Org-Fitness Today!

The Communication Conundrum

What do you do in a situation where you've got someone being verbally abusive? Especially if that person is a doctor.

Since some of my work is in the health care field and I have heard stories of situations similar to what I described above, I was glad to see the latest from the folks at Crucial Conversations. Crucial Conversations is book and training program based on the work of an organization called VitalSmarts.

I was fortunate to get certified in the Crucial Conversations training while I worked at Servco. What I like about Crucial Conversations is it gives great examples and tools for dealing with common work related communication issues. The training includes a basic communication model that helps people understand their own communication patterns and also how to understand more clearly the communication of those around them.

Kerry Patterson answered our tough question here.

Let me know what you think of this. If you are interested in learning more about the Crucial Conversations training program, please contact me.

Great Teambuilding Resource

Tom Heck is offering over $300 is specials with the purchase of his Teambuilding Puzzles book. Just click the link below and for $29 you will receive access to the 9 bonuses worth over $300. I've ordered my book and have already put to use one of these bonuses. I highly recommend this resource if you are interested in leading teambuilding activities. A couple of these bonuses will disappear after November 30, so if you want all of the $300 in specials, order it before the 30th.

Book: Teambuilding Puzzles

Leadership Development: How's yours?

How's the leadership development in your organization? Do you have a full bench of capable leaders ready to step up to the next level?

If you were able to answer both these questions positively, you are in the minority. Many organizations and entire industries are facing almost crisis-level shortages of leaders ready to step up to the next level. Unfortunately, it might get worse.

Demographics and the aging Baby Boomer generation are partially to blame. The following numbers are just an example of what we are facing: There are about 76 million baby boomers and only 46 million in the next generation, Generation X. Of those baby boomers, up to 50 percent of the management workforce will be eligible to retire over the next five years. So, what's a leader do today that can help make a difference?

The Hay Group offered up their ideas in the July 2006, Insight Connections. The seven steps are outlined below.

1. Encouraging leaders at all levels to create work climates that motivate everyone to perform at his or her best.
2. Making leadership development a priority for everyone involved.
3. Helping leadership teams work more effectively together in addition to helping individual leaders improve.
4. Providing job shadowing opportunities for mid-career managers.
5. Ensuring that high-potential employees receive 360-degree feedback for leadership development—early on.
6. Ensuring that mid-level managers have the time to participate in leadership development early in their careers.
7. Providing external coaches for senior managers.

These are all great ideas for building leadership capability and bench strength in your organization. If you would like to talk more about these ideas, feel free to contact me or click on Comments below. Click here to read the full Hay Group, Insight Connections.

Preaching to the Choir: Employee Development

For some of you, this is like "preaching to the choir" and for others it is just a reminder of what we need to be doing (or should be) with our employees. AllBusiness.com has a daily e-mail tip of the day and today's tip has to do with employee development. Titled Employee Development Is The Key to Success. Employee development has been mentioned several times by employees as the key to retention.

Here's a list of six ways to encourage employee development from the AllBusiness site:

1. Support employee development and training programs
2. Assign mentors to junior employees
3. Offer tuition reimbursement
4. Emphasize and encourage development
5. Recognize and reward employee growth
6. Promote from within

Do you offer a comprehensive employee development program? How do you encourage employee development in your organization?

Training and ROI

How valuable is the training you are providing? What kind of return are you getting for your investment? What difference does the training make in overall job performance?

These are important questions to ask and get answered. According to the 2005 ASTD (American Society of Training and Development) U.S. companies are investing heavily in training spending on average between 2 and 10 percent of revenues on corporate training or $955 per employee.

Accenture recently did a study of over 250,000 employee records and found the following in regards to workers with the most training:

• Were 17 percent more productive
• Performed at 20 percent higher levels than their peer groups
• Stayed with the company 14 percent longer

This shows training's impact to the bottom line. For the details and source of this information, click here. How does your organization measure training ROI? Click on Comments and let us know.

Training: Investment or Expense?

How do you see training? Is it an investment or an expense? I guess it depends on how you see development in general.

I recently asked a small business owner if he offered any training for his employees. Like many small businesses, his answer was no.

Often times employers are afraid to invest in training employees for fear that the employees will leave and go on to another job. My question is, what if you don't train your employees? Are they going to stay because you don't train them? I doubt it.

Employee Development: Still Not Formalized in Most Companies

In today's world, it is still quite rare for companies to have formalized development programs for individual employees. However, more and more companies are realizing the benefits and advantages of providing individual development plans for employees.

A recent Inc. magazine survey, reported that 84% of human resource professionals do not use a formal or structured employee development process. These HR professionals reported using generic training programs for such topics as customer service.

Employee Satisfaction and the Service Profit Chain: New Confirming Research

The Service Profit Chain was first popularized by James L. Heskett and others in a 1994 Harvard Business Review article. He subsequently wrote a book, The Service Profit Chain (1997) which details even more research. Essentially what research at Sears and other organizations shows is a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer service.

If employee satisfaction (ES) goes up, a few months down the road, customer satisfaction (CS) will also rise, and most importantly, profit goes up too.

ES + CS = Increased Profit

The reverse is also true, so if employee satisfaction drops, the other factors drop as well.

Does your company have an easy way to measure this? How about a web-based solution?

Public Education in Hawaii and Transformation

Randy Moore spoke at my Rotary club (Rotary Club of Metropolitan Honolulu) this past Thursday. His topic, Act 51 and Reinventing Education for Hawaii. Here is a link to the Act.

Randy is the past CEO of Kaneohe Ranch and has a strong business background. He retired from the corporate world a few years ago to become a middle school math teacher in a Hawaii public school. I doubt many CEO's would choose this occupation and he has to be admired for his willingness to do this.

A few months back, State School Superintendent, Pat Hamamoto, tapped Randy to assist in the redesign of Hawaii's public schools. This will be no easy task as anyone familiar with the challenges facing public schools in Hawaii will attest.

As a parent with four children in the public schools I have a vested interest in seeing the schools improve. My daughter serves as the student representative on the newly formed SCC (School Community Council) for her school.

My question to Randy at the end of his talk had to do with the first point of his talk. The school principals are being asked to take on a completely different role from what they have had in the past. Essentially they will be held accountable for their schools progress and be responsible for managing their schools much a like a business manager must manage his or her business. In the old world, principals were told what to do and essentially passed the buck on up and fundamentally, this is what is wrong with the system.

My question had to do with how are these principals going to be trained for this new position? From a business perspective, this is like asking an employee or even a supervisor to now run the business and to be responsible for the performance of all the staff, to create and manage a budget, and to submit a business plan as to how all of this will be done. 

Randy's response was good--he gets it. Essentially he said they have budgeted 500K for training. (click here for the DOE-Hawaii Principals Academy press release) He admitted this was not enough. Most Hawaii principals have grown up in our system where they have never had to do this. He cited a San Diego district who went through a similar process and in five years time, this SD district had a 90% turnover rate of principles. Now that is change!

I heard some comments and discussion among Rotarian's saying that is what will work. I was shocked the first time I heard that Hawaii principals were unionized. Randy did start off his talk by saying principals will get a hefty raise of over 30 percent over the next two years. This is being given to them as a way to justify that principals will now work a 12-month schedule. They'll need the time to make all of this work.

Randy also used as an example how you could break the principals into three groups regarding the transformation. Much like Bridges does in his work. Many of them are in the large middle group of transformation. A smaller group is holding back and resisting these changes, and finally a small group is embracing he change.

Part of me is a bit skeptical in all of this. Looking at my fellow Rotarian's, while many have good ideas and strong opinions on how to improve the public schools, very, very few of them have sent, or are sending their kids to public schools. My own opinion is that the fact that Hawaii has so many private schools, and people have so many options besides the public schools, exasperates the problem. Take away the private schools, and believe me, change would come extremely fast to the public schools.

Ah, this is could be the topic of another post, back to finish this one.

I really get that Randy is working hard on this and his business perspective is good for the system. However, I just can't help but wonder how many principals will shake their heads, yes, yes, yes, all the time while looking at their nice fat State of Hawaii retirement benefits, and be counting down the days to take advantage of them.

NASA Transformation and Leadership Development

NASA has released a white paper report that describes the transformational changes that are required since the Columbia accident in February, 2003 within the agency.

The transformation is based on three areas:

1. Technical Excellence
2. Organizational Excellence
3. People Excellence

These are not unlike what many corporate organizations undertake around major change or transformation. The Columbia tragedy and the 1980's Challenger tragedy are much visible, therefore create a bigger impact on society highlighting the need for change.

You can read the report by clicking here.