What is the "essence" of personal development programs in business?

IMO (as always) “training” is for me teaching a person a specific skill—how to weld, the process for loading an airplane, how to clean teeth, etc. “Training” is the specific education for preparing a person to do a specific usually hands-on job.

Developing one’s staff/employees/associates has a broader meaning. We may not be focused on a specific skill set as we are on growing the person, but note NOT necessarily to be promoted. That line of thinking assumes that everyone wants to be promoted—and they don’t. We know of at least four major different Career Concepts (thanks to Driver and Brousseau at USC) Linears define “success” as gaining power and status. Experts define success as becoming artisans and craftsmen. Spirals get bored with the ladder climb and want to be learning all the time. Transitories only work so they can do something else. ALL four patterns have major value to add to a company. But assuming everyone wants to be promoted is folly. Every participant I’ve met in 40 years of consulting has seen Experts ruined by promotion into management. And that’s usually done because the Linear promoters assume everyone is like them.

So here is what the essence of effective employee development has been for 40 years and consulting with companies all over the world.

1. Career Concepts. There’s more than one definition of success. Be aware and make better informed career decisions for self and others.
2. Leadership effectiveness can be measured by Buy-In. Leadership is about managing energy—and when you ask someone to do something, you can get postive or negative energy. See below.
3. Human Behavior can be viewed at three levels: Visible (what you can capture on film), Conscious Thought, and VABEs. What are VABEs? Each level has influence techniques associated with it. Level One techniques are basically Skinnerian—rewards and punishments. This is what most managers use. Level Two Techniques include logic, data, science, evidence. It turns out though for the vast majority of people in the world VABEs (Level Three) “trump” evidence. There is more energy pro and con at Level Three than at Level One. Learn to see, understand and act at Level Three. See for example, Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards.
4. Every person who wants to live “inside-out” instead of “outside-in” should IMO have a charter—for themselves, their departments, their divisions, their companies and even their countries. Any executive who cannot articulate a clear, robust, and inspiring charter is IMO negligent. What’s your purpose in life? (It’s your life…) What do you want to look like at age 70? (vision) etc. See below and my website Level Three Leadership for more.
5. Managers need to understand the nature of problems—most don’t. See below.
6. Executives are organizational architects like or not, and yet they make design decisions based on pre-conscious VABEs without understanding the likely consequences of their choices. I’ve seen major companies take five years to get to organization B and then five years later go back to organization A — for example. Imagine the lost energy in that place.
7. Executives can only influence results through organizational culture. They design things, and the put people in their designs and the resulting collision is a “culture” that either functions well or not. Culture is a collection of shared VABEs. See for example Ed Schein’s work, especially Organizational Culture and Leadership.
8. Effective executives must be masters of the change process. Most IME shoot from the hip. Again, it all comes down to VABEs.
9. Does how you feel affect your performance? (100% of people in my experience say yes.) Do you know how you want to feel? Happy isn’t good enough. If one can manage feel, performance comes out the other end. Managing “feel” is about managing energy, which I say is what leadership is. See again the Buy-In Scale.
10. Balance. How does one manage all the —AL aspects of life (physical, intellectual, financial, social, professional, etc.) effectively? I have a colleague who once noted “excellence is a neurotic lifestyle.”

My week-long seminars at Darden School UVA and for clients worldwide introduced all of these elements with examples, stretching role plays, and Level Three analysis throughout. I’ve retired, but all of my material is on-line at my website. Here are a few of the concepts rendered visually.

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Melody Jacob

How should college and above instructors develop learning goals for their students and themselves?

 Your question doesn’t include what level or discipline you are teaching. IMO for anyone in college or graduate school I would teach them the following:

1. Write a personal Charter beginning with a one sentence mission statement. What do you want to spend your life doing? (This may change, but by age 30 one will go farther if one has it figured out/chosen. See chart below. With a charter, individuals have set their own learning goals and success definition. see also my website at Level Three Leadership I wrote my own personal charter (and one for my department and my school) and used that for my personal development and growth plan.
2. I’d also teach them the Balancing Your Life exercise—how to make a “well rounded” set of annual goals. What do you want to look like on all the —AL aspects of life at age 70? (physical, intellectual, financial, etc. 14 + of them) This is the Visions and Strategies section of the Charter in #1. Again they set their own goals for who they want to be.
3. I’d teach them the four basic Career Concepts (Driver and Brousseau at USC) and encourage them to live “inside-out” and not “outside-in” blindly accepting society’s Linear definition. Not everyone is meant or cut out to be a Chief Executive.
4. I’d teach them the differences between three “levels” of human behavior: Visible Behavior (Level One), Conscious Thought (Level Two) and VABEs (Level Three) Nobel Prizes have been awarded for the concept that people make big decisions based on VABEs OVER solid evidence. VABEs “trump” evidence. And invite them to begin identifying their core VABEs which executives worldwide claim to be 99% habitual-mindlessly repetitive. A one page, data-based, list of one’s VABEs / habitual Life Themes on all the —AL aspects of life is literally a description of one’s personality.
5. Depending on the discipline, I’d write course contracts — grade goal sheets (taught me by Steve Covey, my first instructor in business school). If you want an A in this course, you must do these things. For a B, you must complete the following. And so on. This takes a careful preparation for the instructor—and the advantage is that the students set their own goals for how much work they want to do in your discipline. Each student reads the options and signs a “contract” to strive for whatever grade level they want. It’s “possible” but not likely that everyone could get A’s. This is not a relative grading system, rather an absolute system with clear standards of performance.
6. My goal for myself has always been that a) every class would be so interesting and high energy that everyone in the room would be naturally and fully engaged. And b) that every course would be better than the last one. At HBS we had a rule of replacing the bottom 10% of classes in a course every year. Like Jack Welch’s HR promotion model. And I wanted my course ratings to be the best in the school, at least in my discipline. The year I left HBS to go to UVA, my course was ranked 2nd. Michael Porter had the #1 rated course. This means one cannot waste a single minute in class. I taught by case method my whole career—which lecturers don’t like. I assumed people could read—both the cases and the technical/analytical notes that accompanied them. Lectures (in the main) are the kiss of death for student energy. I’ve known of one or two professors who make a lecture engaging. Most cannot and put students to sleep.
7. I also wanted to read voraciously to add week by week to my knowledge of the field and what others were doing in it. I started keeping track of what I’d read each year and found with 30+ minutes a night or during the day squeezed in I could read on average 40–50 books a year.
8. I made slides of the good books, summarizing on 2–5 slides the main ideas so I could cut and paste those slides into decks for talks that begged those ideas. I now have some 300 slide decks. Thanks to a California colleague for this idea.
9. I wrote teacher’s version of my syllabi with teaching plans for each class including objectives, time allocations, and more. See my book Teaching Management for details. Also on my website above. I revised these every year to ensure every year the course(s) got better and better.

Is management stressful?

 Stress comes in many forms. The literature supports the idea that a certain amount of stress, “eustress,” is essential for creativity and productivity. I had the experience of being the chief executive of a non-profit that included 3,000 people and eight different units. I found it both exhilarating, stressful, “heavy” as in responsibility, exhausting and energizing, frustrating and rewarding.

The “background” stress is always there in that one is constantly concerned about the health and well-being of the organization and how to enhance and invigorate the members and the organization as a whole. Most CEO’s IME (as a consultant as well) share this constant stress and deal with it in their own ways. Exercise helps. Sleep helps though not always available. Having good lieutenants helps enormously. A deep conviction in one’s mission/purpose helps. And in the end, as they say, the “buck stops here.”

Some CEO’s show the effects in their health, in their relationships (divorces), and/or in their decision making. Others seem to thrive on the constant challenges. Things never are “perfect” and for a mild perfectionist, that was stressful for me. I was impatient and goal oriented and when things didn’t work, it was stressful.

The Serenity Prayer seemed wise to me, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to see and understand the difference between the two.” And it was hard for me not to want to “do it all.” Eventually, after 7 1/2 years, that wore me out and led to something of a mid-life crisis. Others persist with “apparent” serenity.

So I’d say, yes, management is a stressful job—it demands effective stress management of people in it.  

Who was your most important mentor and why?

 Tony Athos was on the cover of Time magazine as one of the country’s best teachers. I arrived at Harvard business School as a naive Idaho transplant completely unused to being in the midst of world leading researchers, former Secretaries of Commerce, and other famous people. For some reason he took me under his wing. I remember asking him to watch me teach a class one time, in a course he’d co-designed. I prepared as best I could. He came, sat in the back, and afterward, I rushed to his office to get his verdict. His opening was, “Jim, you’re boring.” Thunk! An arrow to the heart.

He went on like this. “I notice you play basketball with the doctoral students at noon.” I do. I love basketball. “Well, that’s obvious. When you come back you are glowing, you are floating three inches off the ground, and you are emanating energy. You need to figure out how to play basketball in the classroom.”

I went back to my office utterly deflated —- because in my mind, basketball was play and teaching was work and my mom had taught me work before play. I sat there and ruminated. Hmm, there is a start, a tipoff. And since we use case method, you “pass the ball” from one student to another. And then they dribble, sometimes uselessly, at other times making a huge point, a three-point basket. Hmmm, you COULD play basketball in the classroom.

That experience changed my life. It was a major VABE abrasion—and instead of rejecting it, I adjusted my VABEs. Whew.

There were others—I have a “Heroes Page.” I’m grateful and learned from many of my HBS instructors and later colleagues: Paul Lawrence, Jay Lorsch, Jack Gabarro and Sherwood Frey. And at MIT, Ed Schein who introduced me to the notion that there were three layers of human behavior—visible behavior, conscious thought, and semi- or pre-conscious VABEs. He used Central American pyramids as an example. We can see and touch the visible artifacts, the pyramids themselves. We can learn and infer though we cannot see them, the rituals they performed on those pyramids—human sacrifices. The real issue though is, WHY did they do that? VABEs. To make real change, one must work at Level Three. see my website at Level Three Leadership 

I later focused my doctoral thesis on the nature of developmental relationships including mentor/protege relationships.  

Do chief executives actually affect organizational performance? What are the key issues?

Yes and no. In large scale bureaucratic organizations like government agencies and some companies, the entrenched culture may be stronger than the will of a change-oriented manager. Or the new executive may be there for other reasons than to implement change. In those organizations, the “masses” below have seen leaders come and go and they “know” that this, too, shall pass. So like the Gulf Stream is largely unaffected by the surface waves, the organization’s performance changes not. Consider the American Veteran’s Administration for one. And many large American private companies.  

A change oriented, powerful, high energy executive can make a difference for good or bad. Bob Nardelli from GE went to Home Depot and famously almost ruined the company before he left—getting btw some $200mm for his failed efforts. Asset strippers like “Chainsaw Al Dunlap” can kill an organization—by intent. A few enlightened CEO’s like Jim Goodnight at SAS Institute can create fantastically successful companies that everyone wants to work for—and resist the pressures of would-be public investors who would never want to pay for on-site health clinics and elementary schools.

So yes, a leader can make a huge difference in performance both for good and for ill. IMO IME a wise executive has and can articulate a robust “charter” for the organization beginning with a simple, one sentence purpose/mission statement. IMO executives who cannot outline a robust charter are negligent.

Further, IME there are people in authority (who may or may not be leaders) who want the top job for the benefits and perquisites. Type I in my view. Type II leaders don’t care about that stuff, rather they have a laudable mission they want to accomplish. I trust the latter, not the former.

Then there’s the deep-seated white-hot topic of the purpose of capitalism. Most business schools have taught the core VABE of “maximizing profits.” IMO this has become an obsolete and morally defunct core VABE. The reason is that historically executives pursued this purpose at the expense and abuse of the Commons.

The “Commons” are all the things that every person, every department, every company, and every government worldwide share. Namely, air, water, soil, flora, fauna, and the underprivileged. We ALL share a responsibility to protect rather than abuse the Commons in which we ALL live. So for me, the core VABE of capitalism should be “maximizing sustainable profits” by which I mean profits that protect not abuse the Commons. This would change many things like product design, supply-chain management, packaging, and notably end-of-life disposal of products. (Like the piling up of used up, rusted Japanese cars in Central Africa.,)

“Conservative capitalists” resist this notion vehemently claiming that everything is contained in the stock price. Not so. It’s demonstrated historically that unless someone (governments and unions) put pressure on corporations they will go to extraordinary and Commons-abusing lengths in the search for one more percentage point of profit margin.

An executive who has a robust charter and pursues maximizing sustainable profits is IMO a leader for the present and the future.

Finally consider the CEO of a highway construction business in Indiana who sold his business for $200 million. He promptly gave each of his 100 employees (secretaries, truck drivers, pavers, machine operators etc) $1 mm each. When asked why on earth he would do that he noted that they had done all the work, all he’d done was organize them. AND he still had $100 mm, what did he need with more? IMO that man was/is a “net contributor” not a “net extractor/taker” as most managers seem to be. We often forget that Adam Smith said that capitalism depended on men of good character—which to me meant that they cared about their communities and being net contributors, not abusers of the Commons and net takers.

What are some older recruiting techniques that make no sense in the real world?

 I prefer “less sense” over “no sense,” and “today’s world” over “real world.” That said, WRT new entry level hires IMO IME …

1. Assuming everyone wants to be upwardly mobile/Linear instead of recognizing various Career Concepts and hiring proportionately for the corporate need and strategic mix. If everyone is an alpha Linear, it creates a highly political dog-eat-dog culture with questions about who’s doing the work. Strategic proportions of Linears, Experts, Spirals and Transitories (for downtrends) makes more sense.
2. Recruiting primarily at alma maters. Tends to create “old boy” cultures.
3. Limiting gender, ethnic, national and racial diversity tends to create insulated and vulnerable organizational cultures.
4. Socializing new hires to do things our way (only) which dampens creativity and innovation and better ways of doing things.
5. Hiring primarily on salary and benefits negotiations rather than passion, fit with culture, and energy level.
6. Hiring by HRM or Personnel departments rather than by the line team who will use them.
7. Hiring for “warm bodies” in periods of rapid growth rather than strategic planning. See #1.
8. Hiring without careful regard to Critical Core Capabilities and their enhancement. See Kaplan & Norton Strategic Mapping.
9. Hiring for technical skills rather than social/culture fit skills. It’s easier to teach skills than change attitude. See The Aberdeen Experiment.

For higher level recruiting …

1. Poaching talent for more money—money hungry mercenaries will do the same to you.
2. Hiring “successful” executives from another industry who don’t know your industry and the people in it.
3. Hiring people who don’t and didn’t have the ability to create and articulate clear, robust, and inspiring “charters.” See Level Three Leadership and below.
4. Hiring people who haven’t and don’t have respect for and a deep desire to protect rather than abuse the Commons (air, water, soil, flora, fauna, and the underprivileged).
5. Hiring people whose primary VABE is “maximize profits.” IMO a defunct and in today’s world immoral value. Instead, we should adopt “maximize sustainable profits” that acknowledge every person’s and every company’s responsibility to protect not abuse the Commons. The former are “net extractors” while the latter are “net contributors.” Hire people who want to give more than they take. Even investors have the global citizenship responsibility to protect the Commons—we all live in the same world.
6. Hiring people who put VABEs ahead of hard evidence. Most people do. (See Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize for example.) We should hire people who seek out and adapt to hard evidence and science.
7. Hiring people with a high Orientation to Hierarchy (OH). They want to be kings and dictators, and are not interested in the well-being of the “little people.” I divide people in positions of authority into two major categories, Type I and Type II. Type I authoritors (may or may not be leaders) want the perquisites of power—cars, offices, exclusive memberships, etc. Type II leaders have a burning passion to accomplish a vision and don’t care so much about the trappings of power. I trust the latter, not the former.

For starters, off the top.

Are you a leader or a follower?

 Consider the relationship between living “outside-in” vs “inside-out.” We live outside in in order to fit in, not be rejected by the “group/culture” and that’s good otherwise we could have no functional society. We need to obey the rules, laws, cultural expectations in order to cooperate with other humans. Most people live mostly outside-in. A few live mostly inside-out asserting their viewpoint on the world around them. That can be good or bad. Conquerors live inside-out and force others to live outside-in.

Personally, I lived outside-in for the first half of my life, striving hard to live within the rules and guidelines of society and my strict, comprehensive religion that prescribed what I wear, how I talk, how I use my time, how I raise my children, what I eat, what I did with my by-now-very-little leisure time. Eventually, about age 48, I collapsed under that layer of outside-in Expectations and began anew—and to assert myself on the world around me. I have used this OI-IO model very successfully in my consulting practice worldwide as a small part of my week-long seminars. See Level Three Leadership for more.

Although I was a leader in my religion, I was living outside-in to someone else’s VABEs. In the end, IMO everything boils down to genetics and VABEs. Given that mid-life crisis/rebirth, I am living more inside-out now. I have become a very skeptical “follower”—too many times I’ve emulated and/or followed others only to find that was confining, constraining and just plain inaccurate philosophy of life. I now follow Science and repeatable, multiple sourced evidence. And wrote a book in my retirement A Song of Humanity: A Science-based Alternative to the World’s Scriptures to combat the millennial mountains of mythological rubbish that continues to be perpetrated on the world’s defenseless children.

I hope my experience and writings will be of help to people worldwide who want to “find themselves” amidst all of the other people telling them what to do, what to think, and what to believe. At home, even my dog does her own thing though. As a consultant before retiring, I was honored to teach people all over the world. Am I a thought leader?  

Why don't more organizations and people "get it?"

Hmmm. IMO and IME it’s ALL about VABEs. Companies look for a sustainable strategic competitive advantage (SSCA). Products can be backward engineered. The Coca Cola formula is carefully guarded secret. Organizational culture, a set of shared VABEs, however are much more difficult to imitate/duplicate. Because VABEs go deep. And are often unexamined.

Example #1. Pike’s Place Fish Market in Seattle WA has been generating high margins and profitability in a commodity market for years and years. There are other fish markets literally less than 100 yards away who aren’t and can’t. Because they don’t believe that’s the way to run a business.

Example #2. SAS Institute in Cary NC has quadrupled the size and profitability of its primary competitor who was formed the same year—SPSS. NCState vs Stanford. The Stanford based SPSS went public a few years after forming and now—-SAS is four times its size and offering elementary school, health clinics, parks, healthy foods etc. on grounds. Things a public company wouldn’t do because of the “loss” to investors of providing those things.

Example #3. Starbucks founder Howard Schulz offered part-time employees comprehensive health benefits and employee stock option purchasing plans when he had only ten stores and 100 employees. He said that single decision—based on his experience at age 7 when his father was severely injured at work and couldn’t pay the bills—was the basis for their subsequent growth. Who else does that? Imagine a Board of Directors facing that proposal.

People reject science in medicine (face masks?) in favor of their VABEs. Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for his extensions of Amos Tversky’s work that revealed that people make big decisions based on their VABEs over evidence. VABEs “trump” data and hard science.

This is why I’ve spent most of my career working on Level Three Leadership . How does one influence Level One (visible behavior)? Rewards and Punishments. BF Skinner. Superficial. Level Two is conscious thought—and influence tools include logic, data, science, evidence. Level Three is VABEs—semi- or pre- conscious VABEs. Worldwide VABEs dominate science except for a few for whom the primary VABE is “In Truth We Trust” rather than “In God We Trust.”

In retirement I wrote A Song of Humanity: A Science-Based Alternative to the World’s Scriptures to combat that tendency—which I fell prey to for 35 years. Scientists are inductive thinkers—they start with the raw data. Most people are deductive thinkers—they start with the conclusions and screen out disconfirming data. The well-known “confirmation bias.”

That’s the”it” that IME most companies don’t get. Another “it” is the core VABE in most businesses to “maximize profits.” IMO that VABE is obsolete, morally defunct, and bad capitalism. “Good capitalism” IMO has a core VABE of “maximizing sustainable profits.” Sustainable means protecting not abusing the COMMONS—the things that we all share: air, water, soil, flora, fauna and the underprivileged. A few companies are net contributors rather than net extractors/takers.

Example #1. Indiana freeway construction company owner who sold his company for $200 mm and promptly gave each of his 100 employees a million dollars each. When asked why he noted that they did all the work, all he did was organize them AND he still had $100mm, what did he need with more? Net contributor.

Example #2. Bob Nardelli went from GE to Home Depot and nearly destroyed the company. He got $200mm for going away. Net taker/extractor.

It’s all about VABEs. Net extractors have a perhaps pre-conscious VABE, “My goal is to get as much out of society as I can.” Net contributors have a different VABE, “I want to leave the world around me better than I found it.” A simple Boy Scout principle: leave your campsite better than you found it.

Note that there often, too often, is a gap between espoused VABEs and VABEs-in-Action. Emerson once said, “What you do thunders so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what you say.”  

How to distribute abilities in a team

IMO there are four basic clusters of skills needed on effective teams. See below and for more my website at Level Three Leadership The task / process dichotomy is from Blake and Mouton. The creativity/pragmatic axis is mine. Do you have people that can articulate and represent all four quadrants? If not, beware.

As for technical representation, think about sequential vs concurrent engineering. The US government reacting to cost and schedule overruns with TADS and LANTIRN and other programs (Comanche) began to require concurrent engineering in which traditional end of process functions like production, maintenance and customer usability were brought forward into planning and development. (We can’t make what you designed. We can’t maintain what you built. We can’t operate what you gave us.) To avoid the cost of late stage engineering change requests (ECRs) which were very expensive in both time and money. The problem is that concurrent engineering increases the front end costs. The calculus shows that the bet is that up-front costs would be offset by late-stage change based costs. See chart below. IPDT = Integrated Product Development Teams. When defense companies used IPDT’s there was lots of resistance in large part because the benefits are only apparent at the end of a program, while the upfront costs (green line) are much, several times, higher than the traditional sequential cost structure (red line). Sequential processes in one client I had included 23 hand-offs from one department to the next. (!)

So, who should be there? Many team members IME have wondered why they were there. THAT leads us to the predictable phases of team development. See below. Beware of jumping to phase 3 (many impatient team leaders do) and ignoring clarifying the issues in the first two phases lest the unresolved/assumed issues come back to bite you in the tush.

Have you stayed too long in one job? Are you bored at work?

That depends deeply on your Career Concept. Some people define success as moving up. (Linear) Others as becoming an expert craftsman, artisan or national treasure. (Expert) Others as constant learning. (Spiral) Others as something other than work. (Transitory) (Driver and Brousseau at USC. Self-Assessment at my website Level Three Leadership ) Your question implies a Linear or Spiral core VABE.

If you are an Expert at heart and value hands on craftsmanship more than increasing power and status, then perhaps never. How long should an artist, sculptor, athlete, writer, cabinet maker, engineer, guitar maker, consultant stay at their jobs so long as they are improving? Perhaps lifelong.

Are you clear on what you want? IME most people aren’t. Money? Power? Fame? Salvation? Live long? Do you really want more responsibility, that is, to move up in power and status? It sounds nice, and consider the content of the Linear job path. Distance from doing it yourself, adopting the Linear VABE “I enjoy getting things done through other people,” taking work home at night with you (I’ve been there), making big strategic bets with no assurance that you are right, tolerating multiple attacks on you and your decisions, feeling responsible for thousands of lives, worrying about financial stability, and much much more.

As another respondent has noted, are you bored silly? I’m at heart an Expert and my experience in large bureaucratic organizations (like traditional banks) was abject boredom. People who love finance didn’t feel that way—I was more interested in “why people behave the way they do” and loved every minute of my subsequent career in Leadership and Organizational Behavior.

Have you identified your purpose in life yet? Many people live “outside-in” wandering about using trial-and-error looking for satisfaction. People who have chosen (usually not given) a purpose in life tend to have focus and energy. It sounds to me like you are living outside-in waiting for the world to give you satisfaction. i predict that when you (if ever) clarify your life’s purpose/mission, boredom will never be an issue.

I encourage you to begin crafting a ”robust personal charter.” To begin, one sentence—what’s your purpose in life? “To be happy” isn’t specific enough. There’s a summary chart below. For more see my website at Level Three Leadership

How can you tell if you are an Effective and Efficient Speaker?

This it seems to me is a carefully crafted and important question. I stuttered badly in high school despite multiple experiences in public speaking. When I was concerned about what the audience thought of me or was unsure of my material, I spoke way too fast and with a high pitched voice.

IME one becomes an effective and efficient speaker when one has developed a deep and relatively comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter, when one has learned to use pace carefully (drama classes can help), when one as noted by another respondent eliminates fillers (pace helps with that), when one manages or escapes from the fear of rejection, when one understands adult learning theory and therefore dares to address the “real” issues, and when one has a passion for helping others rather than looking good.

Note that “con men” are effective and efficient speakers. Convincing others is I guess the goal of “effective.” “Efficient” is the goal of Occam’s Razor—just enough to do the job and nothing left over. Mozart was criticized for having “too many notes.” Many speakers have too many words. Impacting an audience is the goal—and often that is done with fewer words properly paced and properly chosen and properly delivered. The “con men” issue is a focus on intent. To deceive? To serve self? To build one’s own esteem?

Carl Rogers implied a two part translation that takes place when one speaks. The first translation is from “experience” to “thought.” The second one is from “thought” to “speech.” Many ignore the first translation when their first awareness of the desire to speak is an idea. Many also struggle with “I know what I want to say I just can’t find the words” the second translation. IME learning foreign languages (Cantonese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Scottish and Southern) one must do so out loud. There are literal neural-muscular synaptic linkages that must be developed in order to speak clearly. I practiced in the shower, in the car, while walking, in my office, everywhere in order to overcome stuttering and to learn new sounds (Cantonese was difficult for me).

Non-verbals. I’ve also written about how “YOU” are the message even before you begin to speak. How you dress, how you groom, how you move, how you begin all convey messages to your audience in a flash.

I’ve also written about the “language of leadership” that includes what a colleague and I call the “rules of the dance.” Things like replacing your “buts” with “ands.” Using first person not second person language (I have a problem not you have a problem—which creates defensiveness). Not disguising your opinions as questions (don’t you agree or think that…. ?). Not presenting your opinions as facts (“reifying”—see for example Berger and Luckman The Social Construction of Reality ) and more… for more see my website at Level Three Leadership )

Watching the news and the questions that reporters ask and the “panels of experts” that dominate the news these days, is an hourly class/lesson in assessing effective and efficient language. Many are pressured by time constraints and talk way too fast with way too many fillers.

If a person has investigated their (new grammar rules on gender pronouns) subject matter carefully, CARES about their audience over personal appearance, and understands the power of dramatic timing and tone and non-verbals—one can become an effective and efficient speaker.

You’ll “know” because a) you feel it, b) you are amazed at what you just said, and c) the audience erupts in spontaneous energy—deep thinking attention or standing applause.

Are we retaining our best talent?

 I don’t know who “we” are. In general though, there are some obvious repeating trends/patterns IME. Organizations vary widely in the ways they search for, screen, select, on-board (socialize) and design work for employees. IME many organizations routinize those processes in generic ways that inexorably if not intentionally pound new employees into “our way of doing things.” That socialization process discourages many new, highly talented, energetic, creative people. Some conformity is necessary to “organize” energy. Finding that middle ground that focuses human capital pools without de-energizing them is an important and often overlooked effort.

Understanding that not everyone by a long shot is linearly (upwardly) motivated is an important first step in strategic human resource acquisition and retention. (See Career Concepts below—adapted from Driver and Brousseau at USC.) Ignoring the goodness of fit between candidates and organization culture, between strategic needs for innovation and creativity and conformity, and between respect for tradition and emerging competition contributes to the flight of highly talented people. The “off-boarding” process should include IMO careful analysis that should inform the recruiting processes. Frequently they don’t.

I’ve been privileged with many excellent, well-known clients. In those leadership development seminars I always respected adult learning theory (adults learn best by dealing with issues of immediate relevance to them) by beginning with “what are the biggest problems you are facing?” That one hour exercise in a week-long seminar always produced a list of what the mid-to-upper level manager/executives saw as critical to them. Over time, I could predict even across different clients what the list would be. We wrote those on flip charts so we could refer to them and connect them with our session by session discussions. Despite my efforts to upload to management the content of those lists, most clients seemed utterly uninterested. They didn’t want a feedback loop, just a repeatedly “successful” seminar.

One example and I’ll stop. After introducing the Career Concepts research in a session, a man came up to me and said, “Why don’t executives listen?” What do you mean? “I’m an engineer, a good one. In my previous (very well known) employer because I did good work, they kept putting me in leadership development seminars. I said, Look I don’t want to be promoted. I love my work, I want to do it well, and go home and be with my family. They didn’t listen, so finally it got so annoying that I quit and came here. I’ve only been here for six months and already they’ve put me in your leadership development program! Why?” The answer is because those executives who are Linearly oriented have a VABE that everyone is or should be like them. As one COO said to me, “If the janitor in this company doesn’t desire to be the CEO, we should fire his ass out of here because that’s the American way, you pick yourself up by your bootstraps and climb as high as you can.”

Is your best talent leaving your organization? Perhaps it’s because they don’t get the respect and latitude that they deserve. It could be because of money (they often say), AND IME people would rather love their work and whom they work with than make a few more bucks—which IME as alumni have called me and said, leaves them unhappy.  

For more, see my website at Level Three Leadership. 

 

How to manage large virtual meetings?

IMO every meeting should have an agenda based on questions not topics. EVERY item should be a question that the group is expected to answer or offer insight on. If meetings are just for information, they are a waste of time—just email the information or publish it in a selfie video.

For me, I would ask an important question based on each agenda item and ask everyone to use the Chat feature to send in their answers. Be sure to record the chat sequence so you can calculate/compile the answers you got. You said “large” meetings, so I’m assuming 70+. Or even 40+.

For example, if the first agenda item is “Should we continue spending research funds on the XYZ project?” my question might be, “If XYZ succeeds, how would your business be affected?” or “What do you think the odds of XYZ succeeding are and why?” Do not put out an agenda that says “XYZ Project.” AND you could collect this data with a Qualtrics or Survey Monkey survey that would save people’s time even more. AND you’d have automatic compiling and know who hadn’t responded. So, is your meeting really necessary?  WHAT is the purpose of the meeting?

I’ve become vehemently opposed to topic based agendas—they just end up in endless repetitive discussions.

IF you are having these meetings just so people can see each other and thereby “reconnect” you might break it up into smaller meetings of no more than 15. And be clear on the agenda—or it will devolve. “What’s the best thing you were able to accomplish this past month?” Or “What’s the biggest challenge you are facing this coming month?” Or “What’s the most important thing you learned this past month?”

How does one communicate effectively in a multi-cultural environment?

IME very carefully. Be wary of making jokes—half or more won’t understand them. Be wary of making cultural analogies or metaphors. Have respect for every individual foremost in your mind. Invite lots of questions and opinions—even in cultures where people are taught not to question the instructor, maybe especially there. Avoid presenting your opinions as if they were facts. Own your VABEs. For example, “Y may I ask how old you are? I’m 73. Aha. In your experience thus far in life, given all the people you’ve met so far, how much of their Visible Behavior, what you can capture on film, in your estimation is habitual? By habitual, I mean mindlessly repetitive.” Y answers—usually about 75%. The age question personalizes the discussion and brings it down to ground. I reveal my age first. The second question is applicable to anyone. “X, may I ask how old are you? Thank you. In your N years in life, given all the people you’ve met so far, what proportion of the way they think would you estimate to be habitual—that is, mindlessly repetitive?” Most will say 85ish%. “Z, may I ask how old you are? Thank you. In your N years in life given all the people you’ve met, what proportion of their VABEs would you estimate to be habitual?” I explain VABEs. They usually say 95%+. “Now the rest of you, do these estimates match your experience in life? “ I usually do that one after each of the Level One (visible behavior), Level Two (conscious thought), and Level Three (VABEs) questions.

For the vast majority of people, these are totally new questions that they’ve never thought about before. The numbers highlight the difficulty of making changes in individuals, teams, and companies. “Given your estimates, what are the odds that anything I’m going to say today or this week will change what you do, how you think or what you believe?” Very very low. “So, why would I even come here? Because I’m hoping there are 5%, 15% or 25% of the people in the room who are and will be open to rethinking what they do, how they think, and what they believe.”

Although this example is taken out of context of a week-long leadership development seminar, IME it works extremely well in engaging participants in the first hour and works with those from Asia, Australia, South America, Central America, North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Working at Level Three, carefully and respectfully, is a powerful, universal set of concepts that bridge multi-cultural environments.

See my website at Level Three Leadership

What is the value of and goal of a problem statement?

 First, what is a problem? Especially “the” problem? Most people in my experience have a vague, fuzzy sense of what a problem is—and that confusion leads to confused attempts to solve. I assert a problem is a want-got gap for someone. (WGG) Someone wants something they are not getting. For that person, the gap is a problem. The same issue for someone else may not be a problem.

So the question becomes, “what do you want?” Power? Wealth? Fame? Salvation? A more efficient manufacturing process? A cleaner environment? A better relationship? Be careful here—are you sure that is what you want? Vagueness here contributes to confusion—be specific.

Once “you” know exactly what you want, the next question is “why are you getting what you’ve got?” If others are involved, do their “wants” line up with yours? Why or why not? Most analyses focus here. We analyze competitors, processes, our human capital, social capital, organizational capital trying to find the underlying reasons why our results (gots) are what they are.

Without clarity on WHO sees the gap between what they WANT and what they’ve GOT, efforts to solve the thing will be confused and inefficient and often unsuccessful.

So the goals of problem statements should IMO be to clarify the WHO, the WANTS and the GOTs and then to mobilize collective efforts to reduce the gaps. If the WANTS of for instance management and employees aren’t aligned, there will be a constant tension/struggle/pressure between the two. That’s one reason why I emphasize Level Three Leadership

BTW, when meeting agendas are built around questions, not topics, they tend to be more effective because participants are focused on the answers, not broad ranging often repetitive discussions. A good problem analysis can suggest the right questions to ask on the agenda.