Passionate learners, better performers.

Think about someone learning more about their hobby, like gardening, cooking or bicycle repair.

That person is not simply flipping through a manual. They are sponging up the knowledge they need, applying it immediately, and retaining it for life. They become more passionate about the topic as their comprehension grows. Over time, they discover new ways apply the learning, and their performance improves.

We want students to become better, faster. Short-term results (success or failure) lead to increased satisfaction, and higher satisfaction leads to a demand, or a pull, for additional learning. Our objective is not to push more content at them (check-in-a-box-training), but to help them achieve results quickly.

Find someone who is passionate about a topic or task and you will find a person who is or will soon become, successful at performing it.

A Rising Demand for Emerging Leaders

The IBM Global Human Capital study surveyed over 400 companies in 40 countries across North America, Asia and Europe. The findings? A lack of focus on leadership development means companies are increasingly unable to plan for the skills needed to remain competitive.

As the baby boom leadership retires, many companies will discover a generation’s worth of experience and talent has walked out the door, and remaining emerging leaders ill-equipped to fill the void.

In the study, the transfer of experience and information from one generation to the next is still relatively isolated by department and geography. Within traditional organizations, there is also a reluctance to advertise individuals as expert talent or allow them to act as internal experts. This occurs despite the fact that organizations first recruit a person based upon their unique talents, abilities and experiences.

However, once inside the organization, many traditional leaders tend to ignore or downplay a person’s experiences – the very reasons they were hired!

Collaboration between leaders, departments and employees is critical for future organizational success. Despite the prevalence of technology that can easily enable this type of sharing, functional silos, misaligned performance measures and work constraints inhibit the practice.

Without effective collaboration, an organization’s ability to identify rising stars, track and reward service champions and chances for improving operational effectiveness are severely limited.

Our solution? Structure leadership development programs to clearly define the challenges emerging leaders are meant to solve (in partnership with customers and employees), let them work on these challenges soon after being hired, and measure that employee’s ability to perform and make decisions, all while providing significant incentives that reward the right behavior.

Characters, Challenges and Cliff-hangers: What Toy Story 3 can teach us about learning

Did you see the movie? I double-dog dare you to tell everyone you did not get a lump in your throat as Andy prepared to leave home, or when the toys faced an uncertain future near the end. Those moments are examples of great storytelling.

Creative writing is a major part of great storytelling, like peas and carrots, hands and gloves. Think about the last training material you created.

Do you enjoy reading it? Did it tell a good story? Does it move you, or change the way you feel about a particular topic? Would you want to sit through it again – just for fun?

People respond to challenges with a combination of emotion, physical responses, and intellectual capacity. Yet most courses often only appeal to our cognitive, rational side. That’s a big mistake many corporations make. (shhh… “emotional” sounds so…“unprofessional"!)

Wrong! If you truly want to create more meaningful learning, you need to appeal to your audience’s fundamental humanity: their emotions.

By creating characters, challenges and cliff-hangers that spark a true emotional response, you keep them focused on opportunities coming from within the learning, and not the sports updates on their Blackberry.

Advertisers, movie producers, and great sales people learned years ago that the best way to engage the brain is through the heart. Ditto learning and employee development.

6 Ways to Improve the Learning Experience, Today

1. Get Married!

You've spent a lot of time courting each other, get married already! The faster new-hires connect knowledge to performance, the faster they learn how to do things the “right” way. Give them a real assignment and let them spend their orientation (honeymoon) phase asking intelligent questions that will really help them. Place them in charge of a new project (with oversight) and let them apply that talent you so coveted on their resume. A daily process of offering content along with application helps employees understand why, when and how their performance is meaningful to you, the organization and customers.

2. Turn Off The Firehose

A highly linear delivery of topics, with a progressive order of learning objectives, is not always the most effective method for creating a compelling learning experience. A more situation-based, organic (but still logical) delivery of content, tools, and challenges can make the experience much more engaging.

3. Challenge Their Creativity

These new hires want to shine. Eager and engaged, they are waiting to tackle a meaningful challenge. Warning students in advance of every potential problem or tough section eliminates a more powerful learning experience. If done correctly, challenging learning moments can make learning more engaging and much more memorable.

4. Let Customers Teach

Use social media to introduce user-generated scenarios. Offer challenges (solving puzzles is inherently pleasurable for the brain) and let students determine the best resources available to solve them.

5. Fill The Gaps (not time)

Your learners must face challenges that are continually just beyond their skill and knowledge level, but which they believe they have the tools (their own ability, combined with the resources and tools) needed to keep acquiring new levels of skill and knowledge. Good, dynamic assessments (like coaching) can offer “just-in-time” support for any person, at any skill level.

6. Learning Happens Everywhere

You can find learning spaces at any number of customer touch points. You control some private spaces, like your office, the training center, the phone system, the lobby or your website. You are not in control of public spaces, such as parking lots, grocery stores, bars, Facebook, customer blogs, Twitter, and other social venues that don’t ask for your permission. Learning can occur in a parking lot or a website, yet he objective is the same: connect the learner to the learning to the performance that creates a better experience. You job is to learn how to use public spaces to help your employees learn.

Flyer, Driver, Walker: what kind of leadership journey are you on?

It's summer, and I found myself thinking about life and leadership in terms of travel, along with some remarks I have heard over the years.

Flyers: Leading by Proxy

“We have seagull leadership – they fly into town, shit on our heads, then fly away.”

VP of market operations

Many people own stock. I do too. Every now and then, shareholders get a notice of an election or vote to be held, along with an invitation to send in a vote, by proxy. In this situation, my proxy stands in as my representative voice, my surrogate, the fake Russ.

Leadership by proxy isn't as helpful. It's fake leadership. It doesn't build the long-term health of the organization or its community, and besides, nobody likes pearls of wisdom dropped on their heads.

These flyers demonstrate very little commitment to community, the customer or employee experience. They fly into a meeting, then fly out, confident they have grasped the situation and set things straight, while a helicopter staff pops in every morning to deliver information and receive updates. Send them back to their home by the beach.

Riders: Leading by Observation

“Our CEO's understanding of the community? About as deep as the tread on his Lexus' tires.”

Manager, field sales

A majority of us experience life as a sequence of trips: we drive to the store, we drive to the office, we drive to our kid's school. Usually, we're only slightly aware of the communities we pass through to get to our destination. But how much can we really learn about customers when we zoom past their houses at 75 mph?

This type of leadership is mixed, at best. Yes, they see some community challenges firsthand, but they are still passengers: they come close to the community experience but they never fully engage in it. It's the average leadership experience. However, I think truly great leaders choose to walk instead…

Walkers: Leading by Experience

"Often I walked without any staff or supporters. As a result, I was able to see firsthand Florida's natural beauty, as well as its people and their challenges."

Lawton Chiles

In 1970, Lawton Chiles decided to run for a seat in the United States Senate. At the time, he was largely unknown outside his district, so he embarked on a 1,003-mile, 91-day walk across Florida, from Pensacola to Key West. He even worked at local businesses as he traveled. It made him a local legend and earned him the nickname "Walkin' Lawton".

I think of a “walker” as the kind of leader who remains close to their community, customers and employees. For them, developing, sustaining and improving the service experience is a daily discipline. Walkers do more than walk a mile in the customer’s shoes, they stand beside their customers and help deliver the experience, as any partner would.

Fly, drive or walk?

Flying around seems energetic and seductive, yet it disconnects leaders from their community.

Ray Bradbury once described the great majority of us as seeing life in a "blur", a general wash of images and color as we speed by. Yet driving through a community like a tourist just seems too passive. Not really the definition of leadership, is it?

I admire walkers like Lawton Chiles, leaders who take the time to lead through daily contact, a step-by-step journey that shapes them and the people they are trying to lead.

Not Your Grandfather's Career Path

Remember the traditional notion of a career ladder? Traditionally, a person began their career in an entry-level job, then moved into team or local management, then on to regional management, and ended their career in C-Level or executive leadership.

This required an employer-employee agreement. Two-way loyalty that, at most organizations, is outmoded or gone. Very few organizations promise lifetime employment or tenure. Some exceptions include government agencies or very large institutions with multiple layers of management.

So what is the new "normal" career?

* flatter organizations, and a "do more with fewer" reality
* new-hires that expect to work as creative agents for multiple employers within their lifetimes
* outsourcing and contracting as a business norm, not some radical experiment
* working from home or remote locations as part of the experience
* workers that leave if they do not enjoy the experience

The 21st Century career is a series of engagements (jobs) and life experiences that ultimately form a person's specialty or focus, that in turn enable them to move up, over or into any number of life experiences. In short, your emerging leaders want a rewarding experience, not a timecard to punch or a cubicle to occupy every day.

One of our clients asks new hires how they can best engage and get the most from them in a 21st Century work arrangement. They listen, modify, then follow up by letting the employees challenge themselves. And, it works!

10 Questions to Ask Emerging Leaders

Gather your high-potential employees together–those employees you have identified as future and emerging leaders–and ask them what they need in order to succeed. Do it now, before they leave.

Here are some questions I might ask your emerging leaders:

1. How do you define success (visualize it five years from now...)?

2. What are the biggest challenges facing employees today?

3. What changes are occurring within your department, and what is needed to address them?

4. How are you improving employee performance and the customer experience?

5. Do you see your personal philosophy and the organization's as different or 100% aligned?

6. In five words or less, how would you describe this organization's leadership experience?

7. If you could work anywhere in the world (doing anything you want) would it be here?

8. What should an emerging leader be required to do, above and beyond any job description?

9. What do emerging leaders like you need from this organization?

10. Anything else...?

“Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

Robert Stephens
Founder of the Geek Squad