Tag: Teamwork

The Best Work Group Sessions

Hunter Dean

There is a brilliant new book on Amazon.com called The Talent Code – Daniel Coyle. In this book the author looks into what he calls Talent Hotbeds. For example, how does one tiny Russian tennis club set in a forest surrounded by abandoned cars get more world top-20 ranked tennis players than the entire country of the USA?

Or how did the Brazilians manage to go from winning no soccer/football World Cups to winning several in a relatively short timeframe? He has looked at places that produced more classical music geniuses than should ever be considered possible from one place and asked the question – How do they manage this?”

The author brings to bear fascinating research which by understanding could enable you to change the way you work with upskilling your own business teams. Ironically, one thing he found that stood out more than any other single point was that often the people who became the best in the world at their chosen field were not exceptional when they started.

From Spartak, the tiny tennis club in Russia: see Dinara Safina, World Tennis Champion, and her first time on the court.

YOU KNOW WHAT? ACTUALLY SHE’S NOT A NATURAL!

Daniel speaks a lot about the changes that occur in our brains when we are learning new things. Of equal importance for adults in business who want to learn faster is to understand that when children learn things in a great environment where they are incredibly focused, there is often little or no RUBBISH running around in their heads. Because of this, their heads can take EVERYTHING in.

As adults, when we are being trained, at times we are thinking about other things – the new house purchase, a recent breakup, how hot it is outside, etc.

So how might you use this research? Well, another thing they found at these camps or training centres for the best TALENT IN THE WORLD is that the training was often conducted in very small chunks, and slowly!

If the final result of this method was someone like Dinara Safina, a Russian World Number One tennis player from Spartak, how did she do it and what could you do differently to get World Class results from your team members?

Three things to consider changing about learning and performance in your team:

1)Teach material slowly. Take your time; don’t rush. Now, I mean a 1-hour work group session might cover just one product type, such as the number one seller and what she does. Cover the topic so that every person in the room gains a significant amount.

2)People who don’t want help won’t learn. The faster you accept this, the better off you’ll be. If they don’t want to change, have the tough conversation!

3)Team some of your best people with those on their way up that really want to learn. Give them some serious coaching across three or four days. This may only need to be four to five 10-20 minute sessions with the coach (expert). Also, these sessions need not always be face to face.

Being focused on results is great, but so is being focused on superior learning. Make sure that when you are teaching a specific strategy that your people are focused on learning what’s done by the expert, NOT JUST HOW MUCH THEY HAVE TO PRODUCE. Often managers and leaders set up so much stress in environments that people just stop learning.

Check out http://www.TheTalentCode.com

Time & business results

Hunter Dean

I have friends you can’t meet for morning tea for 8 weeks because they are booked out. Others, you can consistently book a catch-up with so long as you give them 7 days notice and that’s that, every time. Then there are people who will be available tomorrow at 3pm or Friday at 9am and any further out than that and you can forget it!

TIME – Why is that the case?

Is it true that the person booked up for 8 weeks is more important, successful or has more happening in their lives than those you could get an appointment with tomorrow?

INTERESTINGLY IN OUR EXPERIENCE, NO!

Funnily enough, some of the leaders of the biggest organisations in the country operate very much in the now. If it weren’t for some very smart assistants, things would look very different. How might this information influence you and your team’s ability to get results?

Is everybody different around time? What kinds of people are similar and why? We will deal with only one part of this major body of work that up until now been badly under-researched.

How do I know? Well, all the time I see organisations facing people issues where certain portions of populations are extremely reactive and others are the opposite, far too slow to react. Where do you sit? How about your best people when you are “Managing Your Talent”? Are they reactive or more strategic? What’s needed more in your environment?

“Your interpretation of time is not a right or a wrong one. However, if you are too extreme either way with regard to your specific work context and what’s required, you can really lose out.”

What should you do to ensure your thinking around time fits with your business role? Here are three suggestions to consider with regard to the people in your workplace.

1)In a fast-paced sales or back office production environment, you probably want to be able to move quickly and hence timeframes are almost certain to be shorter.

2)In a strategic planning or IT implementation environment, it might pay to have a medium-term time perspective. However, watch out! Get this to be more a long-term perspective and that $500 million dollar IT rollout can easily blow into costing twice as much.

3)In Strategy & Planning roles in major organisations, the people involved are better to have a really good understanding of time in the long term. But they still need to be able to partner with the people on the floor conducting the rollout.

So what if you’ve got people in completely the wrong place?

What if you have people (even managers) on the floor who think learning a set of specific behaviours will take 3 months when your best manager considers it can easily be learnt in 24 hours? A problem in many IT, HR and L&D departments is that when major rollouts occur, the third parties always talk about giving things some time… until the budget’s blown and the business is locked into making even tougher decisions!

Performance Mngmt Why?

Hunter Dean

Performance Management – Why Get Good At It?

Over the past 10 yeas I’ve experienced many organisations where senior executives shy away from having the “Crucial Conversations”, the reasons are often similar.

“Look I don’t think you really need to “Fire” people, or its not really in our culture, we don’t feel its necessary to force people to change etc”

This entry is about why the better you are at Performance Management the better you’ll be at anything your business throws at you at all, in fact the better you’ll ironically be in your relationships outside the business also. At the end of the day if something in a business or any other relationship is not working if all parties concerned are not wanting to change or pretend they are when they’re not then stop wasting your time. When you consider implementing processes around talent identification and talent management seriously consider how good your best people are around the following areas.

Three Keys to Strong Performance Management

1) Consider a proper format

In some organisations development plans are a waste of breath and hence when someone falls down there is little if anything to benchmark it against other than their peers actual business metrics. This often though may not stack up though, as people often have excuses like, I deal with different clients, products or systems and hence its different for me.

In order for your personal performance development plans to actually be of use, keep them simple make sure you look at things like what are the top three key things to focus on?

  • Why are you falling down on them right now?
  • What knowledge resources or skills do you need to change this by Friday?
  • Are you prepared to make those changes?
  • Can you make them?

Either people can or cant do whats required in a Performance Management setting, lets be honest actually there is little in between. The problem most leaders have is a lack of courage to ask specific enough questions to ensure a proper answer and therefore result from the team member.

2) Ensure its self perpetuating

There is no point spending a whole lot of time working with a person then leaving them to work on themselves around an area only to find that later they go away and on Friday when you check they have done nothing. Performance Management work must be self perpetuating in the eyes of the person receiving the “Coaching” otherwise its nothing more than the kind of serious telling off your parents used to give you years ago at home.

In order to make Performance Management systems self perpetuating consider starting to get better at your own ability to communicate with people over tough things. Look at some managers who are naturally angry people, meet their children you’ll find anger. Then look at how they performance manage and you’ll see it was easy for them, they just had the meeting spoke very loudly and intensely, to the person until they gave in and agreed to everything asked of them. Then they went off and the employee went off to do his/her own thing.

“Problem is they then don’t, and nothing changes”

Many managers in fact believe that people “Cant” change which makes performance management a little tougher. Look at how good you are at your own tougher communication skills, how good are you at telling your best work mate they have screwed up so badly they have almost lost their job?

3) Understand the things that matter

In many cases managers are trying to council a staff member on something they themselves have no idea about.

For example selling 20% more of a product line in an area where the demographic is such that it cant be done. So they coach and coach then find unfortunately that it would have been much better to ask more questions up front, in which case they would have learned more about the problems being faced. The solution may actually be to sell a different product which can often then result in more revenue than that earned prior anyway.

Make sure you get skilled in the use of tough conversations don’t blame your team members, you are the one that needs to be able to coach them, if they are not performing then perhaps you are the one that needs to have a serious look in the mirror first, not them!