Learning is a process

Clients often ask me about arranging a training event. It’s nice to be asked but I’m always slightly nervous; the language gives me a hint of potential problems later down the line because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of learning. An event, by definition, is a one-off, something different or out of the ordinary. Seminars, meetings, presentations are all events – discrete occurrences, usually used to communicate some kind of information; they stand alone, in isolation. Learning is different.

Learning – and, more importantly, the application of that learning – takes place as part of a process and it’s a respect for that process which is often lacking. The process begins with the delegate and their manager having an open and honest conversation about the need for learning. The delegate must be aware of why they’re attending the workshop and how it will help them to do their job better. This also requires that the manager consider carefully how the application of learning is intended to impact upon business results; if it does, measures should be put in place to record the return on investment of the training. If it doesn’t, the manager should think very carefully about the need for training. After the workshop, the manager must pay attention to the delegate’s attempts to apply their learning and support and encourage them as they do so.

In short, managers must be an integral part of the process of learning and organisations, if they truly want the people they train to apply what they’ve learned, must support this process. All of these aspects of the process must in place to give maximum support to the delegates in their learning and application. In the business environment, learning cannot afford to be an event – it has to be deeply embedded within the workplace and directly linked to the objectives of the individual, team and business. Seeing training or learning as an event is to isolate it – essentially, it is to tell the delegates that what they are learning is separate to what they do as part of their day job. And as soon as you give people that impression, you’re asking them to prioritise between what they learn on this event and what they do for a living. It’s no surprise, therefore, that training events tend not to produce any great or lasting change in behaviour. Consequently, nor is it any great surprise that when budgets tighten, the first things to get cut are budgets for training events.

Do bad times produce bad leaders...?

The Mahabharata contains a wonderful story of a wise man counselling a king, who asks, “Whether it is the king that makes the age or it is the age that makes the king”. The thinking behind the question is whether bad times produce bad leaders or bad leaders produce bad times. It’s a question I’ve often had cause to ponder as I talk to people about teambuilding. Often, leaders will ask me to do something with their teams to generate more honesty or openness, to address underlying issues within the team or just to make the team feel a little better. Whenever I’m asked to do this, there’s always a sneaking suspicion in my mind that the problems I’m being asked to resolve are actually problems caused by the leader themselves – as the Russians say, the fish rots from the head.

We all, eventually, become reflections of our leaders. Consciously or subconsciously, we model ourselves and our behaviours on theirs, for very simple reasons – they have the power to further our career and make our working lives happy or limit our career and make our working lives miserable. Most people, quite sensibly, will tend to tailor their behaviour in order to maximise the probability that the leader will do the former of those options, rather than the latter.

Consequently, most behaviour that you see in teams is largely a result of the behaviour of the leader. Notice I say “most” and “largely”: people have free will and their behaviour is sometimes influenced by things other than the behaviour of their manager but if you see problems in a team, look first at what the leader is doing. It’s a shame that often leaders don’t realise this and overlook their own behaviours in the search for what is “wrong” with their team.

This is hardly cutting edge thinking – after all, the Mahabharata is thought to be around 3,000 years old. But as I’ve written before in a previous blog, we often complicate things that are actually very simple and this is, after all, “a question about which thou shouldst not entertain any doubt: the truth is that the king makes the age”. It doesn’t just apply to formal leaders, or “kings”, either. Most of us are leaders of one sort or another – whether it’s within our families, within our peers or some other group and every day we each have the opportunity, even in some small part, to make the age. As you go about your business this week, what kind of age are you making?

What a load of...

This week, climate change protesters dumped manure on TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s doorstep in protest at his comments denying global warming. Ordinarily, this would not provide inspiration for a blog, but I had time on my hands during a journey and I started thinking about the role I had before I was a training consultant: for six years, I dealt with complaints.

Complaint handling, for those who’ve never tried it, is the second best job in the world – after training, of course. It’s a tremendous opportunity to understand people and one of the first lessons you learn when you deal with complaints is that you’d better listen to what people say or you’re going find yourself in a lot of unnecessary trouble.

If you have a brother or a sister, at some point in your childhood you will have pretended not to hear them: what happened next will have fallen into a predictable pattern. Having realised that they’re being ignored, they shouted louder – on the assumption that you really did have something wrong with your hearing and if they could just hit the right volume, all would be well. When this failed to work, as it inevitably did, they moved to stage two and went running off to complain to mum or dad. Of course, their response was invariably to tell your brother or sister to sort it out themselves and so they moved to stage three: they hit you – which usually brought about a completely new set of problems!

So what does all this have to do with Clarkson, manure and complaints? Well, I realised when I dealt with complaints that we never grow out of that pattern of complaining. If someone complained and I rejected it, they’d repeat themselves, only louder – the letter would be longer, more strident; maybe there’d be phone calls. If that didn’t work, they’d complain to a higher authority – the MD of the company, the regulator or the media. If they still didn’t think they’d been heard, they’d move to the equivalent of violence: parading up and down outside the office with a sandwich board or dumping manure on the doorstep.

Why does this happen? Quite simply because if people ignore us, they’re not just ignoring our words, they’re denying our very existence. It really upsets us, so we fall into the same old pattern we’ve used since childhood. If you keep having the same conversation with someone, if they keep repeating the same thing over and over again, it’s because they don’t think you’ve heard them yet. Better start listening – and showing them that you’re listening – before you wake up and smell something other than the coffee…

Working to live?

I have been feeling a little uneasy recently. One of the things that I’ve tried to do in my work is to help people become both more effective and more efficient. There have been two reasons for this: firstly, I believe that doing so, people’s lives will become easier and I see that as a good thing. Secondly, the more effective and efficient people are, the better their companies will be, providing continued employment, better goods and services and so on. Recent events in France caused me to question this whole philosophy.

Since the beginning of 2008, 23 employees of France Telecom, the country’s main telecommunications company, have killed themselves. According to the French unions involved, the suicides have been caused by a tougher management style implemented after the company’s privatisation in 1998 and that a “never-ending drive for efficiency is causing emotional havoc in the workforce.” The average suicide rate in the general population of France is 35 per 100,000 and France Telecom argues that the suicide rate amongst its workforce of 100,000 is not, therefore, statistically unusual. However, the situation has gotten so bad that the French Labour Minister is meeting with the CEO of France Telecom to discuss the situation. The company seems to accept that it has some part to play in the suicides, because it has hired more counselling staff, is now talking with the unions about the situation and has suspended a series of internal job transfers.

I’ve written before that a job is not a hostage situation – we always have choices and that while we may need a job we don’t necessarily need the job we have right now; all that is still true. But what if your options are severely limited, perhaps due to your skill set, your personal circumstances or the general economic climate? We’ve all had experience of jobs that have felt like they are grinding us down, even though our friends may tell us “it’s only a job.” Could the working environment within an organisation get so bad as to drive its employees to suicide? Does the greater drive for efficiency and effectiveness just increase the pressure on employees? If we show people how to “get more done with less” (a popular phrase in my industry), are we inadvertently making their lives harder rather than easier?

Recent studies by the Aspen Institute found that when students enter business schools, they believe the purpose of an organisation is to develop goods and services for the benefit of society. When they leave, these future top-business leaders believe the purpose of an organisation is solely to “provide shareholder value”. In France, it looks very much like people are dying in this drive for shareholder value: managers and leaders everywhere – and those who train and develop them – must wake up to the consequences and implications of their actions and acknowledge that organisations are far more than "shareholder value" machines.

Going for a walk...?

This week, along with some other local business owners, I had lunch with David Cameron, the leader of the UK’s main opposition party. I’ll make no comment about his politics as this isn’t the place for that debate but I was struck by how clearly he saw the job to be done by this country’s leader, whoever that may turn out to be. It got me thinking about a quote I read from Albert Eistein: “any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

There are hundreds and hundreds of books out there on the subject of leadership. They come at the subject from a variety of ideas and in a variety of different ways. They use different ideas or gimmicks or metaphors to deconstruct and explain the process of leadership, they will pick a variety of historical or sporting figures as models and ideals. Often the ideas and metaphors used are incredibly complex, thereby reflecting – or so the authors hope – the complexity of leadership and thereby justifying the size of the book they’ve written. (By coincidence, Lucy Kellaway of the FT has posted a very entertaining blog on this subject, here.)

I have a lot of those books in my library – I’ve even read some of them! But the more I work with leaders, at a variety of different levels in a variety of different organisations – the more I wonder whether all these books are heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps we’ve been making leadership too complicated; perhaps it’s actually really simple.

When I ask groups what it is that makes a leader, they come up with a wealth of answers, ranging from charisma, to authority, to… well, pretty much anything you care to mention, really. But the one fundamental thing that makes a leader, the one thing that all leaders have in common, is that they all have followers. Someone one described it to me like this: “a leader without followers is just a bloke out for a walk”.

For people to follow you, you have to be going somewhere they want to go. Let’s think about that sentence for a moment. Firstly, it means you have to be going somewhere. How many “leaders” do you come across, every day, who don’t really seem to be going anywhere except, perhaps, round in ever-decreasing circles? Leaders need a direction, some sense that tomorrow will be better than today, that the grass actually will be greener on the other side.

Secondly, wherever they’re going, it has to be attractive and leaders have to be able to communicate that attraction. You can tell people where you want to go, you can show them how you’re going to get there but if people don’t want to go they won’t follow you. Leaders have to be able to sell the idea of where they’re going and why people should follow them.

Of course, we can dress those two things up with fancy words and techniques, we could add in lots of examples but leadership, fundamentally, comes down to those two things. If you’re a leader and you don’t have them… well, you’re just out for a walk, aren’t you?

The ribbon is fraying...

There was a fascinating report on the BBC website yesterday about India’s second biggest airline, Jet Airlines. As a result of hundreds of pilots calling in “sick” at the same time, the airline had to cancel 120 flights, stranding thousands of customers. The “sickness” continued for a second straight day yesterday (9th September) with the number of flights cancelled increased to over 200. As I’ve been working on the employee engagement workshop I've mentioned previously, it came as a timely reminder of what can happen when employees disengage.

This dispute arose after the sacking of two pilots for (it is alleged) their participation in setting up a new pilots’ union but Jet has a history of, shall we say, fractious employee relations having sacked 1900 staff last year, only to call them back to work 48 hours later after a change of heart. Relations between the two sides currently seem somewhat acrimonious, with the chairman of the airline describing the pilots as behaving like “terrorists” and holding out the prospect of closing the airline down entirely.

When I talked about this previously, I described engagement as a continuum and it seems to me that, as employees disengage from their employer they begin to engage with something else. In the case of the Indian airline pilots, they seem to have engaged with a sense of their own solidarity and self-worth, with representatives of the pilots claiming that they “want their voice back in the company”.

The thing that people want most is to be listened to and understood; if we feel ignored, we tend to take whatever action we can to ensure that someone pays attention to us. On the face of it, the Jet Airlines dispute stems from the pilots not feeling a part of the company and being denied any other way of expressing their views. In the current economic climate, this dispute is the last thing the airline needs but it goes to show that employees who disengage from their employer can, potentially, bring a large company to its knees.

A colleague once described organisations to me as “a bunch of volunteers held together with a ribbon” – it's a beautiful image and I’ve never forgotten it. It perfectly describes the fact that no force keeps those volunteers together and at any point they can scatter into as many directions as there are people.

(By the way, for those of you who’ve asked, the first of the employee engagement workshops (“Engaging for Success – enhancing performance through employee engagement”) will be on 20th October in Bristol, with subsequent sessions on 29th October in London and 25 November in Manchester. I’ll post more details – venues and so forth – as soon as I have confirmation.)

Efficiency

The idea of efficiency has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been doing some diagnostic work with a local authority in Scotland and their biggest challenge is the dramatic reduction in their budgets for next year. Their focus is on finding “efficiency savings” – continuing to provide the same (or better) services with less money and fewer resources. As I was writing this article, McKinsey suggested that the NHS should lose 130,000 jobs to save money while the government has responded that the necessary savings can be made through greater efficiency. It got me thinking: what is this thing we call efficiency?

Efficiency is, essentially, the ratio of output to input. It’s based on the idea that it is possible to reduce input whilst increasing output: in a business context, this usually means increasing outputs such as benefit and profits whilst reducing inputs such as effort and expenditure. Efficiency begins with having a very clear and sharp focus on what outputs are expected of you and gearing all of your activities towards that output. The less clear the expected or desired output, the less efficient the system is likely to be. Everyone in the system – and this is especially important in a complex system like an organisation – has to be aware of the desired outputs and then needs to have the autonomy to gear their efforts towards that output.

As organisations face increasing limitations on their resources (the forced reduction of their inputs) whilst stakeholders demand greater profits or provision of services (the forced increase of their outputs) they are driven to strive for greater efficiencies. While it may be a straightforward thing to set clear, unambiguous output targets for an organisation (or a division or team or individual) it’s vital to remember the system that has to produce those outputs is not a machine. It’s a collection of people and people are, largely, inefficient.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense but it’s a fact that we’re not geared to doing things in the most efficient way, all the time. We have our own quirks and foibles, our own ways of doing things, we have preferences, we do things through habit, and use our emotions and feelings to make decisions, rather than proceeding in a logical, rational, efficient manner. All of these things must have a knock-on impact on the quest for efficiency in business.

There’s conflict here as business seeks ever-greater efficiency from a system that, fundamentally, cannot deliver it. The trick, it seems to me, is to reach a balance between the efficiency needs of the organisation and the human needs of the people who populate the organisation. Great organisations will find that balance and thrive but there will also come a point where further efficiency savings are no longer possible because of the human needs and limitations of the people. What then?