When a recent storm left me without electricity for almost a full day, I was amazed at how quiet the house was without all the usual sounds that accompany modern, electrified life. The quiet also was an opportunity; it made it so much easier for me to focus during a face-to-face conversation. This incident reminded me how distractions and poorly executed communication skills can take away from effective workplace interactions. I know from my own experiences as an instructional designer that being practiced in the art of listening is crucial for working with subject matter experts as well as when consulting with business leaders. The ability to truly listen and understand the message by employing active listening techniques makes for good working relationships and often keeps mistakes, misunderstandings, or missteps on a project to a minimum. According to the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (IBSTPI), listening skills are recognized as critical for learning and development professionals. In IBSTPI’s 2012 report Instructional Design Competencies, active listening was identified one of the top essential communication competencies for instructional design. The report reinforces what experience and research has taught me—good listening equals good instructional design in a number of ways, including: It helps to give a better understanding of assignments. Active listening requires you restate and clarify what you have just heard. This provides the opportunity for clearing up any possible understanding right at the source and leaves less open to interpretation. It shows care and attention. When you really pay attention and listen, it lets clients know you are focusing on their needs, including the content and context of the message. It encourages open-ended questions. Another tenet of active listening is asking well-timed questions that help to define and refine processes. Yes or no answers can’t yield this crucial information. In her blogpost, Instructional Design Lessons from the World of Theatre, Andrea May sums it up like this, "Employing active listening…is one of the best ways to ensure that your design takes into account the needs, attitudes, and special challenges of each client." Ultimately, we should always strive to give our clients exactly what they need by listening more effectively. So, what do listening skills have to with good instructional design? It seems, quite a lot. More Resources Podcast, The Big 6: An Active Listening Skill Set, Center for Creative Leadership Management: Self-Assessment, Communication and Negotiation, Active Listening Skills, McGraw Hill

Organizations struggle to find sustainable competitive product advantages. The pace of change in today’s business environment has resulted in significantly shorter product cycles. In her new book The End of Competitive Advantage, Ruth Gunther McGrath says that strategies built upon differentiators are becoming irrelevant. Her view is that organizations must forge new paths to winning: capture opportunities fast, exploit them decisively, and move on even before they are exhausted. CEOs who recognize the shortcomings in trying to leverage product advantages are likely to turn to new strategies to achieve business plans. Potential problems can arise when senior executives create sound strategies that assume employees have the requisite competencies to execute them. Skill and knowledge gaps can undermine what are otherwise brilliant strategies. For example, recent earnings calls are loaded with references to creating more streamlined corporate systems that free up employees to become even more productive without adding anymore head count. Companies that out-learn their competitors can out-earn them. Consider the challenges so many companies have faced in trying to move from products to services. Progressive companies are starting to realize corporate learning that provides the knowledge and skills to provide employees with the abilities needed to execute tasks should be an integral part of their business plans. These companies will: Be proactive in uncovering learning issues within LOBs and addressing them. Align training to enable execution of business plans. Tie business outcomes to learning initiatives. Break down silos that cause internal friction. The advantages of taking a proactive approach to learning initiatives include: Defining business outcomes first and then designing initiatives to achieve them. Scheduling rollout dates based upon the scope of effort vs. ASAP rollouts. Being able to vie for funding for learning initiatives based upon projected ROI. Establishing the value contribution to lines of business leaders in the organization. Prioritizing initiatives based upon the potential value or impact to the business strategy. In traditional organizations, the learning function is largely reactive. It’s operationally efficient and the goal is to keep costs down. In these rearview-looking companies, learning leaders are called in to put out fires. Budgets for training/learning are created without regard for the magnitude of changes in roles, responsibilities, skills, and knowledge that will be required to execute business plans. Learning is viewed as a noun rather than a verb and a cost rather than an investment. A proactive approach would leverage learning to ensure that employees being asked to change have the skill and knowledge to effect behavioral changes that will be required to perform their jobs in a different manner. This amounts to lighting fires rather than fighting fires. A proactive assessment of the business strategy would enable companies to: Proactively assess the scope and magnitude of training needed for the business plan. Assess the skill sets and knowledge of employees that must change behavior. Create initiatives that fill skill/knowledge/behavioral gaps. Measure results to find return on learning investment (ROLI). For example, the trend toward shorter product cycles is a reality and gaining momentum. Work has changed significantly in the last 100 years as we moved from an industrial to an information economy. Business models continually change to adapt to shifting markets and customers. In the same way our schools are challenged to graduate students with the requisite skills for our new economy, so it is that learning organizations must find ways to provide skills sets and knowledge, and develop ways to evolve workers to be productive as their roles change or as requirements for new roles emerge. When learning leaders feel boxed in, or underperform, there are two potential underlying reasons: Won’t is an attitude problem. Someone is unwilling to try and it is someone else’s responsibility to explain why the task must be done and provide motivation (a carrot or a stick) to do it. Can’t is a skill set issue. If CEOs are asking people in their organization to do things they are unable to do, they shouldn’t be surprised when results don’t meet expectations. Nearly all new initiatives ask some or all employees to do things they’ve not done before. Sounds like a gaping chasm that proactive learning leaders can step into - no? Preparation facilitates successful execution. Companies that out execute competitors will likely win—with the help of their proactive and adaptive learning function.

American workers still fret about losing their jobs. The painful and recent memory of mass layoffs still lingers in our collective consciousness, and unemployment rates (while on a steady decline) remain historically high at 7.5% (April 2013 - see http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000). In a healthy economy—pre-2007 say—the balance of power in the employer-employee relationship was mostly in favor of the employee. Contrary to popular belief, people are much more likely to end their relationship with their employer voluntarily than by being terminated. In 2006 the "Quits" rate, or people voluntarily leaving their jobs (see BLS Data Series JTS00000000QUR), was almost double the "Layoffs" rate (BLS series JTS00000000LDR). But during the recession, the relationship flipped: Suddenly we experienced a rate of layoffs roughly twice that of quits as new career opportunities became scarce and employees were much less willing to take the risk of leaving a secure job, as the following graph indicates. Data courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://data.bls.gov). Shaded area denotes the US recession as determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The state of affairs in the US labor market has not yet returned to pre-recession levels, but it is trending back in that direction: Since mid-2010 Quits outpace Layoffs, and in many industries where expertise is in high demand, we are seeing a return to aggressive retention efforts. In a 2013 study by BlessingWhite, a division of GP Strategies, focusing on employee engagement, it was determined that 45% of employees in North America reported considering a move from their current employer in the next 12 months. There is a strong correlation between this stated intent and actual turnover—and even if the employee does not leave, this does indicate a lower level of commitmement to their current employer. As the concerns about loss of talent grow in your industry, look to the value of training and development as a retention tool. When asked why they were considering leaving, the top response was, "I don’t have opportunities to grow or advance here." This holds true even for those employees who otherwise report being satisfied with their current job and contribute at a high level. "Development opportunities and training" is one of the top drivers of contribution—along with clarity and regular feedback. This makes sense: If you want an employee to contribute strongly to the success of your organization, you need to provide them with the resources and the knowledge and skills to get the job done. But what might be more surprising is that, across the board, "career development opportunities and training" is one of the top drivers of personal satisfaction at work. So if you want to drive higher levels of contribution, help employees find satisfaction at work and improve your retention scores—look to developing your people. This will demonstrate a commitment to their future and to the future of the enterprise. For more information on BlessingWhite’s ongoing research series on Employee Engagement, please visit http://www.blessingwhite.com/EE2013. Fraser Marlow can be reached at fmarlow@gpstrategies.com or on Twitter at @frasermarlow.

As the baby boomers prepare for their much-anticipated exodus from the workplace and Generation Xers become the establishment, all eyes are on Generation Y, aka the millennials. Our recent workship during the CLO Summer School session "Millennials Are Different. Sort Of. So What?" explored the much talked about generation gap, what millennials want from work and the strategies for ensuring a mutually satisfactory employer-employee relationship with them. Using the 2013 Employee Engagement Report, Billy Biggs (a Gen-Y colleague), and I (a baby boomer), debunked common misconceptions and provided unique perspectives on what you really need to know to manage, retain and develop the newest generation to enter the workforce: • The top engagement and retention drivers of millennials. • Tactics for effectively leading this group. • Implications for learning and development. • Mistakes to avoid in addressing generational issues. The bottom line? The generations are more alike than different and Gen Y employees are more different than alike. Every individual comes to work with unique values, talents, and aspirations. While summer school may be over, learning doesn’t stop! If you haven’t yet, be sure to listen to a recording of the Webinar. So how does your organization keep Millennials engaged? I would love to keep the conversation going!

I went snorkeling for the first time in Malaysia, off one of the southern islands, Sibu. I’m not a strong swimmer, so the thought of going out of my depth made me nervous, but the addition of a lifejacket dispelled this fear. The risk of sinking diminished; I was able to duck my head under the water for the first time and discovered a whole new world: a world of colour, movement and beauty, hidden from sight by the surface of the sea. After ten seconds, both Cath and I stuck our heads up above the water, both wide eyed, tripping over ourselves to express our amazement at what we’d seen. I’ve lived my life by the sea: from early days building sandcastles and digging ditches, I’ve graduated to kayaking and sailing relentlessly, but all the time on the surface (if you ignore the ignominious dips into the soup after ill advised turns). It was only this trip, with lifejacket, mask and snorkel that the window on a whole new world opened up for me. Perspective is a funny thing: we think we know something, then our eyes are opened and we realise we were missing a huge part of the picture. This initial disturbance is a key part of learning (as are the performance support and exploration tools that enable us to change our perspective). We have to disturb our current view before we can take on a new one. Sometimes this disturbance is planned, sometimes accidental, indeed, unraveling ‘how we come to learn‘ was one of the themes I explored at the conference. Sometimes planned, sometimes needs driven, sometimes through curiosity, sometimes by accident, it takes disturbance to start the process, disturbance either externally (planned and need) or internal (curiosity). I’d never have discovered this new underwater world without the support, literally, of a life jacket. I would never have had the confidence to jump, but it’s only by jumping that we learn. Maybe sometimes we should focus less on the end results of learning, more on supporting the process. Helping people to jump in safety, creating the right type of disturbance, and celebrating when we find the riches that lie beyond. That’s got to be a great approach to take. Originally published on Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog

In today’s "Do more with less" economy, senior executives are taking a step back and looking at many of their programs and asking their teams, "What’s the business impact?" From sales kickoff activities to enablement programs and new hire training programs, they’re looking for justification on why they should fund such programs. A consistent program under the microscope by sales leaders is the new hire sales training program. Here’s what’s going on. Sales leaders are looking to their training and HR colleagues to help improve new hire sales training execution. A major catalyst for this push is the need for more globally consistent programs that: Get new hires up to speed more quickly Drive costs out of fragmented global execution Create a more consistent output of skilled new hires Provide a higher quality mechanism that helps reps overcome complexity Last month I had a conversation with a sales enablement leader in a large financial services company. She was asked to rebuild and relaunch their global new hire training program. She had done a lot of work to identify the work already going on across the globe and determined what appeared to be working or not working. But she admitted they were stuck on how to move forward. The challenge as she defined it? "Getting everyone on the same page so they could all move forward." I see this a lot these days. A clear challenge exists, but unified action doesn’t. Creating unified action across a variety of different groups and moving forward together is a challenge I see a lot. When you look at new hire sales training, there are a lot of people with a vested interest. For example, product groups want to make sure product knowledge is covered, marketing wants to make sure the brand is covered, HR wants to make sure engagement happens, sales operations wants to make sure compliance happens, sales management wants processes followed and sales enablement wants to make sure reps have the right skills. That’s a lot of perspective coming into one program. This is a new reality that many sales enablement professionals have to learn to deal with. In the case of this most recent conversation about new hire training, the concept of improving new hire sales training wasn’t foreign to any leaders in those groups. What was foreign, however, was the idea of coming up with specific actions to take, priorities to tackle and content to create. These tactical elements were hard to wrangle in. So, we took a step back and took some time to think things through. To help, she sent me the 50+ files that composed the global "view" of new hire sales training and I reviewed it. She also shared more details about where she was "stuck" on their new sales training decision-making process. When we reconvened, I shared what I was able to synthesize from her situation. And then I asked a simple question: "So, at what point will new hires be learning about their customers?" "Ummmmmm," she said. I continued. "Sorry, I just couldn’t find much detail about the customer as I was working through all the information about who your company is, when it was founded, what products you have, what your vision is for the way products need to be used, the innovations you’re looking to bring to the market, the processes that reps need to follow and the technology they’re supposed to use." "Yeah," she said. "It’s a lot about us, isn’t it?" "Yes," I said. "Perhaps we should start there?" To me, there is a key lesson to be learned in how to balance more with less when it comes to enabling reps to sell more successfully. What salespeople need MORE of are services from internal groups that are designed to help them embrace their reality and help them have more valuable conversations with clients. What they need LESS of is random activity designed to "help them sell" that actually puts more burden on their backs and requires them to figure out what to do on their own. In other words, if your new hire training program is all about your company and its products, how exactly is that program helping reps have conversations with senior level buyers in the first two weeks on the job? So, if you’re looking to revamp new hire training, remember it’s not about more product, process or program training with the goal of cramming information into the heads of salespeople. It’s about enabling new hire reps to have the right sales conversations with their buyers on day two of their job. Here are some tips to get in front of the sales new hire training challenge: Define the interlock between employee onboarding and new hire training. While HR typically handles onboarding, what’s the focus and business reason for investing in new hire training? Clarify that design point and get sales leadership buy-in on what the program is designed to accomplish. Determine if new hire training is tactical or strategic. If sales leaders are asking you to revamp sales training, why are they asking? For example, do they want to talk about all the tasks involved, or do they want to talk about the role of new hire training in achieving the sales strategy? Move new hire training from an event to an experience. Too many sales new hire training programs are built as siloed activities instead of an end-to-end enablement service designed to help reps get critical traction in the first 90-120 days on the job. If everyone in marketing, sales, training and management takes that approach, the design point and objective of the program become fragmented, and the program becomes more about your company than the client’s reality.

August marks the countdown before a new school year, even if it’s been years since your K12 or college days. Now’s a great time to reflect on what has or has not been accomplished during the summer. While summer’s not the lazy vacation it might have been in years gone by, the longer hours and agreeable weather bring about a change of pace and offer a chance to achieve something that you simply didn’t feel you had time for earlier in the year. The possibilities during summer months are endless—and there are many online references to consult. Both formal and informal activities count: Reading a great book Learning a new skill or working towards a fitness goal Travelling to a favorite or new place Organizing some aspect of your life Summer experiences may enrich us and set us on a different course for the rest of the year. For some, making a monetary investment or voicing a commitment to others by signing up for a workshop or online course is sufficient incentive to complete it. With so many social media avenues available to us, we can post our intentions publicly or selectively, and then follow up with updates on our progress and hurdles. Let your friends know what you’re up to and you might just get company or at least a cheering section. For others, the personal sense of accomplishment is what drives them to achieve a goal: A gardening class can help you to beautify that neglected patch of backyard A CPR refresher course could bring you peace of mind at the pool or beach If you enjoy your community’s history, find out if the local museum has a docent or volunteer program you can participate in. Have a fitness goal? Check out local parks to see what seasonal activities could help you stay on track. For example, trails challenge programs offer incentives (for example, a patch or T-shirt) for hiking "x" number of miles of park trails. If you’ve got a family or friends group of varying ages to consider, something you may all enjoy is a treasure-hunting activity with GPS devices known as geocaching it makes any hike an adventure. What, you say you haven’t started anything yet? Don’t fret now that we’re in the final weeks of summer. If you’re a procrastinator, this may be the push you need to start OR wrap up that program!

Plenty of companies in the SharePoint universe have produced amazing extensions to the platform. A common question that I am asked is "Is this SharePoint add-in any good?" This is always a loaded question for me to answer. After all, I believe that any add-in has the potential for being a good add-in. For me, the question is actually "Is this add-in a good fit for my organization?" In this month’s CLO Magazine, I published an article around this very question and offer insights into doing an initial evaluation of SharePoint add-ins. Click here to read the full article, otherwise enjoy a snapshot look at the insights below. So, back to the question "Is this add-on a good fit for my organization?" To help formulate an answer, hold the add-in up to the following five initial questions. Sort of like the sniff test. How does SharePoint fit in with the strategic objectives for the organization? How does the add-in, being considered, assist with fulfilling the strategic objectives? What features or services does the add-in have that the organization does not need or will not use? Does the add-in scale well within the SharePoint platform? When deployed, how easy or hard will it be for the user base to use it?                 In the end, the myriad of add-ins available for SharePoint are spectacular with each having the potential of propelling an organization toward their goals. But the value of the add-in is limited to the value an organization gains from using it. In order to determine whether an add-in is good for your organization, hold it up to the five aforementioned questions and see how it measures up.

If you have children, you’ve probably witnessed the power of a good story. Picture a story hour at the local library—children gathered around, quiet, focused, and interested, even if only for a few moments. Whether gathering for coffee or at the water cooler, it seems human nature to be interested in stories. Think of a time when you had to sit through a presentation; didn’t a good story make it more memorable? In workplace training, don’t you wish you could get that same level of rapt attention from your learners, where they absorb, apply, or even share what they have learned? You can if you make a place to weave stories into the training design. Storytelling can: Relate the training to real workplace challenges: When we uncover a real and useful story from a subject matter expert, it gives real depth to the training. It connects the learners to the specific message or skill, rather than generalities. Encourage learners to share their own stories: Real stories serve as a prompt for an open, honest discussion for sharing best practices, challenges, and opportunities. Reinforce application and practice: Stories give learners a way to visualize how they can apply the learning to their own situations. They show specific examples of when and how to apply knowledge. Stories compel people to learn and retain: They breathe life into flat data and objectives, and link valuable meaning to numbers and facts. Storytelling in instructional design can be a powerful, motivating tool. In the Training Designer’s Guide to Saving the World, training consultant Cathy Moore calls designing experiences as one of the six essential steps to make training more powerful and relevant for learners. She writes, "People have to take action. Your goal now is to help them practice that action. To do that, you’re going to design experiences, not information." Adding useful workplace stories to training not only grabs our attention, but also makes us listen closely, helps us remember, and inspires us to apply what we’ve learned. More resources http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning2-0/why-you-need-to-use-storytelling-for-learning/ http://www.ginaabudi.com/use-storytelling-in-learning-programs/ http://www.vision2lead.com/Storytelling.pdf

I had a great meeting in London yesterday: We talked about the changing nature of work in the Social Age, about the evolution of leadership about the challenges of change. As we rode the lift back down to the lobby, a colleague talked about her 16-year-old daughter who had recently joined her on a work experience day. She recounted how the first thing her daughter had done was to take a photo in the lobby, surrounded by the glass, steel and suits of formal work, tag herself and then share that image across her social networks. Funny thing was, I’d done exactly the same thing myself two hours earlier: snapping the abstract chrome sculpture that sits by reception, tagging myself at Global HQ, taking photos of the view from the top floor and sharing it on Facebook. I’d also tagged myself in London and shared that information, asked a few people if they were free for coffee and joined a US colleague who was in town for work for a cup. We inhabit multiple communities, formal and informal. Our working lives cross them all, and we narrate the results in real time. We live social lives: As the divide between the formal world of work and the informal social spaces that surround it collapse, as technology becomes increasingly social and we narrate our lives in pseudo real time across multiple communities, so the very nature of work changes. I’ve charted some of these changes already: how the real power today lies in creating meaning (not in just knowing stuff), how we turn to our communities for support and challenge and how informal technology facilitates different types of conversations and the support of personal learning networks that follow us from job to job (and why organisations have to allow for this and not strangle it with restrictive policies). And we’ve explored the changing nature of authority in the Social Age and how Social Leaders need to demonstrate humility and agility, not just positional authority. The behaviour of Tweeting your picture in the lobby is not the aberration; it’s the norm. Inhabitants of the Social Age work out loud; they share their narratives and create meaning in the moment, turning to different communities at multiple times throughout the day for different purposes. The ability to form, develop and maintain those communities is a key skill for social leaders and social workers. Organisations also need to engage in the story. One organisation I worked with went to great efforts to cleanse its presence from Facebook, believing that there was no place for employees to form communities there under their name. They were, of course, entirely wrong. Whilst on the one hand organisations wring their hands and ask how to generate engagement, on the other they do whatever they can to stamp it out, restricting access to technology, controlling conversations and moderating debate. The Social Age is not about stopping conversations; it’s about taking part in them. That organisation has now reversed its position and supports thriving Facebook spaces. They don’t use them to talk about restricted work subjects, but they do use them to build and strengthen the sense of community, the pride of collaboration and achievement, and sure, now and then, to moan about something. But, why not? Nobody lives in a glass tower… The glass tower of the office used to define what we did and where we did it, but today work happens wherever we engage with it, wherever we have power and a signal. We live social lives and work in social ways. And it makes us more agile, more able to respond, to adapt and to be creative and innovative. Programme design needs to reflect this new reality, providing spaces for the personal narration of learning and development, the co-creation of meaning in community spaces and a place to narrate the organisational story. Social behaviours for social lives. Originally published on Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog.