Forward Momentum: Delivering Results

By Rob Zell

I had a boss once who loved to draw on the white board. It became something of a joke on his team, that at the beginning of a meeting we would hide the dry erase markers before he came into the room. It never stopped him; he started carrying them around. Only recently do I truly appreciate his approach.

Sidebar for a personal story: My daughter’s soccer team recently ended their season and part of my end of season gift was a coloring book and crayons and the missive that it was something to help me reduce my stress (something of a gag gift). At home after the party, I sat down with the coloring book and colored a picture. I took the time to work slowly and carefully, experimenting with different colors and used shading to highlight areas. It took me back to a calmer time: I worked on the image for me, not for my boss, or my kids, or for the executive committee – just for me. I loved it.

I am known among my peers as the visual learning guy. I push hard on the team to use fewer words and more pictures in both the training materials we produce and the presentations we create. If an image is worth a thousand words then we should we be creating voluminous training in images, not pages of text. Too often, the push back is, “I can’t draw” or “I’m not creative.” Let me say now that everyone can take this approach given some processes and tools.

1. Take some time to tap into your creative side. A quick search on Google yields a plethora of sites on coloring to relieve stress. I’m not saying you should make it a daily habit, but why not take a few minutes once in a while to doodle? It unlocks a thinking habit that thrives on free association and random connections that you might not have considered. Those links are the foundations of innovation and might lead to bigger and better ideas.
2. Incorporate a process for thinking differently. The Six Thinking Hats framework developed by Edward de Bono is a wonderful starting point for organizing meetings and encouraging a style of thinking. Assign the role of Green Hat to various team members and have them work at being the creative, “blue sky” thinker. By assigning the role to a person you give permission for ideas to flow and remove limitations.
3. Encourage mind-mapping as a technique for organizing information. On many occasions I find myself in meetings struggling to grasp how all the parts of a program or initiative are tied together. The various stakeholders have input into the problem and the resulting maelstrom can be hard to decode. A mind map can help illustrate the interconnectedness of all the ideas and make concrete the linkages that the entire team needs to see.
4. Seek out visual representations of complex ideas. I have two sites I visit regularly to keep my mindset firmly planted in a visual approach. One is the RSA.org channel on YouTube. This British think tank does a fabulous job of linking thought leaders to artistic displays of the concepts. The images drawn in the videos make the presentations so much more vivid. Another is visual.ly a web site that shows how information can be presented visually and, in my opinion, more memorable.

Finally, let me say that visuals don’t have to be high end art work to be effective. A very simple visual can speak volumes to the reader and communicate at more levels than a paragraph of text. Visuals are great for learning, meeting management, brainstorming, even project management (what’s a WBS but a visual of all the tasks in a project?). Don’t fear the creative side, embrace it and take your projects and work into a different, better, more holistic place.

How are you using visuals and creativity to work more efficiently in your role? If you aren’t using them now, how could you?

By Vicki Wrona, PMP;  Rob Zell

While listening to podcasts and reading articles that I enjoy, I thought that if we all share our favorite business blogs and podcasts, we might find a few gems to brighten our weeks. Below are some suggestions. What are your favorite podcasts?

From Vicki:

The podcasts I enjoy listening to are:

• Get it Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More podcast by Stever Robbins provides good tips for professionals.

• TED Talks – available in hi-def video or audio only, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Topics include business, environment, technology, engineering, science.  The podcast can be found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video.

• To The Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK) by PRI and Wisconsin Public Radio. I have subscribed to this podcast for years, both through audible.com as well as directly from their site. I am a fan of this show, its wide (huge) variety of topics, and its excellent interviewers. I have enjoyed shows on topics I would never have thought about or taken the time to look into.

From Rob :

I admit to not listening to many podcasts as I tend to be more of a visual learner. I enjoy a series by RSA called RSAnimate.  You can find them on YouTube for free here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rsa+animate&aq=0&oq=rsa

RSA creates videos from audio tracks of famous authors talking about their works and matches it up to video of an artist sketching the concepts. Fun and educational for the auditory and visual learner. It includes summaries from Daniel Pink (Drive), Sir Ken Robinson (on education), and many other thought leaders. It’s fascinating to listen to the summaries while the artist expresses the content visually.

By Rob Zell

It’s soccer season again and I’m reminded how culture and fit impact performance. Your organization depends on both elements to be successful. If you ignore the impact of culture and fit, you are doomed to fail. In this post, I’ll be discussing a bit of both.

I was reminded of fit this evening after speaking to a parent who wants to pull her child from my team of eight year old soccer players. She has some very compelling arguments as to why he should no longer play, the main reason being that he has never played the sport. Imagine being dropped into the design and development space at Valve computer games directed to code the next great game and you have no experience coding! Granted, my boys’ team isn’t World Cup caliber, but they have played for a few years and at least know the basics. In recreational soccer, I don’t have the luxury of “Hiring for Fit”; I play the hand I get dealt and we do the best we can. At the same time, soccer is the beautiful game and a ripe ground for creating a space in which youngsters can learn some basic skills and then should be innovative and creative about using those skills to achieve a common objective, namely, scoring more goals.

In your organization you do have the luxury of hiring for fit. In fact, it should be a priority. There is plenty of research out there that says if you do it, it results in a happier, more productive work force. Your people will have a sense of belonging and that makes them more likely to be successful. If they don’t “fit” they will consistently struggle to perform the basic functions of the organization. Making sure a hire is a fit in the organization means defining the culture.

In a post I wrote some time ago, I reflected on how coaching soccer can be compared to creating a culture of learning and development. It involves a lot of trial and error, awareness of what works and what doesn’t and plenty of positive reinforcement. I started wondering if my team culture was driving that behavior or driving it to extinction. After a hard look in the mirror, I started questioning my performance as a leader of culture.

Culture can be defined a few different ways and has been in plenty of literature. You can start at Wikipedia and continue your research from there. I recently facilitated a workshop in which I presented several elements of culture, namely: Symbols, Stories, Relationships and Rituals. Without exposing too much information, let’s just say that after quick reflection, I don’t think I’m creating the best culture for brand new players to join my team! Luckily, I have the insight (from my recent workshop) to know what my options are. I can either:

1. Change the objectives. Kind of difficult. We do want to win games but I could take some emphasis off that point.
2. Change the culture. That’s a tough one. It means changing my behavior which will require tremendous effort.
3. Prepare to fail. Okay, #2 is looking more realistic. I don’t want to fail as a coach or leader of a team.

You can look at your organization in a similar light. If the culture clashes with the objectives of the organization, then the culture will undermine your efforts. It is usually easier to modify your goals to fit your culture than change the entire culture. I’m not proposing you abandon them. I am saying you tweak them to fit the culture. In my case, my goal might shift from “Win as many games as possible” to “Demonstrate learning the game of soccer every time we play”. I think I can live with this, since we all get trophies regardless of how we perform (that’s a post for another day). Furthermore, I can change the culture of my team by working on my behavior during practice and during games.

You have a choice in your organization – define your culture and leverage it to be successful or be ignorant of the impact on performance and muddle through as you always have. Culture can be defined at the level of the organization all the way down to the business unit or work team. First, take some time to examine your culture and the fit of the team. Second, develop a plan to adapt for maximum success.

I’d love to hear what you think. How is the culture of your organization driving your business results?

By Rob Zell

How do we increase the longevity of a learning solution? In Part 1 of this series, I challenged the learning organization to examine some basics in their processes and create more effective solutions. In Part 2 of this series I challenged the learner to take a more active role in the learning experience and to share the new found knowledge and skill with the team. However, an effective learning intervention relies on three elements: the solution, the learners and the environment to which the learners will return. In this post, Part 3 of 3, I’m going to examine the environment into which the learner returns and the person responsible for that environment: the manager.

1. Be Laser Focused

As a manager, your people are constantly looking for opportunities to learn and develop themselves. Whether they state it in their development plans (as mandated by HR) or keep it rolling in their subconscious we all want to be the best at something. Your job is to help them get there while being laser focused on the goals of the organization and how your team contributes to those goals. There is rarely warm, fuzzy time to send folks away to training when you have reports to create, products to manufacture, clients to satisfy and budgets to meet. It is critical, therefore, to do two things:

1. Be constantly aware of the goals of the organization and how your team contributes to meeting those goals.
2. Grow your people in ways that help contribute to those ends.

Tune in to the potential you see in your employees and their own goals and align their needs to the business. Look for ways to give them opportunities to be better and contribute in a way that makes your team and the organization better. Does this sound self-serving? It shouldn’t. Think about organizations that rely on employees to be highly focused, demand constant improvement and have high standards for how success is measured. How about NBA basketball teams? As I write this, the NBA finals are underway. Consider how those organizations view talent development, even in their star players.

2. Get Help From Experts

Your organization probably has a training team just waiting to help you be more successful. Granted they may feel understaffed and can’t offer all the classes you want or need. But they are experts in the field of learning and can probably offer you options for informal methods of helping your people grow without formal classes or courseware. They can probably help you set up mentoring sessions, job shadowing, special projects, provide learning resources and draft objectives and outcomes that you can use to demonstrate the power of learning and the impact on your work group.

Don’t be fooled in to thinking that learning only happens at a learning event. Some of the best learning comes from actually working at something new and different. It might mean you need some coaching on how to help your people process and get the most from the experience. That’s ok; you are a learner too.

3. You Don’t Have To Be The Expert

One of the hardest parts of moving up the management ladder is change. You were probably promoted because you were the fastest developer, the most accurate auditor, the most analytical financier, or the most profitable salesperson. Your promotion has taken you from those ranks, and now you process reports, communicate goals and track budgets. You’ve stopped doing the work and started leading the work. It was great when you were still the expert, but times change. New hires have better info, faster tools, new ideas and different perspectives.

Again, that’s ok.

Part of leading is knowing when to turn over decision making to the team. Let them be the experts. Be a learner yourself and have your people demonstrate what they know and what they’ve learned so you can be better at leading and showing off how great your team is. Work to understand what they bring to the table and they will continue to want to grow and develop to be better. When you create an environment in which employees have the confidence to stay informed and look for improvements all the time, you build a stronger, more effective team that gets results. The team that gets results looks good and makes you look like the leader you want to be.

When you create the right atmosphere for learning you foster a team that seeks constant improvement, that shares knowledge, and that strives for success. To be effective, learning can’t be something that is done to you, or to your employees. Learning must be something that teams embrace and leverage for competitive advantage. What do you think? How are you leveraging the art of learning in your work group? What do you do well to foster learning and what obstacles do you face that derail the process?