Monthly Archives: June 2011

S.M.A.R.T plans for SMART employees – working with international clients

Posted on June 28, 2011

When working with native-English clients I find I sometimes have to pay attention to the meanings of words so that we do not end up talking at cross-purposes. (English speaker – what does ‘being assertive’ mean to you?) Working with non native-English clients is even more problemmatic and often leads to interesting situations. The problems are not so much in the actual translation of a word or phrase but more in the meaning behind them and how they differ in meaning according to culture.

For example, ‘aim, goal and objective’ translates into Polish as ‘cel, cel i cel.’ There is no distinction between them in Polish. Why, I wonder? What does this say about Poles? The distinction is important in English. Or if I show my CV to a Russian I usually have to spend several minutes explaining what I mean by ‘executive coach’ since to them ‘coach’ means ‘trainer’, as in sports trainer. And I have learned to be especially wary of the term ‘personal development plan’ which more than a few Russians see as a threat to their privacy rather than simply as a plan of development designed for a specific individual.

When it comes to acronyms like SMART with non-native speakers, we have further problems.  In English, if you want to make sure you set out a good work objective for someone, you can use SMART as a quick guide. An objective is a good one if it is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-limited.

Acronyms can be quite clever at giving extra meaning in an easy-to-remember way to something. To me, the word ‘smart’ in English suggests a range of attributes such as ‘clever’, ‘intelligent’, ‘sharp’, ‘tidy’, ‘bright’, ‘quick’, ‘energetic’,'organised’ and ‘stylish’. Remember the old (and no longer permitted) job advertisement they used to hang outside the factory gates, “Smart young lad wanted”?

At bquest we use SMART learning and development plans . We use the acronym slightly differently however – we say Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-limited. In my opinion, if an objective is judged achievable then it is also realistic. I think the word ‘Relevant’ is better because it makes sure you focus on an objective that is worth achieving; you should be asking, “Is this objective the right objective, is it relevant to me and the business?”

So, an acronym like SMART can be used as a form of mental model. It has its core mearning of S.M.A.R.T and it has a whole set of associated meanings of smart; if you want a good learning objective, then SMART is a very appropriate word. In English, that is. Does it work in other languages?
Many native Polish speakers, hearing the word ‘smart’, will translate it first as ‘elegancki’, the reverse translation of which is obvious. An ‘elegant learning objective’ is not quite the same thing as a ‘SMART learning objective’! An bang goes the immediate value of the SMART acronym. In fact it may even be confusing; I have to spend extra time making sure Polish bquest participants don’t think being ‘elegant’ is the goal of their learning and development plans!

We native speakers of English are lucky that English is the global language of business, but we have to be especially careful that we don’t take it for granted that ‘our’ English is the same as the English of others. Here’s a true story:

I went to a conference ten years ago about internet technologies for management education. The conference was in English. A Japanese expert stood up and presented a paper, in English. I did not understand a word. He sat down to applause. A man in the audience stood up and asked the presenter a question. The man I found out later was Portuguese. He asked his question in English. I did not understand a word. The Japanese presenter replied, again in English. Again, I did not understand a word. The two of them exchanged a couple more questions, obviously understanding each other. It was then I realised that there was a new language of ‘international English’ emerging that native-English speakers like me would have to learn if we are to communicate effectively in future.

Years of clarifying meanings with Russian, Thai, Polish, Italian, French and other clients has really helped me understand and empathise with other cultures.

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What is your attitude to employee development? Do you include the development of your company work horses?

Posted on June 22, 2011

At bquest, we focus on developing the key employees who bring special value to your company and your ‘talent’ or ‘hi-pos’ who need extra attention and nurturing as they grow with your company to become the next generation of people leaders, enterprise leaders and thought leaders. But what about the competent work horses (worker bees? bread and butter employees?), the ones who are not stars but who are essential to the successful day-to-day working of your business? What do you do with them?

I remember providing employee development for a storage and shipment unit of an oil company. Everything there was organised around both the oil handling process and safety. Employees had manuals for this and manuals for that. Everything was laid out. Once you had learned the shutdown procedure, the start up procedure, the flange swapping procedure, the recruitment procedure, etc. etc., there was nothing much more for them to learn to perform to a high standard. Except perhaps how to solve the small and not-so-small technical problems, usually wear and tear problems, that emerged over time, or how to deal with the introduction of an updated procedure.

This may make it sound like a trained monkey could do this job. Quite the opposite. Employees there were all highly qualified, skilled and experienced engineers. Their responsibilities were huge. If they failed to turn dial X and open valve Y at the right time the site could explode! (You can see from my lack of knowledge of the technical details of their work meant that I couldn’t do their job; I have great respect for their level of expertise.)

I expect there are many such skilled technical jobs where you become expert after some years, a master, but where further significant development is not really needed. (Being an expert is not the same as ‘personal mastery’ as proposed by Peter Senge.)

For the employees I knew in the oil storage plant, the most common further development would be to reduce the technical aspect of the job and learn to become senior managers. And in my experience, few of the engineers I helped wanted that. They were well paid, they knew their jobs well, they worked regular hours, so why bother with the hassles, politics, stress and with stepping out of their comfort zones into ‘management’.

For such employees, the key development issue is how to prevent them becoming complacent, how to keep them alert. If you know the mental model the ‘ladder of competence’, these competent and valuable employees had reached the level of ‘unconscious competence’. They could do their jobs without too much thinking. For them, the main danger is of unknowingly slipping back down to the level of ‘unconscious incompetence’. For those who don’t know this useful model of learning and personal mastery, one example is the experienced car driver who steers, adapts speed and changes gear ‘unconsciously’ because she is so competent. Until one day the car in front suddenly brakes and then she finds – as she ploughs into the back of it – that she was driving too close. Her ‘unconscious competence’ actually masked her ‘unconscious incompetence’. Which is why when learning to become an advanced police driver you are trained to verbalise everything you see, do and are thinking about. Mastery is being ‘unconsciously competent’, but mastery also requires switching to and fro with being ‘consciously competent’ to check you are still competent.

Technically competent work horses need to have some form of regular refresher training and ongoing testing that challenges both their actual skills for currency and their unconscious behaviours for slippage, preferably done in some positive and fun way that makes it an enjoyable change from daily routine.

Technically competent work horses with some creativity and ambition, or with a need for a break from the daily routine, need an outlet. You could of course try the ‘Chernobyl method of action learning’ (TM) and let those employees have fun (‘develop new competencies’) by playing around (‘experimenting’) with the equipment. But then you risk wiping out the plant, the town around you, or even the planet. Better, much much better, is to create ‘managed action learning’ experiences, otherwise known as ‘development projects’. In the oil storage plant, top management encouraged the engineering work horses to do small to medium-sized development projects, not so much to develop the employee or to improve operations – though these were often valuable side effects – but mainly to keep them stimulated and alert. Which is why this particular oil storage plant have continuously high performance, almost zero downtime, low employee turnover, and no significant accidents in the twenty years I have known them.

You cannot afford to ignore the ‘development’ of your work horses.

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Promote from within? Or hire from outside? Which is best for your business success?

Posted on June 16, 2011

There is an ongoing discussion on business forums about whether it is better to promote people from within the company or better to bring in new people.

The arguments are that if you promote from within you get people who have been brought up in the company culture, who know the whats, whos and hows – and where the dirty laundry is kept. Continuity and stability are more likely to be maintained. You create a motivating sense of career growth and personal development. And you don’t have to pay for expensive headhunters or risk bringing in a turkey.

Bringing people in from outside on the other hand brings fresh perspectives and new ways of thinking. An outsider brings objectivity to see when the king is not actually wearing any clothes. Recruiting allows you to quickly fill gaps in the company’s skillset. And you don’t have to bother with the time-consuming bureaucracy of internal succession planning systems.

Just as both approaches have their upside, so they have downsides. (This is a useful thing to remember about many decisions you have to make!) Promoting from within may discourage change and adaptation and may even promote groupthink. People who are promoted have their baggage in the form of past relationships, company politics, favours done, etc. which makes it harder for them to make tough decisions. Whereas bringing people in from outside often means upheaval as the new broom sweeps a lot of good out with the bad. And problems are often caused by the new CEO’s lack of understanding of the company history; cynics say that as far as the new CEO is concerned, history starts with their appointment!

So, which is better? The research done for ‘Built to last’ found that long-lasting companies tend to promote CEOs and senior managers from within. The CEO knows, consciously or unconsciously, that even though they may want to put their mark on the company they are essentially a temporary holder of the job whose duty is to pass on the company in good health to the next generation, preferably in better shape than when the job was inherited. These CEOs have spent many years in the culture, they know the company, its products and customers and how it works intimately. They have been key players in making the company the success that it is now and they are not likely to make big changes to what they themselves have built.

That said, even in a longlasting company, as A G Lafley showed in the last ten years, it is possible for a person promoted from within to make big changes to the business model and culture and, in Proctor and Gamble’s case, to ‘revitalise’ the company.

So, the argument for promoting from within seems to be stronger. But what other evidence do we have? According to a 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal “Internal transfers and promotions accounted for an average of 51% of all full-time positions filled in 2009, up from 39% in 2008 and 34% in 2007″. A slim majority. In another WSJ article we see that a company like Caterpiller which traditionally promoted from within because “we knew better how to run the business than outsiders” is increasingly “looking outside as it tries to overcome management shortcomings“; their view is that their “home-grown mentality hurt Caterpillar when it wasn’t able to fully benefit from the global boom from 2006″. And everyone knows the story of IBM being turned around, indeed saved, in the 90s by Lou Gerstner, an outsider from Nabisco and American Express.
I think the always interesting Steve Tobak summarises my view pretty well:

“Boards and CEOs should promote from within, hire from outside, or do both. They should do whatever they need to do to ensure the company has the talent and experience it needs at that point in its evolution. There simply is no broad argument for choosing one way over another. So give it a rest.”

I think this pragmatic approach applies to both small businesses as well as large corporations.

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How do you find the right employee development and training for your company?

Posted on June 9, 2011

Recently I was discussing how small businesses can find a person or a company who can provide them with the sort of employee development they really need.

If you put employee development into Google you get a whole mish-mash of links in the search results, including  dictionary definitions of the term employee development, organisation web pages describing their employee development policy,  links to blogs which have either the word employee or the word development in them, one or two links to companies providing some sort of employee development services (but not necessarily relevant to what you might actually want) and links to alternative Google searches that use words related to employee development. Today, Google’s suggestions for alternatives were: ‘importance employee development’, ‘employee development plan examples’, ‘define employee development’, ‘meaning employee development’, ‘employee development book,”employee development plan template,’ ‘employee development specialist,’ and ‘elements effective employee development program.’ (Strange one, that last one.)

Tough. So what can company managers actually do?

My first suggestion is to write a short sentence that describes what you want and then pick out key words from it. For example, if you write: ‘I want an employee development system for my key employees’ you can then pick out employee development system key employees. Put these words into Google and, hey presto, bquest appears on the first page. And if you put brackets around key combinations of words you can be even more precise. For example, if you put “employee development system” and key employees then bquest is right at the top!

But maybe you don’t know exactly what you want. For example, maybe you don’t think about a system. It’s not that you don’t want a system, just that you hadn’t thought in those terms. Or maybe you haven’t thought about focusing development on only a segment of your employees such as the key employees that bquest focuses on.

In which case you need to create a list of words that you can search on. This is the sort of brainstorming method that I use whenever I am doing some research through Google:

1) Begin with a simple term or phrase. For example, employee development. We know this will bring a mish-mash of links and it is unlikely to show what we want in the first page or so. So, be patient. You are going to have to go through a number of pages of Google search results, say 10, to build your initial list of search words.

2) On Google’s first page of search results of employee development, right click on each link and open in a new tab. (Ignore any links that at first glance are obviously inappropriate; don’t try and read everything, just skim your eyes over the words.) You will then have 10 tabs open.

3) Go to each tab and skim read the page. Pick out words that you hadn’t thought of. For example, the first Google link for employee development is, today, http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/toolkit/development/index.html This is a university site and says a little about what they think employee development is. Not necessarily intersting to you, certainly not if you are looking for a provider.

But, skimming the page brings up some interesting words and phrases. On the page, I like: upgrade, knowledge, skills, abilities, organizational performance, highly-skilled workforce, save a great deal of money.

Another link on Google’s first page of results is actually a provider of employee development services http://www.employeedevelopmentsystems.com/ This page has words like: personal effectiveness, professionalism, lower costs, greater efficiencies.

Carry on for the other pages, noting down the words you hadn’t thought of. Close each tab when you have finished with it to keep the number of open tabs under control (unless it looks at first glance like you would want to read it more carefully later).

The words you note will form your pool of words to search with. You can combine them in different ways, for example: professional workforce, increase personaleffectiveness of employees, and so on.

4) After you have got a first pool of words, then I suggest you open a new tab and start a second Google search. Keep the first Google search open as you may want to come back to it and continue where you left off, looking for more words to be used in searching.

Some general tips:

When searching for something as important as employee development, do go beyond the first few Google pages. Good providers may not have the highest rankings in Google, especially if they don’t match your search terms exactly. And we have seen how complex it can be to find search terms.

Play around with endings of words, and use synonyms. For example, try professionalism and professional, and increase and increasing. And for the word saving also try reduce costs and reducing costs.

Include the minus symbol to cut out words. For example, if you look for executive coaching you may get lots of football coaching as well. So add -football to cut out links to football coaches.

At the end of all this, you should have open about 10 candidate providers of employee development services. Then you need to make a choice. But that’s another bquest blog!

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Great places to work

Posted on June 7, 2011

I read the latest 2011 list of good UK companies to work for at www.greatplacetowork.co.uk with interest. They have a ‘hall of fame’ which includes world famous names like McDonalds, Danone, Bain, and Morgan Stanley. The best this year include Twinings, Bacardi Brown-Forman and Dow Corning.

Although there are some valid criticisms of such lists, for example 1 and 2 , why and how to get employees engaged fully with the company is an important topic for any company that wants to increase performance and profitablity. The models used by Gallup and Great Place to Work provide a framework. And I always say, however imperfect a framework, any framework is better than nothing as it provides a clear starting point from which to begin looking at things in a structured way; you can, and should, always then adapt your starting framework as you build your understanding.

Without naming names, I noted two companies listed in their Best European Workplaces list that I have had personal experience of that I would NOT like to work for. These two have very strong working cultures that do not tolerate differences of view. From induction onward, their employee relationship and development actions strengthen this. Everyone is aligned in one mentality and in one way of working together. These companies are the ‘do it my way or it’s the highway’ types.

This pushes my big red annoyance button. Personally, I always like to ask questions, to challenge the norms, to discuss alternatives, hoping maybe to even be the bit of grit in the oyster that helps create a pearl. I want to be involved in some way, however small, in setting direction. In effect, I want ‘my way’ to at least influence a little ‘their way’. That way I feel I am really contributing my brains, effort, heart and soul for the benefit of the company; I become fully engaged.

These two companies are not for me. But, good luck to them; they are successful, they are long-lasting. Seeing their names in the list and my reaction to them reminds me of the findings of Collins and Porras in Built to Last which looked at companies like Disney, Wal-Mart and Merck among others. They found that there are no great companies suitable for everyone. Great companies are only great for the people who can fit in fully with their working cultures, which tend to be so strong as to be almost cult like. Fortunately, as CEO of bquest, I don’t have to join the cult to help client companies! As an outsider, I can ask the challenging and useful questions they may not be asking of themselves.

So, your questions for the day: Do you have the right people employed with you who are both competent and who can really fit in with what you want your company to be and to do? If you don’t, what are you going to do about it?

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