HOW TO - BRING FOCUS TO YOUR TRAINING EFFORTS To make the best use of your time when training any level of employee, you need to know what you want to accomplish. Too often people are sent to training to get ‘fixed’ which is NOT what development and education are about.

If you want to gain clarity about training outcomes, ask the following quetrions:

• What are your people doing that they shouldn't be doing?

• What aren't your people doing that they should be doing?

• What would you like to see your people doing that they aren't doing now?

• Describe what you see your staff doing when you view the organization/department the day/month/ after the program has been conducted. What do you see?

Once you know where you are headed, you have a much better chance of actually getting there. After you’ve looked at what you hope to achieve through training, take a good look at the people you are sending to training. Do they have the ‘right stuff’ fro training to succeed?

Do they have FOCUS?

Where are you headed? As a team at work or as a team made up of clients and consultants, without a clear goal, the journey becomes an aimless amble rather than a trip with a destination.

Do they have FLEXIBILITY?

Is there an ability to adapt and continue ahead? Expecting not to alter or shift indicates that people think they can operate either alone, or with people who think, believe and behave exactly as they do.

Is there DESIRE?

Do you want it? The drive to act, try, and move indicates a readiness to create progress.

Labels: consultants, focus, Training

  7:59 AM •  0 Comments •

How to - Deal With Difficult Situations Many people will tell you that there is no conflict in their organization – and what they often mean is that when there IS conflict, it is avoided. Therefore the disagreement simply goes underground and remains unarticulated and unresolved.

When resolving conflict, the following guidelines are part of a valuable philosophy to have:

1. Preserve Dignity and Self-Respect

That goes for all of the people involved in the conflict. In a heated discussion, it is easy to say something demeaning. Keep your focus on the issues you are talking about, not personalities. Unless proven otherwise, assume that the people are expressing legitimate concerns when they disagree. Even if they appear stupid or stubborn to you, you won't get any closer to resolving the dispute by putting them down.

2. Listen With Empathy

Try to put yourself in their shoes. See things from their perspective. If their ideas conflict with what you already believe, see if you are discounting their message. Are you communicating hostility in your tone or body language? To fully get the information basic to managing differences, you need to listen with a neutrality that suspends critical judgment. When you listen fully to understand, you send the message that you respect them, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

3. Don't Expect To Change Others' Behavior

When the stakes are high, the reflex reaction to disagreement is the desire to change the other person's basic behavioral style. Changing your own behavior is tough enough. Changing the behavioral traits of someone else is almost impossible. Instead, focus on what you say and do when you are with a "difficult" person. Behaviors automatically transform when either person changes their customary pattern of relating to the other.

4. Express Your Independent Perspective

When you are the lone dissenter, it is tempting to surrender your conviction to conform to more popular views. At other times, it is possible to get so enmeshed in the dispute that you loose the war in order to win the battle. What you provide others is your individual point of view - which means that you have to reflect about what really matters to you.

Labels: Communication, difficult, expressions

  8:11 AM •  0 Comments •

How to – Pinpoint Your Training Needs When planning for developmental and skill training programs, there are some critical steps necessary for making sure that training is a solid developmental resource. They include:

Identifying competency or success-factor information

These are the knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, and characteristics that represent the fundamental skill or behavioral components of a job. In short, they are the things people must know and be able to do in order to perform a set of job requirements. Even if you think you know all there is to know, start with a blank piece of paper, and create a thorough inventory of everything it takes to do the job well.

Build profiles

If one objective of the developmental effort is to establish specific job requirement information, it makes sense to construct job profiles using the previously created success factors. Making useful job profiles start with the establishment of two important criteria:

• the critically (importance) of each success factor
• the proficiency level (degree of mastery required) for each factor.
Remember that you are creating a profile of the job, not the person doing the job. People often go to their strengths, and positions take on the focus of the person who does them, rather than what the position may require.

Assess employees

You can develop reasonably accurate pictures of employee strengths and weaknesses by building on the competency and success-factor models. A good rule of thumb is to gather information from the employee, the employees' immediate supervisor, and two of the employee's peers (have the employee choose one and the supervisor choose one.)

Identify gaps

After you create an employee profile, you can compare it to the previously established job profile in order to identify the most logical and critical gaps in development. Compare the required levels of competency to the actual levels. The difference between the two is the gap. Once you've made this kind of comparison, you could create a summary of all employees relative to their job requirements. That then can be used to identify group developmental needs, to target and focus training needs and dollars, to select employees for promotions an to determine the distance the group needs to move in order to be brought up to acceptable levels of performance.

Identify options

Development options can be linked to three basic sets of activities:
1. Formal, in-house programs, designed to provide training and developmental options;
2. External programs; workshops, seminars and formal classes that address identified competencies
3. Internal, on-the-job experiences that are identified as sources of growth and development

Follow Through

This sounds so simple, but many organizations fail to follow through. The message sent to employees is that the process stops with the training assessment. Some type of mechanism should be put in place to commend and reinforce desired behavior. People need to see and hear tangible rewards for their efforts, even if it simply interest in their development on the part of their manager. People tend to do what gets noticed.

Whatever method you use to determine your training needs for the coming year, keep your objectives in mind - What would you like to see happen as a result of your assessment? What would you like to see someone do more of? What would you like them to do less of?

Once you answer that question, then ask - What are you willing to do to ensure the results you want? How much time, money and human energy are you, and your organization willing to invest in developing your talent?

Labels: profiles, success, Training

  1:04 PM •  0 Comments •