttles performance in the long run.

d) Finally it is about asking What Next on Distributing Annual Increments:   With Bell curve managers were seen as forcing people into buckets without proper reason (Read it as poor feedback giving practice).  Without Bell curve managers will be seen as playing favorites or as being so non-discriminatory that their best performers will have no reason to stay back.

Just a couple of years down the pendulum will swing another way when maybe another CAPCO will start adopting the Bell and Everyone follows... without remembering that the last thing that can make your practice sustainable is the form, however the right substance behind the form is what needs to be understood.