From SmartBlog: Design a training program that works

“So, you’ve just hired someone — they have a great attitude and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. What are your plans for training that new employee — not just orientation, but job skills training? Do you know what training they really need?”

Wally’s Comment: This guest post is by Arte Nathan, a veteran HR professional. It highlights the importance of doing training right. Nathan also thinks that using line managers and others from inside the company as trainers is a good idea.

From Employee Performance and Talent Management Blog: Inspiring Performance – It Takes More than Just Pay

“A recent survey from Kelly Services found that more than half of all Americans surveyed believe they would be more productive if they had greater interest in the companies that employ them, through benefits such as profit sharing. In previous posts, we’ve established the many benefits pay for performance programs provide when they are done well, but this survey helps to clarify who pay for performance matters to and why.”

Wally’s Comment: This issue fascinates me. We’ve known for decades that money is not a motivator, except for a brief period of time or a special set of circumstances. We know that money is a hygiene factor. That’s what Chris Argyris would call the “Theory Espoused.” The “Theory in Use” is quite different. We create programs that are pay for performance just as if the pay would motivate better performance.

From Great Leadership: Selection vs. Development Assessments

“This post is written for the everyday manager, HR manager, coach, or consultant that doesn’t have the time or interest to learn about validation, reliability, confirmatory factor analysis, correlation coefficients, and adverse impact. However, you’re using assessments, and you know just enough to be dangerous. Oh yeah, that pretty much describes me. Maybe you too.”

Wally’s Comment: Dan McCarthy uses common language to outline what you should know about how to use development assessments. He also tells you what not to do with them and why.

From Customer Think: Promoting Your Best Salesrep to Manager? Not So Fast

“The skills and traits for success in a sales management position overlap but are very different for success in a direct selling role. That means that if that salesrep, no matter how well they have performed, does not possess the specific skills and traits required for success in that management job, they are likely going to fail.”

Wally’s Comment: This isn’t just about salespeople and sales managers. In most companies these days we move individual contributors into a management position based on almost anything except what we know about what it takes to succeed in the new job. Hear me, ambitious souls! Being a sales manager is not a higher and better form of being a salesperson. It is a different kind of work.

From Open Forum: How to Use Projects to Develop Your Employees

“Nearly everyone loves a challenge, especially your best employees. I’m wagering that they want to contribute more, and guarantee that the most motivated hope to showcase their talents and develop their capabilities.”

Wally’s Comment: The things that make for success at work are mostly learned on the job. If a person only does their basic job, they only have a single source of learning. But projects can provide additional learning and development. They also give you additional ways to evaluate both performance and readiness for moving up.

Title: How to Be the Best … and Learn from the Worst

Competency: leadership

Who benefits: executives, managers, supervisors, future leaders

Consultant Usage: highly recommend this book to executive coaches; great stories for leadership and management trainers

What’s it about? This is one of my shortest posts ever.  Don’t want to waste your time.  Do want to spur you to action.

Do you know of Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at the Stanford Engineering School? Perhaps you are more familiar with the catchy title of his book The No-Asshole Rule.  The book was a best seller on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Quill Award as the best business book of 2007.

The book is about how to create a jerk-free work environment.

But being jerk-free isn’t the same as having a Boss who inspires you to your max.  Thus his latest book, hot off the press, is Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst.

I have had the good fortune of an advance preview of this book and I am jazzed.  Much of the book is told through stories.  The stories of the good bosses made me want to go find them and hug them.  If these stories are accurate (and I have no reason not to believe they are accurate), then these are the stories that all bosses should aspire to emulate. 

If you are a leader of any kind, or a wannabe leader, run – do not walk – to get this book.

Catch you later.

Technorati Tags: good bosses, bad bosses, no asshole rule, leadership, robert sutton, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley

Over at Johnson and Johnson there’s a slightly different situation. In an article titled “J and J Chief Tends Corporate Wounds,” the Wall Street Journal described it this way.

“So far, it doesn’t appear that the recalls will shorten Mr. Weldon’s tenure as CEO, said a person familiar with the situation. J&J board members will probably ask Mr. Weldon “to stick around and fix” the problems that have triggered the recalls, the informed individual said.

Another person close to the situation said Mr. Weldon wouldn’t want to leave J&J in the lurch. ‘There is a kind of competitive streak in him, and he feels he needs to fix’ the situation, this person said.

Mr. Weldon also repeatedly has told fellow directors that his potential internal successors weren’t ready to take over the corner office, according to this second person.”

Read that last sentence again. No one is ready? Even worse, no one is holding either Mr. Weldon or the board responsible for that shocking fact.

There’s no excuse for not having a successor or two or three available. And yet the situation at HP and Johnson and Johnson is not rare.

In 2008, there were 80 new CEOs at Fortune 1000 companies. Forty-four of them were promoted from inside the company. The rest, almost half of the total, came from outside. The Institute for Corporate Productivity found that less than half of the 275 companies they polled had a formal succession plan.

This is crazy. Every CEO leaves the job. Some fail. Some retire. Some die. Some leave to “spend more time with the family” or to “pursue other interests.” Someday you have to fill the job.

Doesn’t it just make good business sense to prepare for that day? It’s not impossible. Companies like GE, Proctor and Gamble, Xerox, Wal-Mart, and DuPont have all managed the feat.

Creating a succession plan that works is a bit like planting a tree. It takes a while to bear fruit.

A good succession plan should include hiring people you think may turn out to be capable of running the company one day. They should receive training and development opportunities. Top management should be ferociously involved in the evaluation and development of future senior executives.

It’s not easy. It’s also not quick. But it does seem to be the way great companies are grown.

“Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. .”
Franklin P. Jones

Cigarettes in the United States all come with health warning labelson boxes—perhaps vendors should do the same in marketing and selling multi-rater assessments that are so commonly used by coaches, consultants and organizational practitioners.  These same cautions also apply to multi-rater assessments developed “in-house” by many organizations using their own competency models.  At least five important myths should be considered when using and interpreting multi-rater feedback interventions¹.

Five Myths About 360 Feedback

1. Ratings Between Rater Groups are Highly Correlated with Each Other. 

Research consistently shows that ratings between direct reports, peers, supervisors, self and others overlap only modestly. Self-ratings are typically weakly correlatedwith other rater perspectives with greater convergence between peer and supervisor ratings (Nowack, 1992).  These diverse perspectives amount to different perspectives held for the coachee by the different rater groups.

It seems intuitive to expect that some differences in perspectives will occur across rater groups.  In general, direct reports tend to emphasize and filter interpersonal and relationship behaviors into their subjective ratings whereas superiors tend to focus more on “bottom line” results and task-oriented behaviors. Interestingly, peers seem to be uniquely able to predict future leadership behavior.

It is important to note that rater group differences might also be a point of confusion in the interpretation of their data for coachees trying to use the results to determine specific behaviors to modify and which stakeholder to target.  At a practical level, it means that coachees might be challenged to understand how to interpret observed differences by rater groups and whether to decide to focus their developmental “energy” on managing upward, downward and/or laterally in light of these potentially discrepant results.

2. Ratings Within Rater Groups are Highly Correlated With Each Other. 

In one meta-analytic study by Conway & Huffcutt (1997), the average correlation between two supervisors was only .50, between two peers, .37 and between two subordinates only .30. 

From a practical perspective, since reliabilities set an upper limit for validity, having too few raters providing input to the 360-feedback process might actually minimize the usefulness of the feedback that is given back to participants. Given these findings, vendors who do not provide a way for participants to evaluate within-rater agreementin feedback may increase the probability that average scores used in reports can be easily misinterpreted—particularly if they are used by coaches to help coachees focus on specific competencies and behaviors for developmental planning purposes. 

Vendors who don’t provide a way to look at spread or differences within rater groups could lead to misleading interpretations of average scores which are very typical of how 360 feedback reports summarize data.  If raters are polarized in their perceptions of specific behaviors they are observing, the mean score will tend to be interpreted as if the participant is average (e.g. if on a 1 to 7 frequency scale one rater experiences the participant to be a “2″ and the other rater experiences the participant to be a “6″ the mean score looks OK and might not reveal so such rater differences).

3. Interpretation of 360-Feedback Results are Relatively Easy and Straightforward.

A triad of “positive illusions” have been previously hypothesized by Taylor & Brown (1988) that include: 1) People tend to inflate the perceptions of their skills and abilities; 2) People typically exaggerate their perceived control over work and life events; and 3) People generally express unrealistic optimism about their future. 

Of practical significance is the meaningfulness of self and other rating differences and its relationship to receipt of feedback and actual performance on the job.  Research consistently has found that when self and other ratings are in agreement and high, effectiveness is generally also high. Effectiveness on the job tends to decrease as self and other ratings disagree and become lower.

Finally, in our own coaching practice, using diverse multi-rater assessments measuring different competency models, we have repeatedly observed that under-estimators (those whose self-ratings are meaningfully lower than others) tend to be highly perfectionist, self-critical, overly achievement striving and likely to focus on their perceived weaknesses rather than leveraging their “signature” strengths in developmental planning discussions.  Despite, trying to help our coachees interpret the feedback findings in a “balanced” manner, these over-estimators appear to be hypervigilant to the perceived “negative” information contained in their report and often “fixate” on the lowest average scores on ratings scales and the open-ended comments that appear to be “neutral or critical” in tone relative to other more positive comments collected within rater groups.

Finally, to add to the confusion about over-estimators and under-estimators it is known that personality can play a big role in the acceptance and use of 360 feedback for actual behavior change.  For example, leaders who possess high core self evaluations(a constellation of high self-esteem, high self-efficacy, internal locus of control and low emotional stability) seem to be most motivated to change behavior when they have a big gapbetween self and other ratings and those with low core self-evaluations tend to be most motivated when there is maximum agreement between self and other ratings².

4. Most Leaders Improve Following 360 Feedback. 

Although research supports that feedback does result in significant performance improvement, effect sizes are relatively small suggesting that “zebras don’t easily lose their stripes.”  For example, numerous studies of personality show that genetic effects account for approximately 50% of the variance in personality and that in at least one third of all feedback interventions performance actually decreases.

It would appear that we must accept that all of us have some skill and ability “set points” that may provide an upward ceiling to the growth and development of many coachees. Current research also suggests that the effect sizes (statistical measure of actual change) is quite modest in meta-analytic research on 360 feedback meaning that the size of change may not be very large.

5. Self-Directed Learning Following 360 Feedback Results in the Best Results.

All too often, vendors and some practitioners espouse the “diagnose and adios” approach to multi-rater feedback hoping that self-directed insight alone will result in motivated behavioral change efforts.   As previous research suggests, this approach could actually contribute to more negative affect and behavioral disengagement.

Some limited support for other approaches to structured follow-up comes from a recent doctoral dissertation study evaluating the effectiveness of 360-feedback interventions in 257 leaders in diverse organizations³.  In her study over 65% of those surveyed expressed strong interest in utilizing some type of an online follow-up tool to measure progress and facilitate their own individual behavioral change efforts. 

It would appear that follow up coaching, manager involvement in the developmental planning process and online systems to facilitate tracking and monitoring of action plans all would help leverage the 360 feedback effort. I will be presenting some data and a case study next month in Chicago at the Linkage The Best of Organizational Development Summit to demonstrate how our Talent Accelerator online developmental planning and coaching system integrated with our 360 feedback assessments seems to enhance deliberate practice leading to increased leadership effectiveness.

So, the next time you want to create a positive illusion, don’t forget to pull these “rabbits of your hat” to ensure a winning performance….Be well….

Technorati Tags: ken nowack, envisia learning, executive development, disengagement, leveraging strengths, overuse of strengths, 360 degree feedback, Johari Window, leadership effectiveness, management development, supervisory training, organizational development, leadership training, OD

1. Nowack, K (2009). Leveraging Multirater Feedback to Facilitate Successful Behavioral Change. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 61, 280-297
2. Bono, J. & Colbert, A. (2005).  Understanding responses to multi-rater feedback: The role of core self-evaluations. Personnel Psychology, 58, 171-203
3. Rehbine, N. (2007). The iimpact of 360-degree feedback on leadership development. Unpublished  doctoral dissertation, Capella University

From Fortune: How big companies can stop the brain drain

“Across all industries, the best and brightest are striking out on their own to escape corporate bureaucracy. That need not be the case. Here’s how big institutions can re-imagine themselves as centers of innovation.”

Wally’s Comment: What makes this post special is that the authors are John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who are also authors of The Power of Pull. That means you get some ideas for today, along with an informed look toward the future.

From Winning Workplaces: Simple Performance Management Practices that Drive Up Employee Engagement

“Most of us are familiar with Gallup’s employee engagement research and the twelve statements they use to measure it. When I look at the list, it strikes me that there are some basic employee performance management practices that, if done well, address most of these needs.”

Wally’s Comment: I have a problem with most of the discussions of engagements. I find most “engagement programs” to be exercises in statistical manipulation. That’s because I understand engagement to be an emergent property of the work environment. You don’t influence it directly. Instead, you use a few simple actions to create an environment where engagement can grow. Here are some ideas about what you can do.

From SmartBlog on Workforce: An interview with Honest Tea’s Debra Schwartz

“Debra Schwartz is director of human resources for Honest Tea, a beverage company based in Bethesda, Md. Miri McDonald, an expert on organizational development, recently spoke with Debra about her role in cultivating the company’s progressive culture. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.”

Wally’s Comment: The talent development challenge is more intense when your company has a distinct culture. That’s Honest Tea. You can get some background by reading their profile as one of 2010′s Winning Workplaces.

From Dorothy Dalton: Should mentoring by executives be mandatory?

“I have recently been approached to act as a mentor to a few younger people at different stages in their professional lives. Apart from the fact that I started to feel really old, the thought of being singled out to share the benefits of my somewhat lengthy experience with younger, more junior individuals was secretly quite flattering and whole idea of being perceived as a ” savvy sage” was also something of an ego boost.”

Wally’s Comment: Mentoring programs have always made me uneasy. I’ve enjoyed and gained from my mentoring relationships as both a mentor and protégé. But it’s always seemed to me that those relationships had to grow naturally to be effective. Dorothy Dalton takes the program idea one step further. She asks if all executives should be required to mentor.

From HR Daily: The Impact of Social Media on the Hiring Process

“There have been many articles written about the importance of social media in marketing and advertising, but little thought has been given to the role it plays in an organization’s hiring process. The HR, sales, and marketing departments typically occupy different corners of the corporate office, but they share a common role as brand ambassadors. It is widely accepted that employees and their conduct reflect upon the company they work for. What is not often considered, however, is the impact that the hiring and interview process can have on corporate reputation and perception. The hiring and interviewing process should be regarded as an extension of marketing and failure to do so puts companies at risk of significantly damaging reputation and countering positive outgoing efforts–especially in an age of social media, brand identity is more vulnerable than ever.”

Wally’s Comment: Social media are driving changes in many areas of business and talent management. One of the first areas to feel the impact is recruiting.

Title: Women Are Losers: Why traditional mentoring programs can be detrimental to women’s careers

Competencies: coaching, talent management, mentoring

Who benefits: while this article is primarily about women, the content is useful to upward and outward mobile employees and their bosses and mentors

Consultant Usage: career development specialists, executive coaches, some trainers

What’s it about?  Wait! Wait!  Don’t jump on my a**.  The title was just to get your attention.  Read on.  I am only reporting on a personally eye-opening article in the just released September issue of Harvard Business Review.  Written by three women. 

The article is Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women.

The article poses and answers three questions and offers a solution.

The three questions/answers are:
1. Are women as likely as men to get mentoring? Yes.
2. Does mentoring provide the same career benefits to men and women? No.
3. Can mentoring be harmful to a woman’s career? Yes.

Before commenting on the third question/answer and the solution, let me present a metaphor that works for me (and probably only me) and a recollection of advice given by one my all time favorite motivational speakers. 

My metaphor (sort of).  Have you ever “lost” your car or house keys (of course you have)?  Did you eventually find them in the very last place you looked (of course)?  And did you comment to yourself something like “I should have known they were there all this time?” (probably)?  That’s how I feel about this article.  It presents me with something I probably should have known for the past 40 years and I flat out missed it.

One of my all time favorite speakers is Morris Massey.  I remember some of things he said.  I had to remember.  If you are not familiar with him, he speaks too fast to take notes.  If you are familiar with him you already knew that.  One piece of advice he gave was “Never should on yourself” (enunciate carefully if you say this out loud), which I just did in the above paragraph.  And one of the reasons he gave for that advice was that most of us make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time (this does not always apply to politicians, but that is another story). 

Now back to the article.  After reading it I was shocked and appalled at my own shortcomings.  I have over a 30 plus year span mentored more than a dozen younger professionals, a majority of them women.  I gave them advice, connections, assignments, sent them to training courses and anything else I could think of to help them along. 

Except the one thing they needed the most.  And I missed it. 

So now let me go back to question #3 above and the solution proposed in the article.

Can mentoring actually be detrimental to a woman’s career.  Yes.  Why?  Simply because we mentors can get them doing all the peripheral activities that we think will make a big difference in their careers … and we take them away from their primary work responsibilities … those activities that are crucial to their next and future promotions.

Some of these traditional mentoring activities are good.  But what is missing, what I overlooked, what appears so obvious that most of us will knee-jerk and say “Oh of course I was doing that” … I wasn’t and probably you weren’t either, was Sponsorship.

It is like the old expression of being all dressed up and no place to go.  Mentoring is getting dressed.  Sponsorship is having somewhere to go.

Sponsorship is the active pursuit of getting someone promoted.  It is identifying a position or positions that the mentee could reasonably fill in the short term and then lobbying the higher ups and anyone else with influence to get your mentee that next job. (One caveat, this all assumes your mentee is seeking upward or outward mobility.)

In my semi retired state not so many people seek me out anymore.  But I am proudly playing the role of mentor to a young lady going to a university in Mexico.  (Hola Karen, I know you read my posts, so pay particular attention to this and the next paragraph.)  I have paid part of her tuition, given her advice, made some suggestions and she has responded perfectly.  She has a very bright future ahead of her.

But I realize now that I am failing Karen if I don’t undertake the additional role of Sponsor.  It is not enough for her to graduate from university.  She is a business major and I need to make sure she gets into the mainstream of the business world.  I need to “promote” her with people who can hire her and see that she succeeds (she has the brains and the personality, she just needs the guidance). 

To those of you I helped in the past, I apologize for not doing better.  I just didn’t know “better”.  And to the authors of this must read article, I thank you for your insights.  This is one old dog who just learned a new trick.

Catch you later.

Technorati Tags: mentor, mentoring, sponsors, sponsorship, career, careers, career development, career management, promotions, promotability, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley

That thought came flying into my head when I read John Sumser’s “HRXformation” post at HR Examiner. Here’s the core of his message.

“It looks like there are several kinds of transformation in HR: things that improve the delivery of HR Services as currently conceived; Projects that dramatically change one aspect of the enterprise; Ways of operating HR that transform the very idea of HR.

A quick review of online literature on HR Transformation is almost exclusively focused on the first category. So called ’shared services’ approaches are really a new twist on the long standing questions about centralization and decentralization that characterize all fads in organizational thinking.

There is simply nothing serious out there about HR as an intentionally transformative function.”

I’ve got news, friends. A change is gonna come.

Look around you. Is your workplace different than it was even five years ago?

What do you think it will be like ten years from now? Demographic, economic, social, and technological forces are transforming the workplace even as you read this.

You won’t have to wait. Earlier this month, the Corporate Executive Board announced that 81 percent of the companies it surveyed reported “major redesign initiatives” in the last twelve months.

People initiatives should be at the core of workplace transformation. According to Booz Allen: “Executives believe that making people initiatives a higher priority is essential to successful transformation programs, but feel they often fall short on execution.”

I know that’s true. But when I read John Sumser’s post, I began to wonder how this is all going to play out.

Change is gonna come. It’s going to happen.

Change is gonna come. It’s going to happen with you or without you.

Change is gonna come. If you’re waiting for an invitation, it’s too late. If you expect that coveted “seat at the table” before you act, you’ll miss the revolution.

Change is gonna come. You’ve got a decision to make. Will you be proactive and help drive the change in good ways. Or will you be reactive and let it all wash over you.

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”

Pearl S. Buck

Have you ever experienced leaders who seem to lose it during meetings or tense interactions with others–emotions spewing out of them like hot lava leaving an active Mount St. Helens?  Or, dealing with those analytical, controlled and “closed” leaders who are always appear to be emotionally constipated? 

Feelings expressed or feelings repressed……

Which one do think is most damaging to your health?

Those Who Feel and Express….

Two types of studies tend to illustrate how expression of some emotions in leaders might have serious long term consequences for health.

First, Ed Suarez, Ph.D. at Duke University recently illustrated an association between anger, hostility and a very important inflammatory marker of cardiovascular disease called C-reactive protein (others have found the same outcome with homocysteine).  In his study of 123 healthy non-smoking men and women he found that anger and hostility were significantly associated with higher levels of C-reactive protein while controlling for other factors¹. 

This study adds to the growing recognition that practicing “sign language” when being cut off on the freeway may not exactly be the best way to react to social and interpersonal challenges if you want to live long.

Second, Johan Denollet, Ph.D. has studied a very interesting personality type he calls “Type D” for many years. “Type D” personality types are identified based on their high scores of negative emotions (e.g., worry and anxiety) and low scores on social inhibition, or being insecure socially and lacking assertiveness.

In just one of his studies, Denollet followed 319 individuals for five years and tracked cardiovascular events that developed. Individuals high in “Type D” were four times more likely to suffer a second heart attack than “non-D Types”².

So, being chronically anxious, nervous and socially uncomfortable seems to be a set of toxic emotions that can be deadly.  Type D personality appears to be a risk factor at least equivalent in importance to the other “conventional” coronary heart disease predictor factors.

Those Who Try Not to Feel and Hold It In…..

What about those of us who don’t express feelings such as anxiety and anger?  These individuals also appear to be at risk to get sick and equally vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and even cancer³.

My friend and true “data shaman” Gary Schwartz, Ph.D. at the University of Arizona School of Medicine was one of the first to explore the relationship between those who work so hard to present themselves (and others) in an overly posive light and health.  These “repressive copers” don’t report being anxious at all–in fact, they report just the opposite. Individuals who utilize repressive coping tend to work hard to create very favorable and positive impressions to others (high impression management) and report little or no worry, anger and anxiety (low negative affect).

In fact, those of us who tend to “repress” emotions appear to be at risk for high blood pressure, heart disease and even breast cancer⁴. 

Apparently, the energy to repress emotions is physiological taxing to ourselves but seems to give most others in our lives a break!  Some preliminary research using 360 degree feedback also suggests these leaders might actually be prone to “over estimating” their strengths and working endlessly to self-promote themselves to others.  These self-enhancing leaders might not only be high risk to derail because of inaccuracy about their skills, knowledge and abilities but they might also be prone to getting sick.

So, three main conclusions:

1. How you go about expressing negative emotions seem to be pretty strongly associated with long term health.
2. It’s not the negativity of the emotions per se that is the problem but how leaders cope with these emotions.
3. It seems more important to feel good, than having a goal of merely feeling good.

Still confused?  Well, then try reading and interpreting the leadership literature…..Be well….

Technorati Tags: emotions, positive affect, c-reactive protein, type d personality, negative affect, feelings, repression, repressive coping, kenneth nowack, ken nowack, nowack

1. Suarez, E. (2004). C-Reactive Protein Is Associated With Psychological Risk Factors of Cardiovascular Disease in Apparently Healthy Adults. Psychosomatic Medicine, 66:684-691
2. Denollet J, Vaes J, Brutsaert DL. Inadequate response to treatment in coronary heart disease: adverse effects of Type D personality and younger age on 5-year prognosis and quality of life. Circulation 2000; 102:630–5
3. Schwartz, G. (1990). The psychobiology of repression and health. In J. Singer (Ed.), Repression and dissociation (pp. 405-434). Chicago: University of Chicago Press
4. McKenna, C., Zevon, M., Corn, B., & Rounds, J. (1999). Psychosocial factors and the development of breast cancer: A meta-analysis. Health Psychology. Volume 18(5) 520-531

From Industry Week: Identifying Your Future Leaders

“Sustained, committed leadership development can be a key differentiator between the most successful manufacturers and the also-rans. Are you taking care of your talent pipeline?”

Wally’s Comment: This article draws on survey data from Deloitte and from Hewitt. It looks at links between stock market performance and leadership development and it identifies some practices that separate top performing companies from others. How can you pass this up?

From 4th Gear Consulting: Leadership Development… Are You Investing, Or Just Spending?

“Most of the companies I work with dedicate some percentage of their revenue toward developing the leaders in their business. One of the discussions we often have up front is the difference between spending money to train leaders and investing to grow them.”

Wally’s Comment: Randy Hall makes an important distinction between investing and just spending. You’ll read echoes of insights in the Industry Week article above. But you’ll also find recognition that leadership development happens mostly on the job and what that implies for you.

From TLNT: Why It’s Always Easier (and Better) to Motivate Without Money

“In any economy, it’s important to focus on the non-financial motivators for three key reasons.”

Wally’s Comment: Since Frederick Herzberg we’ve know that money may be short-term motivator, but for most of us most of the time, money is a hygiene factor. Well, if you can’t pay more, what can you do? This post suggests a few things.

From the Performance Improvement Blog: Evaluation Ethics: Going to the Movies

“Sometimes our work as evaluators, whether measuring the impact of a corporation’s leadership training program or measuring the results of a program to keep teenagers in school, can negatively affect the welfare of participants.”

Wally’s Comment: Stephen J. Gill offers this thoughtful post about the ethical challenges that can arise from program evaluation. It’s worth a slow read.

From ERE Net: Learn From HP’s Errors — a Checklist for Designing an Effective Succession Plan

“Most organizations do a weak job at succession planning, but as recent events highlight, Hewlett-Packard deserves some sort of award for completely blowing it! While the “entire story” behind the departure of CEO Mark Hurd has yet to be uncovered, it is clear the issues leading up to it were a complete surprise to the board and that no succession plan is in place. Within five days of Hurd’s separation, HP had lost nearly $11 billion in market value and become the corporate punching bag for reacting stupidly.”

Wally’s Comment: Most of the many, many, many posts about the Mark Hurd incident deal with why Mr. Hurd did what he did or whether HP made the right decision. But Dr. John Sullivan suggests that you can learn a very important lesson from the fact that there was no one ready to succeed Hurd when he jumped or was pushed from the executive suite.

Title: Well Connected: An Unconventional Approach to Building Genuine, Effective Business Relationships

Competencies: career development, sales, achievement orientation, managing relationships, building strategic relationships, collaboration, engenders trust

Who benefits: any person not satisfied with the status quo

Consultant Usage: highly recommended for consultant self-development and business building

What’s it about?  Today’s post is short and sweet.  I was mostly thinking about job seekers when I began reading this book.  However, the book has multiple uses. 

The book cover sums up the book very well: “In today’s uncertain business environment, the best way to succeed is through partnerships—with colleagues, with vendors, with competitors, with anyone who might share a common goal and can help build mutual success. Such partnerships require strong, meaningful relationships. In other words, these relationships require that you become well connected.”

There are several things to like about this book.  First, there are a number of success stories for the reader to learn from.  Second, there is considerable amount of spaced devoted to “critical enablers”.  Critical enablers are those folks who really can make a difference in helping you reach your goal.

The most unusual aspect of the book is the clear focus on not broadly expanding your network but focusing your attention on finding and developing a close relationship with the critical few who can help you get your next job, big sale, right vendor ….

With the right people identified, the key then becomes the establishment of a relationship that is mutually beneficial. 

Sounds simple.  My experience suggests that not a lot of people really “get it.”  You will know those who don’t get it.  They are the ones who cynically claim “It’s all politics.”  Of course it is.  Thing is, anyone can play.

If you are starting out, going up, expanding wide you could save yourself a lot of time and effort by understanding what is in this book.

Catch you later.

Technorati Tags: critical enablers, well connected, business relationships, career development, sales, achievement orientation, managing relationships, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley