Training with the Midas Touch: Developing your organization’s greatest asset

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Training with the Midas Touch: Developing your organization’s greatest asset

Richard Palmer

Kogan Page

Training with the Midas Touch

Training with the Midas Touch Developing your organization’s greatest asset Richard Palmer

First published in 2002 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses: Kogan Page Limited 120 Pentonville Road London N1 9JN UK

Stylus Publishing Inc. 22883 Quicksilver Drive Sterling,VA 20166–2012 USA

© Richard Palmer, 2002 The right of Richard Palmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 7494 3739 1 Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn www.biddles.co.uk

For George, Tom, Jack and Lucy – four golden nuggets

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

Human capital – your accumulating asset Attracting and retaining talent 5; The knowledge-based economy 5; The greying workforce 6; Becoming an employer of choice 6; Profit 6

3

2

Alchemy – base metals into gold Why we don’t do it . . . 10; . . . And why we should do it – managing expectations 13; Homogeneity 17; Midas Miracle Pharmaceuticals 20

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Finding the nuggets 24 Becoming a gold prospector 24; Honing your skills as a gold prospector 36; Becoming a great manager to work for 38; Spreading gold fever 39; Build on strengths 41

4

Building your gold reserves – the internal talent pool The internal recruitment market 43; Spread the jam 46; Build in some slack 47; What talents to put in the pool? 52

42

5

A map for the treasure hunt – pacing out the talent pool Learning stairways 60; Learning avenues 65; Development and retention 69; Will you do it? 73

60

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Refining the nuggets Defining terms of engagement 76; Discretion assured 80

74

vii

viii Contents

7 The alchemist’s laboratory Competencies – elements in the mix 86;Before you start 89; Training and development tools 91

86

8 Ideas for cutting and polishing the stones Corporate universities 106; Personal partners 107; People still read 107; Saying ‘i do’ 108; The computer bank 109; Personal development programmes 109; Learning scholarships 110; A place to learn 110; The playroom 111; Skills circles 112; The working man’s club 113; Out-of-body experiences 114; Aunts and uncles 114; Reverse mentoring 115; Doorman for the day 115; Can I help you, sir? 116; Walking down the avenue 117; A day out 117

106

9 Putting it all together The big mistake 119;The personal development portfolio 120; The skills matrix 121; A performance management model 121; The training and development plan 128; Setting priorities 131

119

10 Implementing the Midas touch Why are we making the journey? 134; How are we going to get there? 135; What will help us on the way? 139

133

References Further reading Index

141 143 144

Acknowledgements

Books don’t just happen. They are a process of fermentation where different ingredients are added at various stages. Catalysts are thrown in and the mix takes on a new nature and spirit. It develops and changes over a considerable time. Finally it materialises and matures. And so it was with this book. My initial thanks go to Rita Johnston who had the leadership to develop the Masters degree in Training and Development at the University of Sheffield, the very first such programme in the UK, and to John Wilson who tutored on the programme. This was the root from where my interest in training and development flourished and hence ultimately this book. A thank you also to Graham Knott and Richard Harlow-Trigg who encouraged me to pursue the creative talent of writing when it didn’t always seem such a good idea. Special thanks go to Christine Slim who was the instrumental catalyst in making me do it and gave me the encouragement and the firm push off the top of the hill to start the project. Gratitude also goes to my colleague Professor Brian Squires of Nottingham Trent University for taking the time to read the manuscript and for his constructive suggestions, and also to Philip Mudd of Kogan Page for sparking new ideas and directions. Finally my thanks go to the forbearance of my family for putting up with the days and evenings of distraction and distance and to my son George for producing the diagrams and to my daughter Lucy for the poem.

ix

Introduction 1

Introduction

We are all familiar with the story of King Midas, the character from Greek mythology, who was granted a wish and chose that everything he touched turned into gold. His talent proved troublesome when it came to food and drink and he was finally relieved of his enchantment by bathing in the Pactolus River. But the Midas touch has become synonymous with those who are able to add value and make something more precious and valuable. That is precisely the theme of this book, the assertion that there is much of inherent value and potential in the people within all organizations and it is only through the unleashing of this talent that organizations can truly develop their competitive edge. And as the competitive nature of the market and the rate of change accelerate, it is only people, the people you employ, that will really make the difference in the way you run your business. The book is a source of ideas for all those who have the task of leading people, whether CEO of a large corporation, the manager of a site or the supervisor of a small department, whether you are in HR or training. And it matters not whether you are in the private sector, the public arena, a government employee or a charity worker, developing people will be a key asset in your tool box. So, whatever the size or nature of your task, the basic principles outlined in this book remain true, that you have undeveloped talent working for you, that with a little care and attention will become a far greater asset in your operation. In fact, you are sitting on a gold mine. This book will help you to release those assets. You can of course use the whole conceptual framework of the book. But I suggest that in any management strategy, there is no one size that fits all. I suggest therefore that you use it as a resource, a book of ideas. Read it with a highlighter in hand, dog-ear the pages and scribble in the margins. Pull out those ideas that are valuable to you, that will make sense in your organization, or that you can 1

2 Training with the Midas touch

adapt to your own circumstances. I hope you will find some useful recipes that suit your tastes. As an aid to learning and thinking, the final chapter provides a review of the major points contained in the book. This provides a practical aide-mémoire and is to assist you to develop your own thoughts and an action plan for a strategy that will work for you and for your people.

Human capital – your accumulating asset

3

1

Human capital – your accumulating asset

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure . . . We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God . . . We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. Marianne Williamson1

If we accept that the above is correct and that there is a star in all of us, why are we so bad as organizations at uncovering and developing those talents? Why don’t we employ a department full of stars, who are exercising their talents in the course of their work and hence adding a much greater value to the work they produce? It has been one of the Holy Grails of management for the past 50 years, and particularly in the past 10, to search for a way to harness the hearts and minds of everyone at work.To possess a well-motivated, trained and focused workforce all pointing in the same direction is the dream of every CEO. As we proceed through the chapters of this book, we shall examine not only why we need to do this but also how we can help this to happen. Because in today’s corporate world, those who continue to ignore this vital element in organizations will end up in a state of mediocrity. And mediocrity will lead to failure and demise. Of all the capital we employ within an organization, it is the human capital that will take us on a real journey of improvement. 1

This quote is often found on the Internet incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela from his 1994 Inaugural speech. It is from Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love (1992) published by Thorsons. 3


When we first consider the concept of humans as capital, we may believe that we are diminishing people to a bottom-line figure, a column in the accountant’s spreadsheet. We are finally taking the people out of people management and relegating them to numbers. But in fact, the opposite is true. By considering people as capital, we are at last recognizing the value that the individual brings to the place of work. Here, finally, we are attempting to give credence to the value of people and the talents they possess. The story, with which you may be familiar, goes like this. Accountants have traditionally valued a company on its fixed assets, the buildings, machinery, land and other capital assets.This was fine whilst organizations continued to use these as the primary means of production. For instance, a manufacturing plant sitting on a piece of land has a set of physical assets with a value. But as organizations increasingly outsource more of their production and become more knowledgebased in their operations, this becomes increasingly difficult. If we consider a software producer – for instance, Microsoft – the value of their physical assets is quite small when compared to their market value.The source of their inherent value lies not in the bricks and mortar, but mainly in the human capital they employ. Hence, more organizations are waking up to the idea that a large proportion of their value is within the human capital, the intellectual capital and the knowledge that is locked away in their employees’ heads. That Aha! moment has arrived. We can no longer remain locked into the mindset of repeating the platitude that people are our most important assets, yet doing nothing concrete to demonstrate that statement.We are now moving to a point where we must do something positive to retain and increase the value of those assets. Human capital, then, becomes a useful phrase for us in considering the people we employ. Unlike the majority of other assets, which are set on a course of depreciation the minute they are purchased, human capital is one of the few assets that can and will appreciate in value given the right opportunity and development. And the time is never better! There are a number of very compelling reasons for all organizations to wake up to the need to do something serious and meaningful in the way they develop and employ their people. A number of substantial trends have emerged that, when taken together, indicate that those organizations that don’t wake up to the new realities in the workplace may find they are no longer in the game.

Human capital – your accumulating asset 5

Attracting and retaining talent Much attention has been focused recently on the issue of attracting and retaining talent. Full employment has found several economies with severe labour shortages, notably the United States, creating skills gaps in organizations which impede growth.The phrase War on Talent has entered the corporate vocabulary. Note that there are two problems here: the first is to attract the talent to begin with and the second to retain that talent. But the world economy is currently in a downward trend.Won’t this enable us all to avoid the talent war as more good people hit the market as a result of redundancy and downturn? This may be only partially true, if and when it happens. The phenomenon of talent shortage is not solely a result of full employment. Most recruitment consultants and those involved with employment will tell you that it is always a difficult process to find the right fit of skills, education, experience and personality to match a client’s expectations. Good talent has always been and always will be short.The buoyant economy has simply brought the problem into a sharper focus. There are no inexhaustible supplies of talent out there in the market. Organizations that want to grow and improve their performance are going to have to be responsible for growing more of their own talent.

The knowledge-based economy In western markets, we are moving increasingly to knowledge-based economies. The employment of people with knowledge, those who create and retain that knowledge, is the key to adding value.The use of manual skills to create wealth is less and less of an attractive or realistic option in western economies. We are now employing people for what they know, more specialists, reservoirs of specific knowledge that become key to improving the organization’s success. The advances in IT, technology and globalization have all contributed to this trend. This means that the human capital we employ now becomes a more valuable asset and more unique. It is one of the reasons why the idea of human capital as a valuation concept has arisen. Suddenly, we can no longer go to the employment agency and replace a leaver with an individual with similar skills. Attracting and retaining the right talent within our organizations becomes a critical agenda item. Making things is no longer sexy, knowing things is.


The greying workforce Likewise in mature economies, the population is ageing. As birth rates fall to critical levels in Europe, the United States and Japan, as well as in other economies, the number of young people entering the workforce is dwindling. This places an additional burden on organizations that no longer have the supply of new and younger employees to recruit and develop.This demographic trend has substantial implications not only for national economies but also for the employer. It means that organizations will have to spend more time developing and nurturing the talent they already possess. The next intake of bright young things is no longer there unless you are an employer of choice.

Becoming an employer of choice As the competition for well-trained and talented individuals increases, it is only through becoming an employer of choice that organizations can attract the right calibre of people. Becoming an employer of choice will involve many aspects of the employer– employee relationship. And one critical component will be providing the right encouragement in training, development and growth. We shall discuss later how the expectation of this aspect of employment is high on employee’s personal agendas.

Profit The above reasons are compelling arguments for devoting more resource and energy to the development of our human capital. But for the commercial sector, there is an even more compelling reason. There are no surprises for many to hear that organizations that devote their energies to their people reap the reward in better profits. And yet it is only recently that substantial surveys have come forward with the evidence to show that this can be regarded as true.This book is not going to contain lots of statistics and surveys. But this one is worth particular note. A survey commissioned by the Institute of Personnel and Development (1997) from the Institute of Work Psychology at The University of Sheffield gathered data from an intensive 10-year study of over a hundred small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in the UK.The survey posed four questions. These concerned the effect on company perform-

Human capital – your accumulating asset 7

ance of, firstly, employee attitudes, secondly, organizational culture, thirdly, HRM practices and, fourthly, which managerial practices are most important in predicting company performance.We shall concentrate upon the third question, which reads: Do Human Resource Management practices explain variation between companies in profit and productivity? The report states: When we examine change in profitability after controlling for prior profitability, the results reveal that human resource management (HRM) practices taken together explain 19% of the variation between companies in change in profitability. Job design (flexibility and responsibility of shopfloor jobs) and acquisition and development of skills (selection, induction, training and appraisal) explain a significant amount of the variation. This demonstrates the importance of HRM practices. In relation to productivity, HRM practices taken together account for 18% of the variation between companies in change in productivity. Job design and acquisition and development of skills explain a significant proportion of the variation.This is the most convincing demonstration of which we are aware in the research literature of the link between the management of people and the performance of companies. The survey drew attention to the two clusters that were particularly significant – job design and the acquisition and development of employee skills. Yet it is interesting that organizations continue to ignore these as value-added activities. And it is particularly interesting that organizations are ignoring it at this point in time. Continuing downsizing and trimming of fat has left some organizations so thin that they may face the prospect of corporate anorexia. With this thinning process, each individual becomes a critical key component in the organizational machine. This is reflected in the concerns over attracting and retaining talent. And the movement towards knowledge-based organizations only reinforces the critical nature of each employee. As we have also seen, the supply of younger employees is diminishing. At the same time, organizations are seeking to elicit more commitment from their employees.Whilst this is the desire of organizations, emerging data suggests that the individuals may feel different about things. A number of recent surveys are suggesting that employee loyalty is falling and more employees feel disengaged from their employers than ever before. So, there are good reasons at this point in time for us to commit more energy and resources to the development of our people.These are the corporate reasons


for considering robust action in developing our people. In the next chapter we shall look at it from the employees’ point of view and examine some of the trends in employee expectation that make this activity even more critical. As we progress to consider the question of developing the organization’s greatest asset, let us continue to hold the thought that there are very good reasons, economic factors as well as profit-driven motives, for doing this. Organizations exist in the commercial sector to make gold. What we shall see over the forthcoming chapters is that much of the gold an organization has at its disposal is left lying on the ground or buried – undiscovered and undeveloped. It is sometimes only when other organizations come along and spot that potential and mine that gold that we realize what we didn’t appreciate in the first place, our greatest appreciating asset.

Alchemy – base metals into gold 9

2

Alchemy – base metals into gold

I think any company that’s trying to play in the 1990’s has got to find a way to engage the mind of every single employee. . . If you’re not thinking all the time about making every person more valuable, you don’t have a chance.What’s the alternative: wasted minds? uninvolved people? a labour force that’s angry and bored? That doesn’t make sense. If you’ve got a better way, show me. I’d love to know what it is. Jack Welch, quoted in Tichy and Sherman (1992)

We have seen in the last chapter that there are compelling and valid reasons for organizations to give more attention to the human capital they employ. In any organization, there will be talent that lies buried, undiscovered and undeveloped. It is surprising that we allow this to happen, as the salary costs for most organizations are the highest budgetary item. And yet many continue to ignore this source of added value and look upon it solely as cost. The mystery is that many organizations recognize that their major challenge is to engage all employees. It preoccupies a lot of management time and thinking but often does not seem to materialize into a concrete reality. The concept of human capital may help us to change the corporate mindsets on how we treat and develop our people. And this concept may allow us to move the value of people – and how we increase that value – further up the management agenda. It is, however, easy to say that we should be doing this in the cosy confines of a book. The reality of everyday corporate life provides many distractions and hindrances to prevent it happening. We shall progress to review some of the good excuses shortly.

9


As we start to consider the benefits of training with the Midas touch, a useful analogy we shall use is alchemy. Alchemy was the ancient art devoted to turning base metals into gold. Originally from ancient Egypt and China, it flourished in the Middle Ages as alchemists searched for the philosopher’s stone, a substance purer than gold that would turn lower metals into gold.They believed that gold was formed in the earth from baser metals and that there must therefore be a way to replicate what nature was doing. Despite the mystery and intrigue that surrounded much of this activity, it was from the roots of alchemy that chemistry was born. We are not going to find a philosopher’s stone. But the analogy is useful for thinking about the base metals, the raw materials that we have working in our organizations that we can use and develop far more effectively.We need to start to experiment with alchemy. But first, those excuses . . .

Why we don’t do it . . . There are lots of good reasons why we do not spend the right amount of time developing our human capital, even when we recognize the importance of this task. Below are some of the common hindrances we experience.

Priorities and pressure There are all sorts of driving priorities and pressures that arrive every day. Suddenly, we are faced with an urgent crisis that demands immediate attention and must be dealt with. Our days become more filled with these. As the pace within organizations speeds up, these become more common. Good intentions are crowded out by the noise of the day. Firefighting becomes the accepted process. The time to plan and take time out with our people is at too much of a premium. Our staff can wait, the customer won’t. As Ulrich (2001) states, ‘Change has been the metaphor for the past decade. Now it is speed.’ A sense of urgency is demanded in all that we do at work. Pace is therefore likely to get faster, worse rather than better in terms of pressure on management. And with this arises a contradiction. As the pace increases, we shall need more flexible, versatile and better-trained employees. The pace of activity will, however, give less opportunity for time and attention to be devoted to human capital. It is important that this dilemma of time and pace is recognized and confronted. Short-term planning adds to this dilemma.With the pressure for short-term results upon us, it is harder to invest the energy and time we should do to


develop our people. Short-term results become the main driver.The expectation of improving someone’s performance and capability over a longer time frame does not always fit comfortably into this short-term cycle.

Focus on task, not process It is easy to see the bottom-line results of gaining another order, despatching a product, increasing output, or reducing costs.These are measurable and tangible. They are tasks and no one cares how they get done, so long as they happen. This can divert our attention from the process, the way people work and what they are personally achieving. There is a need to concentrate on process, and not solely on task. In moving from task to process, the question we need to ask is not what gets done but how we achieve it, that is, how we achieve it through our people. If we look at how it happens, we shall be able to look at behaviour, attitude and how employees are applying their skills. Through this means, we can make improvements to ensure that the task is completed more effectively in the future.

No budget There’s no money in the budget for training this year. It’s the greatest excuse for not thinking about your people development. No one in higher management is going to castigate anyone for not training.The decision has been taken out of the hands of the line manager because there is no money for training. It is true that no budget means no expensive training courses. But there are other ways to train and develop people and we shall look in later chapters at how you can very easily develop people without a budget. If you want to hold on to this excuse, stop reading now!

No corporate objective on training Linked to the above reason is the situation where there is no specific corporate initiative or objective in place to encourage the training and development of staff. This is akin to saying there is no corporate objective for managers to maximize their use of information technology (IT). Organizations take it as read that their managers will be doing this. And so it should be with people development. The competitive advantage an organization can achieve by improving its people is much greater than the advantage it can achieve via IT. (This is because competitors will soon catch up with any IT initiatives your


organization implements – it is far harder for them to catch up with the better quality of your people.) The lack of a specific corporate objective or process to facilitate training does not provide an excuse for not developing our human capital. It is an integral part of the manager’s role.

It’s an HR role Training and development is what the guys and gals down in HR do. If you need a course or any help with your people you can get HR involved. People development is often not seen as a line manager’s role. Having a specialist department provides an escape clause. But just as IT departments can’t improve your personal exploitation of IT, so the HR department can’t develop your people. Both departments can put in new systems to assist in this process of improvement. But that is as far as their input can go.The maximization of people remains a line management function.

Leave me alone, I’m happy doing what I’m doing It is easy to believe that those employees who don’t complain about their lot, those who do not raise the question of development, are happy doing what they are doing. Why disturb the status quo? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But what is going on beneath the surface? It is analogous to the car that hasn’t been serviced for a long time. It doesn’t show any sign of trouble and it’s still going fine.We know that this negligent approach doesn’t work for long and that sooner or later a breakdown will occur. Likewise, the same will happen with our people. The breakdown could manifest itself as stress, reduced effectiveness, sickness absence or leaving the organization altogether. When a person leaves an organization, there is the painful experience of finding a replacement. The car analogy is a good one to continue to consider. Finding a new member of staff is similar to buying a second-hand car. You experience a lot of hassle looking for the right specification of model.You seem to have to compromise and can’t find exactly what you want.Will it be reliable, where has it been before, are you getting what you believe you are getting? It takes a lot of time, energy and work before you get to the point of decision and finally make your purchase. In the cases of both the car and the person, the investment in regular maintenance pays off.


. . . And why we should do it – managing expectations There are some good excuses for not spending time on our people. But the scales are turning.We looked in the last chapter at some very good reasons from the organization’s perspective why we now need to spend this time on our people.There are also some very good reasons from the employee’s perspective for us needing to do this. And a lot of these reasons are to do with the expectations that employees now have of their workplace. People are now earnestly seeking development at work. It is becoming an integral part of their agenda. A large percentage of current surveys on people at work, on motivation and good employment practices cite development as high on the employee’s list. To quote just one of these from the United States, Kaye and Jordan-Evans (1999) in their book, Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, list from their research the most common reasons why people stay with an organization. Listed in order of popularity and frequency, the first 6 of 18 reasons read: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Career growth, learning and development. Exciting work and challenge. Meaningful work, making a difference and a contribution. Great people. Being part of a team. Good boss.

They report that 90 per cent of respondents listed at least one of the first three items among the top three or four reasons they stayed. All of these top half a dozen reasons point strongly to the need to pay careful and individual attention to our human capital. It is interesting to note that pay, fringe benefits and working conditions are not in the higher rankings of the survey. Fair pay and benefits are ranked at number 11, with working conditions at 14. From another perspective, a recent government initiative in the UK, the DTI report, Partnerships with People (1997), outlines the importance of putting people at the centre. It advocates five paths to sustained success: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Shared Goals – understanding the business we are in. Shared Culture – agreed values binding us together. Shared Learning – continuously improving ourselves. Shared Effort – one business driven by flexible teams. Shared Information – effective communication throughout the organization.


One of the qualities that it lists from the best practice organizations participating in the study is that ‘they are organizations who train and educate all their employees – not just for today’s markets but for the future as well’ (my italics). The Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998, the largest survey of its kind in the world, provides strong evidence that ‘high performance people management practices are associated with better economic performance, better workplace well-being and a better climate of industrial relations.The following people management policies were found to be particularly important: off-the-job training, regular performance appraisals, team working, no compulsory redundancies, problem-solving groups and family friendly working arrangements.’ In the UK, unions are also waking up to the idea of learning. They are now training Learning Representatives, people who are there to ensure that members will receive the skills they need. Having gained acceptable standards of living for their membership, they are now turning their attentions in new directions and placing learning on the agenda. The above instances are only a small number of snapshots that are included to reflect how different stakeholders are viewing the importance of development in the workplace.

The new psychological contract The nature of work has changed dramatically within the past 20 years. The security of a job for life has gone. Whole industry sectors have disappeared throughout the western world. The idea of joining a stable organization and progressing through its hierarchy has been replaced by careers in interim management, temporary or part-time employment, portfolio careers. Redundancy is as common in professions as in blue-collar sectors. No one’s job is safe any more.The tacit understandings between employer and employee have been replaced with a far more uncertain world. Employee loyalty and commitment are diminishing. The large number of mergers, acquisitions, globalization, downsizing and de-layering of organizations leaves a workforce wondering what will happen next and one that is unsure it wishes to make a personal commitment to the organization. Employees are now seeking an employer who cares, not only about them personally, but also about their personal development and growth. A new item is now firmly in their agenda. As Will Hutton expresses it (2000),‘The employer who offers to develop the workforce, allowing employees the chance to grow creatively and stretch themselves is the employer who will win competitive advantage.’ The new agenda is how can you help me to grow and become a better, more fulfilled person? Do you, as a prospective employer, have the capability and processes to help me in my development?


And that development is an individual issue. As Peter Drucker has remarked, you cannot manage people, only lead them. That insight is even more valuable as a way forward for us as we seek to harness our employees and help them to develop. As an adage, it helps us tremendously to understand and work within the new psychological contract in a more focused way. And there are new expectations from new generations. Generation X no longer comes with built-in loyalty to an organization. Nurtured in an era of reducing security, both within organizations and within families, they are seeking what is best for them. And just as we are starting to recognize and deal those challenges, here comes Generation E, who will have a whole new set of aspirations and judgements on the workplace.

I want a fat salary, a signing bonus and a cappuccino machine. Oh, and I’m bringing my bird to work. I’m the New Organization Man. You need me. Robert Ziche, cover of Fortune, 16 March 1998, from Kaye and Jordan-Evans (1999) It is fair to say therefore that expectations have changed for many individuals in the workplace. The needs of people in a western economy where standards of living have risen to a point where material goods can no longer be the sole satisfaction derived from life and work. People are seeking more in their lives, a spiritual and meaningful dimension in both their personal lives and the world of work. Compensation is still important. But what follows? There is an alternative set of rewards being sought. The questions, Who am I? Where am I going? and How do I get there? become more commonly asked questions. Inner meaning and peace are climbing up the ladder of expectation and crawling into the corporation. The question resonates: ‘I need to earn at a certain level but my own sense of worth and fulfilment are equally important to me. And if this corporation can’t meet that need, I will move to one that can.’We are coming to a place where the corporation is no longer in the strong buyer’s market and the sellers are getting more demanding every day. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in self-improvement literature. This explosion underlines the fact that people are seeking a better understanding of themselves and a more meaningful existence. A spiritual dimension to life has become the Holy Grail for many. Growth, development, self-improvement and recognition, all recurrent themes within this book, are now high on many personal agendas.


The idea of individual training and development in a more holistic sense is not a new one. As early as the turn of the last century, Rowntree, the chocolate manufacturers, were setting up new factories and became aware of the need to train their younger staff. As more young girls were employed in their factories, the company was aware that these people would not have the chance to develop the necessary domestic skills they would require in later life to run a home. The company set up classes and these employees were paid for two hours a week and obliged to attend domestic school to learn these skills. Physical training classes were introduced for boys and these were later supplemented with classes in Maths, English and Woodwork, all in paid company time. Cadbury’s were undertaking similar activities. In the book Industrial Challenge (1964), there is a clear summary of how this development activity had evolved into the 1960s. They report a whole range of development activities for their young people, from induction through factory and office training, apprenticeships, college schemes, supervisory and management training, scholarships, works clubs and institutes, Outward Bound, Duke of Edinburgh schemes, weekend and overseas expeditions. These are not activities that are the preserve solely of workplace training for specific jobs. As the writer states, ‘A society with full employment has accentuated the need to search out and develop those with ability, in order that they in their turn may best contribute to the competitive efficiency of the firm.’ It sounds a familiar call.

Continuous improvement The Total Quality movement of the early 1990s taught organizations the need to move from steady-state thinking to continuously improve their processes and products and to engage all employees in the business. At the same time, the theme of constant lifelong learning emerged, the need to transform, update and retrain ourselves and our organizations constantly. The lifelong career was disappearing.We would all be retraining into something new and different every few years.These undercurrents in society and the growing speed of change have nurtured in people the desire to move onwards and upwards in their own growth. Hierarchies are now much shallower in the workplace as organizations have de-layered.The opportunity for regular movement upwards within this hierarchy has been replaced by the desire to grow within. It is a mistake to believe that we can ask people constantly to change their skill sets and mental maps of the


organization yet expect them to remain in a state of contentment and readiness for the next change.That does not work. Expectation cannot be in one direction only. People are demanding that the organization takes some notice of their agenda. Employees and prospective members of the organization are asking for something in the other direction and underlining that this new contract has to be a two-way street. The best practice concepts of continuous improvement and lifelong learning have raised the expectations of today’s employees. Those organizations that fail to recognize these expectations will remain marginalized in their competitive advantage.

Homogeneity Against this background of the individual seeking recognition is a force working in the other direction. Globalization is bringing more sameness to the world. Diversity and cultural difference are being swallowed in a bid to make every market homogeneous. Many worldwide brands such as Coke and Microsoft are making everything look the same. McDonald’s prides itself in a customer having the same consistent quality of eating experience, whether in the United States, Russia or Mexico. A can of Coke is ostensibly the same, or its makers want it to be, anywhere in the world. When we buy apples from the supermarket, we are used to them being of the same uniform size, blemish free. Compare these with any home-grown food that comes complete with maggot bites, variations in size and ripeness (and normally more taste). Chickens on the supermarket shelves are remarkably concentric in their weight. We are growing used to homogeneity and our experiences are teaching us to expect this. Products are available all year around. The seasonal nature of food has disappeared. We can eat grapes whenever we wish to do so. There are signs that more and more people are growing discontented with this trend. The protests at recent G8 summits, such as were seen in Seattle and Genoa, span a range of pressure groups. As well as including violent, activist and off-centre political groups, more moderate sensitivities are also joining in the desire to change the shape of the world. There may be a common theme, the concentration of power in large corporations, the globalization of product and the loss of the individual in the midst of all this. These are new issues for us all to face on a global scale. But they are also issues coming into the places of work. A part of this message is that the individual counts and requires that someone pay attention to him or her. Alchemy may provide some answers for organizations in harnessing this desire of the individual to be counted.


Homogeneous human resources (H²R) Can we say that such a trend is something to take seriously in the workplace? It is certainly an undercurrent that needs to be considered. There is a danger within this trend of ‘sameness’ that we homogenize our human resources. We count them as all the same. We take a group of sales assistants, look at the skills they need to do their jobs, put them all through the same training course and expect them all to perform the same, We are surprised when they don’t! We reinforce this by the provision of the same uniforms and same corporate image. We want the customer to believe in our identity, to relate to it and to gain security by seeing the bank teller in one town in the same uniform as another town.We do this for all the right reasons; organizations need to promote an identity, to have a presence that customers and clients can relate to. But at a subconscious level, it does encourage us to put a label on our people. We see a group of nurses, a department of clerks, a section of factory operatives, an office of programmers as a group of homogeneous people who all have the same values, training, backgrounds and drives.This is where we lose our sense of the individual, the special skills and talents we can develop and bring out in that person. This idea of homogeneity is reinforced in our language.We talk of pedestrians, drivers, homeowners, drinkers and other generic terms to refer to groups. The fact is that these groups share only one commonality, eg they own a house or they drive a car. Likewise with our staff, they share only one common factor – their job title. Just as all drivers are different, so are all sales assistants, managers, call centre clerks. It is easy to fall into this trap of sticking our staff into pigeon-holes. And once we stick them in there, it’s sometimes difficult to pull them out again. Mission statements, corporate values, and competencies all are there for the right reasons, to give the organization a sense of identity and cohesiveness, and we can give much greater focus to our endeavours by these means. But there is also the danger of swallowing the inherent talents and individuality of the person if we do not allow the individual to flourish within the culture. As Ridderstråle and Nordström (2000) say, ‘To attract and retain good men and women, we have to treat them as individuals. . . We are moving towards one-to-one leadership. The consequence is that each and every little system needs to be personalized.’ It is easy to fall into the trap of ‘same skills’ training for all. We attempt to give everyone the portfolio of skills that a particular job requires without paying attention to the inherent skills of the individual; that is, we assume we are starting from a common base. For example, if the organization requires frontline staff with superb customer service skills, we must recruit those who have this natural


ability. It is useless to try to give these skills to someone who is not really interested in customer service. Because the result is one we are all familiar with: the sales assistant we meet in the store who gives us a cursory ‘Can I help you’ but has no tone or enthusiasm in his or her voice. This is the danger of ‘same skills’ training, if the base from which the individual is coming has been ignored. An organization must, if it is to thrive and encourage creativity amongst its employees, think of them as individuals. A useful analogy is to think of the organization as a garden. It has a range of different shrubs and plants, perennials as well as annuals, high and low plants of different colours, that thrive in different soils.The alternative view is a field of homogeneous plants, all the same, all from the same seed, grown with the same fertilizer and the same insecticide to produce the same results. That situation is acceptable so long as everything remains constant – customer demand remains the same, the climate doesn’t change. Of course, that is not the reality facing organizations. The challenge facing organizations is to have flexible creative people who can respond to rapid changes in the market and the climate. The serried rows of plants in the field don’t stand the same chance of adapting to changes that the variegated garden does. So when we are considering the development of our staff, we must avoid homogenizing our human resources. We can encapsulate that thought in a formula: Success = / H²R that is, success does not equal homogenized human resources. This is a useful aide-mémoire to keep in mind when considering the development needs of staff. By retaining this thought, there is less likelihood of reaching for the off-thepeg training solutions applied across a group of people, which are widely used and which are in general ineffective at producing the changes in performance they promise. We must conclude that all stakeholders of the organization are taking a far greater interest in the development of human capital. As we have seen earlier, employers are seeking a greater recognition from their employees in the issues of growth and development. There is best practice interest from governments seeking to improve economic growth and the trade union movement is putting it firmly on its agenda. And the ideas associated with human capital as a valued resource on the balance sheet are becoming more commonly held. Shareholders are therefore paying more attention to the human capital angle and annual reports are nowadays more likely to contain statements on people development. It is now up to the organization to be attentive and to encourage managers to invest more time and attention in their human capital. We need more


managers who are alchemists, who are prepared to look at their staff as individuals. And that means all of their staff, not just the shining golden boys and girls but the base metals also. If we are to move our organizations forward through better training and development, we will not do this by concentrating only on the seniors.The juniors have a life also, and they have an inherent value, a human capital value, often overlooked and not developed to its full potential.

Midas Miracle Pharmeceuticals We finish this chapter by considering a fictitious case study concerning some of these issues. Midas Miracle Pharmaceuticals has two plants. Plant A is in a large town, which is situated in the hills of Northern England. It is a 50-mile ride to the nearest city along winding roads. Because of its isolation, nearly all the employees at the plant come from the town. Plant B is on the outskirts of a provincial city.There is a lot more competition for labour, hence Plant B employs people from a much broader spectrum of experience. We are going to consider the training needs within the laboratory of each plant. Both laboratories do the same work.They receive samples from the preparation department, do tests on the quality of the product and then pass those tests on to the order processing department, who release the order. Both plants have problems of uneven workflow throughout different periods of the year. The laboratories have been identified as the bottleneck causing delays to customer deliveries at peak times of the year.The managers of both laboratories have been asked to set up a problem-solving team to come up with some solutions. Plant A’s manager has been in post for nine years. All of his four staff are male. His group have all attended the same school and college in the town and have all completed the company’s apprentice training programme.Their values and outlook on life are very similar and many share social activities in the area. We can represent their entry into this group as five parallel lines (see Figure 2.1). Plant B is different.The backgrounds of the members of the laboratory vary considerably and their direction of entry into the group is far more diverse. Josie was born in South Africa and moved to the UK to take her degree at a red-brick university. She travelled for a year doing voluntary service in South America before settling in the UK, went through the company’s graduate training programme and has been manager of the laboratory for a year. She is taking a short course with the Open University in managing people. Olaf is a displaced refugee from Eastern Europe where he worked in agricultural engineering. He has taken a two-year course in electronics since


A

B

Figure 2.1 Diversity circles arriving in Britain and has developed an interest in computing. Josie has given him a number of special projects in the department to develop the computer systems in order to improve the speed of logging test results. Tony is local. After leaving school at 16, he did manual work for three years before joining as a lab assistant and has been sponsored to study part-time for a certificate in chemistry. He is being coached by Olaf, in order to develop his computer skills. Anika is from a family of nine. She is a second-generation immigrant from the Caribbean who trained as a nurse. She transferred into laboratory work in the hospital and then into Midas two months ago. She has no formal qualifications other than nursing but is spending a half-day a week on an orientation course. Josie is keen to see that she receives a good overview of the plant’s operations and structure as a part of her first move into industry. Darren moved from Scotland four years ago, where he ran his own business selling pharmaceuticals. He has a degree in chemical engineering. Josie has asked him to contribute to a cross-functional team that is looking at improved maintenance processes in the plant. Darren’s degree is a useful knowledge base for the group. He is gaining a lot of personal satisfaction from this group, developing his skills of working in groups and is making a lot of useful suggestions. We can represent the entry of the individuals into this group as far more diverse, the lines coming in from a number of directions.The manager of Plant B instinctively recognizes this diversity of background. See Figure 2.1. The two groups approach the problem of the bottleneck in different ways. The laboratory manager of Plant A has tried to maintain a stable group. Two members of his department have tried for posts elsewhere in the plant in the past two years, one wanting to move into marketing, as he believed he had good customer and interpersonal skills that could be put to good use in this function. Another had applied for a programmer’s job in the IT department as he wished


to develop his talents for program development. He has produced some programs in his spare time for a games manufacturer. Both were encouraged to stay in the laboratory by the manager. He promoted them to test engineers and brought in a common job description and grading across the department. This gave them both salary rises.The new grading structure brought an ordered view of all jobs across the department.They stayed. But they are no longer happy in their work and feel under-utilized. The manager doesn’t believe that any of his staff need any further training, as all are proficient in their jobs. He does ensure that each of them gets to a technical seminar or exhibition every year as a reward for their loyalty and to ensure that each has an entry in the organization’s training plan. The group in Plant A decides that they will accept the manager’s suggestion to overcome the bottleneck by working more overtime on an organized rota basis. They set up the rota of availability on weekends to handle the peaks of work. The proposal is agreed but there is not a lot of enthusiasm for it. The manager agrees to give time off in lieu for this work at quieter periods. It does provide a solution but in reality it is only half a solution and it does not tackle the root cause of the problem. Plant B has a more dynamic solution. The manager sets out to put in a failsafe way to ensure that customer deliveries are not delayed.The group members, who have a diverse background of experience and knowledge, bring a lot of fresh and different perspectives to the issue. After generating a lot of novel ideas, they decide to combine the preparation department and laboratory into one new department, which will be called Analysis Services.They propose to crosstrain members of both departments to do one another’s work. A flexible number of employees can then follow the work through the process. The two departments will be physically united. The group has produced a skills matrix to identify who can already perform which tasks. A training plan has also been produced to ensure that the training gaps in the new structure will be closed. This training will be built into the individual’s development plans, which their manager has already formulated with them. The preparation department is brought into the problem-solving group and agrees to the solution. All have bought in to the solution, which will offer more variety of work, less overtime and increased skills.

Lessons Manager A has made a number of fundamental errors in managing his people. He has practised what we will call ‘individual discrimination’. In his mind, he has seen his group as homogeneous and has deliberately set about making them


so, with a common job description and job title. He has blatantly manipulated the progress of individuals who wanted to move to develop their skills elsewhere. On the surface, the department works. It is stable and the members are well paid. But the members of the department are not motivated or committed in their work. The solution to the bottleneck problem is the last straw for two of them. Soon, he will lose two staff members and will find it hard to understand why well-paid, long-serving people are leaving him. In their book, First, Break All the Rules, Buckingham and Coffman (1999) formulate a list of 12 questions to measure the strength of a workplace, ‘the core elements needed to attract, focus and keep the most talented employees’. One of those questions is ‘At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?’ That is a great question to keep in mind when searching for the talents and skills that your staff may possess. The manager of Plant B does in some ways have an advantage. Employing a department of different backgrounds, both ethnically and of experience, it is easier to think of her staff as individuals, owing to their differences in experience, accents, physique, backgrounds etc. It is easier to see the diversity that is available and to build on that richness. Manager A has been hoodwinked into a sense of believing that all of his staff are the same, because of their shared background and experiences. It is true that they will be more similar than the more diverse group at Plant B. However, they will certainly not have the same abilities and talents as one another.The manager does not set about identifying, developing and encouraging the talent he has at his disposal. And the company ends up losing two employees whose talents could have been used in different departments. The idea of the diversity circle is a useful way to consider where your human capital is drawn from. It can be used on a departmental or an organizational level to think generally about the sources of recruitment into a group and whether you are limiting the diversity of your employee base by relying too much on tried and trusted sources of recruitment. Finally, the manager of Plant B is an alchemist. She has already got her staff doing a number of activities to develop their skills. She does not know precisely where this will lead but she does recognize these talents and is setting about developing them. She recognizes that individuals do have different talents and is helping these individuals to achieve in these areas. She is doing this irrespective of their level in the hierarchy and is developing all, not just the senior stars. By developing her people and recognizing their individuality she is not only building up the loyalty of her staff but is also promoting new and fresh ways of thinking. And she is meeting the individual’s desire for personal growth. Alchemy is at work.


3

Finding the nuggets

There is something rarer than ability It is the ability to recognize ability. Elbert Hubbard

If we accept that each individual counts and has talents to offer, how do we start to discover these talents and develop them? How can we tap into these assets, increase their value and use them to add value to the organization? When someone goes searching for gold, the appearance of the landscape won’t necessarily tell the prospector where to start his or her gold mine. What lies underneath the earth? It may appear as a barren, dry piece of land or an impenetrable forest. It is only through techniques of exploration, data analysis, divining, excavation, hunch and other means that the prospector eventually makes his or her discovery. So, how do we do this with the people we employ? How do we start the journey of identifying the potential that we have working for us and finding those nuggets and precious stones? There are some paths we can follow and in this chapter, we shall examine some of the techniques we can use to find that hidden gold.

Becoming a gold prospector Let’s review how you can start to identify the skills, talents and potential you have in your department or organization, how you can start to become a gold prospector, winkling out the nuggets that are littered around your organization. I also like the image of a truffle hunter, the person going off in the morning with his or her hound or pig to unearth a hidden treasure, sniffing out something of value and bringing it to the surface for others to benefit from. This is the 24

Finding the nuggets 25

task of anyone responsible for people, to find the possibilities and potential these individuals have that will bring benefit to the organization. Let us start with our intuition.This may seem an illogical place to start rather than with some factual sources, but we shall see that intuition is not about wild guesses. It concerns all the information you are about to gather together.

Intuition One situation we encounter in today’s management, which can be a block in our thinking about people’s potential, is the need for hard facts and data. All organizations are driven by data. What gets measured gets managed. Results, scores, accounts, market shares, ratios, metrics of every description are the stock in trade of management and we are surrounded by numbers and performancerelated criteria. And these do focus our attention. It is therefore only natural that we want to put a number or score against our people. How can we compare, manage and improve them if we don’t have a score? After all, this is what we have all experienced throughout the educational system.We have been subjected to tests, scores, grades and results, streamed and judged accordingly. However, that has not measured us as whole people. And when it comes to people, numbers can be misleading. This is not what we use in our day-to-day transactions with other people. Finding a mate, social interaction, all our interpersonal existence is done on the basis of a complex process of judgement and intuition. It is a part of our survival equipment. We are all capable of this and every time we meet someone, we are instantly starting to make judgements about that person’s suitability, personality, strengths, honesty, trust and myriad other factors. Apart from the exception of dealing with accomplished and consummate liars, most of us are capable of detecting the truth via the subtleties of speech, body language, posture, innuendo etc. This natural ability is what transpires when we get a surge of excitement in our stomach as we meet a loved one, or the hairs on the back of our neck rise when we feel threatened or in danger. The likelihood is that if you’ve survived this long, you know something about people! Don’t be afraid to use your intuition. In a world of data and information overload, it is very easy to feel uneasy if you haven’t got the ‘facts’ to back up your hunches. Of course, the more information we have, the better our judgements can be. But let us not undermine the importance of our gut feelings, our intuitive right brain sides.


It is interesting to look at the content of managers’ information and what they do with it. The evidence here is that a great deal of the manager’s inputs are soft and speculative – impressions and feelings about people, hearsay, gossip and so on. Furthermore the very analytical inputs – reports, documents and hard data in general – seem to be of very little importance to many managers. Mintzberg (1976) Intuition becomes increasingly useful the longer you work with a person. First impressions will count but when you have the opportunity to work with a colleague or member of staff, you will soon start to understand what makes them tick, how they operate, their strong areas and what talents they possess. The more you talk to them in an informal setting, either walking the job, over lunch, or at the water cooler, the more your picture of them will become more vivid and the detail clearer. This is why it is so important to have a continuing dialogue with staff. Limiting this to formal review processes doesn’t give you this vital informal feedback which is worth so much to you as their manager. When you walk the job, you see them in operation. What does their workstation look like? Are they tidy, are they struggling with a particular part of their work, are they getting help and encouragement from the right people? What does their body language say? Do they seem happy? Are they working too much on their own? A flood of information hits you that you then build into your data banks.The word you were given on this person as a hard-working member of staff is borne out by the fact they always seem to be working on something.Your judgement of them is reinforced. Intuition is often a matter of confidence, going with your hunch, and is perhaps far more widely used in management than we would like to admit. There may in fact be very valid reasons to give more credence to intuition in today’s corporate world. The planning processes of the post-war period have become less valid in a more chaotic and rapidly changing world. Long-term strategic planning, and shorter-term tactical planning as well, is increasingly less reliable as the previous steady state has disappeared, as global markets become far less stable.The lead times of product design to product launch become shorter and shorter, particularly with high-tech products. The time-consuming and patient market research we would like to do is no longer possible. Dealing with ambiguity is now an important management competence. Because of this changing world, an increasing use of intuition becomes necessary, whether we like it or not.


Remember that intuition is not just taking a wild guess.We often have some data to throw into the pot, as we shall discuss later on. Intuition is about taking the whole picture into account. There are some things that can help you to make intuitive judgements and which you may use already. For example, when exercising judgement, play around with the idea, look at it from a number of perspectives. Juggle it and meditate on it. Don’t be afraid to sleep on it. If you haven’t reached that level of comfort with your proposed decision, then let it stew a little longer. Talk to others about your thoughts and in the final analysis, don’t be afraid to go with your decision. Remember you are basing this on your own (and others’) views, experiences and education, in which you have put your trust in your life to date. Yes, but I’m still a little uncomfortable without data, you think. What other means do we have to start this process of mining the nuggets, of prospecting for diamonds, of hunting for the truffles?

A black and white photograph The first piece of information you are most likely to have is the person’s CV, résumé or application form. This is only a black and white picture. It will certainly tell you what education they have, the experience they have gained to date, hobbies and interests. It may also contain information on their accomplishments and perhaps a self-description, but a word of caution here. Job seekers are nowadays far more adept at glossing their CVs. They are not necessarily economical with the truth, but will use their CV far more as a marketing exercise than as the factual document it was 20 years ago. However, it is your starting point and will contain a lot of good base data. It is, both figuratively and tangibly, only a black and white picture. It does not tell you their preferred work style or learning style, what motivates and drives them, what makes them throw off the duvet in the morning to get to work, their talents. I have never, in 25 years of recruitment and HR work, seen a CV with a section marked talents! People will spell out their skills in a list, so why not their talents, that is, the inner natural abilities they possess?

Some other snapshots There may other documentation available. Records may exist on previous performance appraisals, performance management documents, key performance indicators, centralized records on education, courses attended, personnel records, training plans and other documentation unique to your organization.These are all data in helping you build a picture of your staff member. Remember that


previous performance-related documents from before your time will encompass others’ judgements about a person. Don’t see this as fact, firstly because you may not know what sort of relationship the person had with the appraiser, and secondly because people change. Your staff may have been involved in 360° feedback exercises. If so, this will be an invaluable source of information and will also mean that the individual already has some view on their strengths and how others perceive these.

Personality tests Many organizations use personality, psychometric or other tests to evaluate prospective and current employees. If your organization does, then you already have some good data from which to start your search. Typically, these tests will give personality profiles, an indicator of the skills and talents that make up the person. For instance, they may tell you about the person’s ability to work with detail, creativity, interpersonal skills, influencing style and learning preferences. This can be very helpful in deciding whether the person is in the right position where they can flourish, for there is nothing more frustrating than to mismatch an individual’s skills with those required by the job. Consider the person who is a great creative talent, has great ideas and loves to start up things, get things moving.They have buckets of ideas and can always see a new perspective on a problem. But they get bored with detail, they don’t like finishing off. Once the project is launched they are not interested in tying up all the loose ends and getting the product to market. You have employed them in the Marketing Department for their creative talent. But a part of their role is to do detailed analysis on the market sectors, combing statistical reports for trends and crunching large chunks of data to show trends and usage. They are at sea.This is their worst nightmare – care and detail and analysis.They have no talent for this and either avoid or mess up this part of the job. This match between a person’s make-up and the requirements of the job is the starting point. Because if there is a serious mismatch, no amount of development is going to put it right. If your staff have been through personality testing, they will once again already have a view as to their capabilities. This is useful to you because, like most of the suggestions in this chapter, it has started them on the process of selfawareness.

Formal meetings There are a number of formal occasions when a discussion can take place with an employee on their development. The first is the initial interview when you


first start to learn about the person. This is a fairly intense discussion, where you are trying to elicit a total view of an individual in a very short space of time. Another opportunity is the performance review meeting. This is likely to contain elements about past performance, future aims and objectives, and development needs. There may also be formal meetings of a counselling type or internal promotion boards when you have the opportunity to meet formally. The secret of these formal meetings is to make them as informal and open as possible. In such formal settings, individuals are very often protective or closed and guarded in their response. I recently interviewed a candidate who was totally adamant he was going to give away as little as possible during the interview. He sat with folded arms throughout the hour, giving short responses. Afterwards, when he saw that the formal interview had finished, he dropped his folded arms, dropped his guard, and started to talk socially – he became a totally different person. I learnt more about him in the final five minutes as we chatted than in the whole of the formal time together. He had switched his mindset from formal to informal status.

Asking others An invaluable source of information is from others that know your people. It is a fact that everyone likes to be asked their opinion, and particularly about other people. We will all have different views on a particular individual, but certain threads will normally emerge. By talking to six different people about a specific person, you will get six differing opinions. But you will get some qualitative information. And the important thing is that you make up your own mind on the individual’s capability. There is a danger in asking around for opinion. Sometimes, a person can become tarred with a ‘corporate brush’, an error that was made, a faux pas committed against an influential member of the company, a spell in a job for which they were not suited. But others who have known and worked with the individual can give you many insights into that person’s strengths. It is also more common these days for employees to do work for other managers, particularly with the wider use of matrix-style management structures, dotted-line responsibility to another functional manager, or a secondment to a project team or an assignment outside the normal area of work.These situations where your employee works for other groups or individuals can be useful sources of information on the employee’s potential.


Personal development portfolios/learning logs Larger organizations sometimes have a personal development portfolio or learning log that the employee maintains. These can come in many guises.The concept is for the individual to keep a record of their education, development, etc for their own personal benefit and as a record for them and the organization. They typically contain a CV, training courses attended, development goals and achievements to date, and can also include information on learning over the past year, major learning experiences that were not part of a formal development process. For instance, this could be something learnt outside work, ideas learnt from reading a book, information or skills learnt on the job from another person. For instance, in some countries, school-leavers now have a portfolio which includes such information as their school report, qualification certificates, achievements at school and other data. Professional institutes typically insist that student and graduate members record their training and developmental experiences so that they can be judged for corporate membership, and some institutes also go on further from there to encourage the recording of further ‘post-graduate’ developmental experiences as an aid to lifelong learning. Apprenticeships and on-the-job training certificates often call for portfolios of training and development to be recorded. These sources of information may be available to you for certain members of staff. If you are serious about developing your people and want to start to formalize this, such a system of learning logs or portfolios can be a good starting point. This sends the message that you are taking development seriously and that you want the individual to take some ownership of that process.

Skills audits Some larger organizations will have more sophisticated processes for identifying the talent and potential they employ.They may have performance management processes in place, succession planning models, and audits covering elements such as educational qualifications and skills, for example the number of employees speaking a particular language. Computerized personnel records allow such information to be accessed quickly from databases. But these do not give you a qualitative guide as to the makeup of the individual person. An easy way is to build your own skills audit, either for the department or for the whole organization. On an organizational level, this can be done effectively and easily via intranet processes. A simple way of identifying the talent within your area is given below. The process should be conducted on an open basis, giving employees the opportunity to fill in a pro forma, and then discussing their views with them. One idea


behind this is that very often, people will underrate themselves or may not have put a label on the skills they possess. For instance, someone who is a very good team player may never have expressed their ability to get along in team-working situations in this way. The identification of this skill could lead them to think more about the great contribution they could make in teams and to look for ways to express this in the organization or to develop this into a team leader or facilitator type of role. The following is a suggested list of headings that a skills audit could contain: l l l

Education: List all qualifications you have received to date. Training: Formal training courses completed during the past 10 years. Skills: List the main skills that you possess, eg presentation skills, IT, organizing, supervising. l Talents: Are there areas in or out of work for which you have found you have a particular gift? List all of these, for example sports, music, artistic qualities, design, creativity, listening etc. l Personal qualities: How would you describe yourself? Think about strengths, for example flexibility, integrity, trust, team working. You will see that there is some cross-over on the questions. Skills, talents and personal qualities will mean different things to different people. We are not looking for precision here as to whether the individual feels that working in a team is a skill, a talent or a personal quality. By providing a range of opportunities for the person to express their strengths, we are trying to tease out these areas that can then be used more productively and developed more effectively.

Skills matrices If your organization uses skills matrices, you will have access to a snapshot of the skills and knowledge in your area of operation. This gives a useful skills portfolio, indicating who has what skills and how they are spread. We shall talk later about the value of these matrices as a developmental process.

Career and life development essay The next exercise is a very powerful way to determine direction, life goals and self-awareness. This is not a ‘quick fix’ but quite a reflective exercise, which can be very helpful to a person wishing to determine their future direction. I recommend that you try this yourself before sharing it with staff. It is an ongoing process, something that has more value if reviewed each year. By this method,


the user builds up a picture of progress and what has happened, what has changed and what has been achieved. A most important part of the development process is to know oneself and to develop self-awareness. This understanding can then be linked into the organization and ways explored for mutually acceptable paths to pursue. The career and life development essay is a very useful methodology to facilitate this. Because it can be personal in some of its content, this is not something you should expect your staff to share automatically with you. Ooh! So, what use is it to me as manager? The benefit to you as a manager is that it gets your staff to think about their own development and desires. Try as you like, you cannot decide their future, their drives. They are internally created. All you can hope to do is to help the individual be more conscious and self-aware of what they have to offer and where they want to go. The exercise is reflective and they will wish to take it away, develop it and then you may find that they will return and share insights or components with you. Even if this doesn’t happen overtly, you have started their thinking processes. Another way of using it is to encourage your staff to share their essay with someone they trust or admire – a mentor in or out of work. It can also be used as part of a training course, where there is normally more of an element of trust and experimentation. The exercise is holistic; it does not deal solely with work. Nor should it, as it is about exploring me as a person, where I’ve been, where I’d like to go to, how do I get there, what are my strengths, my failings, my influences, likes and dislikes. Not everyone will feel comfortable with the exercise but I suggest that most people in any relatively responsible role will try it and benefit from it. I repeat that you should not expect instant results or feedback.There is a longerterm perspective in this exercise and it may be some time before those using it assimilate the information they are trawling up from within themselves. Finally, the exercise is not something to attempt over the lunch break. It is taxing, thought provoking and introspective. Because of this, I have indicated a natural break point. The exercise can then be administered in two parts, with a gap of a couple of weeks between handing over the two parts. Consider the following questions and answer honestly.The benefit of this exercise is in being open with yourself in determining your career and life development goals. There is a benefit in sharing this with a trusted friend, work colleague, partner or someone who knows you.You may wish to work on it until it shows the reality of what you truly believe is an accurate reflection of your situation. It should be written as an essay under the following sub-headings:


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Education: Describe your education to date, your achievements and satisfactions. Career to date: Describe your career to date, the turning points, the highs and lows. Skills abilities and talents:Talk about what you are good at, what comes naturally to you, activities in which you feel comfortable or that give you a buzz. Weaknesses: There are some things we all struggle with. Think about those areas where you feel vulnerable, less than comfortable. Are there things you can do to strengthen these areas? Personal characteristics: Describe yourself as a person. What would others say about you? Family: Describe your family and relationships with them. Influences: Who have been the greatest influences in your life, either by direct contact or indirectly by observing their lifestyle?

Break off at this point, if you wish, and then continue with the items below later. l

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What have been the biggest learning events in your life, the events that made you change the way you see the world? These may have been unpleasant as well as pleasant events, but they were things that made you grow. What brings you to life and what deadens you? Make two lists of these events. How do you get results in your life? Career goals: What are your career goals over the next year and the next five years? Personal goals: What are your personal goals over the next year and the next five years? How do you intend to achieve those career and life goals?

The 24-carat nuggets There will be some golden stars you possess already. Don’t overlook them just because they are good. Are you giving them their full opportunity to shine? Typical of this sort of gold is the person who goes the extra mile. That does not necessarily mean the person who works the longest hours. That could be down to inefficiency.


The content of jobs these days is far more flexible. This is an issue we shall discuss in some detail later. The carefully prescribed job with a detailed description and controlled duties is fast disappearing.There is far more latitude today in most jobs. Some core activities have to be done but the scope for doing other things is far broader. This sort of star ranges more widely than others in what they do.They seek out other duties and projects, get involved with others in solving problems. They are using their abilities and savvy to find the issues where they can contribute and do so unbidden.They are worth examining and coaching. Very often, they will search out the tasks at which they excel and where they feel they can make their best contribution.This is a strong indicator as to where their talents lie. The second type of golden star is the person who simply has a natural talent. They can just do something in an effortless way. They need little direction but take ownership of a situation and have the knack of making it work with seemingly no effort. This is talent performing at its best. Sometimes it is not spotted because it can be just a small area of a person’s responsibility. Let’s consider an example: a clerk who is given responsibility for organizing a large staff outing.The whole thing is well supported by attendees, goes like clockwork, all the arrangements actually happen as planned and a good time is had by all. The thoughts of all are to ensure that Jane organizes the next one. In fact, there is a likely talent here for planning, organizing and making it happen, which sounds very much like the accepted wisdom on what a management role is all about. Question these instances where you see people making things happen, as these are the pointers to talent.These may incidentally also not be recognized as talents by the individual. It is therefore important to share your views and tell the person if you think they have a gift. If it be true, as some hypothesize, that we only discover 25% of our talents by the time we die – a hypothesis that must remain a conjecture because who would ever know the truth – then the sooner we start experimenting with ourselves the better. Charles Handy (1997) The Hungry Spirit

Problem people Poor performers, frustrated employees, under-achievers. Got any?! Don’t dismiss them as you start your hunt. These are the guys and gals that very often take up a lot of your time, the high maintenance employees. It may well be that they


are real problem employees.Whatever happens, they are going to bitch and moan about it and you are never going to get to the bottom of their angst. But there may be some good reasons for them being the problem employee. Reasons can be various. It may be that their initial recruitment or subsequent change of job has put them into a job where they are not suited; the match of their skills to job is totally wrong; they just can’t gel with their supervisor. Or maybe they are more capable than their manager gives credit for and have become frustrated. Or they may have outgrown their role and no one has had the savvy to give them the extra challenge they need to spark them up. I have seen many of these people move departments or role and overnight become total stars. After all, the reasons above are why we all think of moving jobs. Making the call on whether they are people who have potential will be your call and your instincts will be your guide. One idea is to experiment and try to give them one or two different assignments to see if there is any change in their attitude. Approaching the situation in this way rather than by making dramatic changes will minimize your risk.

Making a home-made video You will recall that we started this discussion with the idea of looking at the individual’s CV, what I called a black and white photograph of the person. As we have proceeded through the last few pages, we have added a lot of ideas on how to give colour and life to your judgements about the potential of your staff.Think of it this way – by the end of your thinking process you will have a short home-made video, a cameo of each individual that works for you. You perhaps already have one on some of them, a little short summary in your mind that plays out in pictures, words and feelings all your thoughts about this person. That is how our minds work on such decisions (well, mine does!) The story twists and turns, you edit, cut and paste until you have a view of what you believe to be the true story and frame of reference for this person.The video will change constantly as you add new bits of information to it. But this is your working model, the story to date on the individual. It is the intuition we talked of earlier, the gut feelings together with the judgements and views you have reached, as well as all the data, observations and other clippings and cuttings you have added. A summary of all these sources of information is given in Figure 3.1. I have called it the Gold Prospector’s Matrix. It will help you identify where to look for the data you require. It will also tell you if you are relying too much on one quadrant. Are you making your judgements based solely on the formal meetings you have had with the person? Are you relying too much on hearsay? Is there one of these quadrants to which you are giving undue attention and


Formal reviews Initial interview Performance reviews Promotion boards Counselling Other formal meetings

Data-based sources CV/application form Performance records Training/personnel records Personality/other tests Skills audits Skills matrices Training plans Learning logs/development portfolios 360° feedback

Informal sources Walking the job Social contact Networking for views Direct individual feedback Asking others Observations on behaviour Interpersonal reactions

Intuition Gut feelings Judgement/values Reflection/meditation Subconscious views Combination of all other data Your home-made video

Figure 3.1 The Gold Prospector’s Matrix credence? The matrix should assist you in your thinking and help you to make a more balanced judgement about your staff.

Honing your skills as a gold prospector How can you start to improve your skills in the direction of identifying talent and ability within your area? The first step is to start with some of the above suggestions. Start to think about the people you employ and where you believe their talents and skills lie. Use some of the above examples to try to divine who should be developed and how. You can start small with some introductory discussions, post a few ideas and suggestions around about wanting to spend more time on development. You can start to open your eyes to the potential you see around you and collect a few thoughts throughout the week on what you see in your staff. Another useful way is to get in touch with a work colleague or a manager outside work who is good at developing people. Where are the departments or local organizations that others always want to recruit from? Get in touch


with these managers and they will be happy to share their tips and experiences with you. Try to get one of them to act as your mentor. People with this talent are normally happy to share their thoughts with others and are easy to spot. They are interested in people. They talk about their staff and how they are coming on.They talk about teamwork.They are often people watchers or those interested in the human condition. They know that people can be the most difficult and time-consuming part of management. They also know that they are the most rewarding part of management and that time spent in this area pays back great dividends. They have few people issues that arise in their areas and are recognized as a fair boss to work for, but they are not soft or naïve about people. They also never stand in a person’s way when they are promoted or leave their department, because they acknowledge that when this happens, they have done a good job.

Develop your own style As your proficiency increases, you will develop your own style. Compare this to your management style. It is most unlikely that one day you read a book on management styles, liked one of the techniques and immediately set yourself the task of implementing this style. It is more likely you learnt your style from observing other managers, from your superiors, from the advice of others, from your mistakes, and from the culture around you. And it is also likely that your style evolves and changes as you grow and as you discover new ways to be more effective. The identification of potential is no different in principle.There are no magic prescriptions. The magic is arriving at a prescription that works for you and produces results.

Be objective An easy trap to fall into is subjectivity. Just because you like a person, this does not mean that person has huge potential. Conversely, those with whom you feel less affinity can be overlooked because your judgement of them is clouded by your feelings towards them. It is important that you are fair and consistent in your dealings with your people. Clearly, you must also not discriminate.The key is to hold the thought in mind that this person is an individual with talents that may as yet remain undiscovered and it matters not a jot what ethnic background, sex, age or other distinguishing element they have. They all have undeveloped potential that is not being brought out.


Be prepared to make mistakes Despite all your best efforts, it is inevitable you will make the wrong calls.What seems like the sensible path turns out to be the wrong route.You can learn from this. Why didn’t it work out as planned? Don’t beat yourself up about failures. They are one of the richest learning experiences. Those not making mistakes are never going to grow in their abilities. Start in small ways.You are not necessarily looking to promote this person, whom you judge as having certain potential, to a much bigger job. You can experiment with additional assignments, a stretching project, an expansion to their current role, work for another department or whatever course of action you choose, to judge capability. See how they respond and discuss their responses with them. By starting small, you are limiting the risk of exposure and can build gradually. Small steps, not giant leaps, will help you to refine your judgement and to build stronger foundations in your thinking.

Becoming a great manager to work for We can all like to believe that employees join our organization because they are attracted to it. They may like what it stands for, the benefits, location or whatever. But is that true? The majority of organizations ensure that prospective employees meet the manager they will work for to ensure there is a fit and that the manager buys in to the recruitment decision. Otherwise, HR departments would do all the recruiting and hand out the employees to departments. This never, or rarely, happens. So we can see already that the idea of just working for the organization is not totally sound. The employing manager – the person to whom the individual will be responsible – needs to feel comfortable with the individual. What I’m getting to is that whatever the culture, rules, values, mission or status of the organization, there are always differences in the way different departments operate, that is, different sub-cultures exist in all organizations. Each department will have different ways of working, a different ethos, a different management style within the framework of the overall sets of rules. Even within organizations that have well-developed people development processes, there will be barren lands, managers who only pay lip service to the process and go through the motions. Conversely, in those organizations that have no such processes, there will be managers who do find ways to develop their staff, because they instinctively know that it pays handsomely to do so. So, even if your organization is not a supporter of this sort of activity, it does not stop you as a manager taking some actions to start the process.


We have discussed in earlier chapters how important the opportunity to develop at work is. By meeting this need, you are going to build employee loyalty and commitment and a much greater team of people around you.That in turn will enhance your performance. As Buckingham and Coffman (1999) point out, ‘Most people would instinctively agree with the generalization “ Engaged employees stay longer” . But our research suggests that the link between employee opinion and employee retention is subtler and more specific than this kind of generalization has allowed. . . people leave managers, not companies. So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people – in the form of better pay, better perks, and better training – when, in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue. If you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers.’ The point here is that people take to their managers, not the organization. And how true that is. There are normally high and low turnover departments in any organization. So, the point is you do not have to have a well-developed corporate policy on developing people. But you can start to do that work in your area today, independent of your organization’s philosophy. This is no different than any other management tool you may use, planning for example, or problem solving. You can become an area of excellence, a manager that is highly regarded for the development of your staff. The result of a more highly motivated, more highly trained team will not only be its own reward but will make the job of managing a lot more effective.

Spreading gold fever You may be in a position of having other managers working for you or want to introduce the ideas of development of people and the identification of potential throughout your organization. How do you do that? Like any change programme, you have to get the buy-in of those involved. It is important that those who will be actively involved in the process understand the reasons for doing it, because the process does involve an investment in time. That is not an easy thing to convince people to do in today’s frenetic world where results and shorter time frames are the norm. Remember also that some managers still want to manage people, that is, to control and direct the individual’s activities. This is contradictory to releasing individual energy and initiative. Managers with such a style will not be your natural potential gold prospectors. We noted earlier that you cannot manage people, only lead them. Therefore, look to your leaders of people first, not your managers of people.


One useful way of putting the programme to your manager is to compare the investment in people to that of a piece of machinery. If you have invested in a piece of new technology, you have sought agreement on the budget, installed it, trained employees how to use it, put in a scheme of maintenance, and sought a return from it.You have also set aside depreciation on it. Consider then how much you are spending on the salaries and fringe benefits of your section or department. Get people to think about the cost of employing that person over a space of five years (you can multiply salary by 1.2 to get a rough guide on total employment cost). Let’s imagine it is a total of £100,000 over five years. That is a considerable investment which even in large corporations would require signing off at a senior level, with a detailed report on the pay-back period of the investment and detailed justification. Next, get people to think about how much they have spent in time and in money on developing such an asset.What have they put in place to protect the organization’s investment? Remember that human capital is the only capital in a business that appreciates. Are you letting the asset depreciate or, if not that far, at least not encouraging it to appreciate? You can also link rewards and bonus payments into staff development and encourage it generally by getting an area of excellence up and running. Nothing breeds success like success. Some early successes are always an encouragement to others. Give publicity to what is happening.You’re sponsoring an employee on a part-time degree or starting language classes in the lunch hour – so let the whole world know about it. Lead by example and ensure you have done something positive and visible before you ask others to do so. Walk the talk or you will destroy your argument immediately. You must also consider some form of process to monitor whether it’s happening. Keep it simple. If it is too exacting or detailed, it won’t get done. You can consider some of the ways mentioned in this chapter, a development portfolio that will be called for at any internal interview, a skills audit, a performance management process, a training plan. We shall examine some of these simple and useful processes later in the book. Or you can commit the organization to a recognized people kite mark, such as the Investors In People standard which is widely used in the UK. There follows some general bullet points of the major benefits of uncovering and developing potential that you can use to convince others of your arguments: l l l l l

better staff retention; a more highly motivated workforce; improved teamwork; higher morale; employer or department of choice;


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better productivity; return on investment (ROI); higher profit.

Build on strengths A final word in the chapter about the potential you are seeking to uncover. A traditional role of training and training analysis has been geared towards identifying weaknesses and shortcomings and correcting these faults.There will be instances where a person hasn’t got the required skill levels for a specific role and will of course need training to bring them up to speed.This is all well and good. But this idea of training focusing in on the weak spots and setting about fixing them has led some to concentrate on this aspect as the main purpose of training needs analysis. Wrong! The whole tenet of this chapter is that we are looking to find the things a person does well, to uncover their strengths, talents and skills. Let this be the focus you pursue as the predominant consideration. Once you have established the normality of staff development, the faults will be corrected as a matter of course. Of course you must take remedial action on low performance, but do not make the mistake of making this the primary focus for all of your training and development activity. As Drucker (1999) eloquently puts it ‘waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. Concentration should be on areas of high competence and high skill. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.’ In this chapter, we have examined some ways to seek out the precious stones, the golden nuggets we have hidden in our organization.We have looked at how to gather data on this and discussed intuition, and the making of our home video on each member of our staff. We have looked at some processes that we can employ to foster staff development and an exercise to get individuals thinking about their direction. We have considered how we can improve our own skills in this area. We have examined ways and ideas for introducing development into our area or organization, the benefits of so doing for the line manager and finally, how we should be focusing on strengths. As we start to uncover the individual talents of our employees, we can turn our attention towards developing these talents. To help us in this, the internal talent pool is a useful model to consider and we shall now proceed to look at the ways we can develop our own internal talent pool.


4

Building your gold reserves – the internal talent pool

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know. Thomas Wolfe

Finding the right talent for your organization is only half the story. As Thomas Wolfe identifies above, fitting that talent into the right spot, so that it is actually applied and used to full effect, is the real challenge. But when this does happen, things really start to sing. The design of job descriptions and the ensuing search for the perfect fit candidate is a tricky business.We all know that square pegs in round holes spell disaster. But what if we have a slightly elliptical peg in a round hole? Finding the perfect fit is often impossible. And even when this does happen, the fit is not always long lasting.The job or the person changes and the perfect marriage can become rocky. And yet with the slimming down of organizations and the diminished number of employees the importance of the perfect fit becomes ever more vital. Furthermore, as we move deeper into the era of the knowledge worker, the quest for the right knowledge sets and skill sets is ever more critical and closely defined.We are no longer hiring an ‘extra pair of hands’ but going to the market for more and more specific profiles of personnel. Because of the specificity of today’s person specifications, the search in the external job market can turn into a lengthy, arduous and expensive business. 42

Building your gold reserves – the internal talent pool 43

As the requirements become more specific, so the internal recruitment market becomes a more sensible option. This chapter looks at how we can develop more of the knowledge and skills we need to fuel the organization’s present and future needs by the development of an internal pool of talent from which we can draw more readily.This idea is based on the premise that every organization has a unique set of requirements that it needs within its human capital and that the sensible manner to ensure future supplies is to ensure that a bank of these requirements exists within the boundaries of the organization. We are going to look at how we can build our store of these requirements, to build up skills reservoirs and to enhance our gold reserves within the organization.

The internal recruitment market A frequent cry when we need to recruit a new employee is that there is no one suitable for the post internally. But it is a not uncommon experience, after a long and expensive recruitment campaign, to come back to the beginning and make an internal appointment. There are clearly times when an organization must go outside. There will always be a requirement to bring in new blood, those who will bring with them an elixir to rub on those intractable problems to which nobody inside seems to have a solution. And there are times when substantial shifts in capacity are necessary to increase output. There are many other good reasons for going to the market for new human resources. We do sometimes need the injection of fresh ideas to challenge ‘the way we do things around here’. But perhaps we are apt to reach for the new recruit a little too eagerly and could save considerable time, money and effort by considering those we know more carefully. Here are some good reasons for considering internal recruitment.

Cost External recruitment is an expensive business.The placing of an advertisement in a quality newspaper is very costly. Recruitment consultants and head-hunters are able to charge high rates for putting the right sort of people your way. The problem is not always that the right person doesn’t exist, but knowing where to find them. When all the hoop-la and magic are stripped away, head-hunters and recruitment consultants are deriving their fees purely from putting buyer and seller in contact with one another.These are just two major costs associated with external recruitment.


Time It is normally much quicker to source candidates internally. Lead times for external recruitment can typically be between three and six months. Internal processes are speedier. A further time saving with internal appointments is that the organization can control the transfer date and is not beholden to periods of notice required by the previous employer. Internal advertising can now also be effectively posted on intranet sites, hence giving employees faster access to possible opportunities.

The reliability of external selection Interviewing is still the main process used to select candidates. Most acknowledge its unreliability but there is no real alternative at present. It can be made more reliable by assessment centres and other forms of testing but it is still widely criticized as an unreliable means of selection.

The unknown Whatever method of selection interviewing you use, you are dealing with the unknown.You hope by the end of selection to have formed a good idea of what the successful candidate is all about. Some are more successful than others in this process of judgement. But when the judgement is wrong, high expense and considerable disruption can follow. Also, we often overlook the vast amount of accumulated knowledge that internal candidates can have at their disposal. As we acknowledge the growing prevalence of the knowledge worker, this can strengthen the argument in favour of internal candidates over external recruitment. Perfect stranger he walked into the office a perfect stranger. after an hour’s interview he left, an imperfect one.


The learning curve External appointments often need a longer time to assimilate into the new role. They may bring all the right skills but the time needed to find out ‘how things get done and happen around here’ can be considerable. An internal candidate will know the protocols, rules and procedures, the culture, who are the influencers and the people who need to be consulted, as well as the organization’s products and markets.The advantage that internal candidates have in this respect is often overlooked and underrated.

Known potential The internal candidate already has a track record with the organization. It is much easier to get a realistic assessment from present members of the organization as to how this person can perform and what potential they have.You are dealing with better known and more thoroughly evaluated quantities.

Morale Employees are more motivated if they can see progression within the organization. They are less likely to have to go outside to find the level of satisfaction and progression they are seeking if your organization is promoting an internal recruitment market. There are numerous advantages, therefore, from looking inside rather than out. What stops us doing this more frequently? One block is that we tend to look at the negatives of those we know. We concentrate on the weaknesses. For example, we take a judgement that a certain internal candidate generally meets the person specification but their IT skills are sadly lacking. Whereas with the new external candidate, we look at their strengths, what we believe the person could be like. This optimism about ‘the new’ is common in all our human relationships.We should consider more often and more carefully the candidates that already exist within the organization before going out to external sources. The old adage that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ contains a lot of truth. In their book, Built To Last (1998), Collins and Porras examine how visionary companies, that is, companies they call ‘more than successful, the best of the best in their industries’ source their CEOs.They report: ‘As companies like GE, Motorola, P&G, Boeing, Nordstrom, 3M and HP have shown time and again, a visionary company absolutely does not need to hire top management from outside in order to get change and fresh ideas.’ They go on to say: ‘Of 113 chief


executives for which we have data in the visionary companies, only 3.5% came directly from outside the company, versus 22.1% of 140 CEOs at comparison companies. In other words, the visionary companies were six times more likely to promote insiders to chief executive than the comparison companies.’ So much for the argument of going out for new blood! One objection that may be raised at the idea of recruiting internally is that the calibre of candidates is not high enough. If that is the case, where does the fault lie? Is the organization training solely for present needs and present job skills and ignoring the developmental aspects of its training? When one considers the high cost associated with external recruitment that we mentioned earlier – a moderately sized advertisement in a quality daily paper or the placement charge from a recruitment consultant – the organization can provide a lot of developmental experience and training to its workforce for such a cost. How can we set about redressing this imbalance and ensuring that we have a better internal recruitment market?

Spread the jam There is no doubt that the bulk of effort, energy and money in training goes on management development.This has been where companies are prepared to spend their resources and where they perceive they will receive the greatest rate of return. A better manager means a better-managed organization. A megaindustry of business schools, training organizations and management literature leads us to believe that by improving our managers, we shall improve our businesses. I do not argue with that. But I do draw attention to the fact that we miss a lot of opportunity by not considering the rest of our human capital. It is through developing more people, not just the top people, that organizations can better provide for their future. Tesco’s, the large UK retailer, (Jane Pickard, 2001) have recently introduced a talent-spotting process ‘in which lists of people with potential for promotion are drawn up regularly from store level upwards’. Here is a company acknowledging that there is unspotted potential in its midst, something all organizations can benefit from. Nothing remarkable there, many companies have systems for spotting talent. But this is too often limited to management ranks, the top 5 or 10 per cent of the organization. Our concentration on management development throws us off the scent of employee development. Management development courses are typically very expensive. For instance, the cost of a week’s programme at a prestigious business school can buy a large amount of employee training for a considerable number


of employees. (It would be interesting to measure the impact on organizational effectiveness and performance of the one-week management programme versus a more widely distributed general employee development programme.) Spreading the jam more widely will and must increase your chances of having a better internal recruitment market for your future needs. A recent survey in the UK underlines this need for broader training. The Department for Education and Employment (2000) in its report, Skills for All, takes a wide view of the skills issue and examines not only the impact of external skills shortages but also the internal skills gaps that organizations are reporting. The ranking of the first six categories of skills that are sought in connection with internal skills gaps reads: Communication Customer handling Team working Problem solving Technical/practical Management. It is interesting that organizations are ranking some of these generic skills above technical and management skills on their shortage lists. What is equally interesting is that organizations are acknowledging they are not training their employees in the skills they require. ‘Nearly half of respondents with internal skills gaps admitted that the problem was caused in part by their companies’ “ failure to train and develop staff ” .’ I rest my case! Spreading the jam is most probably the biggest impact your talent pool can have on the organization’s performance. Moving the focus from management development to employee development is the first and most effective element in your contemplation of developing a talent pool.

Build in some slack One idea contained in the concept of the talent pool is that the organization builds some slack into the system. It starts to develop a set or group of talents that it can progressively employ and draw upon as needs arise. In short, it is better prepared for the eventualities it may face as a result of change making fresh demands on its human capital.There are a number of issues to think about in considering how to build in this flexibility.


Succession planning The days of aiming for precise detail in manpower and succession planning have passed. An organization can no longer rely upon its predictions for future needs. Corporate existence is now too volatile, unpredictable and fast paced to know with any certainty what your requirements in human capital will be over a fiveyear time frame. Even two years is becoming hard to judge. For this reason it becomes necessary to build more flexibility into the human capital pool. The organization needs a better selection of possible skills and experiences from which it can draw to meet the unforeseen changes that inevitably lie around the corner. We will discuss competencies in more detail later. But if an organization has a clear view of the competencies that it requires, these are a good starting point to enable more flexible planning and to develop these competencies in a larger population of its employees. As the survey above demonstrates, many are failing in that task. For this reason, we should do two things. The first is to develop more of our capital and not just the top 5 per cent. The second is to build into the system some more slack. When talking of slack, I mean a looser configuration to succession planning, one that identifies potential on a more general level. There are many methods for identifying potential. Here is a simple method to start this process. Each manager or area proposes two or three rising stars, employees who appear to possess the potential to progress. Putting a name to them is the first and crucial stage to ensure that their development receives some attention. An individual training and development plan is then agreed and actioned. The organization then at least has a list of those whose development it should be monitoring. This process does not need to be precise. What the organization is doing here is identifying a talent pool, a loosely knit group of people who are destined to go further and to whom attention should be given. The idea of building such slack in the system may need selling. It may not be popular because it defies the measurement test, it is unpredictable, it can be seen as too woolly. But many organizations are now forming these sorts of methods to identify potential. And there are successful parallels in other areas of business. 3M use this philosophy with good effect in their product development. Their 15 per cent policy allows researchers to spend up to 15 per cent of their time working on their own projects, thus creating new and unplanned products outside the main corporate plan. We should be encouraging more of our managers to do the same with our human capital, building in some slack for them to develop the future talent of the organization. And we can measure this. We can develop indices on the number of our employees that are pursuing learning, the number of successful


internal promotions, the number of employees learning outside the boundaries of their present jobs. One word of caution on the succession plan. The process can lead us to concentrate development activity on the few. In building talent pools, remember that we are seeking to extend development. The transition from management development to employee development is a key component of creating a talent pool. The gold standard The gold standard was an economic theory that was followed by many countries from the 1800s onwards. The principle of the theory was that a citizen could, if they desired, convert their currency into gold. In other words, the central bank of that country would hold sufficient gold reserves to meet all such demands. The Gold Standard was thus used to control the amount of currency in circulation at any time. It is a useful concept to hold in mind when building a talent pool.The question we should ask is could we meet all the demands on our people for talent if they were all called for at the same time? If we can’t meet them now, there are already serious implications for our ability to perform effectively as an organization. The next question is could we meet these demands if they were made in the future? If we can’t there is time to take remedial actions.The Skills for All survey quoted earlier suggests that many UK companies have already left it too late and are no longer on the Gold Standard. They cannot meet the current calls that are being made upon the skills of their people. Countries no longer run their economies on the Gold Standard principle. But it is a useful concept to hold in mind when fathoming what resources you need to add to your talent pool in order for your organization to work on the Gold Standard.

Blue skies The organization needs to look forward into the future when considering its talent pool. The future is uncertain but amongst that uncertainty there may be some changes that, although far away, have good odds of becoming reality. For instance, the organization may see major trading opportunities arising in South America in the next three years. Here is the opportunity to start to develop some language skills and an understanding of the culture amongst staff. Quite


a number of employees may be willing and interested in learning Spanish. If the opportunities in South America don’t arise, you have not lost much money (language training is very cheap if done over a longer-term period). Or perhaps there are technological developments going on within your industry, or substantial legal changes that are already beginning to surface. These are not imminent enough to call for focused training but are broad and certain enough for you to start the process of increasing the corporation’s knowledge store of the issues. This type of unfocused training may appear too nebulous for some tastes. But it is not. Successful organizations are purposefully and continuously scanning the boundaries to elicit future trends. Looking into the blue skies – using such techniques as scenario and PEST (political, economic, social, technological) planning – and trying to anticipate the future is how your organization will be ahead of its competitors. Most probably you cannot commit large amounts of resource to training on star-gazing (unless your organization is cutting at the edges of technological innovation). But having some human capital ready and prepared, a handful of employees developed for the likely scenario, can pay handsome returns in competitive advantage. Having some employees developing in areas associated with future scenarios can also accelerate the generation of new ideas and the move of the organization towards the new opportunity.They can be an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in building in this forward-looking process.

Reorganization There are a host of negative phrases to describe the corporate landscape of the past 20 years – re-engineering, de-layering, restructuring and downsizing. And then there is the plethora of mergers and acquisitions. They bring with them a host of issues for talent, skills and knowledge.The reorganization of corporations has led to a depletion of skills in many areas. And it has also led to a great depletion in knowledge, which is one of the reasons for the growing interest in knowledge management. Many organizations are suffering as a result of stripping out too many middle managers. Others realize after the event the amount of unrecorded or unacknowledged skill and knowledge that has been lost as a result of a major reorganization. And much of that realization has arisen as a result of the denuding that organizations have suffered in their cutbacks. The knowledge that was never really noticed or valued has suddenly disappeared. It is not likely that this trend will abate. It is therefore important for organizations to have at their disposal a good range of talent to fill the gaps and to close the ranks when a reorganization has taken place. Even with the best of planning, it is unlikely that any organization ever gets the processes of


reduction right. And skills gaps will inevitably result. By having a betterdeveloped talent pool, the disruptions associated with reorganization are minimized and a well-developed talent pool enables the organization to fill the gaps more quickly and effectively.

Key dependent workers Every organization has employees who are key.The place will collapse without them, it is said. The organization is so dependent on them that the thought of their departure brings managers out in a cold sweat. The reality is that if the big red bus gets them tomorrow, you are going to have to face that crisis in any event. As the era of the knowledge worker becomes more anchored, we are likely to face this conundrum more frequently. The erroneous assumption we sometimes make is that the only protection we have against a disaster is to clone and have a second-in-command. This is not true. We can, by looking at the skills and knowledge this person possesses, invest these skills and knowledge in a number of different employees. We can build within the talent pool different aspects of this key worker’s role so that we have a disaster action plan. An extension of this thinking is to move into job redesign. For instance, moving more of the work of an engineer design group out to technician-level employees. This allows the engineers to focus more on the highly specialized end of their work and leave the more moderate components to the technician group. We can also dissect the job role and extract the really critical skills that will cause real harm if the key worker leaves. Based on the Pareto principle, there is likely to be perhaps 20 per cent of the key worker’s role that produces 80 per cent of their results. By isolating this 20 per cent, the cross-training needed to cover the role becomes less onerous.

And then there’s all the other stuff We are employing human beings. And human beings do strange things sometimes.You will have within your organization those that die unexpectedly, run off with the next-door neighbour, sail around the world for a year, give up their secure job as a financial analyst to become a stand-up comedian. Fact is stranger than fiction. Sudden departures should be an expected part of corporate life.We must be prepared with a better spread of knowledge and skills to meet such contingencies. With a well-developed talent pool, we are in a stronger position to resolve these unforeseen eventualities effectively and to minimize disruption.


We have looked at a variety of reasons why we need to build more slack into our training and development if we are to make a better internal recruitment market. By building a talent pool we are much better placed to meet change, to gain competitor advantage and to respond to the marketplace. But how do we decide in what area we should be training?

What talents to put in the pool? Make it a pool, not a puddle If you are serious about developing a pool of talent, it has to be large enough to be meaningful. If it is half-hearted and consists of small puddles, these will soon evaporate.The wisdom comes in making it large enough and also diverse enough in the range of skills to meet future needs. Putting all your eggs in one basket of talent provides a high-risk strategy. For instance, concentrating on developing a highly trained large group of specialists against a possible future scenario isn’t much good if the scenario never materializes. Keeping a balanced diet in the pool is important to make it meaningful. A good spread and diversity of talent will allow the organization to meet a variety of different scenarios.

Skills shortages Skills shortages can seriously inhibit an organization’s ability to meet its targets and plans. Therefore, a prime consideration is to examine where current shortages exist and to review how these can be met from within. An example serves to illustrate. A common current shortage is for IT skills. But is this really an insurmountable problem? If you employ any young people at all, it is likely you have a wealth of talent that can be used and developed in this area. The problem lies in our perception, because these employees may be called despatch clerks, operatives, temporaries, or whatever. My proposition is that a lot of IT skills shortages are a fallacy.The latent skills are there, but organizations are not prepared to put in some training and resource to develop these people, so that their skills can be put to proper use. When it comes to the recruitment of IT personnel, the organization’s expectation can be for the totally concentric round peg in the round hole. We want the ready-made IT specialist, a person who is able to sit down on day one and start working to the full job specification. Of course, we need such people sometimes, but not all of the time.


Furthermore, the motivation of a person given the chance to prove and develop their skills in a new area will be very high, higher perhaps than the ready-made new recruit. IT is a unique function at this time in having this group of highly talented and latent-talented younger generation. They are far more adept because of their familiarity with the technology in this skill area and are often not being effectively earmarked and developed as talent because we have given them a non-IT label. This is only one example of a skills shortage, and an example that may be more imagined than real. But all areas of skills shortage within your organization should be examined. Training a pool of present and up-and-coming talent is a great alternative to fishing in an expensive and over-fished external pool. Meeting skills shortages internally can be experimented with. A pilot programme is a useful way to try out this idea and measure its effectiveness.

High turnover Areas of high labour turnover may appear as tempting hunting grounds to identify skills that need adding to the talent pool. But beware, this is too simplistic a link. Adding more skills in this area may solve nothing. Firstly, you need to identify the root cause of high turnover. It is easy to link high labour turnover in our minds with the above issue – skills shortages. We may believe that too many people are leaving because of high competition in the marketplace. But it is likely that there will be other, more pressing reasons for high turnover. These may concern issues of poor wages, bad working conditions, unsatisfying work or incompetent bad management practice. It is important to resolve these issues at source before considering additional skills training internally to meet the high turnover issue.

Core competencies If your organization supports core competencies, then this is a great advantage to your thinking. These are the skills, knowledge and attributes that your organization has deemed to be critical in employees. We talked earlier of the preponderance of management development as opposed to employee development.The same may be true of your competencies. If this is the case, you should look towards competencies required throughout the broader organization, not just at management level. However, any competency frameworks are a great place to start for identifying those skills that are currently in great demand or will be needed in greater numbers in the future.


Competencies can be messy and misleading in their configuration. It would be nice to think of them purely as skills. However, many organizations muddle this thinking.They include, as well as knowledge and skills, such areas as values, attributes, character traits, and behaviours in their competencies and these latter categories can be difficult to train in. For example, a core skill required by nursing and ancillary staff in a chain of nursing homes is ‘the ability to lift and move patients in and out of bed in a safe manner’. This requires manual handling skills training. A competence in the same chain of nursing homes may be ‘to show empathy to patient problems’. I use this example to show that there can be differences between core competencies and core skills. The core competence above will be required by nearly all of the staff, the core skill only by the nursing and ancillary staff. If you are building your talent pool solely on core competencies, you may miss the core skills that are required in different parts of the operation. So, use your core competencies but bear in mind how they have been generated. If they are supposed to cover everyone in the organization, it is probable that the core skills elements of individual groups and departments have not been included in the thinking.

Core skills Core skills is the second area to examine. These skills may be at professional, technical, craft or clerical level. Are there adequate supplies of talent in these key areas? As indicated above, seek out the clusters where there are groups requiring the same common skills. The talent pool becomes particularly important where larger groupings of a skill are needed. For instance, a small organization with one accountant cannot have a second fully qualified accountant trained and waiting in the wings (it can, however, have someone trained up to do certain key parts of the professional’s work). On the other hand, an organization that has a large department of professional accountants should be developing talent at a lower level to replace those personnel. These core skills can be developed in two ways, either a net increase in the numbers of personnel studying for these skills or an upgrade of the level of the skill, for example moving employees from first degree level to Master’s degree, or an upgrade of institute membership.

Generic skills These are skills that can be common to a number of jobs, for example IT skills, presentation skills, communications, customer service, languages, problem


solving, team working, continuous improvement. Some of these may appear in your key competencies. They are a pool of skills that many will use in the organization and for which there will be a steady demand. Training in this area is therefore rarely wasted. And it provides the person transferring to another job with some good basic skills that otherwise would need to be developed when that person is in post. Hence the training gap on appointment will be much smaller where there is general training happening in generic skills.These skills are generally a safe bet in increasing the organization’s gold reserves.

Get back to basics We can make some very unreal assumptions about the people whom we employ. Basic literacy and numeracy are often taken for granted.We assume that a written message, or a simple set of figures given to employees, will be understood by all. Dependent upon your type of business, the statistics will vary. But there will be employees who are not proficient in basic reading, writing and arithmetic. This deficiency of skills will often be hidden.Those who have such deficiencies will go to extraordinary lengths to hide them and will be very creative, after a lifetime without these skills, in finding ways to work around this disability.These are tricky areas, hot subjects to handle when you need to uncover such training gaps. But simple skills such as these are also building blocks to developing your talent pool. A group of employees who cannot read or write are very restricted in opportunity to develop within the organization. They will not read your notice boards, nor will they be able to use your e-mail or intranet. And they are more widespread in your organization than you would like to believe. Even for those who possess basic literacy and numeracy skills, there are opportunities to develop their levels of proficiency. A shop-floor employee moving into supervision may find that their written skills and vocabulary cause them embarrassment and inhibit the effective communication they wish to achieve. To take the example of the UK, ‘The estimated one in five adults in the United Kingdom who cannot function effectively with written words or numbers are more than ever excluded from our fast-moving society’ (Learning and Skills Council, 2001).

In-filling on training programmes Organizations may be running in-house programmes for a specific group of staff. It is worthwhile to consider who else may benefit from such programmes. The addition of more trainees can often be done with no or minimal additional


cost.Where an organization is running such programmes, it is sensible to include others on the programme or parts of the programme and hence increase the pool of skills available to the business. For example, a course on project management may be specifically aimed at a group of project managers. But these general skills may be of great value to a number of other job functions, including other practising or aspiring managers.

Cross-training and flexibility A lot of reserves for the talent pool may be developed on the job by ensuring cross-training within a department. This is the invisible way in which talent pools often grow without any recognition that it is happening. Getting more people to learn the jobs of others in a sensible and manageable way provides not only increased skills levels and satisfaction levels, but also more insurance against the key worker scenario. It’s a great way to get talent pools started at a local level without committing too much expenditure. An easy and powerful tool to use for this is the skills matrix.This is simply a list of the key skills and knowledge required throughout a department or section, listed down the side, and a list of names of members of the department at the top. It provides a clear picture of the spread of skills in the area and where there is vulnerability. Table 4.1 shows an example.This is a matrix for the maintenance department of a shopping and housing complex. The department is responsible for general maintenance of the facility, including maintenance of some capital plant as well as some domestic maintenance. A new manager has recently taken over the department and has drafted out the matrix to audit the skills at his disposal. He soon realizes that there has been little attempt to spread skills or to crosstrain within the department. He starts to examine what the matrix tells him. He sees that he has good people in most major functions, but that there is little cover or flexibility.There is also no training currently in process. He also sees that he is reasonably covered for capital plant, with good mechanical and electrical skills. He knows from an early conversation with his fitter, Simon, that he would be interested in learning a bit about electrical work. The manager would also like to lessen his vulnerability in electronics and has asked Tommy, the electrician, about attending some evening classes in this. These actions start to give the manager more room to manoeuvre his resources whilst at the same time building his team’s strength and motivation with the addition of new skills. Kylie has identified that she does not have enough work in the winter months. After some discussion, she expresses interest in undertaking some


C

H and V

C

Refrigeration

A

A

Gas fitting Plumbing

M C A

A C

General building

C

Carpentry Horticulture Key: M C A T

Sven Ridder

Electronics

Jamie Johns

M

Kylie Samsung

M

Anjit Patel

Electrical

Mechanical

Zephaniah Winston

C

Tommy Smith

Pierre de Chemin

M

Walter Kleindorf

Simon Nuttall

Table 4.1 Skills matrix – the maintenance department

M M

Master – can train others Competent Average Undergoing training

carpentry, having done rough woodwork in the grounds. The carpenter has agreed to show her some elementary skills.When the builder, Sven, hears about this, he is keen to join in. The manager is also concerned that there is only one plumber and is considering some further training for Zephaniah, who is very capable of taking on such work. With these actions, the skills matrix begins to show a more promising spread of abilities and a better cover. As soon as this training has taken place, the manager is already thinking of refining the matrix. He is starting to think that Simon has the abilities to train up as his successor and is wondering whether a technician’s programme would be a suitable starting point for him to develop the necessary skills.


He also recognizes that ‘electrical’ is a poor description of the skills that are needed. There is high-voltage switchgear that no one is trained or authorized to operate. Industrial electrical work as well as domestic experience is needed. Likewise, he recognizes that the definition ‘mechanical’ covers valves, pumps, compressors, generators and conveyor systems. His fitters are not trained on all of these, which has led to some lengthy delays and downtime on equipment. On the next matrix, he will split these skills out and list them separately to ensure the training needs receive focus. Here is an important point about skills matrices. They should be dynamic, they should grow, be redefined and be developed through time to reflect a growing understanding of the skills breakdown they seek to identify. This example shows good use of a skills matrix to identify training needs, which, when met, will result in a better maintenance service. The talent pool is being added to and certain potential is starting to be developed. And should anyone leave, the department will be able to cope better than it previously would have done.

Personal development Employees will bring their own agendas into formal and informal discussions of their development needs. It is important to recognize and try to accommodate personal-driven development. A major reason for this is that the motivation factor is so high. A person coming forward to ask about doing an open learning degree has most probably given this a lot of thought before broaching the subject with an employer. The balance is to get this personal development dovetailed into the organization’s training plans. Is there a match whereby the personal development will yield some returns for the organization, short or long term? Employees become increasingly committed to jobs where they can learn new skills, and to jobs they find personally challenging. Allowing employees to customize their growth opportunities provides them with further opportunities to learn and shifts responsibility for that learning to the employees themselves. Ulrich, Zenger and Smallwood (1999) Sometimes, personal development programmes can stretch over a longer term, such as in this example. The organization could take the view that a four-year programme is too long-term. However, the employee will feel well motivated


throughout the programme, will be challenged constantly in their thinking and, importantly, will feel a sense of needing to stay until completion of the programme. These are valuable motivational and retention factors. We have looked at a number of areas we should consider when creating a talent pool. This is not an exhaustive list. You will have your own specific problems and challenges in the field of human capital that are not covered here. But the above are suggestions for you to follow in your early thinking of what your talent pool should look like, its scope and size. In this chapter we have thought about the concept of the internal recruitment market and the need to spread training more widely throughout the organization. This broader spread of training, moving from management development to employee development, is the biggest impact your talent pool can have on organizational effectiveness. We have also considered how there will need to be some slack created in the process and examined some of the skills and knowledge areas we can include in our talent pool to increase our gold reserves. In the next chapter, we shall look at some further techniques that enable you to create your talent pool.


5

A map for the treasure hunt – pacing out the talent pool

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Don Juan

In this chapter, we continue with the theme of the talent pool. We shall look at some further ways of mapping out the process of developing a talent pool and examine the depth and breadth of what we are seeking to create by looking at learning stairways and learning avenues, some paths to enlighten our thinking. Finally we consider the broader picture of job roles and their scope and how we can retain the talented individuals we are developing.

Learning stairways When developing a talent pool, an important consideration is to provide links between the various levels of the organization. Every organization has its own levels of hierarchy and some of these may have a glass ceiling through which it is difficult to pass. The strata of an organization are not as clearly defined as textbook theory would have us believe. For example, we talk glibly of middle management as a level. However, there will be blurs around the edges of 60

A map for the treasure hunt – pacing out the talent tool 61

hierarchical levels. Some managers will be at a junior level within this band and may be senior supervisors. At the other extreme, there will be those bordering on senior management. The boundaries are therefore not always as clear as we would like to believe. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there are often barriers that cause these levels to become impenetrable and the transition from one level to another becomes virtually impossible. One example of a common route between these levels is the promotion of an employee to supervisor or team leader. This is normally an easy transition, because typically the promotee has a full grasp of the skills of the section and is therefore relatively comfortable supervising a group of personnel with similar skills to their own. Therefore, with correct training and development and the identification of the person’s potential, this type of promotion is low risk. The person has already proved a large part of their capability. Having said this, a common error is to promote the best operative to the post without paying attention to their supervisory potential.The best telesales clerk is not necessarily the best candidate for supervisor of the group of telesales clerks. So, the promotion to team leader or supervisor is perhaps the most common stairway we provide for movement up the hierarchy. But there are many more opportunities for such movement and it is in consideration of the other movements that we can effectively stock the talent pool. The starting point is to examine where such barriers exist within your organization. What are the glass ceilings that currently inhibit movement between levels? There are a number of common barriers that exist across many organizations. Here are some typical examples of where ceilings may exist.This is not an exhaustive list. And your own business or sector will contain its own specific barriers.

Non-professional to professional One problem with a transition in this area is that a professional training is often a long one and it is often perceived that such a transition is impractical. This need not always be the case. For instance, consider a general accounts department.There may be employees of great potential operating at an administrative level, who with the right training can be brought up to professional status. Bridging courses are often available to enable the person to move into the junior level of the professional arena and take up the initial stages of professional training through Institute examinations. Other typical examples of where such transitions are easily available are in purchasing and HR.These are typically functions where the levels of activity are more finely graded. The difference in duties between


a purchasing clerk, a purchasing assistant and a professional buyer can be incrementally graded rather than being a substantial step change. Such functions are good places to examine as you commence the development of your talent pool. A gradual increase in the level of knowledge and skills for personnel working in such areas means that there will be less need to go out to the marketplace for more expensive recruits at senior levels. There will be some impractical areas where the transition is too steep. For instance, the movement of a nurse to doctor would be too much of a step for a hospital or health authority to consider. But even in this area, some experiments with redesign of jobs is leading to nurses taking on some of the simpler routine duties of doctors to enable the fully trained doctor to concentrate on the more professional side of their duties. This is good common sense and a breaking of the mindset that certain jobs carry certain duties that no one else can be trained to do.

Technician to engineer Another barrier exists between the technician and the engineer.The technician is permitted to carry out certain lower-level duties that fall below the professional status of the engineer. Very often, this is a function of the level of qualification the technician has achieved. The opportunity to bridge to the necessary higher qualification has been made much more readily available recently by open and flexible learning methods. E-learning, open and distance learning methods enable the technician to move incrementally forward to the higher level of education they need. Even 15 years ago, such transitions were prohibited by the need for the person to step off the career ladder and re-enter full-time education. Now, there is the opportunity to study part-time and in a modular way. Such courses offer a great way for organizations to increase their talent pools and improve the levels of skill and knowledge available within their boundaries.

Supervisor to manager As already outlined, the person promoted to supervisor is very often merely extending their skills base by moving into supervision of a similar group of personnel. But the move to manager may take them into a new functional area with which they are not familiar. Such moves bring different challenges. Previously the supervisor has found security in the supervisory role through a good understanding of the majority of the work they are responsible for. Most probably, supervisors could perform a lot of this work themselves. In the position


of manager, they will be managing work which they do not understand, and possibly have a span of control across more than one function.This is particularly true with the increase in knowledge work. Employees moving from supervision into management need therefore to have a new tool kit to enable effective operation in a management role. It would be easy to promote a supervisor with potential into a management role without paying due deference to the new skills they will need. Once again, you can build such new skills into your talent pool. For instance, where management training courses are taking place, you can include the supervisor who shows management potential within such courses.You can provide directed reading, short open learning courses and other materials that will enable that potential to develop.You can also provide a lot of developmental experiences that bridge the gap and also test whether your view of the individual’s potential is well founded. Areas that will differentiate the manager from the supervisor may include financial analysis, manager as coach, business focus, strategy, managing one’s own development and other management competencies that may be specific to your own organization. Once again, it is important to stress the incremental nature of this transition. It is by providing the wherewithal to make this incremental transition that the talent pool scores heavily. The prudence comes in making the transition more incremental than a dramatic step change.

Brawn to brain We have talked earlier about our predisposition to label our employees into pigeon-holes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the barrier between manual and knowledge workers. It is easy to overlook the potential you may already have in manual areas. If you employ manual workers, the chances are that you have a pool of talent that can yield a lot of riches. Not every manual worker wants to remain in that situation. Some may have missed out on opportunities in early life, may have made the wrong decisions about educational and career choices or may have been late developers. With the maturity of years, the maturing of views and a more stable family lifestyle, they may well be looking for a second chance to develop their capabilities. The TQ movement of the 1990s sought to develop the notion of wider participation. It brought with it the idea that with every pair of hands came a free brain. The premise of empowerment was born and organizations sought to involve all employees far more in the general business activity, continuous improvement and teamwork.This has led to more involvement and participation


and better links across the brawn/brain divide. But still many organizations do not provide that stairway enabling employees to make the transition. You can add to your talent pool by providing the opportunity for manual workers to increase their skills and capabilities in a number of areas. One barrier that may exist may be internal to the worker, that is, their own self-perceptions and confidence levels.They may have bad memories of their education and not have the confidence to make the return into the formal learning arena. Attempts may therefore need to start on a small scale or on a practical rather than a formal learning footing. For example, inclusion as a safety representative, a quality assessor or a visitor guide can provide a link into a position of some responsibility. The addition of additional duties beyond the scope of manual work can provide the first step in gaining confidence in their own ability to learn new things. Other areas for consideration are in IT. Many manual workers now have some contact with this in terms of data input or control.You can build upon this to give a broader range of IT skills, which may then be employed elsewhere in the organization at a later date. Some elementary skills in supervisory development can be provided to groups that have potential. When the need arises for new supervisors, the organization has a group of partially trained supervisors from which it can draw. There may also be opportunities to develop manual workers into technician grades. Once again, this can be done incrementally by the provision of additional duties to test their potential to move permanently into such work. Some will be willing and eager to take up new qualifications and undertake a course of study.Again, the provision of open learning makes this available more readily and also makes learning available to shift workers. From such roots, an organization can develop a pool of candidates from which it can draw when vacancies arise higher in the hierarchy. This section has provided some examples of how you can build learning stairways.You will know your own business and you will know where barriers to bridging exist.We have said that not all barriers will be bridgeable.The canyon may be too deep and wide to traverse. But the provision of such stairways will not only ease the problems of recruitment, but will also have a positive impact on morale and will lead to better retention of the good people you wish to keep within your organization. If carried out thoroughly, such a review of learning stairways can also lead to some beneficial redesign of jobs. As in the example of the nurse taking over some simple medical practices previously carried out by the doctor, your human capital can become better deployed through sensible and simple redesign of positions.


Learning avenues Learning stairways provide the opportunity to build talent reserves on the vertical plane; learning avenues give us the opportunity to think about skills development for the talent pool on the horizontal plane. We work in silos. It is the desire of all organizations to break down the barriers that exist between the silos, that is, the departments and sections that make up an organization. But humanly, we feel protected and secure if we have well-defined barriers and protections, safe environments that we have nurtured and developed and grown up in. Flatter hierarchies, re-engineering and reorganization have led to the removal of many of these functional barriers that existed previously. However, the removal of hierarchical barriers does not necessarily mean the removal of the learning barriers that have formerly existed. The contention of this section is that we need to work much harder to break down the learning barriers on the horizontal axis. In Figure 5.1 we see three silos. Imagine that these are three departments or sections that are part of a process flow through an organization. Consider some of the sections or departments in your own organization and think about what learning you see taking place across these barriers. There is likely to be some interaction and understanding happening. These are represented in the diagram as corridors. The corridors show that there is some interaction of learning between the different departments. This may be limited to communication or systems links that enable information to flow through the process. But the concept of corridors is a narrow one. A corridor suggests a cramped and restricted passageway. The ‘corridors of power’ is a phrase that suggests corruption and

Figure 5.1 Learning corridors


politicking.The concept is negative and restricting. And this is the problem that we face in attempting to interconnect our organizations more thoroughly – corridors are not sufficiently broad to take the flow of learning and communication that is necessary for effective lateral functioning. As we consider the contents of our talent pool, it is necessary to have a broader view of the spreading of knowledge and skills that needs to take place laterally. Figure 5.2 shows a revised model of what your organization should aim to achieve. The interconnections have broadened to become avenues. Avenues are wider, more positive, tree-lined esplanades along which a greater degree of discourse and activity can take place. It is these models we must seek to put in place to bolster the resilience and robustness of the organization’s learning.

Figure 5.2 Learning avenues In the example above, we have considered learning avenues running between different departments. But you can consider learning avenues on three different levels.

The organizational level A good example of where avenues can be used at an organizational level is in organizations where there are multiple sites. The sites may produce similar outputs but in different geographical locations. Examples would be a chain of restaurants, shops, banks, a franchise of businesses, a network of regional offices. Whatever the controlling processes and procedures for these networks, there will be unique differences that arise because of the nature of the local market, culture or staffing.There will be lessons, experiences, knowledge and skills that can be beneficially shared to increase the talent pool.


Owing to the geographical separation, this may have to be done remotely through teleconferencing, intranets, video-conferencing or other methods.The alternative solution is where people from these scattered groups meet for conferences and meetings. At each one of these you should be attempting to include some form of learning where lessons learnt, knowledge and skills can be transmitted from one entity to the rest of the organization. Such learning is invaluable. Remember that your business is unique. As such it faces a unique set of challenges, problems and opportunities. There is a strong possibility that the problem faced in one quarter of the organization has already been encountered and solved elsewhere.

The departmental level Every department will have a unique set of competencies, skills, knowledge and experience that is applied to add some form of value to the organization. If it does not, there is no reason for it to survive. At some time or other, someone has made the decision that the work and content of this department need to exist for the organization to function effectively. But these skills and this knowledge are very often locked within the department. An easy method of quickly assessing the content of this department is to produce a skills matrix.The matrix gives a simple one-page summary of all the human capital contained in this one area of operation. The next stage is to consider what the effect on the organization would be if this combined collateral were to disappear. The idea of this exercise is to focus your thinking on the concentration of human capital within this silo. It is not unheard of for whole departments to disappear from organizations. As well as the possibility of natural disasters, certain financial institutions have been hit by the trauma of whole talented sections of their core operations being recruited en bloc by competitors. But these are exceptions rather than rules. Nevertheless, it is not a healthy situation for the investment of human capital to be concentrated within a silo.The learning avenue provides the opportunity for organizations to spread this knowledge and skill more widely. And this should happen on all levels within the department, bottom, middle and top. By promoting this, you are developing a learning environment, a learning organization that better understands the total workings of the process of operation.

The individual level The knowledge worker provides the prime example of where learning avenues provide value to the operation. The creation and use of knowledge by the


individual is one of the major changes and challenges presented to organizations recently. The wealth of human capital has transferred from hands to minds. The loss of an individual from the organization can take away a disproportionate amount of its human capital. And organizations are waking up to this reality by the appointment of knowledge managers, whose role it is to capture, manage and broaden the boundaries within which such knowledge is contained. We can assist this process by the creation of learning avenues, avenues that flow from one individual to another. We should seek to mitigate the loss of the key dependent knowledge worker. We can do this by spreading their abilities not only vertically to superiors and subordinates but also laterally to peer workers. The creation of skills sharing and learning meetings, whereby individuals share their knowledge and skills with others around them, is a task that should become more commonplace.

Creating learning avenues Learning stairways are about improving an individual’s level of skills or knowledge. That implies an increase in their capabilities through improved qualifications or higher experiences. Learning avenues are different because they are operating on the lateral axis.Therefore, the methods we can employ to create them are different.They are less concerned with formal processes of education and more concerned with experiential learning. Some of the techniques we can employ to spread this learning across the organization are therefore more informal. Firstly, learning avenues at any level will only be effective where working relationships and communications are good. Individuals recognize that information is power and will not trade with others if there are inharmonious relationships.This is where the manager has an important role to play, in ensuring that an atmosphere of trust and sharing is developed. The manager can put in place training plans within his or her area to encourage the cross-fertilization to take place. For instance, targets and objectives can be set to both giver and receiver to encourage the sharing of information. Systems and processes can also be developed that encapsulate the knowledge required. Good practices to foster learning avenues are many and various. Crossfunctional teams working on business problems are helpful. These teams tease out the workings of the departments and processes, thus sharing knowledge. In my experience of cross-functional teams, they also break down a lot of prejudices and misunderstandings about one another’s departments and functions. Bringing together two adjacent departments to work upon problems or interdepartmental issues is a powerful process with very powerful learning potential.


Secondments into neighbouring departments, job rotation, projects and assignments, and structured tours of departments for new starters can all be used effectively. Lateral coaching and mentoring can be employed. None of these techniques is complex but they will add immeasurably to the richness of the talent pool. The investment of an hour a week in a learning meeting is a worthwhile investment.The meeting can take the form of sharing information or knowledge on, for example, a new client, a market trend, an ongoing project in the organization. There can be a sharing of skills. If an individual has a particular tool or piece of software they find particularly helpful in their job, they can share this with others.The learning meeting can also be transposed into a social setting in order to make it more informal and to foster cross-functional relationships in a more relaxed environment. The addition of skills and knowledge across an organization is an area that is often neglected because it is not seen as having any incremental value, that is, it is not increasing the level of skill to a higher level. However, as we have already discussed, knowledge workers as a percentage of the workforce are increasing dramatically.This now makes lateral training a more crucial component of your talent pool. Furthermore, with organizations becoming ever flatter and the opportunity for upward and regular movement becoming more impractical, the value of lateral learning should be given more credence. This is for two reasons. The first is that employees are now more likely to move across, rather than up the organization. A good knowledge of the operations of other silos is therefore a gain to the talent pool and a starting base for quicker, more effective transfers to take place. The second reason is that as more and more personnel become knowledge workers, there is the opportunity to learn as much from individuals on our own levels, our peers, as we can from our superiors.

Development and retention If you have been following the discussion so far, you may be having some concerns. ‘All this training, development and learning is going to make my employees dissatisfied. They will be looking for something new to challenge them and that may well be outside the organization.’ That is a fair point. How can we develop a pool of talent for future use, yet retain that talent within the organization? Money cannot provide the only solution. If we are raising people’s expectations, then those expectations have to be met in part to keep individuals’ motivation at a sufficiently high level. The provision of additional skills and knowledge will make the person more marketable and you may be thinking you could end up being the loser in all of this.


That’s where your skill as a manager comes into play. Firstly, are you creating the type of environment that causes people to want to stay? That should be an ongoing part of any manager’s role. There are several things that can be done to improve the opportunity of the individuals remaining with the organization. For starters, remember that they will recognize the commitment the organization is making to their development.That is an important psychological point. There is a contract that has been formed.You can formalize this into a learning contract that specifies the provisions the organization will make and its expectations in return. This may be particularly pertinent in longer-term developmental programmes, such as degrees or professional qualifications. But don’t get too strung up on this. Remember that we live in a free economic world and for the most part employees are free to leave us if they feel we can no longer provide the challenges they require. Another fear may be partly grounded on the premise that we cannot see the next job for them or that we cannot guarantee a promotion to a higher level. I think this is missing the point and operating on the old mindset of the neat hierarchical progression of promotions for all.

Grey jobs, colourful people Today, job roles are no longer black and white. The legacy of Taylor’s Scientific Management, which advocated clearly defined and controlled job roles, still lives on in some corners of corporate life.This was a major influence in shaping the post-war corporate landscape and, as such, takes a long time to flush out of the system in which it has become ingrained. But the reality for the majority of today’s positions is that there is far more autonomy to working life than ever before. Charles Handy refers to this in his inverted doughnut principle. He outlines an inverted doughnut with the centre as dough – the core of the job – surrounded by open space – the discretionary part of the role (Handy, 1990). As he puts it in an essay in Rethinking the Future (ed Gibson, 1997), ‘In the past, jobs were all core and no space. You had a long detailed job description that gave you no space for self-expression, no space to make a difference.You weren’t empowered at all. There was no opportunity to reshape your individual doughnut or that of your immediate group.’ There are clearly jobs that still exist where the discretionary element of operation remains minimal. Handy uses the idea of a train driver having little discretion on planning his route etc. And call centres provide another modernday example where the work role is heavily directed. Some lowly paid jobs, for instance in fast foods chains, may be heavily prescribed. But for a large percentage of jobs, the element of discretion has grown and the space around the doughnut is increasingly large.


It is in this space that you as manager can provide the additional challenge to match the growth of the individual. You can build new elements into the role that provide additional challenge and opportunity. These may be projects, new assignments or whatever other methods are fitting in the particular situation. The skill within this process is to match the new challenges to the new skill or knowledge that the individual is garnering. For example, you have agreed with one of your staff that they have management capability and they are pursuing an open learning management course.You give them responsibility for recruitment of a new member of staff and for their subsequent induction and development. This is not part of your employee’s role but it gives them the opportunity to practise interviewing skills, and apply the knowledge they are learning. It is a motivational experience for all involved. This principle is shown in Figure 5.3 as the scales of development. This suggests that individual development should be matched by an equal weight of individual challenge. By doing this, you are engaging and feeding the development process. Is there a danger that the person can become overloaded if too much challenge is provided? The answer is that more development will be needed to compensate for the additional challenge.This is a case of common sense and balance. Some have suggested that it is only by overloading a person with significant amounts of work of up to 30 per cent that real development takes place. A pressure-cooker environment is not in my opinion conducive to effective learning, can be counter-productive and is unlikely to aid employee retention. It can work for some people, those who thrive on setting themselves stiff targets and challenges. But for others it is oppressive and weakening. Development

Challenge

Job

Figure 5.3 The scales of development But the addition of exciting and relevant tasks into the discretionary space of a job is the pre-eminent method for putting your staff ’s development to work and providing the reason to stay. There will come a point where the person has proved themselves sufficiently for promotion or for job redefinition. It is also true that when individuals get more interesting things to do, they find quicker and more effective ways of handling the routine and core jobs that used to fill much more of their day. Treat the boundaries of the job as grey and not as black and white. Acknowledge the colour of the person performing that role, and by colour I mean the


Will you do it? The last two chapters have looked at the creation of a talent pool in some detail. They have advocated that there are many good reasons for undertaking such an approach and have provided numerous ideas and suggestions to aid your thinking. It is certain that if you embark upon this process, your talent pool and the way you formulate it will be very different from talent pools in other organizations. And so they should be. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution. But will it be worthwhile? A recent article in Personnel Today (Tuesday 21 August 2001: 9), ‘Are organizations neglecting the potential talent in their midst?’, reports on the Cranet Survey, a survey coordinated by the Cranfield School of Management and conducted by 30 business schools globally. It reports that only a third of large employers (with 200 staff or more) around the world regularly use high flyer schemes to identify employees with potential for leadership and help them prepare for those roles. That is a staggeringly low number of major employers that actually have formal processes for identifying and developing talent. And we are only talking of high flyer schemes here.What about all the other wasted potential at lower levels within the organizations? And what is the picture in those organizations with below 200 employees? Here is a vast untapped reserve of individual potential, a golden seam that runs throughout the corporate world and throughout your organization. It remains untapped, frustrated and ready to leave you shortly.You can choose to develop that golden seam, to convert it into gold reserves and employ it effectively to improve your business results. Alternatively, you can leave it buried under the ground for others to find.


6

Refining the nuggets

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again . . . expecting different results. Rita Mae West

So far in this book, we have been considering the unused talent, the golden nuggets that lie unexposed and undeveloped within our organizations.We have looked at ways of discovering these. We have also examined how we can bring this human capital together and begin to create richer internal sources of talent for the organization by the creation of internal talent pools. We have also seen that the development of human capital can add value to our organization as well as offering increased motivation to a workforce with a new set of agendas. We shall now proceed to examine in more detail how we set about the task of building in the necessary training, development and growth opportunities for the individuals concerned. Let us start with the above definition. It provides a great management maxim. It reminds us that when we seek to improve results we need to do something different to make that happen. There is nothing new or clever in this. But it often does not happen. And this is particularly true when we think of our employees. We have new expectations but what do we change, other than our expectations of them? Organizations are better at making changes to many other aspects of corporate life. They recognize that to produce different results, something has to change. And there are common practices that are taken to show stakeholders, and in particular the shareholders, that the organization means business and is taking positive action. For instance, a new structure is announced to convince the market that the organization has a great new way to handle its business. In this particular example, this is an easy manoeuvre. A new organization chart 74

Refining the nuggets 75

doesn’t take much time or imagination to draft. And as someone once said, ‘Show me a reorganization that has ever yielded real gains in value.’ Or more stringent measures are rolled out – a reduction in workforce numbers, a restructuring exercise. These are seen as tangible and contributive manoeuvres that will add value. Or announcements are made on acquisitions and mergers, new productivity measures or cost savings. Such measures are sometimes necessary for organizational survival. But sometimes, it may be that organizations reach too readily into the drawer marked ‘Tried and tested ways to influence share price’. We exist in a free market economy where such issues are, of course, a crucial component of the machinery and often cannot be avoided. But often, in considering what needs to change to produce better results, we totally ignore the fundamental issue of our people. When was the last time you read in the financial press of any organization announcing a new deal for employees on better training and development or initiatives to improve their human capital? Perhaps such initiatives are seen as too long term and too nebulous for shareholders to judge as value-added. And yet it is arguably the most single important step an organization can make in increasing its competitiveness and profitability. If an organization is not engaging its employees properly in the business, all gains will be short-term prizes only. In 1982, Peters and Waterman, in their groundbreaking book In Search of Excellence, had this to say: Treat people as adults. Treat them as partners; treat them with dignity; treat them with respect.Treat them – not capital spending and automation – as the primary source of productivity gains. These are fundamental lessons from the excellent companies’ research. In other words, if you want productivity and the financial reward that goes with it, you must treat your workers as your most important asset. In 1987, Tom Peters in his book Thriving on Chaos was still preaching the same message: Our investment in training is a national disgrace. That should come as no surprise. Despite lip service about people-as-our-most-importantasset, we value hardware assets over people, and have done so for the last century. The ideas in the people prescriptions are not startling – or at least, should not be. Involved and committed people can move mountains. Yet the fact that this set of prescriptions needs to be presented at all speaks to our long-time national deemphasis on human capital.


If we look generally at the state of organizations today and ask if we are there yet, the answer is a resounding no. Some have done it, and have done it well. But in the round there is a long, long way to go. And yet that may be due to change. The more commonly accepted belief in the concept of human capital is gaining credibility.We are putting a monetary value to the people we employ. We are recognizing the importance of the human assets on balance sheets. We are realizing that physical assets in an increasingly large number of market sectors no longer provide an adequate way to value an organization. This means that the notion of people-as-our-mostimportant-assets is an idea whose time has come. If we accept that we want to increase the value of our human capital, that we want to make our people more productive, more capable and better motivated, what do we need to do? We can’t persuade them by clever talk to improve their performance. We can’t sit back in wish fulfilment and hope it will happen. We can give them more money and hope it happens but it won’t. Neither will ‘doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results’ work.That’s insane! We need to take action to help our individuals learn, develop and grow. And it is to that issue that we shall soon turn our attention. But first we need to stop and ponder some definitions of what we mean by the terms of training and development, because the differences are important.

Defining terms of engagement Throughout this book, the terms ‘training’ and ‘development’ have been used without giving any firm definitions. What are the differences? Training and development are certainly not chalk and cheese.They are more Laurel and Hardy, complementary together and feeding off one another. In thinking about the differences, we are constrained by our use of the words in our everyday language. We train a dog and we train a pilot. These are commonly used and commonly understood phrases. But we talk of bringing up children and of child development, not child training. One problem we have is that training is a very useful word. It can describe any activity that is to do with developing people. Development is a clumsier word. As well as developing people, we develop ideas, housing estates, products, land and projects, photographs and many other things. And so development is less precise and generic in its meaning. This leads us to use the word training in its place because it is more explicit of the activity we are trying to describe. The main title of this book is not ‘Developing with the Midas Touch’ because that phrase is not precise enough to let the prospective reader know what the


subject matter is about. It could be about developing photographs! So what’s the difference? Some have suggested that training relates to learning for the present job, whereas development is more about growth for the future.That is a useful view but then restricts the idea of developing people in their present jobs. Often, development follows on from training. For instance, we attend a training course to learn how to use spreadsheets. But it is only later, back at the workplace, that we develop our skills in its use. In other words, the training is providing the structured instruction but the real skills development comes later. Likewise, a training course in interviewing gives us the basic tools and techniques of what we should be doing. But the actual skill develops in the application of those techniques as we practise the techniques. The definitions I would like to consider are that training is more concerned with formal structured learning and that development is more informally based. (But note that training is not solely about learning in the classroom. It can be on-the-job. Learning to operate a machine can be a formal on-the-job training process.) Pepper (1984) usefully points out that an apprenticeship is in fact a development programme.Whilst there are planned training events and academic study contained in the process, ‘there is a lot more to it than that, for he (sic) learns about people and management and working conditions; and about taking responsibility and about integrity; and during this time he (sic) is growing up – physically, mentally and spiritually’. So, development is broader, and less formalized. And it also encompasses personal development. Training has traditionally been described as an activity to modify ‘knowledge, skills and attitudes’. I would argue that it is knowledge and skills only. Attitudes can only change over the longer term.The length of most training courses does not allow for changes in attitudes to happen. Consider a management development programme that runs over the course of a year with formal training inputs, projects, coaching, and feedback. That can change personal attitudes. But note that it is called a management development programme. Development is therefore broader. It may contain the gaining of knowledge and skills, but also skills development, changes in attitudes and behaviours, higher levels of confidence and self-esteem as well as personal growth and the uncovering of and development of talents.

Roots and wings Another way to understand the differences is to consider how we develop (that generic word again!) as individual human beings, that is, the idea of how we


individual nature of that person. You can then provide the necessary addition of skills and knowledge to your talent pool whilst lessening the risk of the person’s departure. Don’t be simplistic about this. This is not a simple cure-all, a managerial panacea. It does require management wit and intelligence to make it work. And there will be failures and there will be opportunists that take the training and run. But if you are any judge of character you will know who these people are and can make your decisions accordingly.

The training silo A final word on another silo, the training silo. A lot of literature talks about and treats training as an isolated subject. And there is a lot of practice that carries out training as if it is an end in itself. Be cautious if this is the situation within your organization. If you are going to spend the time developing your people and training with the Midas touch, the remit has to be much wider than training per se. When considering your talent pool, start much earlier than training. The process should start with consideration of the function of the various jobs in your control.What is the scope of the role, how much fixed core and how much discretionary content should it have, how will it interface with other roles? Only then, when you have decided upon the content, can you realistically set about the process of recruitment into the role or consider whether the right people are in the right jobs, whether they need additional or less responsibility. It is at this point that you can start to consider the training and development needed in the role. This can begin as early as the initial interview when you can start to formulate in your own mind the gaps between candidate and job role. Following this stage you are going to need to think about the continuing motivation of the employee and how you retain their services.These are all part of the process of forming your talent pool. An old adage on the role of HR and the management of people goes: attract, train, motivate and retain.That is wise counsel and a robust method for dealing with your people. So, do not fall into the trap you are advocating that others should avoid and become a silo in your own right. Take a broad vista of your human capital and follow the whole HR process through. Highly trained, welldeveloped people are not worth a jot if they are in the wrong jobs, unchallenged and poorly motivated. In those circumstances, they feel worthless and will leave. It is why the development scales are an important facet of the creation of your talent pool.


develop roots and wings. Roots provide the basic building blocks. These are the formative aspects.This can include learning, such as education, professional training or vocational training. And training per se would fall into this category. A child learning how to use a knife and fork or to tie shoelaces is developing roots, basic skills to do a job. Training can therefore be regarded as providing the basic tools to do the job. Wings are about learning to fly. Wings provide the ability to fly on life’s journey of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Development falls into this category. Wings are about building confidence, developing abilities and encouraging talent to flourish. The learning that takes place may be more incidental and less structured. For instance, a person has been on a training course on presentation techniques and afterwards, as they make presentations, they begin to develop their skills. One day, they are at someone else’s presentation and note a very effective technique that the particular presenter is using. They decide to adopt that technique into their own repertoire. No formal training has taken place, no instruction has been given. But the individual has learnt something of value that then becomes a part of them. They have developed new skills. In other words, development can describe a more holistic view of learning. Just as when we are bringing up children, we need to give our employees both roots and wings. Without roots – the basic training blocks – we can’t realistically expect the individual to go on to develop wings. A person needs to be trained in basic driving instruction and pass the minimum standards of the driving test before they can go on and develop their skills as a racing driver. Let us consider the example relating to presentation skills in more detail. Let’s suppose that you need to ensure that a member of your staff develops a good level of presentation skills.This is going to be key to their future success in their role. There is a major presentation coming along to senior members of the organization. You consider using this as a development opportunity, throwing them in the deep end, so to speak, with a great learning opportunity. However, you realize the risks are high. The individual, although a confident person, has had no formal training or instruction in presentations and may fail. It therefore becomes the sensible option to provide some form of training.You cannot afford the time for a thorough four- or five-day course that would provide time for skills rehearsal. But you could provide time for a one- or two-day introductory programme to give basic knowledge and skills. Linked to this, you seek some coaching with one of your staff who is an accomplished presenter, who will assist the individual to polish up the material and their presentation techniques. (Or the presenter may be so accomplished that they can provide a series of formal training inputs to bring the individual to an acceptable level of competence.) You also arrange for the presentation to be made by the individual


to the department the previous week to give some feedback to them on their abilities. What you have done here is to formulate a programme that consists of both training and development.The important fact is that the training has come first, the formal teaching of techniques and tools via a formal course or via formal inputs in-house has provided the roots, and the rest of the programme is concerned with providing the wings. Training and development cannot be totally separated. They are two circles that overlap. But we can understand the differences that exist at the far ends of the continuum.

Training versus development Let us not get too hung up on definitions.The idea of this book is to encourage and celebrate the growth of human potential and not to get bogged down in definitions. My point is that as we progress along the path of training with the Midas touch, we shall do very well to focus just as much on individual development as on training. There are some real benefits in doing this. In favour of training, it gives us the sets of rules, skills and techniques, the distilled wisdom of the subject in hand, often from a skilled practitioner. We get the whole package. We can learn to drive without structured lessons but it will take us longer. We will have to fathom out for ourselves the rules, skills, techniques and the laws involved. With structured training lessons we get the whole package of skills and knowledge far more quickly, proficiently and thoroughly. But in general, training courses are expensive commodities. Development is, in the round, a much cheaper and often a more exciting and personalized experience. Many group training courses, for instance, work on the false assumption that all attending are starting at the same level.This misconception means that a large percentage of the planned learning experience is wasted – the more knowledgeable already know a lot of it, for the beginner it’s too advanced, but in general, it captures the people in the middle. And many socalled bespoke programmes are not tailored at all, other than having the customer organization’s logo edited into the corner of the presentation slides. This is an exaggeration to make a point, the point being that a lot of money is spent on inappropriate and ineffective training, a one-size-fits-all product that comes in a personalized wrapper. One major advantage of development is that it is tailored.We can sit with individuals and work out a programme that meets their individual needs far more precisely. This may take the form of a single development activity or a substantial development programme. And, as already


indicated, that substantial programme may well include training courses or formal training inputs. Furthermore, in today’s organizations, development has become easier to implement than was previously possible.The more flexible scope of today’s grey jobs makes this possible. It is now much easier to provide new inputs, experiences and responsibilities into most positions. This job role flexibility provides new opportunities in the way we can engage individuals for the organization’s and for their own benefit. So, as we go forward to consider how to grow our employees, let us consider both training and development and roots and wings. And don’t forget Laurel and Hardy.

Discretion assured Discretionary content We discussed in the last chapter the idea of ‘grey jobs, colourful people’. We were looking at two principles in that phrase.The first is that jobs have become less black and white and nowadays have far more undefined content or discretionary content than previously. The second is that employees are individuals and as such they bring their own individuality and contributions to that job role. And likewise they bring their own agendas and expectations as to what the role will provide for them. Too often, employers forget that employment is a two-way street. That the employer wants to fill a role and the employee wants to earn a wage is no longer a respectable or realistic contract. The employee is looking for far more. And it is within the context of the discretionary content that the employer can ensure the ongoing satisfaction and growth that the employee is seeking. This is not a new idea. The ideas of job enlargement and job enrichment have been around for long enough. These were regarded more as purposeful strategies to design in the motivational aspects of a job. But now in our changed and minimalist organizational structures, they are easier to achieve. The means to use these devices is no longer a case of deliberately designing and manufacturing suitable job roles; the medium already exists in today’s grey jobs. The same is true of delegation. It was once regarded as a good management tool that should be purposefully introduced to improve motivation. In today’s grey jobs, it is a given. What an employee does from nine to five is now negotiable. The trains still need to run on time and someone has to order the stationery, answer the phone and fill in the forms. The rest is up for grabs!


Discretionary effort With the increase in discretionary content comes an increase in the importance of discretionary effort. An individual employee can operate at a variety of different levels of effectiveness.This is not just a question of the person’s abilities and capabilities, and by inference, the training and development they have received. What the employee gives to the employer is far more complex. Two people working side by side on similar jobs can operate at vastly different rates of contribution. And that depends largely upon how they are treated and how they perceive they are treated by the organization.Winning the hearts and minds of all employees has been a rallying call within organizations over the past ten years as competitiveness and organizational minimalization has taken place. But it is inadequate if this is merely a rallying call.That is where many organizations have failed: making the rallying call, but doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results.What are we going to do differently? And that brings us back to the question of motivation. This is not a book on motivational theory. But there are some aspects that we need to consider in order to paint the full picture of how we should develop our people. Unfortunately, it is not within the scope of this book, to make a detailed examination of the range of motivational theories and practices. But we can do no better than to consider the work of Frederick Herzberg. (His work is summarized succinctly in ‘One more time: how do you motivate employees?’, Harvard Business Review, 1987.) Herzberg concluded from his extensive researches that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction were due to two different groups of factors. He called these motivators (satisfiers) and hygiene factors (dissatisfiers). He stated that ‘the opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction but, rather, no job satisfaction’. Looked at a different way, where hygiene factors (dissatisfiers) were rated positively, they did not provide job satisfaction, merely no dissatisfaction. What is interesting for us in this discussion is the rating of satisfiers. He discovered that the major satisfiers are achievement, recognition, the work itself (in other words, the nature and content of the work), responsibility, advancement and growth. The dissatisfiers include salary, work conditions, relationship with supervisor and, highest of all, company policy. The theory is not perfect and there are other theories and models that provide other good insights. But the most compelling thing about Herzberg’s theory is that it works out so truly in practice and provides us with such a commonsense view of what makes people tick at work that we may feel it’s blindingly obvious. Well, if it is so obvious, why do organizations continue to ignore it and turn off their employees in such large numbers?


Motivational breakthrough I was a Theory X man, Then changed to Theory Y. I found my staff worked harder For an open sort of guy. Then Situational Leadership Offered relationship and task. On one day I would tell them, The next day I would ask. I took up Adair’s Circles Individual, Task and Team. Then changed my mind to Maslow And tackled self-esteem. I worked with Blake and Mouton’s Grid And strove to reach 9,9. Production rose dramatically But only for a time. Finally, I found the elixir To transform my management style. And now run four-week courses Called ‘Go That Extra Mile.’ The essence of my secret Is genuinely freeing, The Holy Grail of Management, . . . Treat them like human beings. Good organizations spend a lot of resources on these issues – helping individuals to achieve, giving recognition, paying attention to the content of work and responsibilities, providing advancement and growth. But many organizations do not.They pay lip service to it.They cling to the school of thought that goes something like ‘We’re paying them, aren’t we? They’ll do as they’re told.’A recent survey by Gallup in the UK (Buckingham, 2001) suggested that only 17 per cent of employees were actually engaged, 63 per cent were not engaged and 20 per cent were actively disengaged. That does not make pretty reading. Herzberg’s theory should be written on coffee coasters, mouse-mats, embodied into the values and mission statements of organizations, woven into


corporate carpets and recited on the car park each day before work. If there is one theory that gets to the nub of what really makes people throw off their duvets in the morning to get to work, this has to contain as much commonsense truth as any. So, when we are considering how we can develop our people and refine the nuggets we have found within the organization, this very practical theory of motivation provides some real answers.Those satisfiers we should use to satisfy our employees – achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth – fit perfectly with the ideas outlined in this book: acknowledging the individual, helping them to achieve and grow and designing challenging work that helps them to develop.

Discretionary training and development If we go back to the start of the 20th century, the so-called traditional model of motivational theory was doing the rounds. Scientific management, associated with Frederick Taylor, was advocating a new form of managing people. In order to increase productivity in light of US labour shortages,Taylor devised a model. Essentially, this model advocated that managers should ensure that work was broken down into repetitive tasks and the worker most suited was given those tasks. Managers would find the most efficient method of performing the task. Motivation was by piecework and the assumption was that the manager knew best how the work should be done. So, the job was very prescribed and the training (‘the scientific education and development of the worker’, as Taylor put it) was very directed to the job in hand. Maximum output was the motive. There was little scope for discretionary content in this world. Although the implementation of such methods did run into trouble in the beginning, the general principles of repetitive and efficient tasks were very widely adopted. The car industry has been a good example of where this was widely and enthusiastically introduced and is still prevalent today. As mentioned in the last chapter, the effects of these widely adopted methods have been long lasting and have left an ingrained legacy within the commercial world at large. We can see that with such work specialization, intensive training for the specific job would have been the order of the day. And this would have been rigidly formalized. Nowadays, with the preponderance of knowledge work and grey jobs, we can move away from this view of training and its legacy. We can have a new mindset in the way we train and develop people at work. So, now we can include far more discretionary training and development within most roles. We are able to give new and individually specific challenges and development assignments to employees. We have the scope within our


individual remit as managers or supervisors to push the boat out for individuals and give them growth opportunities. From the motivational point of view, the trick is then to harness that individual’s skills and talents into specific assignments in which they have interest and ability. Figure 6.1 shows that we have a triangle of events, which interrelate with one another – the triangle of discretion. The size of the triangle will vary from job to job. The three elements have already been described. The discretionary content is what we decide to put into the job.This can be agreed in consultation with the individual doing the job in order to ensure maximum motivation.The discretionary effort is what we get out through proper motivation of the individual. And that can be a function of the content and the training and development we put in. Finally, we have the discretionary amount of training and development we decide upon, once again in consultation with the individual jobholder. And as already indicated, the discretion that you have as a manager on what training and development to provide within the role is nowadays far more under your control. The provision of on-the-job learning experiences, whether it is on-the-job training or development, is within your remit. The cost is less prohibitive and is more concerned with providing time rather than money, the development is more individualized and there is no need to seek higher authority to do it. Discretionary content

Discretionary effort

Discretionary training and development

Figure 6.1 The triangle of discretion

Each diamond is different One advantage of taking control and responsibility for the development of your individual staff is that the development becomes individualized.This is no longer


a case of sending employees off on a corporate training programme or attempting to meet some vague thought you may have about meaning to provide a bit of training for one of your staff. It becomes more focused on the strengths of the individual and how you can develop and harness these. It also produces better results and more improved performance than generalized training. If we return for a moment to Herzberg’s ideas on motivators – achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth – these can only be achieved via the consideration of the individual’s needs. Just as we do not cut diamonds to a prescribed pattern, because if we do, we lose their inherent beauty and value, so we cannot develop all our people in the same way. Providing the right training and development can assist in all of these key motivational areas. The triangle of discretion model helps you to think about how you will do this. As we start to think about how we will refine the nuggets that we have found, we have considered some of the differences between training and development, how training can be viewed as a more formal process that is specifically focused, whereas development is more informal and individualized.We have considered the idea of roots and wings as a way to give some further definition to these phrases. We have examined the way jobs have more discretionary content and hence there is more discretionary effort involved in today’s roles. We went on to consider how managers can now provide more discretionary training and development. Finally, the benefit of development in role is one that enables us to provide individuals with challenging and rewarding work which, if we are smart, will match the drives of the individual learner. We have also said that if we wish to get different results from our people, we need to do something different to make this happen. In the next chapter, we shall progress to examine some of the methods and activities that are available to bring this about.


7

The alchemist’s laboratory

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. C S Lewis – The Four Loves

No man is an island. We cannot grow as human beings without the contact and influence of other people. It is through the interactions with others, the observation of others and the influences of those around us that our ideas, values, aspirations, behaviours, attitudes, skills and knowledge are developed. Some of this is planned, as with our formal education and training, some is less formalized and much is accidental. During this chapter, we shall look at how we can assist this process, the various ways the gold that you have discovered can be refined and developed to bring out its true lustre. This chapter explores the tools that are at our disposal for developing our people.

Competencies – elements in the mix A stranger is lost in an unfamiliar town. He stops to ask a passer-by the way to the particular location he is seeking. The passer-by ponders a moment and replies: ‘If I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.’ And so it is with competencies. It would be helpful to provide you, the reader, with a checklist of all the possible skills and knowledge sets you may ever need within your organization. But that would be a book of several volumes. Instead, to make this a workable and manageable list we need to reduce the volume.To do this we shall consider competencies. 86

The alchemist’s laboratory 87

The reason for the story above is that competencies can be a difficult place to start. It would be nice to think of competencies solely as skills and knowledge. This would give us a neat taxonomy of training and development groups required for the organization. However, many organizations also include in their competency frameworks such aspects as behaviours, values and personal attributes which makes the configurations of competency clusters more difficult to understand. For example, creativity may be required as a key competency. There is a certain amount of training and development that can be provided to improve creative skills. But there will be some people that just don’t get it and no amount of training, development, coaching and feedback is going to change that. Even in the most creative environments, someone is going to have to raise the invoices, arrange the meetings and be the uncreative, yet highly organized one. So, core competencies don’t relate to everyone in the organization. They can’t, unless you are planning on an organization of clones. Some organizations tackle this dilemma by having a list of competencies from which individuals identify a cluster critical to their own jobs. This becomes a sensible way to handle the issue. And there can be moral issues as well. Starting to tell individuals what values and behaviours they are to have may be fine in some areas – customer focus, for example, but it is easy to cross the line and get into personal territory. The competency water becomes muddy when we start to impinge upon personal attributes or character traits. Training in areas such as values and behaviours can become tricky. For example, a typical values-based competency framework may include commitment, customer focus, results orientation, creativity and teamwork. In some of these, you can train. Others will rely upon coaching and feedback. But developing employees in competencies such as commitment is a larger issue. We are crossing here from specific training and development into the territory of organizational development (OD), which requires a multifaceted OD approach to culture change. So, competencies can contain a mixture of values, behaviours and attributes as well as skills and knowledge.Where aspects such as behaviours are included, often a classification of suitable behaviours is developed.This provides employees with measures they can perform against and the manager has a ruler against which he or she can coach. Without these there are no clear understandings. Nevertheless, competencies in the round provide a useful short classification of area for your consideration of the sorts of skills and knowledge you need to provide to improve your people. In Table 7.1, there is a list of some of the common major competencies.This is not exhaustive. Many competencies may be framed according to the specific


Table 7.1 General competencies Managerial skills Planning and organizing Problem solving Change champion Decision making Developing systems and processes Delegation and empowerment Leadership and people skills Leadership qualities Managing people Developing people Selecting and attracting people Motivation and retaining people Managing conflict Influencing others Negotiation skills Empathy Counselling skills Communication skills Presentation skills Listening Written and verbal communications Interpersonal relationships Personal effectiveness Teamworking Creativity Integrity and trust Networking skills Stature and credibility

Managing self-development Learning orientation Flexibility and adaptability Initiative Business skills Handling complexity Judgement IT skills Financial analysis Strategic thinking Global thinking General business focus Knowledge of the business Achieving results Risk taking Customer focus (internal and external) Continuous improvement Output competencies Quality of work Availability Adherence to policy Reliability Safety orientation Technical and job knowledge Professional knowledge and skills Product knowledge

and unique attributes of the particular organization. But an examination of the list may aid your thinking and provide some useful leads for you in considering the skills that you need to add to your talent pool. At the bottom of the list are two small sections that denote technical and job knowledge and professional knowledge and skills. Yet within these two lines are


possibly the lion’s share of the skills and knowledge your organization needs to survive and grow.This is a further danger with competencies – we concentrate on the generic needs of the business, the cultural and behavioural aspects of the organization and lose the important detail and minutiae of individual skills and development that are required. For example, consider the job of a personal secretary. Nowhere does the competency list point to the specific skills they need – excellent organizational abilities, word processing skills, the ability to produce spreadsheets, presentations, arrange travel, manage diaries, organize events, handle multi-tasks, telephone skills etc. They are hinted at in organizing and planning, IT skills, judgement, written and verbal skills. But they are not specific. Going all out for competency frameworks can throw the baby out with the bath water. The generic swamps the specific and no detailed skills and knowledge development gets done. This is where the categories of technical and job knowledge and professional knowledge and skills become such important considerations. It is important, if you are employing competency frameworks, to ensure that these categories are included and considered.

Competencies sometimes tell you that you need to wear shoes. But they don’t always tell you how to tie your shoelaces.

Nevertheless, the list is useful to review the skills and knowledge that you may need to add to your skills reservoirs. The caution is merely not to subsume the specific in the general.

Before you start There is a multitude of tools available to train and develop your staff. We shall go on to look at the variety of these in the next section. But before doing this, there are some general observations to make.

Comfort zones We learn by experiencing and dealing with new events. The emphasis here is the new. We cannot hope to develop individuals if they remain in the same circumstances doing the same things. By definition, therefore, development and growth come from moving individuals out of their comfort zones. How much


we move them is a personal choice. Some care is required here. Moving someone too far away from their comfort level is in essence setting them up to fail. That is not acceptable from either party’s perspective. For instance, promoting a person two or more levels in an organization is a high-risk manoeuvre. The chance of the individual succeeding without spending time in the intervening levels is slim.The individual is being set up to fail.The other end of the spectrum is where they are not stretched far enough. The new task or activity is too incrementally based and hence the learning value is insufficient. We therefore need to judge how far to move the individual out of their comfort zone. The move needs to be sufficient for the new point to feel unfamiliar, for the person to need to do something new and different. It may be working with new people, concepts, tools, processes, equipment or whatever. But it needs to make a difference to their perceptions and their ways of working, to give new skills and knowledge.

Coaching As you develop your staff, you must be coaching them.This is perhaps the most important development tool you have available. The essence of coaching is to help your staff develop their skills and performance, to groom them and to help them grow.This must be done with sensitivity. It is easy for a more experienced person to give clear and detailed direction to a subordinate of how to accomplish a task. This is not coaching, this is instruction and has little learning value. The secret of coaching is to allow the individual to develop their own personal methods to accomplish a result, but via your guidance.They will then be developing their own best practices and not merely adopting yours. The bad leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people praise. The great leader is he (of) whom the people say, ‘We did it ourselves’. Lao-tzu from Senge (1990: 341) Coaching needs to be an ongoing process. It is by regular inputs that any critical errors or deviations can be worked through, thus avoiding consequent failure. It is important that at the end of the process, the individual feels that they did it their way. And it may be that you do not feel able to coach the individual in all the skills you wish them to gain. Recognize that you may not be the best person to impart all of these skills because you feel weak in certain areas yourself. For instance, you may be a professional that has mastery of your subject area and


feel you have much to offer your employee in this area. However, you recognize that your selection and interviewing skills are only satisfactory. If you wish to develop your subordinate via coaching in this skill area, then find someone whose selection and interviewing skills are good to excellent and let them work together on such issues. In other words, seek out the best coach available for the task in hand. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, estimated that he spent 40 per cent of his time on coaching and mentoring his staff. That is a significant yardstick to live up to. It also makes you think about the chestnut of an excuse that we haven’t the time to devote to this activity.

Feedback Feedback, previously an under-utilized form of development, is becoming more widely recognized as a valuable tool. To be used effectively, there needs to be adequate constructive feedback. Too often, feedback consists of reprimands for mistakes and errors. The good and satisfactory work does not get the right percentage of acknowledgement. If you are going to use feedback effectively, then you will have to feed back on the good and the satisfactory as well as the bad. Otherwise it remains a form of reprimand. Being objective, focusing on the behaviour and not the personality of the individual, is also important. One reason for the more common use of feedback is the increasing use by organizations of competencies or values that deal with behaviour. As such, feedback can be a valuable way of helping individuals to improve their skills in behavioural aspects of their work, often in instances where training and development courses cannot readily fit the bill. Coaching and feedback do overlap. Coaching can lead on from feedback; for instance, where a person is not meeting standards, feedback will come first. Coaching can then follow to improve performance. Coaching is essentially about helping the individual to improve. Feedback is essentially about providing information to the individual on how they are doing. We all need the views and opinions of others to measure our paths and progress and to be effective we need this information regularly, not just once a year. Both coaching and feedback are important aspects of any of the training and development activities given below.

Training and development tools The range of tools we have at our disposal is wide. Whatever methods you choose to employ, it is good practice to give some structure to the event,


whether it is a four-year qualification or a two-hour activity. A simple process to follow is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Develop and agree learning objectives. Have the learner keep a learning log. Discuss and feed back as regularly as possible. Provide pointers and encouragement but not control. Evaluate their progress. Celebrate their success. Review what the next steps are.

By using this process, you are encouraging reflection which leads to additional learning. You are also demonstrating an interest, providing feedback and motivating the learner throughout the learning process. In other words, this simple process is an investment that will pay back via more effective learning.

Formal programmes We shall not spend too long on discussing formal programmes.This should not undermine their value. It is merely that the format and existence of formal programmes are well known to most.These are the tools that we naturally reach for when we are seeking to improve individual performance. So, as they are a well-known and well-explored medium, it is superfluous to dissect these. Formal programmes can take many forms. The most common is a formal training course, where an individual attends to add new or to improve existing knowledge and skills. But many individuals commence a programme with little idea of the expectations of their manager or organization. They are not clear as to why they are there. If this is the case, the motivation to learn and hence, the value of the learning experience, is much diminished. By using the process above, particularly the agreement of learning objectives prior to embarkation, the learner goes into the experience with some firm ideas about the reasons for the programme. Formal training courses include seminars, workshops and conferences. They also encompass formal on-the-job training processes, where an individual follows a prescribed course of instruction. Qualifications are included in this section as a formal programme, although they could also be labelled as a separate section called education. Qualifications can be vocational in content or of a more general nature. They are likely to be longer experiences and can cover a wide spectrum from a part-time Master’s degree to a term’s evening classes in computing.


But once again, it is important to provide the learner with objectives. And the longer the haul, the more important becomes the need for encouragement and feedback. Qualifications offer a great way to increase general background knowledge and skills and are useful considerations for developing learning stairways and increasing the stocks in the talent pool. Professional training also falls into this category. It may consist of a structured programme of education together with on-the-job experience and projects. Bear in mind that you don’t have to stick with the minimum requirements of the syllabus. You can increase the richness of the experience by adding coaching and other development activities. The person’s growth and potential are then developed much beyond the minimum standard of attainment of a professional qualification.

Development activities Development activities are sometimes overlooked as ‘not really training’.There is no certificate at the close of the programme, less visibility to others of what is happening, often no formal record or acknowledgement of what has happened. They are not advertised as a menu of options that you can dip into and they may not be recognized or promoted from an organizational level. And yet, they are the most readily available method of developing individuals. Many managers will use them instinctively and will wonder why to bother flagging them up as a development tool. Others will not have considered the immense potential here for growing talent. When training with the Midas touch, they offer immense scope to the local manager to improve the value of their human capital. Development activities consist of less formal learning processes than those mentioned above. Some on-the-job training, such as sitting with Nellie, may fall into this category of development. It is difficult to classify, dependent upon its nature, whether it is a formal on-the-job training activity or a more informal development process.The classification does not matter – so long as the learning takes place. (And a personal plea – can we stop sitting with Nellie? She is sounding old and frumpy and giving the activity a bad name. In the new millennium, can we start sitting with Nicky, please?) A major benefit is that you can build them into the workplace, into the discretionary content of the job. And they are the lowest cost options you have at your disposal to improve the individual. The low costs make them a particularly attractive development medium. And so long as they are managed effectively, they can yield substantial development benefits.They are also available on a daily basis. The opportunities for development activities are limitless.


There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of the truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours.To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul. The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 18 March 1897 (1932) We shall examine a few of these activities in detail to understand the principles and nature of job-related development. Following these detailed examples, there is a list of outlines for further activities.These are some suggestions to help spark your thinking and provide some ideas on the sorts of discretionary training and development that you can use. We have already covered one such activity in the chapter ‘Finding the nuggets,’ that is, the career and life development essay. If you are serious about developing staff, this is a good activity to start the thinking process, because from this will flow many of the areas in which you can agree and frame a training and development programme. Here are five detailed examples of development activities. Managing a pr oject project This is perhaps the most widely used development tool and it is one that is used intuitively. The employee is given responsibility for a specific project or assignment. It is important that they have the authority to act within this project. They should be given a broad outline of the responsibilities and expected outcomes. But they should not receive detailed instructions.This would remove their personal initiative and drive. Frustration will follow if they are undermined and have no real power or freedom to act.This does not prevent a review process being in place to ensure they are on the right track. In fact, this is vital and a good form of continuous coaching and feedback. Letting the learner explore the ambiguity and uncertainties of the scope of the project is a part of developing their maturity and abilities. It’s a bit like knicker elastic. Look after it and examine it occasionally and it will provide reliable service. Keep fiddling and interfering with it and it will let you down! The scope and nature of the project can vary immensely, from a simple reorganization of a work process to relocating a factory. Whatever it is, there are several key steps in examining, planning and completing the project: 1. 2. 3. 4.

generating ideas. choosing the best. planning the process. organizing the implementation.


5. 6.

implementing. evaluation.

Myriad projects will be available. You will have many examples that you can use and that fit with your organization’s business plan or with departmental or individual objectives. Here are some simple examples to get your thought processes moving, but the possibilities are endless: l l l l l l l

redecorating or refurnishing a workspace; reorganization of a work area; introduction of a new product to market; design a new form for part of a process; design a new process for workflow through the organization; improve ways to receive customers into the organization; organize an employee open day, an annual party, a trip, a celebration.

The employee must be encouraged to seek the advice, support and input of relevant others. This not only ensures a smoother implementation by winning support, it also improves the individual’s negotiation and interpersonal skills. Likewise, on larger projects, others will need to be involved. This can be used in a more developmental role of building and running a team. Running a gr oup group Problem-solving groups, continuous improvement groups, project teams and planning groups exist all the time in most organizations, either informally or formally. Giving the leadership to someone else can be a tremendous development tool, bringing an immense degree of satisfaction to the leader and to the members. A great deal of satisfaction can be derived when a group has worked together on a problem and has achieved a successful result. There are some basic rules. Running a group can be quite a challenge for a first timer and it is necessary to ensure that the individual has some ideas on the process involved. Formal training may be a precursor to this. If this is not feasible, some time spent working with and being coached by a good facilitator is invaluable. The opportunity to work with a group of people known to the individual makes this a less threatening process. The group will have to knit together, go through a period of forming and negotiating whilst roles are settled.This can be disarming for the inexperienced. The leader will need to understand this. Conflict will be a natural part of the group and reaching a consensus is part of the development. Remember also that you can use membership of the team as well as team leadership as a great tool to develop a lot of people at the same time.


A different form of development through group involvement can be to involve the individual in a creative-thinking group.These can be very refreshing places to develop new ideas and promote some out-of-the-box thinking.You need to have the basic principles of brainstorming in place for this to stand a good chance of success. These are: l l l

Defer judgement. No criticism is allowed.The critical review follows later. Be imaginative. All ideas, the zanier the better, are welcomed. Go for quantity. Buckets of ideas are required. The quality control is built in later. l Combine and build. Combine others’ ideas with your own. Most of creativity is about bringing together previous ideas. Getting a person to sit in on or lead such a group, which can be viewed as a part of the running a group process, can yield some very energizing activity and great ideas. Involve those who are interested in the subject and some that have different backgrounds. So, if you want to develop some new product ideas, involve a financial and a personnel guy, and a shop-floor employee will add to the variety of the output. Remember that not all good ideas are yours! Undertaking a SWOT analysis One of the benefits of a SWOT analysis is that the principles are so simple and so widely known that anyone can undertake one of these with a few minutes’ coaching. The employee identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a particular situation, for instance the current departmental situation. SWOT analyses are very valuable as they look at the positives – strengths and opportunities – and negatives – weaknesses and threats. They are also present time and forward looking, the future represented by the opportunities and threats, examining possible future scenarios.This exercise can be done individually but is better produced via a group of people. For instance, it is a good starting point for someone who has never run a group before. It provides a lot of information on the situation of an organization or department very quickly. It can also provide ideas for other developmental activity and projects. It also allows the individual to explore their own perceptions of the area under scrutiny and allows them to compare their views with those of others. W riting a job description This may sound like a pedestrian activity at first glance. It is, however, a powerful process to clarify both the manager’s and the individual’s thinking on role and responsibilities.


The exercise must not consist of producing a long list of duties.The individual should concentrate on identifying the five or six major key result areas of the position. These are the results that are expected over time. A way of distilling these is to consider what is done to what to obtain what results. For instance, a management accountant may have responsibility for producing budgets. This could be expressed as: to agree, produce, monitor and control annual budgets for all departments, so that budgetary controls are maintained. This is a broad area of responsibility within which many things can happen and is therefore a good example of what a key result area should express. The exercise gives great clarification to the individual as to what is expected from them. For their manager, it enables them to agree the scope of the job. They also provide a starting point to consider what discretionary content to add to the job. In the above example, the manager may ask the accountant to devise a new method for gathering and producing the budgetary information. Or they may ask the accountant to cut the current cycle time needed to produce budgets from three months to one month. These could be both discretionary content and discretionary developmental opportunities. Going outside Encourage the individual to participate in voluntary external activities and relate the skills they learn externally to organizational situations. The area of skills development depends on the individual’s involvement and you can only encourage, you cannot insist on external involvement. There are many good leadership and people-based learning activities outside the organization. These could include involvement as a school governor, local councillor, community service, charity work, church activity, scout and guide movements, youth work, sports coaching, Outward Bound, schools liaison, careers talks, and other social events. Where there is a real transfer of skills across into the organization, such activity can be encouraged by providing appropriate time off and perhaps some other resources, such as making meeting facilities available. Many people feel they learn essential and valuable skills through their outside activities. As they are giving up their own free time for this, they are normally highly committed to the task in hand. It is a common mistake to separate the work and non-work-related activity in our thinking. It is as if we expect the individual to undergo some form of transformation when they come to work. This is clearly not the case. You are getting the same person with the same skills, thoughts and feelings that the youth club gets as its leader. There are also many opportunities for business and professional involvement outside work. These are detailed in the lists of developmental activities that appear later.


The above are just five examples of what a development activity can look like. Below you will find a list of ideas for further development activities. These are divided into the same groupings as the competency list. We said earlier that much learning is accidental. And how often does the individual returning from a training course confirm this by saying they learnt as much from networking in the social time than from the course? It is therefore debatable in many of the following activities as to which section they should appear under. For instance, consider one of the activities above, running a group. The development need may have been to give facilitation skills to the individual. However, as a result of the experience, the individual has formed good working relationships with a number of staff from other functions. They have increased their network of contacts and improved working relationships with a number of departments. They have also picked up some useful ideas and tools from the other members of the group on a range of topics. They have observed some good personal techniques that they had not encountered previously. This is all bonus learning and was not part of the original development need. You will see that the majority of these development activities include the process of implementation. Coming up with ideas and suggestions for change and improvement is often the easy part. Making it happen and actually putting in the change is the difficult bit.This is where the action learning process really is effective. The implementation stage – typically involving the frustrations, blockages and resistance – provides great learning potential. The following list provides over 75 ideas for development activities. As you review the list, this will spark other ideas and adaptations that you can use with your own staff. They will also provide an insight into the nature and scope of the sorts of activities you can employ in development. Managerial skills 1. 2.

3. 4.

Identify with others all the non-value-added work in an area. Set a plan of action to eliminate this activity. Coach in the difference between a progress task – one that moves the organization forward – and a maintenance task – one that solely maintains the status quo. Develop and implement a simple and effective Bring Forward file. Delegate a part of a larger project to a subordinate, being clear on the scope of the work. The principle of delegation is a win– win approach. The manager divests themselves of some activities, the subordinate receives more challenging work. Avoid delegating only mundane tasks, which should be automated or abolished.


5.

Consider what additional responsibilities can be added to a job. Recognize that these need to be challenging and realistic. 6. Develop an individual as a project champion or local expert in a field of operation, for instance a local champion on IT skills or on a corporate project. Give them specific responsibility for implementation of the project in your area. 7. Organize a VIP visit to your facility. 8. The individual uses a problem-solving tool to analyse a problem. Share a tool with which you are familiar or use a commonly available process, such as fishbone diagrams or force field analysis. Leadership and people skills 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Appoint the individual as temporary manager or supervisor to cover a holiday period or maternity leave. The individual runs a training course or a session within a course. Have them prepare the materials and practise delivery. For the inexperienced, this can be as short as a half-hour slot. He who teaches understands. Make the individual part of an interview panel. Review their views on candidates and why they reached these conclusions. Give guidance on non-discriminatory selection. Give responsibility for the sourcing of temporary staff from agencies. Ensure they prepare an adequate person specification. Give responsibility for recruiting graduates or school leavers. Sit in on a disciplinary hearing. Carry out an investigation of the facts surrounding a disciplinary event. Ensure that the facts and not just opinions are garnered. Spend some time working with an awkward employee. Discuss what they have learnt as a result of the experience. How did they cope? What mechanisms did they develop to handle the person? Give responsibility for mentoring a new employee and ensuring the new starter gets a proper induction into the organization. Produce a training skills matrix for an area or department.This produces a useful and powerful one-page skills audit. It involves research and the need for accuracy. It also develops skills in reaching consensus and agreement with all those covered by the survey. Produce an Employee Handbook. This is an effective way to get a thorough understanding of all terms and conditions of employment, rules and regulations.


Communications skills 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Undertake lectures or lead classes at a local school or college. Most such establishments are crying out for inputs from local commercial enterprises. Make a presentation to a group of senior managers. Prepare suitable materials, coach or train in elementary presentation techniques first and review prior to going live. Put in charge of an employee-briefing group. The individual produces a properly constructed report on a substantial issue. Provide coaching in basic report writing and ensure they include a one-page concise executive summary. Have the individual read a long or complex report and provide a onepage summary. This is a good exercise in promoting simple and clear thinking and most arguments can be thus summarized. Write an article for the house journal or local newspaper and liase with the local reporter or journalist. Prepare a press briefing on an important topic. Spend a spell as the editor of the house journal, responsible for collecting, writing, collating, and producing the journal. Involve as a member of a people-focused consultative or negotiating committee, for instance a works council, committee or union negotiating group. Produce a short video of a work process or an aspect of the organization that will be shown to employees or customers. Introduce them via coaching, video or book to the technique of mind mapping. Ask them to produce a mind map to explain the technique to others. (See biography for Tony Buzan’s (1993) book on mind mapping.)

Personal ef fectiveness effectiveness 31.

32. 33.

Coach in good time management. Have the individual work to a daily ‘To Do’ list. Ensure that they understand the importance of prioritizing. Point out the difference between urgent and important work.The urgent needs doing now but is not necessarily important.The important are often the longer-term aspects of work which are delayed because urgent work takes priority. Have the employee attend a meeting as your substitute. Brief on the likely content and give authority for them to make decisions on your behalf. Coach the individual in running effective meetings – be prepared, have an agenda and stick to it, start and finish on time, control and focus the group.


34.

35.

36.

37.

Review a mistake. Analyse what went wrong and why. What did they learn from it and what preventative measures can they introduce to prevent this happening again? The individual draws up organization charts for the company.This is hard to do in isolation and is a good method for increasing contact and networking. Draw up a diagram of their network of contacts. Highlight the internal contacts on an organizational chart. Are they too concentrated in certain areas or levels? Produce a potted history of the organization. Once again, this provides a lot of personal contact as well as research and provides a useful document for new entrants.

Business skills 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

Ask the employee to examine the organization’s vision or its mission statement. Ask them to produce an action plan of how they can personally impact on this. Examine what they do that does not contribute. Ask them to develop what they think the organizational statement should be. Design and implement a new policy. This task involves two sets of very different skills.The first is about covering all eventualities and producing a clear and concise statement of policy. The second concerns skills of communication and implementation. Spend a period of time running a suggestion or continuous improvement scheme. This is a good activity for getting the person involved in lots of different areas and functions in the organization. Involve as a member of a customer negotiation team. Get them to map the negotiation process they saw in action and review with them. Undertake a visit to a competitor organization if possible or to an organization representing an alternative technology or market sector. What lessons can your organization adopt from this visit? Summarize the possibilities and implement where appropriate. Undertake a formal benchmarking process on a particular topic. Research the best practice, make a visit if possible. Formulate a report of recommendations. Implement if the report is accepted. Undertake an overseas business trip, either accompanied or unaccompanied. Ensure the individual is sufficiently briefed to avoid failure. Spend a period on secondment to another department with a new reporting responsibility. This normally happens as a part of a project or assignment.There is a great learning opportunity in reporting to someone new.


47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

Make the individual PA to a gifted member of your staff for a period of time. This is particularly valuable where there are certain skills you wish the PA to develop. Get the individual to scan the professional sector of general newspapers for items relating to your business sector. Get them to develop a collation and circulation process to disseminate the information. Make them responsible for the organization’s entry into a competition or for an award standard. For example, this could be a large project for ISO certification or a local competition on innovation, training, export achievement or in some other field. Give them a secondary role as an internal auditor, trainer, coach, champion, health and safety representative or whatever other secondary roles are available in your organization. Get them to design a foolproof fail-safe system that builds in quality and is designed to avoid errors. Implement it. Ask them to undertake a customer survey examining why customers have left the organization. Get them to design the questionnaires or processes to be used prior to implementation. Get them to analyse and tabulate the results with recommendations. This is a useful exercise for building knowledge of the market sector and a thorough understanding of the organization’s customer-related problems. Undertake an environmental survey. Examine waste materials, harmful processes, emissions, energy and consumables usage. Make recommendations on improvements with cost or cost benefits. Implement relevant improvements. Undertake a project that will entail the use of a new piece of software. Provide some initial training or coaching support. Provide sufficient meat in the project to allow skills to develop. Task them with selecting and installing a new piece of software, firstly having identified the requirements that the software must meet. Get them to delegate the parts of the project beyond their technical capability. Ask them to produce a professional electronic presentation. Provide contacts to others with relevant expertise. Involve the use of a diverse range of materials such as video clips, photographs etc. Conduct an Internet search of information on a particular relevant subject such as a competitor analysis or best practice. Have the information summarized in a report. Undertake a breakdown of your markets – demographic, geographic etc. Produce a short description of the major roles of the various departments within the organization. This is a useful exercise for new starters and provides good insights into functional roles.


60.

61.

Solve an intractable problem.This is a stretching development to get the individual to analyse a long-standing problem that won’t go away. Very often, the problem is shrouded in complexity and locked into preconceived solutions. Coming up with totally new ways to tackle this is a great challenge. It can be good to set this challenge in an area of unfamiliar work or function. The individual can then bring a fresh mindset to it. Develop a process map.The individual maps out the workflow in a specific area. The process is often more complex than the commonly held perception of what is happening. Ensure that improving the process is a part of the exercise.

Output competencies Competencies can normally be thought of as inputs. The outputs are the resulting performance. But sometimes outputs such as quality or quantity of work are included in competency lists. This is more likely in high labour turnover businesses or low skilled or low trust environments.The examples given here are about reviewing those outputs. The basic inputs needed to improve these competencies, for example quality and quantity of output, are about basic training needs, processes and counselling. 62.

63. 64. 65.

Analyse quality problems and customer complaints on products or services with recommendations for solution. This is a full-time post for many so you will need to limit the evaluation to a narrower focus of a particular product or area. Examine a recent health and safety problem or accident. Devise and implement a corrective solution to avoid it happening again. Devise three ways to increase productivity within the individual’s area of work and implement the recommendations. Review absenteeism in the organization.What is the size of the problem and where is it happening? More difficult is to ascertain why it is happening. Brainstorm suggestions for improving the situation. Gain agreement and implement. Monitor to review whether the situation improves.

Pr ofessional and technical knowledge Professional 66. 67.

Produce and deliver a paper for a conference. Start up a common interest local network – for example women managers, best practice for accountants, HR forum, business networks.


68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

Form links with local universities that are involved in your area of expertise. Form a help-line network of technical or professional experts in other organizations. Develop networking skills through regular contact. Encourage the giving and receiving of information. Obtain a committee seat on your local professional institute. Write and submit for publication an article for a professional or technical journal. Find a professional or technical mentor outside your organization. Meet for lunch occasionally. Encourage them to read as widely as possible on their subject area. Tips are as follows. Be selective.Tear out or photocopy interesting articles from magazines (discard the rest of the magazine) and retain a reading file in their briefcase. This can be accessed at dead times such as travelling or waiting times. Keep a check the best-selling books in your field via the Internet, such as on Amazon.com. Read at least three good quality books on your subject per year. Summarize the main concepts in the book on a mind map or in notes. Interpret a piece of new legislation and devise a suitable internal policy or procedure to cover this. Ensure that it is correctly communicated and implemented. Arrange for an external speaker to visit to address a group. Manage the whole arrangement, from booking a suitable person, to advertising and raising support.

Pr oduct knowledge Product 77. 78. 79.

Get some work experience for the individual with the employee most knowledgeable on products. Send the individual to good quality product exhibitions. Ask for a onepage report on product innovations seen at the exhibition. Encourage out-of-the-box thinking. Don’t inhibit creative thinking by pouring scorn on ideas. Permit zany ideas and off-the-wall thinking. Idea generation is a separate activity. The tempering, filtering and conversion into workable solutions is a partitioned later phase.

In this chapter, we started by considering a taxonomy of competencies, how these cover skills, behaviours and values. We have looked at the importance of coaching and feedback and gone on to examine the wide range of formal and informal development activities that are available in the alchemist’s laboratory.


We have seen how development activities offer several benefits in particular a low cost, a readily available means and a powerful way to develop people.They are available in the daily round of the workplace and provide great scope for using the discretionary content of a job by providing discretionary development activity. They are also within the remit of the immediate manager. In the next chapter, we shall look at some generic ways to increase the talent pool and to encourage the process of learning throughout the organization. Each of these activities will provide a development opportunity.The examples given are not all large pieces of work. Remember that when training with the Midas touch, we are not seeking to make everyone into a CEO. What we are seeking to do is to increase and develop the talents of all our individuals. And what may seem like a small step for you as manager can provide a big learning opportunity for the individual at a lower level in the structure. The secret is in matching the levels of activity to the capabilities of the individual plus a bit. If you have found the list too long to take in, go back and choose just six activities. Then contemplate how you can use, adapt or reconfigure these for your benefit. This will assist you to develop your own abilities in identifying and designing suitable activities for your staff.


8

Ideas for cutting and polishing the stones

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the last chapter, we considered ways and tools available for individual development. We shall now look at some ideas for widening the availability of learning opportunities within your organization.These are ideas for encouraging a learning organization, for spreading the jam more widely, building in slack and increasing the talent pool available within the organization. Some are small and simple, some larger in concept. But all offer the increased opportunity to cut and polish the stones you have unearthed and to expose your employees to greater learning opportunities.

Corporate universities We start with a larger concept, that of corporate universities. It is estimated that there are now over 2,000 such universities worldwide. Some have physical boundaries, others are virtual, offering online learning to all employees. Their name is a misnomer. They offer a much broader range of courses than a traditional degree-based university and can pull together a host of formal courses that an organization has been delivering via a variety of other routes, from induction programmes to MBAs. Their strengths are in the accessibility of the programmes to a wide range of employees. And where an organization has 106

Ideas for cutting and polishing the stones 107

specific knowledge sets that it wishes to promulgate, they offer a great opportunity to promote learning stairways and learning avenues. These universities were once the preserve of the large corporation. But with the growing availability of Internet and intranet, it is now feasible for smaller organizations to develop or purchase programmes of learning and distribute these to employees via their intranet. The big corporate university idea can therefore be incorporated in a smaller way. It may be that the size of your organization prohibits the cost-effective development of such bodies or such intranet services. If this is the case, there are other means available to link into such bodies externally. For instance, local colleges and universities may be prepared to offer Internet links into their learning materials at a lower cost than course attendance. National bodies are also taking up the idea. In the UK, the Open University is the prime longstanding example of the success that distance learning can achieve in offering flexible open degree courses.The University for Industry, a government initiative, is now offering a range of open access courses that start at an elementary level under the Learndirect label.

Personal partners Linked with the above is the idea of partnering with local universities or colleges. By developing a close or preferred supplier relationship, you can gain a more ready access to learning materials, reduce costs and also develop courses and programmes together, both benefiting from one another’s expertise. Most educational establishments are now proficient in distance and flexible learning. For example, they may be able to accommodate flexible learning arrangements for shift or part-time workers. If you work in a small organization, it may be possible to form learning guilds with other small businesses that are close by or that share your market sector or via trade associations.The message is that you don’t have to do it all yourself; partnering provides another way to provide relevant courses of training and education.

People still read Don’t forget books! In today’s multimedia world, it is easy to overlook the obvious.The growth in book sales over the past 50 years has been phenomenal. And remember that books are a very inexpensive form of development and the development happens in the individual’s and not the organization’s time.


In 1950 when television first swept the country, it was widely believed that it would end the printed book. US population since has grown by two-thirds.The number of college and university students – the most concentrated group of users and buyers of books – has increased fivefold. But the number of printed books published and bought in the US has grown at least fifteen-fold, and probably closer to twenty-fold. Drucker (1999: 107) Start to build a library of relevant publications. There are some categories that should be included: l

Management: Include respected authors and thought leaders such as John Adair, Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Philip Kotler, Tom Peters, Peter Senge. Cover not only general management but other common commercial functions such as marketing, sales, quality, HR, finance and concepts such as continuous improvement, planning, innovation, creativity and so forth. l Specialist: Include materials on your own technical or professional sector – transport, medical care or whatever it may be. Also include materials on subjects that relate to the predominant skills and knowledge clusters in your organization. l IT: There some excellent idiot-proof pictorial guides on nearly all the common software packages.These provide not only good training materials but great reference books for that trickier less-often-undertaken task. You can scan the Internet for the best-seller lists in the above categories and discover what is new in management writing. Or you can add regularly to your library by joining a management book club. Check bibliographies at the back of relevant books to see what could be pertinent to your organization. And if employees wish to keep the books then encourage them to do so. The costs are minimal. And don’t forget to include copies of Training with the Midas Touch!

Saying ‘i do’ Have all of your employees got access to the Internet? Do they know how to use it properly and recognize the importance and unique attributes it brings to the world of commerce?


Many businesses are struggling to make the transition to e-commerce. The more skills and experience you have of e-related activities, the more chance you stand of making a successful transition. Employing consultants may assist you in understanding e-commerce, but remember that whilst they understand the e-bit no one understands your business, its uniqueness and peculiarities better than you do. Increase the availability of Internet access by installing special facilities that enable people to play with the process. Such facilities can be provided as Internet cafés or in leisure places and rest rooms to increase the take-up and availability. Unfortunately, many organizations have taken an opposite stance, and have restricted access to prevent employees abusing the Internet. This initial reaction was misguided from a learning perspective.

The computer bank An extension of the above is to provide a laptop loan service to employees so that they can develop their IT skills at home.Very often their children will be far more adept at IT and home can therefore be a good place to learn with expert tuition available on hand! Some organizations have expanded this idea and are providing free or very low cost options for all employees to purchase a PC package from work. Access can be provided to the organization’s intranet and e-mail facilities.This is a wonderful example of organizations putting their money where their mouth is and making a real impact upon their employees’ learning abilities.

Personal development programmes Not all of learning is work related. We have already outlined the benefits of personal development via undertaking external voluntary activities. One of the benefits of encouraging any form of learning is that it promotes a learning mindset; it returns the individual to the learning arena. This is a valuable asset, particularly with older employees who feel less comfortable with the idea of lifelong learning.The principle of encompassing general learning goes like this: ‘It’s not what you learn, it’s the fact that you’re learning.’ A good example of a personal development programme is the Ford Motor Company’s Employee Development and Assistance Programme (EDAP), which was introduced in 1987 and has been copied by many organizations. It is open to all employees and provides a wide range of opportunities for personal and


career development.The scope of possibilities is broad.These can include a range of educational programmes up to and including degrees and also encompass craft courses such as plumbing, cookery and art as well as a range of fitness and health programmes. The scheme specifically states that it is not a substitute for work-based learning. It may be difficult to justify the bottom-line results of such programmes or to know where the learning is leading. But such schemes do underline the organization’s commitment to a learning agenda and help to develop a learning culture. Many non-vocational courses can be bought very cheaply and therefore provide good value for money. For example, a scheme that met the costs of non-vocational evening courses but precluded the high-cost programmes such as degrees could be quite inexpensive to run.These schemes also contain a strong motivational element – the EDAP scheme was designed to help individuals build self-confidence and self-worth.

Learning scholarships An alternative route can be offered for those interested in further training and development via scholarships. They do not have to agree their training needs with their immediate supervisor but can apply for a learning scholarship to an independent internal body. The organization offers a number of scholarships per year and the applications are judged on their merits and their suitability to the individual and the organization. This gives those nuggets that have been overlooked or turned down for a particular course of training a second chance. And if you have missed any good performers in your training and development plans or succession plans, it gives them a chance to be noticed. It also gives the organization the opportunity to control the costs of personal development courses by limiting the amount of scholarships available. Once again, there is a strong motivational aspect in such programmes. Provided that selection is fairly done, it gives everyone the chance to put themselves forward and be heard.

A place to learn There is a dream about online training that goes like this. A broad range of training courses is available to all and these courses are delivered to the desk of every employee via an intranet. Employees, who are of course all highly motivated, take time out of their daily routine to dip into a piece of training, do the end of course test and come out of the process certified with a new


skill. This assumes that the phone doesn’t ring, no one comes to interrupt you and your boss doesn’t need to see you. Did they ignore or just forget about the interruption factor? Delivering training to the desktop is a great idea in theory but will it ever work in practice? Until we find a suitable way of managing this process, we have to provide some form of place for employees to carry out this learning. Learning resource centres are one method. A space and resources, normally PCs, software, books and other learning materials, are provided away from daily activity. In larger organizations, such facilities can be provided and staffed by trained advisors. Experience to date of such facilities suggests that they will not become successful merely by providing the facilities. Support and encouragement is needed to make them a living reality.They can be linked into corporate university or online learning ideas. An adaptation of the concept is to have a learning cell in larger departments or scattered throughout the working environment. This provides a learning workstation, which is close enough to the workplace to be utilized. It is earmarked and respected as a private space free from interruption, but is not too far removed to be inaccessible. Such learning cells or pods can provide a good alternative way to provision learning resources without developing a fullblown learning centre. If you are developing a learning centre, then avoid making it look like a library or a classroom. People learn best in relaxed and informal environments. The previously mentioned computer bank is in fact an alternative solution to the idea of a place to learn.The place of learning is transported to the employee’s home.

The playroom Learning and creativity are closely linked. But when attempting to encourage creativity in the workplace, we start at a disadvantage. Our initial education, the traditional educational process we experienced, was not designed to foster creativity. It focused on logical processes of thought and reasoning, prizing Maths and Sciences above creative subjects such as Art and Music. And yet as organizations, we prize creativity more and more. Although we prize it, we do not always facilitate it well. We have got rid of the serried ranks of desks. But often, all we have done is replace them with a random arrangement of workstations, thrown in some potted plants and carpets and expected much better things. In fact, everyone still has the same desk, the same pens and the same computer.


Give a six-year-old a few empty egg cartons and washing-up liquid bottles, some tape and coloured pens and within half an hour you will have a space station, an Easter egg factory, an innovative house, a new mousetrap or some other wonderfully imaginative contraption. It is only a small step from this to a new aeroplane design, a solution to land erosion, a lifeboat for tower blocks or new water desalination technology. All good ideas are simple ones. If we are to promote creativity in our organizations, then we need to get serious about providing the sort of facilities and resources that will foster this type of behaviour. Throughout history, almost every culture has had art, music, dance, architecture, poetry, storytelling pottery and sculpture. The desire to create is not limited by beliefs, nationality, creed, educational background, or era. The urge resides in all of us . . . (it) is not limited to the arts, but can encompass all of life, from the mundane to the profound. Quoted in Senge (1990: 141), from R Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance, Fawcett-Columbine, New York, 1989 If creativity is on your organization’s agenda, then creating the right space for this to happen is an imperative.You can experiment with the idea by trying a small pilot in a conference room or other space. The provision of creative materials, lots of coloured pens and wallboards, large sheets of coloured paper, soft space and cushions, creative reading and visual materials from unrelated sectors, music, scented candles, ice cream is the kind of thing that says this is a different place. This may sound like a bold step in some corporate cultures, and it is. But learning is a creative business and if you are serious about encouraging greater learning potential, such areas become valuable places for people to work and interrelate. If you want crazy ideas that can be developed into good products and services, you have to do crazy things. Or you can stay with what you have got. But then remember that insanity is doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results.

Skills circles A lot of the learning an individual receives remains with that individual. It is not shared or broadcast to others. This restrictive practice occurs because we think of learning as an individual pursuit.We send a person on a training course


for them to learn some new knowledge or skill. The concept of sharing that with others for some reason is not a widely held view, nor a common practice. And yet the traditions of storytelling are a long-held tradition in most cultures. This was how a lot of learning was transferred before the written word was commonly available to all. As discussed in learning avenues, we need to find ways to promulgate the knowledge and skills of the knowledge worker. A good practice to introduce is the idea of skills circles.These can be run as short events, perhaps over a lunch hour or early morning or close of work. Employees who have a specific skill or set of knowledge prepare a short presentation and handout on the subject for their colleagues. For example, it is a good idea, whenever an individual has attended any training course, to have such a session. The benefit is threefold. Firstly, the individual is having to summarize their learning. That reinforces the retention of that learning. Secondly, it derives a greater benefit from the investment in the training by spreading the knowledge more broadly. Thirdly, the individual has to justify to their colleagues why the skill or knowledge is important, once again reinforcing the retention. Some simple examples would be where a person has learnt a new tool or technique – for instance a new problem-solving process, a new project planning tool, some creative-thinking methods, a new piece of legislation, new market intelligence. Or someone may have been taken by some new ideas in a new business book. Think of these skills circles as storytelling circles, people gathered round listening to new words from the outside world, learning from them and altering their perspectives. In earlier days, the sharing of information when a person returned from their travels was a part of everyday life. It is a strange thing that we lose this habit in the organizational context and do not share the things we have learnt with others. You can introduce these circles not just for new learning but for existing skills. As you grow more familiar with the individual strengths of your employees, get them to share these existing strengths with others via skills circles. Make this form of learning a natural part of the working environment and you can greatly increase the talent of your people.

The working man’s club An adaptation of the above idea is to form a club or society that helps spread knowledge in a particular area or function. Normally there will be a common theme. Professional or technical clubs would be examples. Management clubs or PC users clubs are other examples.You will need sufficient personnel


interested in the specific subject area to make this work and an enthusiast to run it. But where concentrations of common interest exist, this can be a good way to encourage a greater take-up and spread of knowledge. Such clubs can include visits and lectures as well as incorporating their own expertise. Others aspiring to these fields of knowledge can also be included. Such clubs also have the added advantage of improving social interaction and employee networking.

Out-of-body experiences We have already covered the value to the individual of external voluntary work. Some organizations formalize this into a variety of forms by providing assistance to external bodies.This may be in the form of secondments to charities, support for specific local community work, partnering with local schools, working with underprivileged or minority groups and other meaningful bodies. Such initiatives need not be large in scope or too time consuming. They can offer good opportunities for building people-related skills and for developing abilities to handle different levels of people.They are also rewarding and give new perspectives by individuals encountering new and very different sets of problems and circumstances. They are also supportive of current trends in stewardship, ethical trading and concern for a broader press of stakeholders, such as the local community.These initiatives contain good learning experiences and the opportunity for the development and exercising of skills in new and different environments. They also have a good motivational effect both on participants and on other employees by nurturing a sense of community and service.

Aunts and uncles Having a good mentor can be a helpful experience both for new starters and for existing employees. Mentors are normally more experienced people with a greater degree of skill and knowledge who will guide an individual through major decisions relating to their career or life in general. They will normally not be the direct supervisor. So it is better to think of them as aunts and uncles, people once removed from the daily responsibilities of direct parenting. Their value is that they give an independent and detached view, their guidance and support being of a nonpartisan nature. Many people will instinctively gravitate to a trusted older friend or colleague to obtain this sort of advice and may have a number of different


mentors for different aspects of their lives – emotional, spiritual, mental or physical. To start a mentoring scheme, you will need to identify good trusted people who can provide sensible and thoughtful advice. Mentors are particularly suitable for younger employees, new recruits and those individuals with talent and potential who will benefit from sound advice and an objective third party.They are also extremely relevant for those who lack the confidence to take the first bold steps on to the learning ladder.

Reverse mentoring The world of IT brings about an unusual quirk in the skills spread across the generations.The normal situation of the older generation having a firmer grasp on the skills and knowledge required in the workplace is unexpectedly turned upon its head. The younger generation are the masters, nurtured in the new technology, having had the time on their hands to develop a vast experience of computer activity. Few in management or work situations have had the drive and time to reach the level of competence achieved by the younger generation. And often, it is not a detailed knowledge that is required from a management perspective but the need to understand the capability of computer systems. This is where reverse mentoring systems, already employed in numerous organizations, are paying dividends. Suitably IT-literate younger members of the organization guide older employees through the detail and overviews of IT, providing advice and coaching in ‘the black arts’ of the PC world. And this can be, with some thought, a two-way learning process, because at the same time the younger members are getting exposure to older, more senior members of the organization and getting some reciprocal learning. Reverse mentoring is a great example of going to the right place to get your learning, where the expertise resides in its fullest glory (and that may entail swallowing a little pride!).

Doorman for the day Working at a different level in the organization can be a valuable learning experience. Some organizations encourage or insist that their managers spend some time operating on a lower-level job. This may be as an operative on the shop floor, a clerical role, a janitor or whatever positions exist in your operation. The benefits are that the manager, who may never have performed such tasks, is seeing the organization from an entirely new viewpoint.


This promotes a much better understanding of how the organization operates and what really goes on down below. Very often, managers are deliberately shielded from the realities of working life by the intermediate levels of supervision and junior management. As a management practice, it gives the individual a lot of real-time information on the temperature, the problems, and the strengths that are prevalent within the organization. This is invaluable information when making decisions about change. Consider a group of managers who are working on an organizational problem. They are working together in an action-learning environment, grappling with generating a number of potential solutions, which will be followed by implementation. If they have been exposed to this sort of learning experience at lower levels of the operation, the odds of reaching a realistically workable solution are much higher than a group of managers who have not had this exposure. Such a process can also be used as an alternative to employee surveys, giving a straw poll on organizational climate. Although far less quantitative in approach, the quality of data gathered this way is attractive.

Can I help you, sir? A variation of this theme is for employees to spend a period of time working at the coal-face in a customer-orientated role. This could be as a call-centre operator, a checkout operator, a reception role, a helpdesk or with more complex sales situations shadowing a direct salesperson. This is once again an invaluable learning experience for understanding the needs of your customer base. There is a convincing argument that every employee should have this experience. All organizational effort in the commercial world (and in most of the noncommercial world) is focused on the one event, satisfying the customer or client. For those employees who are more than one stage removed from the direct customer, this is an important learning event. An alternative version of this is for employees to spend a period of time as customer of the organization. This is easily done in some sectors such as retail or transport. But it can be achieved in other areas as well. How many teachers spend a day as a student in their schools or colleges, medical staff as a patient? Have you tested your organization’s customer interface and rung up for a quote, with a query or for information? Employees’ understanding of customer needs, where the process fails them and what can be done about it are all available very easily and quickly. The learning that can be gained via such processes – working at the customer interface or being a customer – is very powerful and can provide a lot more


benefit both to the individual and the organization than a host of customer service courses.

Walking down the avenue We talked earlier about the need to widen learning corridors into avenues. One method for doing this is to develop a scheme whereby employees spend a short period of time working in a related department.The best payoff can be achieved by basing this experience upstream or downstream in the process – that is, in an internal supplier or internal customer department.This can provide a better understanding of the skill and knowledge of the other department, and can lead to problem resolution at the interface and process improvements as well as producing better working relationships. It also helps individuals to recognize what other opportunities exist elsewhere in the structure.

A day out A lot can be learnt from taking a day away from the work environment to see how other organizations achieve their results. Visits to other technologies and market sectors give the opportunity for employees to see new perspectives and think out of the box. Such visits can often be arranged via trade associations, local employer networks or personal contacts. In the UK there is a specific scheme for such visits. The DTI’s Inside UK Enterprise scheme does precisely this. It allows employees to visit a variety of organizations that present their areas of best practice to visitors, often including a tour of the facilities and short lectures on areas of good practice.This excellent scheme has been copied by a number of other European countries. Employees at all levels can benefit greatly from seeing and hearing how others execute their business. Most business problems are common throughout commerce. Seeing how others have solved them avoids reinventing the wheel. Imagine the impact of having each member of your staff visit a different organization, coming back and sharing the best three ideas that they saw. As with many of the above schemes, it is sensible to have a short form that the employee fills in and discusses with their immediate supervisor on their return, spelling out three or four major learning points from the experience of visiting other sites or working in new departments. This helps capture the learning and, furthermore, any suggestions for change can be discussed with a view to implementation.


The above are all processes that you can introduce to increase the scope and diversity of your training and development activity at work. And many offer the opportunity to bring a larger number of employees into the remit of training and development. For example, getting operators out to see how other organizations organize their production can be a great learning opportunity that is hard to replicate through more formal training. There are many other processes that you can introduce to increase learning – sabbaticals, work shadowing, secondment programmes to name but a few.You may find that some of the processes given in this chapter are some distance away from your traditional view of training. The important action is to review what you can take, adapt and combine to fit best into your organization. And to review what will provide the best payback for you in opening eyes and assist in developing your people and the contribution they bring to work.

Putting it all together 119

9

Putting it all together

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great. Mark Twain

We said at the very start of this book that you couldn’t manage people, only lead them. And this is nowhere more apposite than in the area of training, development and human growth. But as we set off on the journey to improve individual talent and expand our talent pool, we do need some methods for managing the process. This chapter examines some easy models and proven methods for keeping track of where we intend to go to on this journey of development and how we are going to get there. These are the pieces of paper that will help us to manage the process of increasing the value of our human capital.

The big mistake And this is where we encounter the first problem.The processes outlined here, such as training plans and performance management models, are often scheduled on an annual basis. This leads us into a false sense of security. It is easy to start to believe that if we have completed these plans and reviews once a year, we have carried out our responsibilities and all training and development has been taken care of. This is an easy mistake to make and a false trail to follow. Our commitment to training and development needs to be an ongoing continuous process. Let’s draw an analogy with raising children.You and your partner do not sit down once a year and decide what is best for the child’s development over the 119


forthcoming year, write it down and then implement it. There are too many unknown variables. People, situations and circumstances change. And whilst the piano lessons seemed a great idea to all parties last Christmas, they have become a painful and worthless pursuit.What we do as parents is to constantly upgrade and reconfigure our understanding, our feedback and our inputs to the child. We should, of course, not use the model of child-rearing for developing our staff at work. But the principle is used here to illustrate the importance of continuous attention to progress. For good development and coaching to take place at work, the same continuous attention needs to happen – we should be reviewing the individual’s progress on a regular basis. Before you decide to read no further and that people development doesn’t sound such a good idea, let’s be clear that this doesn’t need to be a long or formal process! It can be a short ‘how-is-it-going’ conversation, a check that what you have both set out to achieve is still reasonable and is progressing well. If progress isn’t on track, then here is the opportunity to realign your thoughts and change direction or emphasis. Having said all that, we do need to have some form of paper to direct and manage us through the process. In every way, the pieces of paper are incidental and are only a tool to make it all take place. Once you have used the processes you will find that the activity of coaching, feeding back, agreeing on training and development needs becomes more instinctive. The need for formal processes becomes more critical as the size of the organization increases. In an organization of less than one hundred people, it is relatively easy to keep track of individuals. Personal observation and contact are possible and can be used as important measures. Once the reference point of personal contact is lost with larger size, the processes need recording to enable those centrally responsible for development to have meaningful information.

The personal development portfolio We have already mentioned the value of personal development portfolios or learning logs. These are a valuable method for capturing development issues. They also provide personal ownership of the development process for the individual. A further advantage of the portfolio is that the individual maintains the record. Introducing these portfolios also acts as a powerful statement that the organization is committed to development. There are certain documents that can be included to make a meaningful log: l l

curriculum vitae; records of training courses attended;


l l l l l l l

education and training certificates; development plans; major achievements; life and career development essay; major learning experiences over the past year; references and recognition letters; psychometric test results.

The portfolio builds into a story of the individual’s development to date with plans and aspirations for the future. It is not only a valuable document for internal promotions and selection boards but also instils a personal pride in its author. The portfolios can take the form of a well-produced corporate-style binder with predefined sections or you can introduce them on a less sophisticated basis at a local level. They can be revealing documents for the individual from a personal perspective, reflecting on what their goals were several years ago and how those have progressed and changed. The individual can also include some personal life goals – giving up smoking, taking a gliding course or whatever – to give the portfolio a broader base and can retain these as a separate confidential section for personal reference.

The skills matrix We have already looked at the detail of the skills matrix.This is just a reminder of the value of this document. It is one sheet of paper that gives you a spreadsheet of the skills of all the members of a department. It is an excellent starting point if you are just embarking upon a more professional method of training and development. If you are looking for a simple process to monitor training and development in your area, then this is probably the one to go for, combined with a development discussion (outlined later in this chapter).

A performance management model Your organization may or may not have its own performance process. These go under many different names: performance management, performance appraisal, performance review, and performance development programmes.They contain some common themes and the major ones are outlined below. What you choose to put in a performance model depends on how sophisticated you


wish to get.The more sophisticated they get, the more paper and administration are involved.With sophistication comes the danger that the paperwork becomes the focus – always bear in mind that the conversation is more important than the piece of paper. Remember also that during a performance review, the individual should do most of the talking. These events should never be a receptacle for all that has happened and has gone wrong over the course of the year, with the manager hogging the lion’s share of the conversation. A good rule of thumb is for the manager to do no more than 20 per cent of the talking.

Key result areas Some processes include a list of the key result areas (KRAs). We looked at the format of these under job descriptions.You will recall that these are the major results expected from the job over time and will normally average five to six areas. The inclusion of these fulfils three purposes. Firstly, it is a reminder to update them. Secondly, it gives a good short summary of the job. This is particularly helpful where the documentation is to be read by a third party. Thirdly, some performance schemes review performance against these key result areas. Others focus only on yearly or periodic objectives or combine both for performance review.The advantage of reviewing KRAs is that a more rounded view of total performance is gained than by limiting review to a list of objectives. Alternative pieces of paper, such as job descriptions, may already provide this information, in which case be sure it adds a value to your proposed review process before including it in a performance review document.

Biography You can include a short summary of qualifications, main positions to date and essential skills and talents. Once again, such information is a useful inclusion if the document is made available to a third party, for instance senior management or a corporate head office. If all parties already know this information, it becomes a superfluous bureaucratic inclusion.

Objectives The preferred method for setting personal objectives is to cascade these down from the business plan. Management by Objectives has been in use for a long time as a management tool and is a well-tested methodology. It has achieved a


more popular renaissance recently through the wider implementation of performance processes. The process is a simple concept. As well as having key result areas the individual agrees with their manager a set of objectives that they will achieve over a period of time. The typical planning phase is one year. These objectives can be weighted according to importance, as not all will have equal value. A key objective may carry as much as 25– 30 per cent of the total rating. Performance against these objectives can then be monitored and built into any performance-related pay scheme, if one exists, at the end of the year. This method dovetails into the earlier discussion on the discretionary content of jobs. This is a good means for the manager to build in new challenges and development opportunities to enhance personal challenge and growth. An example serves to illustrate the cascading of objectives. A CEO is tasked with the introduction of a new product in the new year. He passes different parts of this responsibility down to his team of managers. In the case of the marketing manager, she is tasked with arranging all of the product training, product literature, press advertising and press releases for the launch. She in turn passes some of this responsibility down to her publicity officer. The publicity officer is given an objective to have all of the new product brochures complete by the third quarter. But he also suggests to the manager that the product brochures for the two existing sister products in the range should be updated and revised into a new style.This will give a new, fresh look to the whole group of products.The manager had not considered this but knows that he has a flair for this activity and will derive a lot of personal satisfaction from the project. There are benefits all round, not least that this will provide a great development opportunity for the publicity officer. Rather than aping the existing house style, he will have the opportunity for personal input and is excited at the prospect of this work. The marketing manager and the publicity officer set about agreeing objectives for the completion of the tasks, which include time targets for completion and budgetary parameters.

SMARTEST objectives SMART objectives are a widely accepted method for formulating such objectives. Objectives should be: S – Specific M – Measurable A – Agreed


R – Realistic T – Time-bound We can add further parameters that make objectives even more relevant for training and development purposes.These contribute additional impact to the objectives. The first two ensure that the objectives are developmental, the last one that they are in line with organizational direction. They are as follows: E – Energizing.The objectives should consist of issues that the individual views positively and link in with personal talents and interests wherever possible. S – Stretching. The objectives should be stretching, sufficient to take the person into unknown territory but not too far to render the objective unachievable, nor to set the individual up for failure. T – Tied in. The objectives should be cascaded objectives that tie into the business plan and therefore make a real contribution to the organization’s progress. SMARTEST objectives offer real opportunities for personal growth and achievement as well as offering the best choice for organizationally focused activity. If you are used to producing SMART objectives, try the addition of these three parameters to add a new dimension to your objective setting. A further tip when setting objectives is to concentrate upon progress tasks, those tasks that take the organization forward. Avoid maintenance tasks, those that maintain the status quo. For example, a maintenance task could be to ensure that all invoices to customers are processed by month end. A progress task could be to develop a method to automate invoice generation to cut down on lead times and error rates. This takes the organization forward to a better position. Recognizing the differences between progress and maintenance tasks enables you to be clearer in setting objectives that will move the situation forward. Within performance management processes, performance can be measured in several ways, either from the key result areas, the achievement of objectives, from performance against competencies as detailed below or from a combination of these. Rather than the manager leading on these points, it is better to have the individual say how they felt they have performed. You can then come to an agreement on performance. Interestingly, it is not unusual for the individual to underrate their capabilities.


Competencies If your organization has competencies, it is likely that there will already be a performance management system in existence for the purpose of measuring performance against competencies and identifying development needs. Where competencies are being used, it is important to provide a list of standards of behavioural attributes. For example, how does the organization judge commitment? Without some detailed guidance on corporate standards, different managers will be coming to different conclusions. You will also remember from earlier discussions that it is important to include some job-specific skills in the competency model. If these are omitted, the development discussion loses the detail of the direct impact of individual performance on the job.Without the inclusion of specific job-related skills, the model concentrates too much on the generality of generic competencies and behaviours.

The development discussion Here we come to an essential element of any review procedure. It may build upon previous sections of the review or can be used in isolation. It can review past strengths and areas for improvement but should be as forward looking as possible. The development discussion is the most vital element for identifying and developing talent. The sorts of questions it should contain will include: l l l l l l l

What have you done best this last year? What have you learned? What have you found difficult? What are your strengths? How can we help you to develop these abilities? What are your career goals? Are there new skills you would like to develop?

The emphasis should be upon improving strengths and not upon righting weaknesses. The same energy is required to improve performance from good to very good as is needed to move from unsatisfactory to satisfactory. It is also more ennobling for the individual to look to positive traits. I will praise any man that will praise me Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra


If you have been paying attention to your individual staff throughout the year, you will have a good idea of what the general tone and nature of the answers will be. By spreading these discussions throughout the year, the process becomes less onerous on both parties. A once a year dialogue takes on the guise of an interview, where employees may become protective and defensive and look for the right answers rather than the real ones. This is unlikely to be conducive to honest and open exchange on progress and the future. The essence of these processes is to provide valuable feedback to the person and to agree upon ways forward to assist their progress and growth, not to rake over old ground. At the conclusion of the discussion, the goal is to have a workable development plan for the individual, which specifies three or four areas for development. This is only a plan and can be adapted as the year progresses. It should be realistic. A long wish list that both parties suspect will not transpire undermines the credibility of the exercise. It is better to be small and realistic than large and unachievable. It should contain: l

the development needs or objectives – for example, to gain proficiency in the use of spreadsheets sufficient to be able to produce the monthly sales forecast by the end of July; l the training method – for example, attend a half-day introductory course at college and work with colleague X, who currently produces the report; l who does what for when – for example, the individual is to source and book a course by the end of April, the manager is to arrange on-the-job experience with colleague X by mid-May; l evaluation, or was it successfully completed – for example, manager to review progress and proficiency with individual in early July. Not all development issues will be as clear as the above example. For example, the manager and employee may agree that the individual should develop a better understanding of producing marketing plans. Some relevant reading – a book and some articles – is suggested and a visit to a best practice organization will be arranged. The manager will also provide some personal coaching and some examples that they have previously produced. Development is not a science and you must be prepared to accept some ambiguity and flux in the setting of development plans. Individuals may have general thoughts on their development but have not clarified these as yet. It is an easy mistake to assume that an individual has firm ideas about their future path. This is rarely the truth. Some people do have carefully mapped career plans but many careers are a mish-mash of clear thought, good or bad timing, being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time, chance encounters, pivotal unplanned events and many other variables. Once again, this is why ongoing dialogue is so important as it allows the individual to develop their own thinking over time.


There may also be personal agendas arising in such discussions that cannot be met. An employee wishes to embark upon a long or expensive training programme or has unrealistic expectations about the speed at which their development should proceed.This is where ongoing feedback is useful, because such issues can be ironed out and reconfigured over a period of time, rather than stored up for the annual meeting. But there will be the opportunist who is seeking to complete an MBA or an expensive training course to gloss up their CV and assist their movement onward to a new employer. In these instances, you have to go one step back to seek to understand the reason why the person is not fulfilled and whether you or the organization can find a mutual path that meets expectations. You should also pay special attention to new starters or newly promoted employees.These people are likely to have more training and development needs and it is sensible to spend more time on formulating their plans, both in the documentation and in the discussion. For example, they will need more time devoted to policies and procedures, understanding culture and structure, gaining the knowledge base that existing employees already possess, finding their way in the new organization – aspects that existing employees take for granted.

The succession plan The succession plan is included here under the section of development discussions for a good reason. A succession plan is a useful document for tracking certain high-profile jobs and high-profile talent. A list of key jobs with two to four possible potentials for filling those roles exists in most organizations, either on paper or in the minds of the senior team. A useful method is to have a list of key jobs with possible names listed against them.You can classify these names as ready now, ready in 1– 2 years’ time, ready in 3– 5 years’ time. This focuses attention on who is being developed for what. Succession plans are fine and dandy but they can lead you to concentrate all the attention on a small minority of personnel and this can be to the cost of the remainder of the talent in the organization. As an analogy, an army trains all of its personnel. It does not focus only on developing the generals. An army of brilliant generals who can develop excellent fighting strategies is unlikely to win the battle without a well-trained force beneath them. Soldiers need training in the skills of battle and the ability to operate the equipment they use. In other words, it is easy to concentrate solely on the more senior members of the team, when the real added value to the organization is in increasing everyone’s abilities to perform.With this in mind, it is recommended to have a development discussion and a development plan for each individual in the organization and not to limit this to higher levels only. If you do limit this to


higher levels only, you will miss the potential of many employees and lessen your chances of increasing your pool of talent. Did you know that the postroom clerk is a recently qualified graduate with a degree in business?

Constructing a review process If you do not have a performance review process, you can build your own from the above elements.You can start very simply with a development discussion, the most relevant for the issues outlined in this book.You can add some personal objectives – the discretionary content of the job that also offers developmental opportunities. Both of these can normally be done on a departmental basis without a corporate guideline. Background information on biography and key result areas can also be added, useful if you have responsibility for new staff. The competency framework and behaviours measures have to be part of a larger corporate-wide process to be successful.

The training and development plan The above performance management model allows you to formulate individual development needs. But you will need to bring all of your needs together into some form of control document. Here is a simple suggestion of how to put together a plan. We shall look at producing a training plan for a medium-sized department. The same process can be effectively used for a small company. In larger organizations, the departmental plans can be brought together to form the organizational plan. Any specific organizational-level plans can then be appended to this documentation to form the organization’s overall training plan. So this model can be used in any size of organization. There are three levels of training need within any unit of operation. These occur at an organizational level, a departmental level and an individual level.

Organizational level Organizational training needs are normally large in scope. They can include such aspects as the implementation of a new information system, planned changes in culture – for instance an organizational development initiative to introduce continuous improvement, competency frameworks – the introduction


of a new product, the opening of a new market, the implementation of new legislative requirements. Such needs are normally identified at a senior level. For your departmental plan, they are therefore often predefined and a given inclusion that needs to be taken into account. For example, you may need to provision time away from the job for all employees to attend a two-day course on a new customer service initiative.

Departmental level There will be department-wide issues to consider. New equipment or processes coming into the department may call for a department-wide training plan. An increase in production or throughput calls for new employees, revised processes, a project team to review how to achieve this. These all have development implications for the department. You may have departmental performance measures that call for training or development interventions, or more general requirements, for instance improved team working is set as a departmental goal. Once again, these are issues covering numerous individuals. Remember that at both the organizational and departmental levels, there may be training and development initiatives taking place that you can use to your advantage. You can plug into these to increase your talent pool. Or they may offer the opportunity to develop better learning stairways and learning avenues, to spread the jam further and wider. The skills matrix will also make available a lot of information on skills gaps and identify both departmental and individual-level training needs that need incorporating into your training plan.

Individual level These needs will come primarily from your development discussions mentioned in the above performance management section. They may also be drawn from an analysis of your skills matrix or from other techniques you use, such as job analysis. Another good source of training needs is to consider anything new – products, processes, equipment, people, technology – all will have a training implication. These sources of information can then be coordinated into your plan. For example, there may be common needs from different individuals that can be met together. Or you can simply file the individual development plans together as your action plan.


Drawing from these three levels, you now have a total picture of your development needs. As soon as the ink is dry, the needs will start to change as unforeseen eventualities and different priorities arise.This is fine.At least you have developed a starting point. And writing down the plan gives it credibility and stature.

Evaluation It is useful to include a column on evaluation, to check whether the training and development has been effective. There is a lot of debate about how to evaluate training and development. It is not intended to go into the detail of this debate here. The recommendation is, at a minimum, to review whether it happened and whether you feel it has been effective. The simple question to ask is – did it work and has the individual acquired the necessary skills and knowledge that you set out to achieve? One useful tip is to think about how you will evaluate the development at the planning stage.When it is complete, how will I know if this piece of training and development has been effective? Sometimes this can be self-evident; the person has obtained the certificate they set out to gain, they have become proficient in the use of a piece of machinery. At other times, you are exercising your judgement as to whether the objectives have been achieved. And often we are more comfortable evaluating the training element as opposed to the development element – the individual has completed the two-day course, has got the certificate and has filled in the happy sheet to say what a good course it was. (The happy sheet is not an evaluation process. Often all it tells you is that the person enjoyed the course, thought the lunch was good and would go again.) When evaluating development plans, we need to rely more upon personal observation. We can also use action plans, such as the setting of specific objectives and discretionary work. This gives us real-time measures of the person’s growing capabilities. An example illustrates good evaluation – learning to drive. A simple evaluation of success would be that the driver has passed their test and can now drive unaccompanied.That is a reasonable traditional evaluation.They are now certificated. But are they a competent driver? Further evaluations after the initial training has been successful could include accident-free motoring for a year, a clean driving licence, never drinks and drives, car maintained in good working order. These are additional qualitative judgements that provide a better view of competence. And the real evaluation is going for a drive with the new driver after a suitable period of post-test experience – for example sitting in on a presentation after the individual has received training and has been practising for a while.This form of evaluation recognizes that both training and develop-


ment are involved in the individual’s growth and that ongoing coaching and review are essential ingredients of evaluation.

Setting priorities Training and development plans can become a long shopping list of requirements, not all of which will be fulfilled.When you have put together all of your needs into a plan, you may find it is too substantial to implement. In these circumstances, a way to avoid the shopping list syndrome is to prioritize the list. This makes it realistic and focused. You can achieve this by using the following two filters.

Pareto analysis The Pareto principle is a useful tool to employ for setting a priority on the various needs. Consider that 20 per cent of your training and development activity will yield 80 per cent of the improvements. Now review your list of planned activities and draw out those activities that you feel are going to yield the prime benefit over time. These are the priorities to include in your plan. The ‘over time’ component is important. If you focus only on short-term gains, this will preclude the longer-term training initiatives that may be crucial in building up your talent pool or building learning stairways. If you find it difficult to make these specific choices, try prioritizing into A, B and C categories first, prior to identifying the critical 20 per cent.

The development graph If you are faced with a number of alternative solutions to training and development needs or have too many to implement, you can plot these on a development graph (Figure 9.1).You consider each need against two parameters as follows: 1) the cost or effort that will be required to implement the training and development; 2) the potential value of the resultant learning. The preferred activities are those falling towards the upper left section – that is, those with a likely high yield of learning that require a low cost or effort to implement. Where your choices are difficult, this diagram provides a useful scatter-gram to enable you to sort priorities. And it provides the necessary focus for you to plan your budget. Development activities will be cheaper on the whole than training activities and will tend to fall towards the left of the graph.


Potential value of learning

H

M

L

L

M

H

Cost/effect to implement

Figure 9.1 The development graph Choosing development activities that have a high potential learning value will move these to the top left-hand corner. And when you are spending money on the more expensive programmes of training, the graph at least prompts you to ask the question about what the likely yield of learning will be. This chapter has been included to give some working tools that can be used to manage your training and development activity. You can think of them as means to keep track of your gold – the bank statements and investment reports – that monitor what is happening.You may already have some of these or some alternatives that work for you. The above four processes – the personal development portfolio, the skills matrix, the performance management model and the training plan – provide some pieces of paper that will help you achieve this management function. The best practice is to keep these pieces of paper as simple as possible. They are only aids and should not become onerous or take on a life of their own. Nor should they replace the most important aspect in all of this: communicating openly with your staff to understand their strengths and talents, their development needs and aspirations and setting about to improving these.The raison d’être of this book is how to find and develop your internal talent, not how to design the ultimate training and development system. And finally, if you are serious about increasing your gold reserves, remember to introduce the processes for everyone and not just for the stars.

Implementing the Midas touch 133

10

Implementing the Midas touch

You can’t plough a field by turning it over in your mind. Proverb

The conclusion to this book takes us back to the beginning. In the first instance we started with a quote, the proposition that in all of us lies great talent and potential. How does this translate into the workplace? No one comes to work to do a bad job. But through the work of inefficient processes and the ineffective management of people, through bad decision making and neglect, via poor communication and lack of consideration, we manage not only to overlook the talents of our people.We do worse than that. We switch them off and produce a disenchanted and misaligned group of resources. And yet our human capital is primarily the only capital we possess in organizations that can appreciate in value. If we learn to treat this human capital like individuals, treat them as adults, treat them with respect and acknowledge that they are not personnel but human beings, people with individual drives, needs, desires and ambitions, then we start to get somewhere. If we are able to harness the individual purpose and apply that within our organizations, our assets will appreciate and our achievements will grow. This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. George Bernard Shaw 133


That was our starting point. As you begin to consider how you will implement the process of training with the Midas touch, it may be helpful to think about the process as a journey. This is not a simple A to B journey but more of an exploration where you will set milestones and targets en route that will move you closer towards your destination. And we can think of this journey as having three components – WHY are we making it, HOW are we going to do it and WHAT will help us on the way.

Why are we making the journey? You will recall that at the start of this book, we looked at some compelling reasons as to why this journey was a necessary one. These were the challenges of attracting and retaining the right talent; the transition in which we find ourselves as we move further towards a knowledge-based economy; and the changing demographics in western economies. These factors may have already compelled your organization to rethink in some form how to provision for the supply of suitable human capital to meet its present and future needs. One method discussed is to enlarge your internal supply of knowledge and skills. Furthermore, there is the whole issue of the changing expectations of people from their work. The new psychological contract that employees bring to the workplace means that those organizations that are unable to meet these expectations will find that their best talent will not stay.The market is growing increasingly competitive. Finally, there is good evidence to suggest that time devoted to the development of human capital will increase the profitability of the organization.These then are the reasons why we need to be prepared to make this journey. As we set out, we must recognize that each individual will have their own ideas about the destinations they want to reach. We put forward an equation to express this, Success = / H²R that is, success does not equal homogenized human resources. In other words, we must recognize the individual’s views on their proposed destination, what talents they have, and how we can develop these and tie them into the organization’s goals. So, whilst we are setting off on our journey, each individual has their own journey that they wish to make. Helping articulate this journey is mutually beneficial. There will be lots of distractions as we proceed on this journey: the daily round, the bush fires and many rocks and boulders on the path. But these are


not valid reasons for not setting off. Any management initiative consists of such hindrances. A question to ask at the start of this journey is where you wish to end up. Are you looking to become an employer of choice? If so, how will you achieve this? Training with the Midas touch will be an important and integral part of this goal. But you may have to address other issues as well to make your culture attractive to employees. Aspects such as employee well-being, work– life balance, communications, employee relations and benefits packages will all have a bearing on your ability to attract and retain talent. I recently read a summary of what organizations were doing in the United States to retain talent. One company was introducing free dry cleaning as a perk. I don’t know the details of that organization’s culture. But as a way of increasing employee retention, I’d suggest that in isolation, such measures are futile. They must be strengthened with a total strategy of employee-retentive policies. Training with the Midas touch is a vital element in any such policy. You can start your improvements in a simple way. Committing just one hour a week (that’s 2.5 per cent of your working time) to being with your people, coaching, spending time on their development, will be a small investment that will yield great returns. And the double six is that you will achieve a great deal of satisfaction from encouraging and watching the individuals grow.

How are we going to get there? The major content of this book concerns how we can get there. We started with the idea of becoming a gold prospector. There will be people you know who can mentor you in this, good managers of people from whom you can learn.You will recall the matrix that spelt out the various methods available to identify talent – intuition, formal reviews, informal reviews and data-based sources – the sources of information at your disposal.You may already have been considering how you can use this matrix and whether there are new methods that you can build into your toolbox to make your home-made videos of your staff. Your organization’s culture will have an impact upon how you proceed. If it is conducive to such initiatives, you are halfway there.You can assist progress by sharing the ideas in this book with staff, your peer group, your superiors. By posting the idea around, you can start to gain support and commitment to the idea.You will know you have succeeded when your suggestion comes back to you as someone else’s idea! If the culture is not conducive, you can still do a great deal in your own area of responsibility. Remember that employees don’t just work for an


organization. They work for a manager or supervisor and you can become a manager of choice if you start to implement the recommendations in this book. You should also set the right example. ‘Do as I do, not as I say’ is always a good maxim to follow. And a good starting point for this is for you to undertake the career and life development essay. This is an important step for your own self-discovery – the direction in which you should be travelling.There are certain prime times when the exercise is particularly powerful and productive, for instance New Year or after a holiday when a reappraisal of your goals is more engaging. Enabling individuals to increase their self-esteem and realize their potential is a key role of this essay, so start with yourself.There is perhaps more misery, frustration and misunderstanding created in the world than we care to acknowledge by those who are following the wrong road in life. From this exercise, you should come up with your own list of development needs. Making some of these visible to your staff will set a good example of what you intend to do – putting development firmly on your management agenda. Make your staff aware of what you are doing. They may then want some, too. We spent some time talking about the internal talent pool.The nature, scope and size of this will depend upon your organizational situation but you can aim to pilot this with three or four ideas that you feel fit with your situation. Remember the aim in all of this is to spread knowledge and skills over as broad an area as possible and to broaden the remit from management development to employee development – that is, consider alchemy and convert the base metals into gold. To start, you can concentrate on the more pressing areas. There may be a particular blockage you can work upon where a learning stairway will provide a solution or you may identify some lateral needs whereby learning avenues should be opened up. This is not advanced nuclear science.You can start small with little doses of encouragement. As an example, I took some time to reflect on the writing of this book. Writing is considered a solitary occupation and therefore I had supposed that the learning would only relate to me. But as I thought about what had been learnt, the following emerged. Yes, I learnt a lot. I had met a goal to get this book published. So my career and life development essay took a turn for the better! I learnt how to use word processing more effectively. I learnt how to do things differently in my life to provide the right amount of time and space to devote to the task, whilst continuing to carry out a busy job. I developed my ability to distil concepts into a readily understandable form. But I realized others were benefiting. Learning avenues were happening. Firstly, my four children were watching and were interested in the process.They were seeing that producing a book was not a mystical and unattainable project but that it could become a reality if you applied yourself to the task. One of


my sons produced the diagrams as he had far better skills than I had in this area. My 10-year-old daughter was asking questions about the subject of the book. She is interested in writing stories and poetry. Having explained the concepts to her, she produced a poem about the book. I include it here both for her encouragement and to show a small example of a learning avenue being formed. Everyone’s good at something English or Art Maths, Geography or History Everyone has a part. My brother George is good at Computer Science. My brother Tom works in Next with clients. It’s inventions and sport for Jack, my third brother And I’m good at art, just like my mother. Two of my friends in particular were interested in the progress. They have interests in writing. One has produced and submitted a piece of work to a publisher, the other is working on a project. I don’t take any credit for this but merely point out that the process of my writing has helped to encourage their view of writing. And I have explored with both of them some ideas and possibilities for future joint writing projects. One of these colleagues and I have swapped our own ideas and tips about the process of writing, what we have both learnt from our respective writing projects. Much of this has been done via e-mail, again a learning process as we have both written down and synthesized our thoughts. These are only small examples but they show that any development does not happen in isolation but that the learning process can be extended to others, that learning avenues can be created, that sharing of information and knowledge can and does happen very easily. It is by opening up these learning avenues and facilitating their growth that you can add more powerfully to the learning environment at work. As in the above example, these are not always planned events. Creating the right environment and having the right attitude to learning are often all that is needed. One concept we used to think about how we develop people was to consider people as colourful and jobs as grey.Today’s roles contain far more discretionary content and it is through harnessing these concepts in your own thinking that you can add more personalized and talent-related content to individuals’ jobs. Once again, the writing of this book is a discretionary content in my life. It required discretionary effort and produced discretionary learning and develop-


ment. On most people’s agendas is the need to develop and grow, and the triangle of discretion gives us a model to understand this and to bring this to bear in people’s work. But there may be people who do not want to develop and grow. I recall an individual who had worked for over 40 years in the same job and the same department. That was feasible once but is no longer so. If people do not wish to increase and devolve their skills, this can be a problem for all parties. Because if an individual is unwilling to change and develop and wishes to remain within a nurtured comfort zone, they are heading for a crisis point. If they are made redundant or redeployed, they will have neither the vocational nor personal skills to cope. One way we can assist these individuals is by providing learning that doesn’t look like learning. Sending such people off on courses is often a frightening experience for them and one they will avoid at all costs. One effective strategy is to provide the learning on the job, for instance through development activities. That way it feels like an extension, an increment to what they are doing rather than a step change. They are more likely to accept the gradual change. Over a period of time, they have gained new skills and knowledge that have moved them a considerable distance from where they started. If they had been confronted with the need to learn all these new skills as a comprehensive development plan, they might have frozen at the thought. Think of yourself five or ten years ago. Could you then imagine doing the job you are doing now? What new skills have you gained during that time? Would they have seemed feasible? This clearly depends upon your personal circumstances but the point is that it is the incremental movement towards your present situation that has made it seem workable. To have made the transition as a step change would for most of us have seemed totally unrealistic. This leads us to another of the concepts we have explored. It may be that your organization has majored on training activities in the past rather than development activities. Although these definitions overlap, we saw that there are myriad ways to develop the individual in situ. We listed numerous examples of development activities. As you consider your journey, it is worthwhile reviewing this list to see if there are three or four of these you feel comfortable to implement immediately. A list of competencies was also provided and there may be some areas here that you had not previously considered that would provide useful building blocks for your organization. You will recall that a chapter on group development projects was also included, ways to develop the talent pool more widely that would increase the learning amongst groups rather than just for individuals. Perhaps you can start by piloting a couple of these schemes that will fit within your own organization.


What will help us on the way? Finally, we looked at some route maps that would help us on the journey.These were the personal development portfolio, the skills matrix, the performance management model and the training and development plan. One of these may appeal to you more than the others and fit your organizational context more readily. Remember that these are only maps, pieces of paper to direct you on the journey. Don’t be drawn into the trap of letting the process take over and become a job of its own. That is akin to colouring in a vast and detailed map, which may be a beautiful thing in its own right. But you missed the point in that all you really needed for the journey was a rough outline sketch of how to get from A to B. As a recommendation, if you implement nothing else to change the way you develop your people, the most powerful and simple tool is at least to have the development discussion with each individual. And if you accept that an investment of an hour a week is reasonable, that will be easily achievable. And if you have a larger number of staff or start to discover a lot of development needs, then try applying the principle of Pareto. And ask yourself which 20 per cent of the development will provide 80 per cent of the improvements. If you have more complex situations to prioritize, then try using the development graph. And finally, don’t forget to be fair.There is nothing more insidious in employees’ eyes than a situation where processes or policies are implemented unfairly. It can quickly destroy the credibility of the process and those who operate it. And it must all be done in a non-discriminatory way where all categories and groups are equally considered and all legislative requirements are met. I hope that as you set off on your journey, you will find the gems and the golden nuggets that lie hidden in your organization. They will come in all shapes and sizes. It is a fair bet that some will polish up beautifully and quickly and that some gems will be found that can be cut immediately to become far more valuable. It is also a fair bet that others will require a bit more work before they achieve their aspirations and develop their latent talents. And don’t be discouraged by an early failure. Human beings are complex and personal drives and circumstances can change, so you can’t hope to be successful all the time. But a good test is to imagine how you would like to be treated.Would you like your boss to discuss your development needs with you? Would you like your superior to encourage you in your development, to provide the means for you to pursue your own potential and develop your talents and to put these to good use in your job? Yes? Then why not do this for your own staff!


This book has provided some ideas to start you on the process of developing your organization’s greatest asset.There is no one easy solution to the question. Firstly, you are dealing with people and people are individuals who, like it or not, require individual attention. If your organization fails to recognize that, it will fail in the effective use of its human capital. And secondly, what is right for one organization will not fit into another. However, the principles of people development contained in this book are universal.You may be running a large global corporation or managing a small group in the local supermarket. The common ground in both situations is that you are employing people. And believe it or not, they are pretty similar in their drives and desires wherever you find them! Not all of the detailed recipes will suit your taste but it is hoped that you have found sufficient food for thought in this book to convince you to see your staff as golden opportunities and to encourage their growth and development within the organization. I hope that from this, you can develop an action plan to implement some of the suggestions in this book. As you develop your Midas touch with people, you will not only be improving your capability as a leader of people and improving your managerial results, you will also derive a great deal of satisfaction in watching these individuals grow and your human capital appreciate. It is highly probable that you are sitting on a gold mine. Good luck as you start prospecting and watching your assets grow.

Bibliography 141

References

Buckingham, Marcus (2001) What a waste, People Management, 7 (20), 11 October, pp 36– 40, CIPD, London Buckingham, Marcus and Coffman, Curt (1999) First, Break All the Rules, Simon & Schuster Inc, New York Buzan, Tony (1993) The Mind Map Book, BBC Books, London Cadbury Brothers Ltd (1964) Industrial Challenge, Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd, London Collins, James C and Porras, Jerry I (1998) Built to Last, Random House, London Department for Education and Employment (2000) Skills for All, DfEE, London Department of Trade and Industry (1997) Partnerships with People, DTI, London Drucker, Peter (1999) Management Challenges for the 21st Century, ButterworthHeinemann, Oxford Gibson, Rowan (ed) (1997) Rethinking the Future, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London Handy, Charles (1990) The Age of Unreason, Arrow Books, London Handy, Charles (1997) The Hungry Spirit, Hutchinson, London Herzberg, Frederick (1987) One more time: how do you motivate employees?, Harvard Business Review, September– October Hutton, Will (2000) Society Strikes Back. The Good Enterprise, the Purposeful Consumer and the Just Workplace, Industrial Society, London Kaye, Beverley and Jordan-Evans, Sharon (1999) Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, BerrettKoehler Publishers Inc, San Francisco, CA Learning and Skills Council (2001) Strategic Framework to 2004, Corporate Plan Lewis, C S (1960) The Four Loves, Fount Paperbacks, London Mintzberg, Henry (1976) Planning on the left side and managing on the right, Harvard Business Review, July– August, reprinted in Jane Henry (ed) (1991) Creative Management, Sage Publications, London, in conjunction with the Open University Pepper, Allan D (1984) Managing the Training and Development Function, Gower, Aldershot Peters, Tom (1987) Thriving on Chaos, Guild Publishing, London 141

142 Bibliography

Peters, T J and Waterman, R H (1982) In Search of Excellence, Harper & Row, New York Pickard, Jane (2001) Sense of direction, People Management, 17 (16), 9 August, pp 20– 25, CIPD, London Ridderstråle, Jonas and Nordström, Kjell (2000) Funky Business, Pearson Education, Harlow Senge, Peter M (1990) The Fifth Discipline, Century Business, London Tichy, N and Sherman, S (1992) Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will, HarperCollins, New York Ulrich, David (2001) Building the 21st century company, Human Resources, August, pp 44– 47 Ulrich, David, Zenger, Jack and Smallwood, Norm (1999) Results-Based Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998, source of information accessed July 2001 on www.greatplacetowork.gov.uk

Further reading 143

Further reading

Boydell,Tom and Pedler, Mike (ed) (1981) Management Self-Development, Gower, Farnborough Cane, Sheila (1996) Kaizen Strategies For Winning Through People, Pitman, London Chinn, Carl (1998) The Cadbury Story, Brewin Books, Studley De Geus, Arie (1997) The Living Company, Longview Publishing, USA Institute of Personnel and Development (1997) Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance, IPD, London Kotter, John P (1996) Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA Morton, Clive (1998) Beyond World Class, Macmillan Press, London Pedler, Mike, Burgoyne, John and Boydell, Tom (1991) The Learning Company, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead Schuhmacher, Christian (1999) God in Work, Lion Publishing, Oxford Sheal, Peter (1999) The Staff Development Handbook, 2nd edn, Kogan Page, London Ulrich, David (1997) Human Resource Champions, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA Wilson, John P (ed) (1999) Human Resource Development, Kogan Page, London

143

144 Index

Index

24-carat nuggets 33– 34 3M 48 alchemy 10, 17, 20, 23, 136 assets, physical 4 aunts and uncles 114 behavioural measures 125 benefits, employee 13, 15, 39, 40, 53, 135 Bennett, Arnold 93 bibliographies 108 birth rates 5 black and white photograph 27, 35 blue skies 49 book clubs, management 108 books, learning potential 107 brainstorming 95 Buckingham, Marcus 82 Buckingham, Marcus and Coffman, Curt 23, 39 Cadbury’s 16 car industry 83 career and life development essay 31– 33, 94,136 career biography 122 clubs, common interest associations 113– 14 coaching 90– 91, 120 lateral 69 Coke 17

Collins, J and Porras, J 45 colourful people 70– 72, 80 comfort zones 89– 90 competencies 48, 86– 89, 125 core 53 list of common 88 output 88, 103 versus skills 54, 125 computer bank 109 continuous improvement 16– 17, 63 corporate universities 106 Cranet Survey 73 creativity 95– 96 amongst employees 19, 87 providing space for 111– 12 culture, as indicator to success 135 curriculum vitae 27, 30, 35 customer service 19, 116 development ambiguity of 126 employee expectations 13, 15, 19 individualized 84 low costs of 93 ongoing dialogue 126 reasons for 7, 40 versus training 76– 80 development activities 16, 93– 105, 131, 138 144

Index 145

development discussion 125– 27, 129, 139 development graph 131 development plan 126, 127 DfEE 47 discretionary content 70– 72, 80, 128, 137 discretionary effort 81– 83, 137 discretionary training and development 83, 137 discrimination, individual 22– 23 diversity circles 21, 23 doorman 115 Drucker, Peter 15, 41, 108 DTI 13 DTI Inside UK Enterprise Scheme 117 e-commerce 109 EDAP programme, Ford 109– 10 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 106 employees as individuals 19 disengaged 7, 82 engaging 9, 39 employee loyalty 7, 14 employer of choice 6, 135 ethical trading 114 evaluation 130 external visits 117

developing skills as 36– 38 gold prospector’s matrix 35– 36, 135 gold standard 49 grey jobs 70– 72, 80 greying workforce 5 group, running a 95– 96 Handy, Charles 34, 70 Herzberg, Frederick 81– 83 high flyer schemes 73 home-made video 35 homogeneity 17 HR 12, 38 practices 6– 7, 14 role of 72 Hubbard, Elbert 24 human capital 3– 4, 5, 9, 19, 40, 75– 76, 133 human resources, homogenous 18– 20, 134 Hutton, Will 14 image, corporate 18 Institute of Personnel and Development 6 internet, for learning 107, 108– 09 intuition 25– 27 Investors In People 40

feedback 91, 127 Ford Motor Company 109– 10 Fortune magazine 15 Fritz, R 112

job description 42, 70, 96– 97 job enlargement 80 job enrichment 80 job redesign 51 Juan, Don 60

G8 17 generation E 15 generation X 15 glass ceiling 61 gold prospector 24, 135

Kaye, Beverley and Jordan-Evans, Sharon 13 key dependent workers 50– 51, 68 key result areas 97, 122 King Midas 1

146 Index

knowledge manager 68 knowledge worker 5, 42, 44, 51,67, 113 knowledge, loss of 50 product 88, 104 labour turnover 53 Learndirect 107 learning lifelong 16, 30 open 61 Learning and Skills Council 55 learning avenues 65– 69 ,113, 117, 129, 136– 37 learning cells 111 learning contract 70 learning corridors 65– 66 learning curve 45 learning guilds 107 learning logs 29, 120– 21 learning meeting 69 learning pods 111 learning representatives 14 learning resource centres 111 learning stairways 60– 64, 129, 136 leavers 12 Lewis, C S 86 literacy, basic 55 maintenance tasks 124 management development, versus employee development 46– 49, 53, 127– 28, 136 manager of choice 38– 39 managers versus leaders 15, 39 manual worker, promotion of 63– 64 McDonald’s 17 meetings, formal 28– 29 mentoring 114– 15 lateral 69

reverse 115 mentors 36 Microsoft 4, 17 Midas Miracle Pharmeceuticals 20– 23 Mintzberg, Henry 25– 26 motivation, employee 45, 58, 81– 84, 109– 10 new starters, development needs 127 numeracy, basic 55 objectives management by 122– 23 SMARTEST 123– 24 OD 87, 128 Open University 107 organizational climate 116 Pareto principle 51, 131, 139 partnering 107 people, investment in 39 Pepper, Allan 77 performance, low 41 performance management meeting 29 model 121– 25 personal agendas 127 personal development 58, 109 personal development portfolios 29, 120– 21 personality tests 28 personnel records 27, 30 Peters, T and Waterman, R 75 Pickard, Jane 46 planning PEST 50 scenario 50 strategic and tactical 26, 48 priorities 10

Index 147

problem people 34, 138 process and task 11 product design, lead times 26 professionals, development of 61 profit 6 progress tasks 124 project management 94 psychological contract, new 14– 16, 134 publicity 40 qualifications

92

recruitment costs of 43, 46 internal market 43– 46 lead times 44 reliability of 44 recruits, strengths and weaknesses 45 reorganization 14, 42, 50, 65, 75 retention and development 69 reverse mentoring 115 Ridderstråle, Jonas and Nordström, Kjell 18 roots and wings 77– 79 Rowntree 15 sabbaticals 118 scales of development 71 scholarships, for learning 110 scientific management 70, 83 secondments 69,114, 118 self-awareness 32, 78 self-improvement 15 Senge, Peter 90, 112 setting priorities of training 131 Shakespeare, William 125 shareholders 74– 75 Shaw, George Bernard 133 sitting with Nellie 93

skills business 88, 101– 03 communication 88, 99 core 54 critical 51 generic 47, 54– 55 leadership and people 88, 99 managerial 88, 98– 99 personal effectiveness 88, 100– 01 professional knowledge and skills 88, 103– 04 technical and job knowledge 88, 103– 04 skills audits 30 skills circles 113 skills matrix 31, 56– 58, 67, 121, 129 example of 57 skills shortages 5, 47, 50, 52, 83 IT skills 52– 53 SMARTEST objectives 123– 24 stewardship 114 storytelling 112, 113 strengths, building on 41 sub-cultures 38 succession plan 127– 28 succession planning 48 supervisor promotion to 61 promotion to manager 62– 63 SWOT analysis 96 talent 9 attracting and retaining 4, 13, 40, 134, 135 golden star 34 identifying potential 5, 20, 23, 24– 41, 48, 73 rising stars 48 war on 5 talent pool 42– 73, 136

148 Index

building in slack 47– 48 competencies and skills 53– 55 contingencies 51 cross-training 56 measuring 48 personal development 58 size of 52 stargazing 50 succession planning 48 talent spotting 46 Taylor, Frederick 70, 83 teams, cross functional 68 technicians, promotion of 62 Tesco’s 46 Tichy, N and Sherman, S 9 total quality 16, 63 training budget 11 cross-training 56 formal programmes 92 general process to follow 92 identifying weaknesses 41 in-house programmes 55– 56, 79 investment in 135 lateral 69 objectives 11 prioritizing 131– 32 professional 93 same skills 18– 19 versus development 76– 80

training and development plan 48, 128– 30 training and development tools 91– 105 training silo 72 triangle of discretion 84– 85, 138 truffle hunter 24 Twain, Mark 119 Ulrich 10 Ulrich, D. Zenger, J and Smallwood, N 58 University for Industry 107 urgency 10 values 87 visionary companies 45 voluntary work 97, 114 Welch, Jack 9, 91 West, Rita Mae 74 Williamson, Marianne 3 Wolfe, Thomas 42 work experience in a customer facing role 116– 17 in a lower level job 115– 16 in a related department 117 work shadowing 118 workload, balancing additional 71 Workplace Employee Relations Survey 14

Training with the Midas Touch: Developing your organization’s greatest asset

Midas Touch

Midas Touch

Midas Touch

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Midas

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Training with the Midas Touch: Developing your organization’s greatest asset

Midas Touch

Midas Touch

Midas Touch

Greatest Asset

Midas

Midas

Your Magic Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Bound by Your Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Your Magic Touch

Haunted by Your Touch

Developing Teams (Training & Development)

Developing the Individual: Training and Development

The Taint of Midas

The Midas Man

The Midas Plague

Careers With Nonprofit Organizations

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Training Your Superpuppy

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