Susan Scott's Blog, page 89

How Do You Measure Your Learning and Development ROI?

As more companies begin to invest in their employees in serious ways the need to track how that investment is paying off continues. No matter what the size or industry of your organization, if money is spent, the company needs to see how it will eventually boomerang back in. This is a good thing!

However, the key to successfully tracking the ROI of leadership development and training is to not compare apples to oranges. Growing the engagement, trust, and authenticity of your employees isn’t the same as tracking the ROI of a new piece of machinery.

In our Fierce webinar, partner Dianna Kokoszka, President of Mega Achievement Productivity Systems (MAPS) Institute at Keller Williams, discusses how she measures ROI for Keller Williams’ coaching and leadership development programs.

Click here and listen to the ROI webinar, and download The ROI of Skillful Conversation: Relationship Advice for Measurable Business Results to further explore how to start measuring today.

We’d love to hear from you – how do you measure your learning and development ROI?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Maintain the Relationship, Maintain the Culture

There is a lot of thoughtful energy that goes into building a best places to work culture. Often you make the effort to teach your employees a new skill set and create a common language. You might also build out time and check points to ensure that the knowledge is being transferred and then applied. Maybe you even celebrate your employees hard work when you begin to see results.

However, no matter how long it takes you to create that best place to work, you can lose that culture in an instant. The key to avoiding the loss is to maintain the relationships inside your organization. In order to do that, every day you must have conversations that tackle tough challenges, provoke learning, interrogate reality, and enrich relationships.

This week take a survey of your relationships and pay attention to the conversations that need to be had. Your culture depends on it.

Fierce Resources: Culture at Work: The Tyranny of “Unwritten Rules”

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Forbes website and was written by Rodger Dean Duncan.

C ulture at Work: The Tyranny of “Unwritten Rules”  explores the power of actions over words, and what a great impact the unspoken truths can have on a culture. For leaders this is critical. And you might not realize the signs your employees are picking up on until you ask.

“As Yogi Berra famously noted, you can observe a lot by watching. What are the artifacts in your environment that tell you something about the culture? These include things like dress codes, reserved parking spaces, the size of people’s offices, and other tangible clues about how values are operationalized. You can also learn a lot by listening. Listen to the conversations in the hallways and employee cafeteria. Listen to the stories people tell. Listen to the legends perpetuated. The things people talk about—and how they talk about them—can shed a lot of light on their culture. In fact, the conversations themselves are an important part of the culture.”

To read the full article, click here.

3 Tips to Motivate Your Employees by Tapping into the Love of the Team

This Friday we celebrate the holiday of love: Valentine’s Day. Despite what your company thinks of interoffice romance, tapping into the emotions of how your employees feel about their colleagues, themselves, and their organization can be a great way to build relationships, and thus, motivate them to show up even more engaged.

For a lot of us, the people we spend most of our days with are our co-workers. While common business practice would say that it’s not a good idea to say you love your colleagues or boss, the truth is many of us develop deep connections that are made up of respect, admiration, loyalty, and trust – all the components of a loving relationship.

Below are 3 tips to motivate your employees to be more engaged by tapping into the love of the team.

Tip #1: Teach Them How to Confront

All healthy relationships have a certain amount of friction to them. True love isn’t built when there’s a “yes” man. And so, if you want to keep the relationship strong and your teams engaged with one another, make sure they have the skill set and common language to address concerns. Relationships deteriorate, gradually then suddenly, one missing or failed conversation at a time.

Tip #2: Provide Chances to Connect

Sometimes when you label something, it destroys it. Other times by calling a spade a spade, you enrich the process. As a conversations company, Fierce does plenty of talking, and yet, our culture craved a formal process around how to engage with one another. So we created “Culture Buddies”; we’re assigned, at random, a colleague to meet with at least once in a quarter to talk about life and work. When you provide the space and time for your existing relationships to deepen and for new relationships to be formed, you further engage everyone involved.

Tip #3: Don’t Neutralize Everything

In the name of being politically correct there can be a tendency to neutralize all situations at work. We can encourage people to avoid emotions or to not use language that is bold. In the quest for inclusiveness, you alienate people because there is no commitment. When your teams show passion towards their work and their colleagues, they’re showing you that they care. Don’t shy away from that. As long as it’s done with a spirit to enrich the relationship and not tear it down, give it air to breath. This can motivate them to show up that way more often.

Fierce Tip of the Week: Lead the Whole Person

As a Seattle based company, it would be impossible to not comment on the Seahawks Superbowl win. While we’re proud of our team and our city (hats off to the 12th man), what we can’t quite get over is just how Fierce the Seahawks are.

One of the big stories about the Seahawks has always been the unconventional leadership (in relation to the NFL) of Peter Carroll, John Schneider, and the team leaders. The idea is simple – don’t focus only on the football talent a player brings to the team – focus on the entire person. How are they eating, sleeping, and exercising? What is their mental state? By engaging both their heads and their hearts, it motivates everyone to bring their “A” game. It builds the relationship.

This week as you interact with your colleagues, employees, and other leaders, ask yourself: What if I tried to lead the whole person? What if I took care of  my employees on every level – how would that change the way they show up each day in the office?

What would change for you?

And by the way, go Hawks!

Fierce Resources: The Top Trends for 2014 According to SHRM’s HR Subject Matter Expert Panels

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website.

Future Insights: The Top Trends for 2014 According to SHRM’s HR Subject Matter Expert Panels targets the top trends in a variety of different areas, from ethics to labor relations to workplace diversity and inclusion. The trends come directly from the experts within the HR field.

“These panels compile lists of key trends in their subject areas that explore a wide variety of HR-related topics and trends. These “future insights” are a valuable resource for any HR professional interested in seeing what issues HR subject matter experts believe will have the biggest impact on the workplace today and in the years ahead.”

To read the full trend report, click here.

Collaboration is Key

The key is to collaborate. This is what we heard yesterday from Kelly Paine, Costco Manager, Organizational Change Management, at our Fierce session at 2014 Training Magazine Conference and Expo in San Diego.

In the session, Kelly Paine shared how Costco set the expectations for implementing company-wide communication training programs. Specifically, Kelly shared the success of the Cosmos project (read more here) and how the Costco culture of teaching has been critical for its success. At Costco, leaders are expected to spend the majority of their time teaching and collaborating with their teams. In the Cosmos project, collaboration with new teams was created by taking different people out of the business and creating co-location, so people could really solicit the perspectives that they needed to have.

To bring more collaboration to your organization, here are three tips to immediately apply.

Tip #1: Extend the Invitation 

Ask a leader if he or she is collaborative, and the answer will probably be yes. Most leaders are the type of people who go to others for advice, wisdom, or a competing perspective. The problem? They tend to go to the same people every time. The key to breaking down silos and engaging cross-departmentally is widening the scope of who is  invited to the table. Focus on inviting one unexpected person to your team or department meetings – see what you learn.

Tip #2: Avoid the Illusion of Inclusion

If you’re asking for others to give you input and work on something with you as a collective, then be prepared to listen and hear all the different point of views, not just the ones that validate your own ideas. Challenge yourself to truly be changed by another perspective and allow for your learning to be provoked. This can be the hardest to do when another perspective strongly goes against your own thoughts, beliefs, or needs. Practice the art of inclusion and allow yourself to feel your discomfort and repeat back what you are hearing. The key is to make sure you’re not making assumptions.

Tip #3: Delegate

As a leader, one of the simplest ways to boost collaboration on a team is to provide clear expectations by delegating responsibilities effectively and then providing autonomy. Ownership boosts morale, innovation, and engagement. The cherry on top is that it frees the leader up to focus on top priorities or key pieces of a project or idea only he/she can do. It’s a win-win.

Which tip will you try?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Engagement is Everything

On the eve of marrying my husband, my grandmother, who had been married to my grandfather for 50 plus years, gave me some advice. I don’t know what I was expecting, and I was struck by the simplicity of her words. She told me that as long as we both want it, we’ll be fine. She said trouble begins to brew when both parties aren’t engaged. And most importantly, the key to never having this happen is to never stop communicating. The truth is that this sage advice has served me beyond my relationship with my husband; this rule can be applied to almost all relationships.

Engagement is everything; both parties have to want to be there, showing up, working at it, and building towards something. To do that, you have to be authentic, make time, expel the energy, and have the conversations.

This week, Fierce is at the 2014 Training Magazine Conference & Expo in San Diego with learning professionals who spend their days providing the training necessary for the employees within their organizations to  foster engaged relationships.  It’s not always easy to do. Engagement is not a static state of mind. It’s active and the way to maintain engagement at a high level is in the conversations that happen, day in and day out.

This week, focus on these questions: How do you stay engaged? How do you keep others engaged?

Fierce Resources: 37 Ideas to Motivate Your Employees

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Business Insider website and was written by the Yong Entrepreneur Council.

37 Ideas to Motivate Your Employees gives tips for how both young companies and established businesses can look at motivating their employees, so both their heads and their hearts are engaged.

“A good job is hard to find, but every entrepreneur knows a good employee is even harder to keep. As an entrepreneur, one must ensure his or her company is staffed with people who look forward to coming to work every day for more than a paycheck. Through the years, I found that it was easy to keep employees motivated – all I had to do was provide them with a leader worth following and tasks worth fulfilling. But after almost seven years in business, I still find myself searching for new ways to maintain productivity while providing each individual with the drive they need to perform to the best of their ability.”

To read the full article, click here.

Effective Principals Have the Daily Conversations

“If you want people to be honest with you, you have to be ready to hear what they have to say. Real feedback can be tough to give and even tougher to receive. You have to prepare your heart for it. But the truth is essential. It’s the starting point for unification and change.”  – Dr. Angela Brooks-Rallins, Principal at Rodney D. Joslin Perspectives Charter School

This week Fierce in the Schools will join principals around the United States in San Diego for the 7th Annual National SAM/Principal Conference.

The challenges, goals, and amount to accomplish in any single school year can be overwhelming. When Dr. Angela Brooks-Rallins walked on campus for the first day as the new principal at Rodney D. Joslin Perspectives Charter school in Chicago, Illinois, she knew she had some work to do. It was the third quarter of the school year, and she was stepping into a new role with big goals and few relationships within the school. The staff felt unsettled, parents were skeptical, and students were frustrated.

Dr. Brooks-Rallins knew she needed to make the time to be present with her teachers and staff and to change the culture by having the conversations that needed to happen. She began to partner with Fierce. For Dr. Brooks-Rallins, the most important challenge she faced was the fact that there had been a lot of turnover in the leadership of the school causing a general lack of trust. Because of this, collaboration suffered and the conversations amongst the staff were either one sided or avoided all together.

This week at the SAM Principal Conference we’ll spend time engaging with principals who, like Dr. Brooks-Rallins, realize that their most important job as a principal is making time to be a leader for their teachers and staff. That the value they offer is being in the classroom, having the conversations, and engaging with learning that is happening in their school.

Effective principals also know that they must model the behavior they want to see in others. “I knew if I was going to inspire others to commit to a new way of communicating I needed to be relentless in my own commitment. I needed to model the behaviors in every encounter,” said Dr. Brooks-Rallins. “I needed to talk the talk and walk the walk, and to fully commit to a new communication lifestyle.”

Are you attending the SAM Principal conference? If so, what is your greatest challenge as a principal?

To read the full story about Dr. Angela Brooks-Rallins and Rodney D. Joslin School, click here.