Month: June 2020

Categories
Business Strategy

Chapter 6 of Building A High Performing Team on Purpose – Learning and Development.

Why training initiatives often fail

“We sent them on a training course to fix a weakness they had.  They returned and loved the session, stating that whilst there were a number of concepts they already knew, they still enjoyed the session and took a lot out of it.  Now, let’s get back to the core business, the real work…”

I’ve mentioned in earlier sections about the dopamine fix that we get when we think we have completed something, but haven’t.  There is perhaps no bigger place for this to take place than completing training.  Actually, it’s more when others have completed training, because when they do so they are fixed, right?

You might be thinking that’s an odd thing to write in a series about building a high performing team on purpose, that I begin with challenging the value of training. 

Shouldn’t you be suggesting we train our people as much as possible?

Well, sort of. 

There is a measure that is sometimes tracked in organisations to identify whether targets have been met in learning and development.  One of the easiest measures is the number of hours/days spent in training.  These kinds of measures can be useful in large organisations where the political environment requires an irrefutable metric of success. 

The same thing happens at an individual manager and employee level, where the solution to a gap in an employee’s skill, knowledge or capability is to send them on a training program – or a group training session for the whole team.  When an employee gets an offer to spend a day or two away from the office to receive training, they often jump at the chance. They come back to the office and talk about how valuable it was and that it was enjoyable.  It’s enjoyable to get paid to spend time in a workshop where the thinking is done for you and you get to enjoy as much coffee, mints, egg sandwiches and sushi as you want. Many managers and employees have an addiction to training.  

But is it really improving the performance of anyone?

Now let me be clear, there can definitely be significant benefits gained from training and it is essential to building a high performing team on purpose.  It’s just that if a manager is not truly passionate about learning and development, then they view the action of sending someone on a course as being enough.  It’s easy to send an email approving them to go and feels good to think you are actually doing something.  That dopamine fix feels good and we tell people that we send our team on x days training per year.

But in actual fact, in many cases it achieved very little value for the business.


Ask yourself how many of the below points have applied to a training initiative that has taken place in your business?

  1. Is the training tied back to the business strategy?                                                                                                                                                                              
  2. Are the learning outcomes linked back to expectations in the workplace that will improve performance?                                                                                                                                                                              
  3. Did each manager meet with their direct reports and agree expectations before the training?                                                                                                                                                                              
  4. Did each manager or someone else provide ongoing coaching on the skills, knowledge and/or capabilities required?                                                                                                                                                                              
  5. Did the manager follow up to confirm if the skills, knowledge and/or capabilities have been applied effectively?                                                                                                                                                                              
  6. Has there been an overall review of the training initiative against measures of success (and what improvements are needed for next time)?                                                                                                                                                                              
  7. Is the training supplementing a practice of continuous learning at work (as opposed to an initiative that sits outside the day to day)?

If you didn’t answer “Yes” to all of the above questions, chances are you are leaving value on the table.  If this were the case, a question to ask yourself is:


Was this due to a lack of knowledge, or a lack of motivation from your senior leaders to truly create a culture of learning?

With such little success from many training initiatives, it is easy for those senior managers who don’t truly believe in learning and development to not view it as a worthwhile investment.  On top of that, if a company has high turnover of employees many view it as money down the drain.  In a downturn such as right now in the COVID-19 crisis, training budgets get slashed because it is considered non-essential. 

This problem is perhaps even greater when we look at small-medium businesses.  Smaller companies struggle to provide sufficient new entrant training, let alone taking individual employee development to the next level.  

The barriers faced for such businesses are greater than for large corporations, because they usually don’t have a person whose job it is to train people and so this is left up to the manager.  Most managers in SMEs are not properly trained in how to train and are often dealing with day-to-day issues when their new starter joined. 

Coupled with the fact that they are usually hiring one person at a time, holding structured classroom training is simply not an option and competency assessment is usually an after-thought.  Most new starters are therefore left to shadow the existing team, who may not may not be showing them the right things in the right way.  

The result is that the particular techniques and knowledge that helped grow the business in the first place are lost or at best, diluted as the business grows.  Hence, sending someone external for classroom training becomes a much more attractive option.


The difficulty with trying to make adults learn

We are a funny bunch.  Adults.  We really like to do our own thing.  From around age 16 our brains develop in a way that programs us to reject information that doesn’t fit with what we think we know.  Parents often complain that their teenage kids think they know everything and find it frustrating that their previous methods of teaching their children are no longer working.  The correct information that parents are trying to impart to their kids goes in one ear and out the other, with teenagers preferring to make sense of the world themselves.

This is not too dissimilar to the experience that companies have with training existing employees on new ways of working.  We also go where the energy takes us, mostly towards what we like and away from what we don’t.  Once we are established in a business or industry, we like the fact that we know things are in a groove.  We identify with our existing knowledge and anything that threatens this identity is rejected.  Think of that parent trying to tell their 16-year-old that their new style of clothes doesn’t look very good. 

Our identity and our view of ourselves is one of the most valuable things we have.  For some people it is an obsession.  You see this on social media as a giveaway of what the masses think.  People love taking those surveys that categorise them into which Brooklyn 99 character they are most like.  Or perhaps showing video footage of what is “Literally (read figuratively) me!”.

Below are three key problems that exist with trying to make adults learn in 2020…


We are fighting against the learner’s self-identity

Part of the problem with training interventions is that they can conflict with a learner’s self-identity.  Our identity or status as a person is one of the most important things in the world to us.  When I say status, I don’t mean necessarily a fancy car or title, I am talking about how we view ourselves and how we want the world to view us.  

If a person views themselves as being a sales professional and then gets sent to a sales training course with others in their team who they don’t rate as sales professionals, they will be more likely to reject the content or else show the other learners what they know already.  

There is a need to maintain the self-identity that they are a sales professional and this can prevent them from being open to learning something new – if they think they know it already.  But there is a massive difference between knowing about a concept and actually applying it effectively in your job. 

Conversely, if a person is a sales professional, but identify themselves as someone who loves to learn and values learning, they may approach the learning with a more open mind.  They may even want to appear open and to make mistakes to allow others to learn more as well.  

What is even better is this person can become part of the learning creation, by contributing knowledge, feedback and content towards learning programs.  Perhaps even through a forum similar to social media, which is how people are doing so in their personal lives.  As I often say to managers implementing a change or new program – leave something for the critics.  A perfect training solution is not the perfect solution.


People have lower attention spans

People say they are time poor.  That’s not the case.  

 

People no longer have the need to expend energy on things they don’t like anywhere near as much as before.  

Most people don’t want to read a 10 minute article when they can watch a 2 minute video.  There will only be a small proportion of people who have read this far.  I know this because only a small proportion of people truly want to learn what it takes to build a high performing team on purpose.  Well done to you, and I mean that.

Speaking of watching things, before Netflix, before even Foxtel you had to watch Abbot and Costello do their “Who’s on first” routine on a Saturday afternoon if you wanted to watch something entertaining on TV.  For most people these days, unless they have a TV series they are binge watching, an evening on Netflix involves about an hour of flicking between shows they can’t be bothered getting into. 

There is a greater need today to provide learning experiences.  Learning systems need to go beyond LMSs (Learning Management Systems) and provide a learning experience similar to the engagement people are used to from the content they are constantly consuming (which is a lot of video) and social media they are accessing every day.  

If users can share and rate content, have their favourite playlists etc. then these learning practices can become lifelong practices.  They need to then bring this back into their day-to-day jobs for this information to truly become knowledge.


We need to see the relevance and it needs to be practical

There is a need for the learner to buy-in to the learning before it can take place.  With so many messages coming our way each day, our brains are highly attuned to filtering out what we consider irrelevant.  Much like in a sales process, your product or service may be the best out there, but until your prospect knows they have a problem or they are feeling a pain point, there is no motivation to buy.  

Buying is the exchange of energy for more energy.   You give money, which takes energy and you get a product or service that gives you more energy.  Learning works the same way.  You give time, money and effort towards learning and in return you get back more energy.  Energy in the form of better performance, less stress, more money, more confidence. 

Even when the time is paid for by the company, the money is covered by training budgets, there is still the energy to learn and the energy to apply the learning.  So it has to be considered relevant to the learner or else they will switch off.  Help learners solve real life problems that make their lives easier.  Translate concepts into their daily rhythm. 

The problem with training workshops is that only a small proportion of participants will have the learning ability and motivation to translate the content into action.  These people are usually your high potentials and high performers.  Learning only happens when there is a change in the person who has learnt.  

A golf instructor can explain to you how to swing a golf club and you could memorise this information and recite it back.  But does that mean you know how to actually hit a golf ball properly?  No.  You would need to head to the driving range and practice, with your instructor providing feedback along the way.  This example is so easy to understand because of its practical nature.  Yet so many managers think that explaining to an employee what they need to do equates to training them.  It makes no sense, yet is happening every day in businesses. 

Another common practice managers love is shadowing, because they can place a new joiner with a somewhat experienced person and imagine the knowledge transfer through osmosis.  Never mind that the existing employee is doing some things the wrong way, they lack skill in training people and don’t know what it is specifically they are meant to train them in.  The result of this is the new person is not trained properly. 


We need to make learning part of the fabric of the organisation

It’s not enough for training to be a side activity that takes place so we can tick that box.  If you want to truly build a high performing team on purpose, your approach to learning and development needs to permeate through the very fabric of your business.  You need to define what is strategically important, create a learning culture and give people learning experiences.

Now that you have read through a series of chapters that provide the foundations for you to build a high performing team on purpose, it’s worthwhile reflecting back where we are at.  The true power of each chapter is not for it to stand alone, but to work together.  You cannot simply hire great talent and lead them poorly.  Similarly, if you don’t have a clear business strategy and define the important competencies to develop, your training initiatives won’t provide a competitive advantage or further your strategy.


As a reminder, the chapters we have covered so far:

  1. Get your team back to work safely and trusting in you as a leader (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/transitioning-your-workforce-back-after-covid-19-tommy-sim/)
  2. Have a strategy for your business that has trade offs on what is important and what isn’t (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-reasons-you-probably-dont-have-right-business-strategy-sim/)
  3. Design your organisation around your strategy, which goes beyond simply a chart, but encapsulates the processes, performance measures, communication and investment in how the organizational energy flows (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chapter-3-building-high-performing-team-purpose-your-job-tommy-sim/)
  4. Invest in the right leadership who can help deliver on your strategy, ensuring you don’t miscast pure individual contributors into leadership roles (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chapter-4-building-high-performing-team-purpose-your-leadership-sim/)
  5. Bring in the right talent that supports you organizational design and who can learn what is needed for your strategy (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chapter-5-building-high-performing-team-purpose-your-talent-tommy-sim/)


I’ll give you an example:

  • Let’s just say a big part of your strategy is to provide your clients with the most valuable insights into data that will help them further their business.
  •  Your organisational design needs to look at how your business will have the capability to do so, from your defined positions, to your processes, your systems and your talent
  • You will need to hire talent who are predisposed to be good at things such as: analytical thinking, strategic thinking, numerical reasoning and communication.
  • You need to have the right leaders capable of understanding your strategy, who capture the hearts and minds of the team towards that direction and to focus on developing people to your needed capability
  • Your training initiatives need to support the systems, processes, thinking and other important aspects of what you need to deliver in your strategy

This example is very high level, but hopefully it shows how each aspect I have written about needs to support one another for you to truly build a high performing team on purpose.  Each item is also not discrete from one another.  For example, your leaders and people you hire impact on the success of training, because it only works properly by creating a learning culture.


Create a learning culture

If you are going to build a high performing team on purpose, you must have a culture that values learning. Otherwise, any high performance will be short-lived as your competitors are learning faster than you.  A learning culture is made up of a collection of individuals who value learning above most other things and have a natural energy towards learning that goes beyond what is asked of them from the business.  It must be led from the top and the people who hire into the business need to share these values.

Take an example of the two sales professionals: Person A rejects learning and Person B supports and leads learning.  Now think of a company that is full of either Person A or Person B and you have yourself a non-learning culture and a learning culture.  But the harsh reality is that not all people in an organisation have equal influence.  It’s the people at the top who have the most power over what takes place and what people value at work.  So as a leader, if you don’t value learning yourself, then what makes you think that any of your team will value learning?


“I’m already highly knowledgeable, once the rest of the team reaches my level then I will invest in my learning.”


It doesn’t work like that.  It’s not a logical debate.  We’re talking about people here and people follow what the leader’s actions show that they value.  It’s like looking at someone’s feet in a standing group conversation.  If your feet are pointing towards the door you are wanting to leave.  If one person is listening to another person, but their foot is pointing towards a different person then they are just waiting for the sentence to end before they can direct things where they want.  A learning culture starts at the top and needs to be authentic. What’s good for them needs to be good for you.  You then need to hire people who have an ability to learn and a motivation to learn. 


Give learning experiences

Learning is not just about training.  People need to have the opportunity to apply what they have learnt in a safe environment, where mistakes are highly valued as learning experiences.  As a business owner or leader, you may have learnt in a sink or swim situation, but that doesn’t mean that is suitable for others. 

For every success story from a sink or swim situation there were 99 failures that you have forgotten about.  So it’s important though to not set people up to fail, as this will be counter-productive.  You may do so unintentionally, as you might believe the person can do the assignment you are wanting them to complete.  However, if you have mis-diagnosed their strengths and actually thrown them into a task that exposes their weaknesses, you might be bringing their time with you to a premature end. 

Giving people more learning experiences that enable them to grow and be successful is also likely to improve your retention of talent.   People who are able to best utilise their talent and continue to build on their strengths are likely to be more fulfilled in their jobs.  This makes it a lot more difficult to leave their current position as they feel more connected to the environment that is providing that fulfillment.  Once that no longer exists, they will look for that in other places.


Questions to ask yourself 

  • What is the capability that your business needs to have to supports your strategy? 
  • How can you best develop this with new starters? 
  • How can you continue to develop this throughout the career journey for your people?
  • How do you create a culture of learning to encourage employees to bring in relevant new knowledge and capability, sharing it with others?


Key take-aways

  • Small businesses do not have the same learning and development resources and large businesses and often struggle to train new entrants properly because they are hiring one at a time
  • They are also susceptible to people leaving for career opportunities elsewhere, given the relative limited opportunities for new experiences
  • There is a need to develop new competencies and to retrain staff in new ways of working to get the most value out of technological advancement
  • There is a growing trend where the way people learn is more in more personal, social, integrated with work and to support continuous lifelong learning

Categories
Business Strategy

Chapter 5 of Building A High Performing Team on Purpose – Your Talent Management

This is part five of the eBook, Building a High Performing Team on Purpose.


Talent Management: Hire and promote candidates based on competencies that support delivering your business strategy

“Excellent” said Mr Burns, pushing the buttons on his imaginary flute with both hands.  Seated at his desk he looked up towards Smithers, instructing his trusted assistant to go out and swoop up all the outstanding talent who had lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis.  Smithers gave his typical groan when he knew his boss had given him an impossible task that he had to find a way to work.  Wayland moved to protest to Monty, only to find himself directed to the doorway with a loud “NOW!”  

Besides the fact that no one actually wants to work for Mr. Burns, the groan of Smithers is due to the insight that there is not actually the treasure trove of talent that is assumed to be out there.  What he can count on is the sea of resumes that will crash through his inbox, requiring a lot of work to sift through.  It’s not going to be that easy to find great talent.  They will probably end up re-hiring Homer.


The resume of a poor performer sometimes looks very similar to that of a high performer

Have you ever heard this saying? 

“Nobody got fired for buying IBM!” 

This phrase became famous several decades ago and represents the “safe bet” of choosing computers, much like why no large corporation chooses anyone but a Big Four accounting firm to conduct their audit.  If you choose the safe bet and it doesn’t work out, well you are not to blame and were just plain unlucky, weren’t you?

If you’re a business owner or leader in charge of your own fate, you don’t need to live by this mantra.   There is no butt-covering required and so you are in the box seat to avoid following what everyone else is doing.  I have a feeling you knew this already.  So then why does this candidate profile often ring true?


  • Industry experience  – “our industry is very different and so you need to know who is who and the terminology”.
  • Systems knowledge – “our system can be difficult to navigate and our training is not up to scratch yet”
  • Good references – “Their past employers thought they were good”


In Chapter 3: Your Organisational Design,  I mentioned that managers often focus on “crystallised intelligence” (what a person knows right now, such as the capital of Switzerland), rather than “fluid intelligence” (the ability to seek out and absorb new knowledge) when defining what they are looking for.  This is often due to managers being time poor, or in my language I view that as being energy poor.  They just want someone to come in ready made to “hit the ground running.”  

Sometimes, it is necessary to prioritise crystallised intelligence if there is none that exists in the company or to balance up an inexperienced team.  Also, you sometimes need some crystallised knowledge as a ticket to play regardless of how talented someone is.  It’s just that the requirement is too often overstated and it is not a source of competitive advantage to do so continually as it only catches you up in the short term.  If this is your approach it may mean that you are not organised with your workforce planning and/or your staff turnover is too high.  


Constantly chasing your tail is not how you hire for a high performing team on purpose.

But wait… if a finance person has no idea about Microsoft Excel, that rings alarm bells for me!  In some cases, systems knowledge is more important as an indicator, rather than the specific skill itself (albeit the skills also being useful).  Using this example of Microsoft Excel, if in a finance position, all a candidate knows how to do is SUM, then this is possibly an indication they haven’t really explored its power.  

They don’t need to know how to do a combination IF(AND(OR… statement specifically, you just need to be someone curious and smart enough to figure it out.  It’s a possible indicator of analytical thinking and learning curiosity.  You want to know their natural energy goes towards the important parts of the role.  Hiring for a system specifically (often people think of their ERP) will severely limit the talent pool you can choose from and the most capable people will surpass most others in 6 months anyway.

Another common mistake is to overly prioritise existing industry and product knowledge.  This might help in the short term because the manager doesn’t need to put in much effort to train them.  But this crystallised knowledge is less valuable than learning agility and influencing ability.  There will be many people who have bounced around the industry as sales people and know a lot of terms and technical jargon, but lack the ability to have a proper conversation with a business owner or to learn new products that are required to remain competitive in the market.  The manager may also assume that the industry person knows a bunch of things that they actually don’t, until they find out two years later when the sales results are not there.

Nearly every industry has a challenger brand or one that is looking to deliver a premium product or service to the market.  If this doesn’t exist, there is probably a replacement industry on its way to disrupt the entire market.  Businesses that are looking to build and maintain a competitive advantage, but are stuck in these old ways of looking at prospective employees are missing a golden opportunity.  To amplify how much this is going to become even more important, in a recent World Economic Forum study, they predicted that 54% of employees will require re-skilling and re-training by 2022.


So why are people still hiring on criteria that does not correlate with high performance?  The most common reasons are:

  • Having a short-term view and wanting to just fill a gap
  • A lack of interest in spending time on training and development
  • Missing knowledge on what actually drives performance (even if intuitively it is known)
  • Never having experienced what it is like to hire a true high performer on purpose
  • Because everybody else uses the same criteria

I find that small-medium business owners and leaders are best placed to come to the realisation that hiring based on the resume and references is fraught with danger.  It usually takes a few poor performers for the realisation to set in that there must be a better way.  They are the ones that experience immense pain, due to negative impact on performance, the toxicity of culture and the increased workload and stress for that leader.  


Exercise

Let’s look at a position in your company that you might want to hire for in the future.  I will use an example of a Sales Manager for illustrative purposes (the list won’t be exhaustive).  Write down a list of what you would see from a high performer versus a low performer.

  1. List the things that a high performer does
  • Develops, clarifies and gains buy in for the sales strategy across the executive team
  • Hires sales people based off talent for sales, their attitude and aptitude
  • Work with those not suited to sales or the company to move to a different job
  • Invests in their own personal learning and development, particularly leadership and management
  • Spends time out on the road with the sales team, providing feedback and coaching
  • Makes the right judgement call as to when to step in and when to let a sales person make their own mistakes
  • Work collaboratively with operations and other important internal stakeholders to align their priorities 
  1. What would a poor performer be doing?
  • Spend too much time selling directly themselves
  • Justify to the executive team that the reason targets are not hit are due to poor sales staff
  • Complain about operations, finance, pricing, the market, customers
  • Avoid having difficult conversations with people until it gets to breaking point and then create an environment of fear through constant ultimatums
  • Spend little time coaching and developing their staff
  • Solve problems for customers and then throw their team under the bus
  • Say yes to everyone, including the sales team, customers, suppliers, internal stakeholders

Whether you agree with this list or not isn’t the main point here and each situation will of course be different and so the specific context would change the priorities.  Most would agree that the first list is significantly better than the second list.  But what do you notice?  These are all behaviours that you can observe.  Each list of high performers or low performers could apply to someone from the industry, or outside of the industry. 


Hiring for talent and mindset means leveraging the natural energy of people

It’s better to leverage the natural energy of the person than to fight against it.  Issues are presented if you are constantly using your own energy to try and push this person in the direction you want.  When you give an employee your energy, whether that be effort to help them learn, providing them insight into priorities or to set up the right relationships – you want them to take this and build on it.  You don’t want your energy to just be lost.  This is why so many business owners and leaders are exhausted by their people.  They are expending so much energy on their people and getting very little in return.

If I were to say to hire based on things like talent, attitude and learning agility, well that would make sense right?  Most people would be nodding their heads to that and then say “Yeah, but right now we just need experience.  We don’t have the luxury to do that at the moment.”  Besides the cost of getting it wrong, one bad experienced hire will set you back 6-12 months or even longer.  All the while the person who has the right mindset, who furthers the right positive culture in your company and whose natural behaviours perfectly suit the role could have been learning your business.

The issue with poor performers is that it is never the issue that a manager says that they have an issue with this person due to their current lack of knowledge.  Assuming the issue is not due to the manager’s inability to lead and develop this person, the issue with the employee’s performance is nearly always due to one of the following:

  • The work they are meant to be focusing on is not what they are focusing on.   They seem to find time for tasks that are less important and will justify why they don’t have time for the most valuable activities from the manager or business’s perspective
  • Their attitude towards work is about what they can take from the company, not what they can give
  • Their attitude towards other people rubs them up the wrong way or they are toxic for the culture
  • They are not learning things fast enough, having the repeatedly ask the same question and then still get it wrong

Some of you might be thinking, “So, you want me to hire young and inexperienced people all the time?”  No, that’s not the message.  It’s about the fact that people prioritise the wrong things and so there is a need to push one message to balance the ledger.  

However, to answer this concern more specifically, let’s break down experience for a moment.  The problem with experience (and in particular years of experience) is that it is not specific enough.  One year in Company A working for Manager A may be significantly more valuable than five years in Company B working for Manager B.  Even within Company A and Manager A, Employee 1 took every opportunity to learn and apply what they learnt, whilst Employee 2 sat back and didn’t take in anything.  If Manager A was a great teacher and coach, but not great at moving on poor performers then both Employee 1 and Employee 2 could have similar looking resumes.  

It’s important to know that hiring for talent doesn’t simply mean hiring young people, as sometimes people mistakenly think. The assumption that a young person will be keen and open to learning is not always true.  The strategy to hire for talent works just as well when looking at a fifty-year-old who may bring transferable skills and abilities with a greater thirst for learning than some twenty-year-olds.  The message is that it is about the person, not the piece of paper of where they have been.


Be enlightened enough to know that you are not a genius people-reader

“I’m a great judge of character.”   Said no one who understands confirmation bias.

Some of you may have read an article I wrote a while back on confirmation bias.  In particular, the example of the guy in the red jumper stood out for a lot of people.  The story goes like this…you are arriving at a party and your friend is leaving. You ask how the party is that they say, “Great! Except avoid the guy in the red jumper.” You enter the party and then later on notice the guy in the red jumper. He looks like a creep and you avoid him.

Now change that around and when your friend leaves, they say to you “Great! Make sure you speak with the guy in the red shirt, he’s eccentric but such an interesting and lovely person.” When you see him at the party you are instantly drawn to talk to him. Same guy, different outcome. 

As human beings we hate uncertainty.  The unsettling feeling this gives compels us to find an answer that we can tell ourselves is the right one.  During a hiring process, this is constantly happening with hiring managers.  The first look at the resume.  The first meeting with that person.  Whether you feel positively or negatively about that person you will start to look for reasons why they are right or why they are wrong.  

Confirmation bias is just one of many biases that exist during a hiring process.  When people present a certain way that reminds us of ourselves or someone else we like, we instantly feel good about that person and are more likely to hire them.  Just remember, knowing all of your mates, not all of them would be the best employee, or if they would be, they would certainly not be right for every role you might have.  

Conformity bias is when there are multiple people in a selection process and the majority of people or perhaps the most powerful person gives a view on a candidate.  Once that view is out there, everyone else falls into line and ignores the observations they had that contradict that person’s view.

There is one last bias I will mention which is comparison bias, which results in hiring the best from a bad bunch or missing out on that right person. That is, human beings love the number three for some reason.  Three blind mice, Neapolitan Chocolate and Gold, Silver Bronze.  There seems to be a rule of three that exists in hiring that is we need three candidates to compare and to pick the best from that shortlist.  What if all three are wrong?  What if you only see one person and they are right and you lose them to another company because you were waiting for another two to compare them to.

I could go on as there are at least ten different types of biases that are swaying you towards hiring a poor performer.  Step one is to be aware of them and admit you are not immune.  This will lead you to… 


Use a robust selection process and multiple objective assessments

“Our hiring process has worked for us before.   It’s just that you can never really know.”

Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The assessments that exist today that will help you make a more accurate decision to hire have been around for a long time.  However, the uptake of using those assessments is still relatively low when compared to how many people are hired, particularly in small-medium businesses.  

To make things clear, I need to tell you that I have interviewed thousands of people.  I have reviewed the personality profiles and aptitude results in-depth of at least several hundreds of people, if not in the thousands.  These assessments are from a world leading psychometric assessment company, which yes – it does make a difference.  Most importantly, I have been a part of discussions with managers after the person has been hired to review what actually happened.

I could talk to you about studies that have looked at predictive validity and the strength of aptitude testing, structured behavioural interviews and personality profiles.  Most people I speak with find that direct personal experience is more valuable.  So I will tell you that across the past 20 years that I have a lot of direct data from all the different situations I have seen.  The many success stories of situations where the assessments predicted a high performer have been great.  However, it is perhaps when people have chosen to go against the assessments and instead favour criteria that relates to biases, resumes or simply recruitment fatigue (choosing someone because they want to stop having the recruit) that even more value has been achieved. If I didn’t have people going against the recommendation from time-to-time, then I couldn’t have contrasting data to review. 

So it’s important to use a holistic approach with valid assessments to uncover a more comprehensive view of a person you are potentially bringing onto your payroll.  This is best illustrated by the Venn Diagram below:

Yes, it’s more work and yes, it costs more money.  But if you aren’t convinced that it is worth the effort to hire the right person then you may need more trial and error experiences until you get there.  Seeing what I have seen, I want as many people to stop going through the process of learning from their own mistakes.  The challenge for me to try to get across the message to people that they aren’t a mind reader and that just because they want this candidate to be the right one, it doesn’t make it so.  

We are fighting against human nature here.  What is encouraging though, is that with each business leader we work with who is open to learning new things, who values the right people and has the discipline to apply the right process, that we are slowly seeing a change towards hiring the right people consistently.  This is the most important point around this whole series and for every chapter: When people tell you that you are really lucky to have a high performing team, I want you to think to yourself and to tell them that it was not luck, it was on purpose.


Key take-aways:

  • Challenging the industry with a differentiated strategy requires a different type of workforce, so with a deliberate talent strategy to hire, retain and develop talent that competition is not fishing for can create an inimitable competitive advantage
  • Hiring people more on talent and mindset than on their existing technical knowledge gives you a better chance of building a high performing team
  • In today’s context, knowledge is evolving and roles are changing, so the ability and willingness for employees to learn will be key


Recommended actions:

  • Following the review of your strategy and your organisational and job design, you will have the criteria in which to hire against 
  • Complete forward-looking workforce planning activities to plan out how you will hire for the business ahead of simply replacing exits
  • Hire based off the strategically required competencies, talent, attitude and aptitude
  • Use valid and robust assessments in combination to identify a clear and accurate view of candidates


You can read Chapter 4: Your Leadership here.

Categories
Business Strategy

Chapter 4 of Building A High Performing Team On Purpose — Your Leadership

This is part four of the eBook, Building a High Performing Team on Purpose.


I’m going to one day invent a magic dye, as well as high tech glasses, that show you how the energy can be sapped from people in your business so easily by people in management positions. I will colour energy and inspiration in green, with apathy orange, whilst flat demotivation will be red. You can buy this dye and glasses for a million dollars a pop. Until this amazing product is released, you can read this section for free and it may also be useful, albeit less of a psychedelic experience.


Poor leadership and management is one of the biggest killers of success in any company.  You can have everything else working for you, but bad leadership will destroy that success like someone vomiting on your chocolate souffle.  In a small to medium business where there exists a smaller number of managers, one bad one can destroy an entire company.  

People join organisations, they leave managers.

Remember this old phrase?  It became popular a couple of decades ago and is unfortunately still as true as ever.  The reason is because leadership expectations and the impact of leaders on people appears to be growing faster than the rate of improvement in leadership capability.  

Do you know what could be going on in your business?


Business leaders can unknowingly create the wrong type of tension 

Consider an example of advertising in the Yellow Pages or buying a Commodore 64 computer for your processing – it simply won’t work in 2020 that same way it worked in 1980.  If you are using leadership approaches and standards that were popular 40 years ago, you will be left behind and people will leave your company behind.

The change in generations means that people used to put up with poor leadership and would simply just not work as hard.  This is the thing people don’t get – it’s not that baby boomers were that different as humans, it’s that they didn’t expect to receive praise and assumed that if they didn’t hear anything bad they were doing a good enough job.  The fact they got paid was their reward.  

Even so, I still hear this perspective being strongly held by a number of leaders, who are not baby boomers – from generation X and millennials funnily enough.  Millennials have been taught to speak up if they think something is not right and if they are not happy with something, to change it.  Is it any wonder that they will raise concerns when they don’t feel valued and then leave if nothing is done about it?  Is the preference for employees to simply shut up about it, stay with the company and simply just work the absolute minimum instead?

It’s possible that your actions are unknowingly creating the wrong type of tension in your business.  The wrong type of tension is the type that distracts, divides and makes people apprehensive.  

The leader who is not self-aware will be doing this many times a week.  The opportunity to show you don’t care, to show you blame the staff, to show you don’t think much of someone, to be fake around them – happens all the time.  I know you probably don’t think of yourself this way, but you are the big boss, which means everything you do is magnified.


Are your eyes closed to a bad leader in your business?

Let me ask you if this sounds familiar – you hired someone into a manager position.  They were either a good performer internally or hired externally.  They came with strong technical knowledge and are good at producing great work.  They are still a great technical performer and are producing excellent work…

Unfortunately, “Their team keeps letting them down.  It’s so hard to find good staff and especially with the way these millennials think these days, it’s difficult to get people to take five minutes away from their phones, let along go above and beyond.  The manager is working long hours making sure everything gets done.  I’m so thankful to have them around and whilst they are not the perfect leader, you can 100% rely on them…”

This is the classic individual contributor description who is still doing the same things they did before they were hired into a leadership position.  

We have a group of guys who go on a monthly steak night dinner when we can make it.  The other night was the first in a long time due to lockdown.  After a few beers and a red wine at a local pub, I was having a debate with a friend of mine about Michael Jordan, where I claimed that he was a terrible leader.  The response I received was the argument “you can’t argue against six championships!  His methods worked.”  

Now at this point I was ready to proclaim across the pub “correlation is not the same as causation!”  but I am also an advocate of adapting communication styles to the context.  So instead I referred to the fact that he was the best individual player of all time by far and that they had a great team led by a great coach.  He saw himself as a leader and when interviewed, still views himself as a leader.  

But no, he was just the best player and everyone else was scared of him so they did what he wanted.  They knew that if they crossed him they would end up with a black eye, like teammate Steve Kerr did when he stood up to MJ. Being a high performer at a particular role doesn’t imply they’ll be a great leader for that function.


Good workers don’t always make good leaders 

Another story that has emerged with MJ was a time when Australian Luc Longley had an outstanding first half, scoring 19 points. Jordan gave him praise for the very first time at the halftime break.  In the second half, because Longley had already 3 fouls (you have to leave the game after 6), he didn’t play much and hardly scored. Jordan said to him after the game that he would never, ever praise him again after that. 

I could go on. The point here is that not many people are writing that Jordan was a terrible leader, because they just look at his results. This is exactly what happens when a bad leader in a business is seemingly achieving good results for the company. Sometimes, they are riding the coattails of their predecessor.  Sometimes, the market is going well or others have dropped out. Sometimes, their team is banding together through adversity and just surviving despite their leader. 

The thing to consider is this:

The results of a team are either good or bad depending on what you are comparing them to.  If by your comparison point, of say 7, the results of 8 are good and you conclude that it is due to good leadership, then if your comparison point were different, of say 9, and the results were actually bad, being 8, was the leadership now bad too (even though it was exactly the same)?

Good leadership is essential to building a high performing team on purpose.  Ironically, that Chicago Bulls team did have great leadership from others in the team, as well as their coach.  Their success was not about what the world thinks, or who wins a debate out of me and my steak night buddy.  It’s about the one thing they didn’t do…


Stop promoting Michael Jordan to a role on the bench

It is baffling to still see business owners promoting people into leadership experience mostly based on their individual performance, technical knowledge and tenure.  It is most astounding that they are placed into these roles with little to no training and development in how to lead others. 

But I see this all the time. Many business owners will promote the person who has the best technical knowledge and individual output from the team into a leadership position.  This is because business owners who are flat out tend to value the person who is responsible, who knows a lot and who doesn’t need much supervision.  They want to reward them and that person aspires to be a “manager”.  So they promote them to lead the team.  The business owner feels good because they can go work on growing the business, knowing the team is being taken care of.  But is that really happening or do you just want it to be the case?

People who are strong individual contributors do not always make the best leaders.  But they are disproportionately promoted to a leadership role, where they often just perform their old role and respond to technical questions the team has.  Because they are not developing or inspiring the team, they are not getting better and their workload becomes much greater.  What is even worse is that they now have less time to do what they do best – which is be an individual contributor.  

Before reading the key takeaways and recommendations, click here to take my simple Leadership Assessment quiz for your managers and yourself.


Recommendations

This is what I mean by taking Michael Jordan off the court and now asking him to coach the team from the bench.  He won’t be able to take it and he will put back on the uniform and score baskets in a way only he knows how.  Then he will tell them “That’s how you do it!  Now it’s your turn!”  

First, define what it is to be a people leader in your organisation.  Make sure you are properly informed on what this should look like.  This should be part of your organisational design approach discussed in Chapter 3.  Consider the context that you are in, for instance, Network Performance may be a specific area that will drive value for your business.  This is the competency that is engaging effectively across suppliers, staff and customers to deliver a superior customer experience.   

Second, when promoting people into leadership positions, use a range of assessments to determine their suitability, that are based on your definition of leadership.  This should include psychometric assessments, observations and behavioural interviews.  If people do not have the natural energy towards helping others succeed then they will be limited as leaders.

Third, provide the right development, which should not just be training workshops. Leadership development should include coaching and feedback for the leader to practice new skills and uncover their blind spots.  Learning and development will be covered in Chapter 6 for further detail.

Finally, what is perhaps the most important thing is that you and other senior leaders need to embody the definition of leadership that you have.  This is not a task that you delegate to middle managers.  It doesn’t mean you need to be perfect (good leaders are comfortable admitting their weaknesses), but you need to be overtly striving to be that leader.  If this part is missed, then the rest will not work.  


Key take-aways:

  • The value in investing in leaders is not new and the competencies needed to invest in are also not new, but there has never been a more important time to invest in leadership
  • It’s that the digital context heightens the need to invest in leaders and particular competencies move up the ranks in importance.  
  • On top of this, the changing demographics of having more millennials, more generations and the opportunity for people to leave employment altogether for the gig economy makes the need to invest more in leadership.  
  • Recognise that not all of your employees will make good leaders and avoid the temptation to simply promote the person who is technically strong with good tenure.


Actions:

  • Ensure you are defining your leadership roles accurately, including the competencies required for success, given your context, strategy and organisational design
  • Only promote or hire people into those roles who display the potential to be successful in those competencies (not just based on technical knowledge and tenure)
  • Invest in the development of those people to provide them skills to be strong leaders
  • Invest in your own leadership so that you can support their development and role model the behaviours you are looking for in them


To read Chapter 3 of Building a High Performing Team –  Your Organisational and Job Design, click here.

Categories
Business Strategy

Chapter 3 of Building A High Performing Team On Purpose — Your Organisational & Job Design

This is Chapter 3 in the eBook Building A High Performing Team on Purpose.


When I say the term “organisational design”, do you instantly think of boxes with names in them and lines connecting people to their manager? 

Might you then picture what the resumes need to look like to fill the boxes that have titles held by the mysterious person named “Vacant”?

At the next level, do you perhaps think of spreadsheets and how bonuses are calculated to reward the financial results from your business objectives? 

If this is your picture of organisational design, then you are not alone. This is only the tip of the iceberg and a flattened misconception of what your organisation and job design can be.

In reality, what happens is…

  • The boxes merely indicate who has to justify underperformance at management or board meetings
  • The resumes create a sense that all of our problems will be solved by a magical person, who has all the solutions to our biggest challenges – we just haven’t met them yet
  • The spreadsheets create a sense of excitement about the gaudy numbers that could be achieved, but probably never will.

You might have picked up a theme here that the common actions business leaders take under the banner of organisational design are just schematic activities and we’re kidding ourselves that what we want to happen will actually happen.

Why do we do this? Our comfort zone as business leaders drives us towards these steps. It’s the chemicals that are steering us as human beings. They often fool us into thinking we have accomplished something even when we haven’t.  

Our desire to feel good about what we have documented clouds our ability to see the harder work required. The easiest way to get that dopamine fix is to complete something that feels tangible. Changing names in boxes and calculating bonus figures based on projected financial results gives us that fix.

Below, I’ve outlined three steps for business leaders to delve into to consider their organisational design. There might be areas that require you to spend more time on, but remember, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. 

Let’s start by defining what organisational design really means.


1.   Organisational design is leveraging the energy flow of your business

What is organisational design? Terminology is confusing if we just keep repeating the same terms without proper explanation or illustration. So I’ll give you my simple explanation of organisational design. 

Organisational Design is the energy flow of your business. 

Imagine we are at the top of a large dirt hill and you have dug trenches that flow down the slope like tree branches. You pour hot red lava down the pathways, flowing to the bottom. Which way does the lava turn? Where does it stop and bubble up? In which parts does it pick up the pace and start to create new paths? 

Simply writing up your organisational chart is not going to change the energy flow of your business. You need to create an in-depth understanding of which way the lava is flowing right now and how to build new trenches in the direction you want. Just typing names in boxes won’t make much of a difference in trajectory.

So where do you need to focus to leverage your organisational design and have a better flow of energy?

  • Alignment is key. Organisational design is not simply your organisational chart featuring names in boxes – it goes far deeper than that. Organisational design is aligning the combined individual contexts of each person’s job to support the organisation’s objectives.  This means the processes, accountabilities, decision-making, communication flow, capabilities, performance measures, training focus and reward structures needed to support what your business is trying to achieve. As you can perhaps predict, these areas form the trenches you dug for the lava to flow through. 
  • Sequencing is important. Reward structures are often discussed at the start, but they are merely the exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. Imagine you simply write the ! without knowing what the sentence should be. Imagine what you should have been shouting is “That was a brilliant year!” but instead you said “This is f@#$ed!”   It’s important to get the direction right before you add the reward, as otherwise you may emphasise the wrong thing. Lehman Bros got this part wrong and in that case they collapsed and started the global financial crisis in 2008. You need to define the position before the KPIs, which comes before deciding on the reward structure. 
  • The wrong conflicts will constrain you. Conflict can sometimes be inevitable in business due to different priorities of different people. If you have built into your business conflicts that strongly work against each other and your strategy, you will remain in second gear.  A very simple example is that your sales strategy needs to align to the position description, training, KPIs, rewards, processes, systems and disciplines for all of your salespeople and sales managers, right? But actually, you need to also look at the rest of the value chain to ensure that your operations, purchasing, HR etc. are also aligned. Furthermore, whilst this energy conflict can be due to tangible actions, it can also be due to deep seated beliefs and behaviours of the people within your organisation.

Sometimes it is difficult to spot where the energy of your organisation is slipping through the cracks or getting stuck at the bottom of a drain pipe. We’ll go through how to identify these cracks in the third step, but first let’s work through the external factors that can trip you up.


2.   Your organisational design will change or cease to exist

Businesses are changing – quickly. Before the COVID-19 crisis, there was a lot of talk about the fourth industrial revolution and the gig economy. Whilst the aspects and principles of organisational design remain consistent, the external environment is rapidly transforming like we have never seen before.


The fourth industrial revolution

The fourth industrial revolution is causing many jobs to be automated or at least having some tasks completed by machines. What is starkly different this time is that previously a lot of blue collar and physically manual jobs had been automated, there are now a lot of white collar jobs also susceptible.

Routine-based and middle skilled roles are at risk of being made redundant due to process automation. This has already begun in many places, such as the increased capability of ATMs and self-serve kiosks. However, even positions that are considered highly skilled and educated, such as lawyers, are starting to see elements of their roles being completed by a machine.

Ultimately, the human element to connect people and processes effectively will be most important. Fitting these new roles into an organisation’s design will be a key part of how a business best creates a competitive advantage.


The gig economy

We’ve witnessed the rise of the freelancer, enabling people to have a side gig and even a full career without having to be an employee. This trend creates a problem for employers looking to retain employees and keep them engaged. We are now not only competing with other businesses, we are competing with ‘entrepreneurs’ who don’t require a permanent, full time role to make a living.

At the same time, it creates a tremendous opportunity to harness this new source of talent. Imagine the convenience of gaining specialist skills or knowledge that you can access as and when you need it. You can outsource routine tasks that are not value-adding for your employees.  

This could allow you to hire someone who is great at the competencies that will further your business, without having to be good at the tasks that provide no advantage. For example, someone who has proficient analytical and collaboration competencies might rather use those abilities more often and more effectively than be performing routine and repetitive tasks for half their working hours.  

You could take two jobs and combine the fun parts for this type of person then automate or outsource the boring bits. This creates a position that may not exist readily elsewhere for this employee, helping to enhance the enjoyment of their job and ultimate success by capitalising on their signature talents. If these competencies were strategically important to you, then you are also going to get more of this type of work performed by a more engaged, talented and knowledgeable person than the competition.


The risks and opportunities for your organisational design

When external forces are changing rapidly, if roles are not properly defined or updated internally you may have employees seemingly working hard, but not on what is valuable. The business may be left with the wrong type of talent and even worse, continuing to hire on the wrong criteria, adding more of the wrong type of talent into the business.

This type of planning for a new kind of talent for your business may be threatening for others whose identity is built around being able to perform the tasks of yesterday very well. There needs to be a planned approach to transitioning the workforce, which includes both re-training and development, as well as bringing in new talent who have the capabilities required before they are needed. 


The changing lens to enable defining roles for high performance

Many businesses are still stuck in the age of viewing roles on required crystallised intelligence, which is defining competence in a role by primarily looking for existing knowledge or skills. For example, the capital of Switzerland is not Zurich like many people think, it is actually Bern.

Whilst the capital cities of countries don’t change very often, the knowledge and skills required in businesses is constantly changing. Think about the changing products, technology, processes and service models that are taking place. Defining positions only on the basis of what set intelligence is required will outdate your roles before your Ubereats delivery arrives. It is still relevant though, as you need knowledge and skills to be effective.

It has always been the case that fluid intelligence is a stronger predictor of performance. The ability to solve new problems, think logically and flexibly. People with stronger fluid intelligence are more likely to seek out new knowledge, reconcile what it means in their context and apply it to add value to your business. 

Think of such a person doing this each day versus the person who is still excited by their knowledge of European Geography. Now, add in the context of a rapidly changing environment, where new information and approaches are replacing older knowledge at an exceptional pace. Getting an accurate picture on the requirement for types of intelligence in your business is critical to building a high performing team on purpose, which starts with the right organisational design and role definition.


3.   Getting started on reviewing your organisational design for the present and future

Let’s move now to some tangible actions that you can take to get started. Here are 10 questions to ask yourself when thinking about your organisational design:

  1. What is our business model? What are the high level core functions that our business performs to deliver value to our customers (external and internal)? What are the second level processes that are required to deliver that value? When does each function start and end? Are there functions that don’t exist today that need to exist to deliver to our strategy and purpose?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  2. What are the broader external trends that are going to have the biggest impact on our business, both as a risk and opportunity?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  3. (If not completed already) Who is our customer, now and in the future? What do they value? What is our strategic positioning ? What does this mean we have to be exceptionally great at?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  4. What are the High Value Activities (HVAs) that the business needs to be spending time on that will have the biggest impact on delivering the strategy? How much time is being spent on this today? How much time needs to be spent on it?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  5. What are the capabilities that our business needs to have strengths in, to deliver our strategy? Do we currently have this? How do I know this? Would I bet the farm on this answer?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
  6. What are the positions that will be most pivotal in delivering on our strategy and most influential on the HVAs? Am I sure I haven’t identified a processing role or a position that I think is strategically important because it is adding value today with a real live person? (If all you have listed are sales people, you need to rethink this one).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  7. What are the positions that are least pivotal to delivering on our strategy? Can and will they be automated? Will they no longer exist in future?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  8. Who is the least forward-thinking manager who is most stuck in their ways in my business? What is the position in my business that is strategically important, but doesn’t exist today, that this manager would instantly write off as being a waste of money?  (This might be the position you actually need most).                                                                                                                                                  
  9. How do my systems of performance measurement, reward, decision making, process accountability, communication and training focus support all of the above? How are they currently working against it?                                                                                                                                                       
  10. What are the existing beliefs in my business from key people that need to change for me to have an opportunity to move to the type of organisational design we need?

Hopefully at this point you can see that you should avoid approaching organisational design as a quick fix, fooling yourself into thinking you have performed valuable work by creating a new organisational chart, deciding what resume will look best to fill the vacant positions and what bonuses you need to drive performance. 

Instead – go deeper. The energy of your business and how this is channelled is valuable to gain a deep understanding of. More important than this is though, is how and where it should be flowing to deliver on your strategy. By opening your eyes to the rapid changes externally and breaking existing assumptions of what’s important to spend time on in your business, you might just be one of the businesses that breaks the mould for others to follow.

Read Chapter 2 of Building A High Performing Team On Purpose — Your Business Strategy here.