Nobody does it better

We talked last week about managers who don’t listen to the people in their teams (I do hope you were paying attention) and this week we look at the second of the two biggest mistakes that managers make. It’s almost an offshoot of not listening - micromanaging: telling people how to do things and then hounding them until it’s done.

It’s understandable that a lot of managers make this mistake. I’ve written before about how managers often find themselves in charge of a team not because they are good at managing but because they are good at something else. Someone displays an aptitude in their job, they’re marked out for progression and management, often, is the only way of progressing. So a very good engineer, say, finds herself in charge of a team of engineers because that’s the only way she can climb the corporate ladder.

But good engineers - or anything else - don’t necessarily make good managers and, lacking confidence in their new role, managers often fall back onto what they know. They start telling other people how to do their jobs or criticizing the job team members are doing because it’s not done in the way the manager would have done it.

If you suspect this might be you, relax; it happens a lot. But remember, each time you do it you’re making it harder for your team members to engage with their work and you’re making your - and their - life harder. There’s a difference between advising someone who legitimately wants or needs your help and nitpicking, so the next time you delegate work, focus on the desired result and not the method. Explain what you want, not how you want it done. If there are particular rules that they must follow, if there are particular consequences to the outcome, make sure you explain those too, but keep your focus on the outcome.

You’ll need to trust the people to whom you’re delegating. You have to extend that trust - thoughtfully, sensibly - and it will, in time, be returned. It takes two to delegate work; for that piece of work to be done well, you need the other person to accept it, not just take it on because you tell them to. Telling someone how they’re supposed to do a particular task is the quickest way of stopping people from accepting it and as Stephen Covey says “you cannot hold someone responsible for their results if you supervise their methods.”

That’s it for the inspiredblog for this year - we’re off to find a cosy nook in which to celebrate the festive season with a pile of books and some mulled wine. We’ll be back in 2011 to do it all again - in the meantime, have yourself a merry little Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Can you hear me?

Do you have a brother or a sister? When you were growing up, did they ever pretend not to hear you? What did you do? If you’re like most other people, your response probably went along these lines. Firstly, you repeated yourself: louder, perhaps with some attention-grabbing techniques like shouting into their ear or poking them. When that didn’t work, you probably appealed to your mum or dad. When that failed to get a response, probably you hit them.

Time after time, I’ve asked groups the same question and time after time, I’ve got the same answer. And the interesting thing is, we follow the same pattern as adults. When we feel ignored, we repeat ourselves, we try to gain attention; if that doesn’t work, we appeal – to managers, to unions, to regulators, to the media – and if that doesn’t work, we’re left with violence. Perhaps not physical violence but some other way of registering our dissatisfaction, like this wonderful news report.

Not being listened to really gets to us, which is why it’s such a surprise to me that managers I speak to say that not listening to the people in their teams is their number one mistake – the one they make the most often.

It’s understandable that it happens. Managers have so much to do, so many different demands on their time, that setting aside some time to just listen to people, to pay attention to them, can feel like a waste. There are so many emails to reply to, so many other things to do, that the temptation is to multi-task, to pretend to listen whilst doing other things. The problem is, we know when someone isn’t really listening. We can tell when they’re just going through the motions and not really paying attention and so, just as we did when we were kids, we repeat ourselves. Which, of course, is an even greater temptation for the manager not to listen – after all, they’ve already heard that, haven’t they?

It may feel like it takes a long time but listening – really listening, not just to what’s being said but also to how it’s being said, and noticing the things that aren’t being said, too – is much quicker in the long run. It can be the key to unlocking all kinds of prizes: to helping people feel engaged and valued at work, to new ideas or proposals, to really understanding people’s talents and skills.

It takes effort and discipline to listen but the reward is worth it. Try it, the next time someone talks to you. Stop what you’re doing and focus on them. Ask yourself how it feels to be them; what is it that they’re trying to tell you? Why are they telling you? What do they look like, what do they sound like? What aren’t they saying? Do you really understand what they’re saying and what it means to them? If not, ask questions until you do.

It doesn’t matter what technique you use – techniques can be studied and mastered easily, with practice. What really matters is your intent: do you really want to listen to them. Do you really believe they have something valid and useful to say? Until you can answer yes to those questions, you’ll keep making that same mistake of not listening and we’ll keep repeating ourselves – or worse!

Have a nice day

Despite the cold, I had to venture out of the house today to visit the Post Office; even in this interconnected world, sometimes it means far more to send an actual card than a virtual one. Visits to the Post Office fill me with dread and today’s was no exception. There were over forty people in a queue that doubled and trebled back on itself and I settled in for a long wait.

After checking Twitter, Facebook and sending some emails, I’d moved about three feet and that was mostly because two of the people in front of me had given up and left in disgust. It was as I was looking around me that I spotted something that called itself a “Post and Go” machine, tucked away in the corner. Figuring that it was worth giving up my place in a non-moving queue on the off-chance that the Post and Go machine might be the answer to my prayers, I wandered over to investigate.

I’m pretty tech-savvy, I like to think, but it was a bit complicated and I was clearly wearing my best bewildered expression because an employee came over and helped me out. She had the kind of bustling efficiency that I’ve come to associate with ladies of a certain age, usually nurses: kindly and brisk. She pressed all the right buttons - on the machine, that is - and got me on my way in about two minutes. The queue, I noticed with smug satisfaction, hadn’t moved at all in the meantime.

Let’s leave aside the fact that I’ve spent a lot of times in queues, waiting to post things, and not one of the assistants behind the counter has pointed out that I could have used the Post and Go machine. I don’t know whether that lady was employed specifically to help baffled customers - she certainly gave me the impression of being on her way to do other, more important, things. The transaction didn’t add any value in monetary terms, it didn’t add to the bottom line, but she left me with a totally different (and positive) experience of my visit to the Post Office. It struck me as a timely reminder, as we think of cutting costs and efficiency savings, that not everything can - or should - be measured in monetary terms. Sometimes providing good customer service, making someone’s day a little better or brighter, making the world even just a little better place, is worth more than money.

Are you managing?

Many years ago, I spent about six months or so as a manager. In common with many managers, it wasn’t a role that I had particularly coveted or even particularly wanted but, in order for my career to progress, management was the next step. And, to be honest, management looked pretty easy. I was going to be managing the team of which I was currently a member, so there were no problems there – I knew them and they knew me. I knew the job they did, so I wouldn’t have to learn anything about that. About the only difference I could see was that I’d be earning a bit more money and I’d have a new job title.

Of course, I know now that I was in the learning phase that development experts call “unconscious incompetence” – in other words, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Of course management looked easy – I didn’t know the first thing about it. Sadly, this state of blissful ignorance didn’t last very long and reality hit me like a bucket of cold water. Within the first day, I was brought face to face with a whole bunch of things that I didn’t know about management and I learned very quickly that I had a great deal to learn.

This is the phase that development professionals call “conscious incompetence” and it’s painful. It’s that point in development when you are suddenly confronted with the depths of your own ignorance. You’re suddenly painfully aware of just how much the job involves and how much you have to learn.

For me, that pain lasted for about six months; I tried to learn more about management on-the-job but the company I worked for at the time wasn’t particularly enlightened on the subject and so I was left to fend for myself. I was wholly unprepared and I failed: I was eventually put out of my misery and mercifully removed from the role.

It wasn’t a total failure, however, because it taught me a few lessons that have stayed with me. First and foremost, it taught me that management is actually a lot harder than it looks and people who do it well have a real skill and my undying respect. Secondly, it taught me that there often isn’t a lot of support out there for people who move into the role and that support is the one thing that can make a real difference. If I’d been able to find someone to support me through, to teach me what I needed to know and help me avoid a lot of the mistakes I was making, the transition might have been quicker and easier; it might even have been successful.

Since then, I’ve spoken to a lot of managers about the lessons they’ve learned and the mistakes they make and two consistent themes seem to come out. Consistently, managers berate themselves for not listening and for micro-managing. The odds are, if you’re a manager, you make these mistakes too, so over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at these two common mistakes and suggest some ways in which you could avoid them.

The view from here

I’ve been running some time management workshops recently and one of the things that we’ve been looking at is the direction in which people are heading, their longer-term goals. Having a direction is an excellent way (and possibly the only real way) of establishing your priorities, without which it’s impossible to organise yourself in any meaningful way. The thinking behind this is that it’s important to know where you want to get to otherwise, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, it doesn’t really matter which way you go.

I left school with weak A-levels and didn’t go to university. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to return to studying and get the degree I didn’t get a quarter of a century ago. As I was thinking about this, it struck me that it would take about six years to do this and that I would be 45 years old by the time I got my degree. That length of time felt daunting until I realised that, unless something dreadful happened, in six years I was going to be 45 anyway – I might as well be 45 with a degree.

My destination was the degree and I had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it when I began studying. An analogy that I often use is that of a pilot filing a flight plan: when the plane takes off, the pilot knows where he’s going to land – unless, of course, something unexpected happens. It’s a helpful analogy but, like any analogy, if you push it too hard it will break down. Since I made my choice, my outlook has changed and evolved. In the words of every contestant on the X-Factor, I’ve been on a journey and the view from where I am now is different to the view I had when I started studying.

Someone once told me that “to decide is to divide” – a yes to one option is automatically a no to another option. But that yes also opens up the possibility of a whole lot of other options. Because of the choice I made five years ago, I was alert to several opportunities that have come my way in the last few weeks, opportunities that have helped to clarify that vision I mentioned above. For us, the destination doesn’t have to be fixed in stone – we’re not locked into a flight plan and it’s possible for us to change our destination at any point. It’s what makes the journey exciting.

The Outlook is rosy

Say what you like about Microsoft but when it came to Outlook, they really came up with a great productivity tool. I recently purchased a MacBook, to use as my main home computer, and I’ve been disappointed to discover that I can’t find an Apple equivalent that’s as good as Outlook – to the extent that I’m seriously considering forking out a couple of hundred quid on Outlook for Mac.

Outlook does so many things and is used by so many people that I’m baffled by how little people know about what it can do. Few people ever seem to have had any training on how to use Outlook, beyond sending an email. As email, it seems, is the thing that most people struggle with, here are some techniques to help you get on top of your in-box.

The first tip to get on top of your in-box is to stay out of it – or, at least, not dive straight into it every day. When you open Outlook for the first time in the morning, it probably takes you to your in-box and the temptation is then to start dealing with those emails. Instead, set your opening folder to your Calendar (Tools>Options>Other>Advanced Options>Browse and choose the Calendar folder).

Next, stop Outlook telling you when it receives an email (Tools>Options>Preferences>E-Mail Options>Advanced E-Mail Options and uncheck the boxes under the heading “When new items arrive”). The key thing here is that you check your email when it’s convenient for you, not every time someone sends you a mail. If you’re doing the latter, you’re effectively treating email like another telephone – and you probably already have a couple of those.

Once you’ve freed yourself from the constant interruption of arriving email, you can concentrate on other things. A really good habit to get into is only checking your in-box every couple of hours or so – if you like, you can book out half an hour in the calendar to do this, so that you get into a routine.

Why do this? Well, if you were trying to lose weight, imagine how you’d feel if someone regularly waved a cream cake under your nose, telling you how delicious it was. You wouldn’t be very happy, would you? It would make losing weight that much harder. If you’re struggling with email, that’s the equivalent of what Outlook is doing to you. Take some control and give yourself the space to concentrate on your job - which is not, believe it or not, to handle/produce emails.

You have mail...

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by “abroad” – by which I mean, from my Anglo-centric viewpoint, any country that wasn’t the UK. I’m of a certain age, which means I predate email, when the only way of contacting people abroad was to send them airmail letter. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing one of those lovely blue envelopes hit the mat, the glamour and mystique of the strange address and the poetry of the phrase “par avion”. Weeks would pass between posting a letter and getting a reply, the excitement would build and the eventual letter would be read and re-read, digested, considered and then finally responded to.

All that’s changed now, of course. Nowadays, I can text friends on the other side of the world and get a reply almost instantly – assuming they’re awake, of course. I can share pictures of events with friends in at least six other countries (and comment on pictures of their events) through Facebook and Twitter. The waiting for the postman has gone, replaced by the much shorter wait for the ping of the email inbox. Lest this sound like an old man’s paean to a bygone age, let me be clear: what we’ve lost in romance we’ve more than gained in sheer convenience. I’m in touch with friends now in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible twenty – or even ten – years ago.

But there is, of course, a price to be paid. Email has revolutionised communication but it’s brought a whole slew of problems along with its tremendous advantages. And while email itself is steadily becoming less popular amongst what I suppose I must now call the “younger generation” it’s still the dominant form used in business. So if you feel overwhelmed by email, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a look at some email best-practise to help alleviate the information overload you might be feeling.

We’ll start next week by looking at a few of the basic skills but if you have any hints and tips on how to make email – and, in particular, the main tool for using email, Microsoft’s Outlook – work better for you, do please drop me a line.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.

Unaccustomed as I am...

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been flying to and from Scotland, increasing the size of my carbon footprint so I could talk to people about communicating the importance of sustainable lifestyles. It’s been an interesting project and they’ve all been really great groups to work with. Plus, there’s been the added bonus of hanging around university campuses, where the energy and enthusiasm of the students has just been infectious.

A couple of key bits of feedback kept coming up as I was watching the presentations delegates were making and so I thought I’d share them with you. Bear these points in mind, next time you have to talk to a group of people:

Know what you’re trying to achieve

Surprising, but often the speakers didn’t really know why they were talking to the group – they hadn’t worked out, in their minds, what the purpose of their presentation was. Getting this clear in your mind guides everything else in the presentation. Think carefully about what you want your audience to do, know and feel at the end of your talk and then gear your talk to these objectives.

Use signposting and headings

Talking to a group is like giving someone a huge block of text to read, with no paragraphs, no spacing and no headings. Pretty soon, readers get bored and switch off – the same is true of your audience if you don’t structure your talk. The old cliché with speakers is to use the three Ts – first, tell your audience what you’re going to tell them; secondly, tell them what you want to tell them; thirdly, tell them what you just told them. Audiences drift in and out and if you say something only once, there’s no guarantee that people will hear it. If it’s a particularly important point and you want the group to remember it, don’t be afraid to signpost it for your listeners and tell them that it’s an important point.

Know your “in” and your “out”

To be fair to them, most of the speakers I saw knew their “in” – that is, they knew how they were going to start their presentation. If you can find a way of doing this that’s funny, attention grabbing and memorable, so much the better. However, very few speakers knew their “out” – that is, what to do at the other end of the talk. So instead of ending, the talk/presentation just “fizzled out” and left the audience with a negative impression. As part of your planning, know what your concluding point is and end your talk with something other than “and, er, that’s it...”

If you Google “top ten fears” you’ll find that public speaking features in most, if not all, of the lists. There’s no question that most people find speaking to groups to be a very painful experience; with a few simple techniques, it doesn’t have to be a painful experience for your group, too.

Confidence Tricks (Part Two)

The competency profile for trainers is an interesting one. I’ve always have joked that we have to be part Blue Peter presenter, part sadist and part furniture remover but there is another element to it, one that goes unspoken amongst trainers. Well, today I’m breaking the code because the one competency that all trainers have in common is that we’re psychic – we can read your mind. And because I can read your mind, I know what it is that you want. Deep down, you want to be confident.

You may laugh (I certainly hope you do) but I can be fairly – pardon the phrase – confident that you want to be confident because I’m playing the odds, rather than reading your mind. When I ask people what they want from this assertiveness workshop, or time management workshop or leadership workshop the answer the majority give is a variation on “I want to be more confident.”

Being part sadist, my immediate response to that request is “When you say ‘more confident,’ what does that mean to you?” The answer is enlightening because, very often, they don’t actually know. In fact, when I ask them what confidence actually is, they can’t define it for me. So I press on (told you I was a sadist) and ask them “What has to happen in order for you to feel confident?” Again, they usually don’t have an answer.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor defines confidence in this way: “Confidence is certainly mental, but it's... a situational expectation – an expectation of a positive outcome. And that expectation leads to all kinds of investments in making that outcome come true. Because of confidence people put in the effort. They invest financial and other resources. Instead of giving up, they stay in the game longer and, therefore, have more chances to succeed...” But now we know what it is, how do we know we have it and how do we get it?

Confidence is a belief and it’s slippery – sometimes our minds play tricks on us. If confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome, my advice is to look at the evidence in your life. Look for the situations that you have found yourself in and which you have handled; look for those situations that you influenced, turned around, resolved, dealt with. I’m willing to bet (because, after all, I’m psychic) that, more often than not, the outcome was positive – whatever it was, you dealt with it and it turned out okay in the end. The fact is, you’re already a confident person; you just have to start trusting the evidence in your own life and believing it.

Are you being served?

I'm fortunate in that, even in my mid forties, I still have hair. So periodically, I head off to a hairdresser in town to get it cut. I’m not a big fan of getting a haircut – it’s a strictly utilitarian thing for me – and I’ve been fairly free with my choice of hairdressers over the years, never really sticking to one in particular. However, I've been going to the same hairdresser on a roughly monthly basis for nearly three years now; he’s local, seems like a nice guy and he was having a few problems with his business in the early years, so I stuck with him out of a sense of solidarity – small businesses sticking together.

So, here’s the routine. Every month, the same guy cuts my hair. Every month, I get the same haircut. Every month, he asks me how I want it cut and every month I give the same reply. Every month, in response to my reply, he queries whether I really have my hair that short. Then he cuts it, I pay him and the whole thing starts up again in about four weeks’ time. During the haircut, he'll often ask me what I do for a living - I've lost count of the number of times he's asked me. I usually give a different reply every time, just to see whether he notices - he hasn't so far or, at least, if he has he hasn't mentioned the many discrepancies in my stories.

When I first noticed it, I found it amusing but recently it’s started to bug me; the last time I went, there were two of us waiting and he asked “which one of you is Steve?” Is it really too much to expect that, after let’s say at least thirty visits – he might remember who I am? Is it really so difficult to make a little note of who your customers are, what they do for a living, how they like to have their hair cut?

It’s not bad customer service – it’s not like he’s insulting me or being rude or overcharging me or anything like that. It’s just an example of poor customer service. He’s a good enough hairdresser; don’t get me wrong – the core service he provides is perfectly adequate. But I could easily be persuaded to go to another hairdresser, one who offered a similar core service but a better customer service. All for the want of a few, easily taken, steps.

It’s worth thinking about the service you offer – not just the core service but the customer service. Are you building loyal customers? A very good friend of mine runs a company called Spice Learning and they’re doing a series on the “A to Z of Customer Service” at the moment – if you suspect your customers might be feeling a little open to persuasion by other suppliers, I’d recommend you take a look.

On a personal note, the blog is taking a short break. The next “official” post will be on 15^th October, although there may be some shorter updates before then, depending on my access to the internet. Have a great couple of weeks.

Telling your story

Before I get to the subject of this week’s blog, I’d like to ask you to do me a favour. To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen and you’ll also need to pay very close attention to your mind. I’m going to give you a word and I’d like you to write down the first word you think of when you see the word I’m going to give you. It can be any word you like, whatever pops into your head but, as I said, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your mind.

Are you ready? The word is: choice. Write down the word you associate with choice and we’ll come back to it in a while.

I was working with a group this week, helping them work out what they wanted to do with their lives and careers. This obviously involves some goal setting and that goal can be very general or it can be very specific. To use a journey as an analogy, your destination could be as general as London or as specific as a particular address. Neither is better than the other but, in order to set off in any meaningful way, you’ll probably need at least a general idea of where you’re going.

One of the delegates was completely unable to do this. She had, she claimed, absolutely no idea of where she was going. Not only that, she was sceptical about the whole process. There were too many other things that could happen in the future – including the old cliché of falling under a bus tomorrow (I checked: she didn’t) – and for her that made planning or goal setting pointless and impossible.

We spent some time thinking about the journey she had already made in her life and it occurred to me that we can tell our life stories in one of three ways. It can be a story of chance – luck, coincidences and random happenings. It can be a story of destiny – you were fated to marry that person, born to do that job. Or it can be a story of choice – where you are today is a result of the choices you made yesterday and the day before and the day before that. All of those three options, it seems to me, are equally valid; it’s your autobiography and you can tell it any way you choose. However, only one of those options allows you to have any part in building your future, and that’s choice.

Go back to the word you wrote. Some people write negative words – burden, difficulty, overwhelming; some write positive words – freedom, autonomy, excitement. I wonder what you wrote. And I wonder how much the word you associate with choice will determine the way you tell your autobiography – and the extent to which you write your own future.

Banking Crisis

If you deposit more money in your bank account than you with draw, your balance will increase. The more your balance increases, the more interest the bank pays you – increasing your balance further – and the kindly your bank looks upon you. Get a big enough balance and other banks may court you for your business. On the other hand, if you withdraw more than you deposit, the balance will decrease. It won’t stop at zero, however: your account will go overdrawn, taking you into the mysterious realm of negative numbers. The more overdrawn you go, the more your bank will charge you – decreasing your balance even further. If you continually go overdrawn, your bank will probably ask you to take your business elsewhere. Decrease your balance to such a level that you cannot possibly pay it back and you’re likely to be declared bankrupt – which makes further banking (and other things) problematic to say the least.

In his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey talks about the Emotional Bank Account. It’s a metaphor for the state of relationships and works in the same way as a normal bank account except that, instead of money, the balance is the level of trust in the relationship.

Some actions you can take – we’ll call them deposits – will improve the relationship, increasing balance of trust in the emotional bank account you hold with the person concerned. The higher the emotional bank account balance, the better the relationship and the more benefits you with both reap from it. Some actions you can take – withdrawals – will harm the relationship, reducing the level of trust. Keep making withdrawals and your emotional bank account with the person concerned becomes so overdrawn that the relationship breaks down. Do it often enough with enough people and you’ll become bankrupt and, no matter what you do or say, no one trusts you anymore; even things you sincerely intend as deposits will be seen as withdrawals.

I was reminded of this as I read a lot of the coverage about the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs. I’m not making a political comment but it was interesting to see how, no matter what he said or explanations he tried to give, no matter what deposits he tried to make, they were interpreted as withdrawals by some. Even giving a potential £4m to the British Legion was seen by some as self-serving; they just wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said.

We all make withdrawals occasionally – it’s just part of being human. An apology is usually all it takes to restore the relationship. But make sure you notice the withdrawals; we may not all run countries, head political parties or start wars but it’s still possible for us to end up bankrupt.

How do you treat your waiter?

One of the great things about this job is that I get to meet and work with lots of people – I must have met and trained thousands – and a couple of workshops over the last couple of weeks have reminded me of the best and the worst aspects of working with people.

The measure of someone’s character is how they treat people they don’t “have” to be polite to. Watching the way someone speaks to a waiter or a cleaner can give you quite an insight into the way they think. Those who speak pleasantly to them tend to be good people; those who are rude and dismissive tend to have a fixed hierarchy in their minds and the way they behave will depend on where others fit into that hierarchy – nice to the people above, nasty to the people below. This isn’t a class thing and I don’t mean to be condescending by mentioning waiters and cleaners because I include trainers/facilitators in that group, too.

Most delegates understand I have a job to do and they cheerfully co-operate. A significant minority really throw themselves into the workshop and everyone in the group benefits from their attitude. They’re the people who make my job an absolute pleasure – they ask questions, they contribute examples, they engage with the material. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of groups from one particular organisation who have all been like that – I was genuinely sorry to leave because we’d had so much fun together. They were brilliant and I wish I could name the organisation because they’re clearly doing a wonderful job.

A minority of delegates, however, take a different approach and I had one of those groups recently, too, from a different organisation. They thought it was okay to be rude, arrogant and obnoxious. They didn’t want to be in the room and weren’t shy about showing it; for some reason, they thought I was responsible for forcing them to be on the workshop and so took it out on me, in the same way that some diners take out their frustration with their food on waiters.

I’m not complaining about delegates; that would be like a sailor complaining about the sea. Someone told me, early in my training career, that my two duties were to love my delegates and to serve the course objectives and I’ve tried to stick to that. I love meeting people in this way and, as I said, the vast majority are lovely.

When I was a teenager, I went on a school trip to the local theatre to see a production of King Lear. Being teenagers, we were undisciplined and noisy and at one point, the actors onstage stopped the performance and addressed us directly, basically asking us to shut up or leave. That was thirty years ago and I’ve never forgotten the shock of realising that the theatre wasn’t like TV – the actors were real people who could see and hear me and who had feelings about what I did. It’s the same with some delegates; I’m sure they think that we can’t see them reading newspapers, checking emails or sending texts, yawning, looking out the window or picking their nose at the back of the room (yes, honestly).

So the next time you’re on a course or a workshop, spare a thought for the man or woman at the front. If you don’t want to be there, take some responsibility and do something about it but remember: we’re not the ones forcing you to be there and we have feelings too. You don’t have to be pleasant to us and it says something quite fundamental about you if you’re not.

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?

What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.

Training isn't working - post script

As regular readers will know, over the last few weeks the blog has been looking at why it seems that training doesn’t work and what you can do, as managers and the people commissioning training, to change that. This week, I’d like to return to the topic for last look and to share with you something that I found whilst researching the topic.

Let me being by asking you a question. If you were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness but could avoid it by changing your behaviour, would you change your behaviour? If you said something like “yes, of course” you’re like most other people that I’ve asked that question. And, like most other people, you’re probably wrong: the sad fact is, statistically, you’re highly unlikely to change your behaviour.

Think about it this way. Healthcare in the US costs around $1.8trillion a year – the overwhelming majority of that is spent on illnesses caused by five behavioural issues: too much smoking, too much drinking, too much eating, stress, and not enough exercise. All of those things can be prevented or avoided by behavioural changes – but aren’t.

The most shocking example of this that I found was a quote from Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world. He was talking about patients with heart disease so severe that they have to undergo surgery, a traumatic and very expensive operation that can cost more than $100,000. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. These operations temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives - about half the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this are complex. Sometimes it’s a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself but most patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery – not to mention stop a disease that could kill them – by adopting healthier lifestyles. But very few actually do.

Says Dr Miller, "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Change is not hard to do – change can happen in an instant. We can all change things – and things can change for us – in a heartbeat. But, in the words of the Japanese proverb with which I started this blog, nearly a year ago, beginning is easy, continuing is hard. Studies in the US find that what doctors often do is try to motivate people to change with fear – they confront their patients with the ultimatum, change or die. The surprising thing is that people get used to anything: even the fear of death as a motivator stops working as we get used to the idea that we’re going to die. Now, doctors are changing to a more positive message: change and live consistently proves to be more motivating. People can change – we just need a positive reason.

Training isn't working - part three

Having spent the last couple of weeks trying to convince you that training doesn’t work, this week it’s time to turn our attention to the things you can do to make sure that it does. The good news, with which I teased you last week, is that there are some relatively simple things you can do to greatly improve the chances of seeing real, on-the-job application of the things delegates learn on workshops.

This diagram shows how training and development should work, at an organisational level. It starts on the left, with the identification of a business need. What is it that the company or team needs to achieve? What is the goal the individual is working towards? What, in other words, is the purpose of the training – what is it designed to achieve and how does this help the individual, the team or the company?

Moving into the middle box, in order to achieve this goal, the company, team or individual needs to start doing something – it’s only natural to assume that, in order to achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, someone somewhere needs to start doing something they’ve never done before. What is that “something”?

This then drives the right-hand box; to do this “something”, what kind of training do people need. This is when the training intervention can be put together – safe in the knowledge that the workshop (or whatever it is) is designed specifically to achieve business-relevant results.

The picture shows a shaded area around the behaviour box – this is the environment within which the delegates will be trying to apply what they’ve learned. That environment can be destructive and unhelpful, as we’ve covered previously, or it can be supportive and helpful. If you’re a manager, you can make all the difference.

Talk to your people before they go on the workshop. Ask them questions like:

• As a result of this training, what will you do differently?
• When will I see you doing it?
• What help do you need to put what you’ve learned into practice?

Keep in touch with them and use the trainer that you hire – any good trainer worth his or her salt with provide after-workshop support of some kind, so make sure you or the delegates make the most of it. What goes on at work, the messages you give to the people who’ve been on training, the support you offer, the encouragement you give, will make all the difference. And, of course, I’m honour bound to point out that if you want to make big changes – get inspired!

Training isn't working - part two

Last week, I think we covered enough statistics to convince even the hardiest sceptic that training isn’t working. The question this week, is why does this happen and the answer lies, in research by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995), who found that 80% of performance problems relate to factors within the work environment. In other words, what happens outside of the training room gets in the way of application.

In my experience, three scenarios occur repeatedly, and make application difficult, if not impossible:

Training for no reason

I’m working with a multinational company training sixty of their managers, at great cost, simply because they haven’t had any training for a couple of years and the company thought some training might be a nice idea. Training is supposed to be performance enhancing: it's the bridge that takes you from point A to point B. If there isn’t a point B, why do it?

There is a reason – the delegates just don't know what it is

There is an idea that training can “fix” people. A manager has a member of staff with performance or behavioural issues; they don’t want to confront the issue directly, so they send the member of staff on a training course, in the hope that they’ll learn something and change. It’s not always that extreme, though: so many times, I see delegates who’ve had no conversation with their managers in advance of the workshop – they’ve just been sent there. What does that do to their willingness to learn?

Nothing happens afterwards

What happens after the workshop is crucial – if on-the-job reinforcement is missing, there's no reason or incentive to do anything. It’s difficult to sustain changes in behaviour and often we need help and support; if that’s not forthcoming, most of what we learn is gradually forgotten.

Of course, a fourth reason is that sometimes the training's just bad. A poor workshop or a poor trainer (and, lets face it, some are terrible) won’t generate any kind of change or application at all – but that’s a topic for another day!

So what’s the solution? There’s a great quote, attributed to both Einstein and Woody Guthrie (it’s easy to get them confused): “Any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” The inspired philosophy is simple things, done well, repeatedly: the good news is, for all of these problems there some very simple solutions and we’ll look at them next week.

Training isn't working

Have you ever engaged a training company? What differences did you see as a result of the training? If the answer to that is “very little” then I’m not surprised because training, it seems, just isn’t working.

Plato said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. When I say working, I mean there is a noticeable transfer of learning to the business: what happens in the training room doesn't stay in the training room but it leaks out into the business. That's important because it's one of Donald Kirkpatrick’s four key measures for training:

• Level one – Evaluation (did they like it?)
• Level two – Recollection (did they remember it?)
• Level three – Application (did they do anything with it?)
• Level four – Impact (did it make a difference?)

Level one (evaluation) tends to be done most but produces data of the least value. Data at Application and Impact levels is harder to come by but what information is about paints a depressing picture.

In 1985, John Newstrom studied the perceptions held by members of the ASTD and there was a commonly held belief amongst them that training was not effectively transferred to the workplace. They believed that:

• Only 40% of the training content was applied to the job by the learner immediately following training.
• Only 25% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after six months.
• Only 15% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after one year.

Remember, this is perception and not necessarily reality but it is supported by other figures. Baldwin and Ford (1988) conducted a survey of the academic literature of the time on training effectiveness, and concluded, “Not more than 10% of the estimated $100 billion spent each year on training by the American industries actually resulted in transfer to the job”. Although doubt has been cast on the validity of this statement, in terms of the exact percentage and the estimated spend, it’s very similar to studies carried out by USA Today and by Ford and Weissbein (1997).

In 1992, Tannenbaum and Yukl conducted a review of the available literature, and concluded that the transfer of learning to job performance was generally low. They reported that relatively few learners, as low as 5%, actually applied in the workplace what they had learned in the training room, figures similar to those found subsequently by Stolovich (2000).

Have I convinced you – or merely bored you with a whole bunch of figures? The fact is, as Stolovich concluded, “Training alone is not effective in achieving on-job application of knowledge”. Next week we’ll look at why that is and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

The accidental manager

It’s an old cliché that people join organisations but leave managers and I was reminded of this recently whilst speaking to the manager of a medium sized company. They’d recently done a lot of organisational surveys and the results weren’t good: trust was low, many people were discouraged by the style of leadership and parts of the organisation were very unhappy. It started me thinking about those simple – but often powerful – questions that I like to ask.

Pretty much the first question I ask of any new or aspiring manager is “why do you want to be a manager?” The number of people who struggle with that question might surprise you. Often it’s not something that they’ve ever asked themselves before but it’s a question worth thinking about in some detail, even if you have to mull it over for a couple of weeks before coming up with a reason that you feel comfortable with.

I hear many different answers but they broadly break down into three. Some people become a manager because it’s the natural next-step on their career path; if they want to progress within their organisation, they have to move to a management role. Linked to this, for some, is the fact that – in their organisation – it’s the only way to earn more money. Alternatively, some people have a desire to work with and a love of people; for them, the buzz of working closely with people, being responsible for their performance and their development is what leads them into management.

Or, some people become a manager just because they were promoted into it. They were the most productive/technically skilled/best looking in their team and the powers-that-be decided that being so good at whatever it was they did made them the perfect candidate for management. Within this group is a small subset of people who just find themselves there, without having much planned or thought about it and without really knowing what they’re doing there in the first place.

None of these reasons is necessarily a better or worse reason than the others. Whatever anyone’s reason is, it’s their reason and it’s not for me to tell them it’s the wrong one. Nevertheless, I’d argue that, in order to be a successful manager you’d need to (at least) like working with people and want to do it. Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh on the manager in question but these qualities seemed to be lacking – and it seemed like the organisation knew it.