NYNP blog post 7-1-10

Tips for Building Your Influencing Skills

Last night’s ASTDNY Training Director’s Special Interest Group was on the topic “Effective Communication and Influencing Skills for Learning Professionals” and featured executive coach Ginny O’Brien, author of Coaching Yourself to Leadership and founder of The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership-development coaching firm.

Be mindful about yourself, others, and your business
O’Brien opened by talking about the three components of her trademarked integrated leadership model, which are the same three components needed for effective influencing:
1) Lead authentically, from your heart.  This requires a deep understanding of your own personality and values.
2) Build respectful relationships with others.  This requires developing your emotional intelligence so that you can establish trust and build rapport with others.
3) Communicate a vision.  This requires being able to think strategically about where your business is now and where you want to go, and then being able to articulate how to close the gap between the two.

More info about this model is available at www.columbiaconsult.com.  

Communicate assertively
O’Brien focused on the following tips for assertive communication:
* Project confidence with your body language - show that you believe in your own idea
* Be clear - avoid rambling by writing down your message before talking about it
* Know where your audience is coming from and adapt to it
* Ask powerful questions to gain understanding
* Maintain your emotional boundaries, so that you don’t get deflated or lose hope
* Use deep breathing to control your physical reactions to your emotions
* Listen deeply - the more you listen, the more you can adapt your message in such a way that it will actually influence people
* Practice visualizing a time when you were at your most powerful and influential - see it and remember what it felt like when you were at your best, and then practice calling up this image and how you felt, so that you can tap into this feeling quickly at any moment.  You can use this both to prepare for important conversations and to regain control of yourself immediately if you hit an emotional trigger that makes you lose momentum.

Talk in such a way that others can hear you
O’Brien shared that effectively connecting with and influencing others requires consciously adapting your style to match others’ styles, and she referenced the DISC personality profile as a tool for doing this.  The DISC model groups behavioral characteristics into four general styles, which everyone displays to varying degrees:
1) Driven people tend to care about directness, clarity, concision, logic, data, and the win.  They hate wasting time.
2) Influencers tend to care about harmony and relationships, and so they seek out the win/win.  They tend to care more about engaging with people than about data.
3) Steady, amiable people tend to like logical methodologies and need time to process information.  They hate to rush.
4) Compliance-focused, analytical people tend to care about detailed and organized data, and they tend to stick to the facts over personal relationships.  They don’t want to be pushed into decisions, and they don’t want long conversations.

Her tip for figuring out which style is a person’s dominant one - which will guide you in matching your style to theirs - is to first look at a person’s energy in groups.  Drivers and Influencers are extroverts, so their energy will be high in groups, whereas Steady and Compliance-focused people are introverts and will exhibit low energy in groups.  From there, look at a person’s work style.  Task-focused people will be Drivers or Compliance-focused, and harmony-focused people will be Influencers or Steady people.  

A new meeting feature
SIG Chair Sanford Gold introduced a useful new meeting feature called Community Time, which sets aside time for the group to share challenges, solutions, and resources.

ASTDNY President Lance Tukell and President-Elect Jim O’Hern closed the meeting by encouraging participation at the chapter’s upcoming summer events, which can be found on www.astdny.org.

NYNP blog post 3-23-10

Five steps to transform a judging mindset into a learning one
Action Learning Conversations open up new thinking

Tonight's ASTDNY chapter event featured Dr. Victoria Marsick, Co-Director of the J.M. Huber Institute for Learning in Organizations, a principal of Partners for the Learning Organization, and Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dr. Marsick introduced the concept of Action Learning Conversations (ALCs) as a tool for peer mentoring and coaching. ALCs are 45-minute group conversations using the ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional) Framework, which moves conversations from focusing on the objective facts of the situation, to reflecting on feelings and reactions, to interpreting what the feelings and reactions mean, and finally to deciding on what actions to take.

ALCs provide a structure for getting help from peers and seeing situations in a new light. Rather than discussing or debating a challenge, which can activate defensiveness and entrench people in old ways of thinking, ALCs require listening, questioning, and thinking together, which can transform people's perspective. ALCs create an environment of win-win, where people can learn in a safe space, rather than win-lose, where people end up judging each other and closing off their thinking.

The five steps
1) Share a challenge framed as a question. The person with the challenge shares, then the group asks clarifying objective questions to learn more about the context of the situation. Then the person with the challenge may indicate the specific help needed.

2) Question-storm. Everyone silently writes down one or two reflective or interpretive questions, then the group shares the questions in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.

3) Share assumptions. Everyone writes down their assumptions about the situation, and then the group talks about the assumptions as if the person with the challenge were a fly on the wall. The person with the challenge silently listens and writes, and is invited to join the conversation only after everyone else in the group has had a chance to share their thoughts.

4) Reframe the challenge. Everyone writes down how they would re-frame the original question, and then the group shares these in a round robin while the person with the challenge silently listens and writes. After this, the person with the challenge may share a few insights learned so far, while the group listens without asking any questions.

5) Identify action steps. The person with the challenge identifies next steps.

Tips for successful ALCs
Dr. Marsick advised that diversity of thinking is helpful for ALCs, so if members in a group all know each other well, it's useful to get a couple less familiar people to join in. Also, if one group member is known to be a strong personality, it can be helpful to get a facilitator, to prevent that person from taking over the ALC. Facilitators are also good for groups who have trouble following specific processes, especially because it can be difficult for people to ask real questions rather than asking fake questions that are really problem-solving advice in disguise. When the fake questions start flying, facilitators can step in and model what it looks like to genuinely inquire about facts, feelings, or thoughts.

The proof in the pudding
We had a chance to practice a mini-ALC during the chapter event tonight, and my group was really helpful with the challenge I shared. In the end, the ALC process succeeded in uncovering some of my hidden assumptions, in helping me reflect on other perspectives, and in reframing the challenge into one with a more optimistic outlook.

Recommended reading
* Understanding Action Learning by Victoria Marsick and Judy O'Neil
* Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee G. Adams
* Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change by Chris Argyris
* "The Political Brain," by Michael Shermer in the July 2006 Scientific American, reporting on research by Emory University psychologist Drew Weston

NYNP blog post 2-8-10

Three tips for up-and-coming learning leaders
Advice from senior leaders

Tonight's ASTDNY Training Director's Special Interest Group featured a panel of senior learning leaders discussing "Managing your Career: Skills and Competencies associated with the CLO Role.' The panel was assembled by Dr. Lyle Yorks, and the panelists were:
* Dr. Lyle Yorks, Associate Professor of Adult and Organizational Learning, Columbia University's Teachers College
* Sherwin Chen, Vice President of Learning, Prudential
* Bettina Kelly, Senior Vice President, Talent Strategies Group, Chubb & Son
* Jeff Wetzler, Senior VP, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer, Teach for America
* Deborah Wheelock, Leader of Global Talent Management, Mercer

The panel offered advice for training professionals about getting ready for top leadership roles in learning and talent management.

Be an asset - build personal credibility
Dr. Yorks kicked off the panel by sharing some of his research on the traits of successful Chief Learning Officers. His advice: "Be an asset. Be able to present your work as a key enabler to meeting business strategy."

The panelists echoed this concept of the importance of personal credibility, focusing on the importance of being able to deliver results both as an individual contributor on a high profile project and by assembling a great team of people and putting processes in place that enable the team to pull off great things. The keys are to demonstrate what you can do, project emotional strength and resilience, and always have an opinion but be willing to change it based on data.

Develop political savviness
Two quotables on the topic of political savviness were Chen's "It's all about people's perception of you and how you can influence people who don't report to you" and Wheelock's "Be savvy to the point that when you have a meeting, you already know the meeting's outcome because you've done your pre-work of talking to people."

The panelists advised developing deep relationships with people at all levels of your organization, building allies and coalitions within your organization, networking with people outside the organization to learn about their strategies, and understanding the company's climate. Learning leaders need to be able to lead laterally, including motivating and inspiring people around you.

Develop business acumen and a deep understanding of your business
All of the panelists stressed the importance of sharp business skills. Wetzler advised, "Deeply know the business, the industry, and the company's priorities and strategy. Think about the big picture and be a learning strategist." Kelly advised "Be agile, and know your organization's current appetites and where the opportunities lie."

When discussing business acumen, the panelists talked about the need to manage change, convey the learning function's return on investment in business language that appeals to senior management, connect the dots about how your function contributes to the company's strategy, forecast what the workforce will need to be able to do in the future and build the company's competence to do it, and be able to quickly assess a situation and communicate what you see.

Readings recommended by the panelists
* HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business, by David Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Dani Johnson, Kurt Sandholtz, and Jon Younger
* Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, by Patricia Shaw

NYNP blog post 11-18-09

Debunking the Myth of Training ROI
Notes from Michael Molinaro's provocative ASTDNY presentation

At last night's ASTDNY meeting, Michael Molinaro, Corporate Vice President and Head of Leadership Development at New York Life Insurance Company, gave a presentation titled "One Last Time: What's the Deal with ROI?" In his presentation, he took on the much-hyped training industry focus on calculating return on investment (ROI). ROI is basically the amount of money earned by spending money.

Focusing on the trend of measuring ROI for soft skills training like executive coaching and leadership training, Molinaro gave three succinct reasons not to measure ROI:
1) You can't
2) You don't need to
3) You oughtn't want to

You can't measure ROI
Molinaro pointed out that current formulas for measuring ROI are basically guesses. The models all factor in a percentage weighting for how confident the person doing the calculations is in the validity of the rest of the formula, which essentially invalidates the entire calculation because it's never close to 100%. After all, what CEO would bother with an accounting figure that the accountant believes is only 65% accurate?

You don't need to measure ROI
Molinaro stated that there is no point in going to ridiculous lengths to come up with a mythical ROI number when there is a wealth of research that backs up the value of developing employees. If the point of ROI is to justify the need to spend budget money on training, then the existing data already meets that need. He suggested that a better use of time and resources is to focus on linking training to organizational strategies and goals.

If you need hard data about the value of training and developing employees, he referenced the following three studies:
- Laurie Bassi, Paul Harrison, Jens Ludwig, and Daniel McMurrer (2004) published "The Impact of U.S. Firms' Investments in Human Capital on Stock Prices," which discussed their research finding that companies that spend more on training perform better in the stock market.
- Bruce Pfau and Ira Kay (2002) published The Human Capital Edge: 21 People Management Practices Your Company Must Implement (or Avoid) to Maximize Shareholder Value, which discussed their study of over 750 companies which found that companies with effective human resources practices can increase their shareholder value by 47% more than companies without effective human resources practices.
- Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999) published First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, which distilled information from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by the Gallup Organization and found that good management is the key to strong organizational performance.

You oughtn't want to measure ROI
Molinaro said that it's demeaning to try to put dollar figures on the work of a field like learning and development, which is a field primarily focused on human beings rather than numbers. He urged the attendees to have the courage to believe that because this field involves different work than businesspeople' s jobs, we should be held accountable in different ways.

A final note
Lance Tukell, Director of Global Training & Development at Chartis and next year's ASTDNY chapter president, suggested that an alternative to calculating ROI is to ask at the start of a project: "What is success to you? What do you need to see?" This will result in much more useful information about how a training project will add value to a company.

NYNP blog post 11-2-09

Recommended reading for leadership development

Tonight's ASTDNY special interest group (SIG) for training directors was a roundtable discussion comparing leadership development strategies and processes. Moderated by new SIG Chair Jim O'Hern, the Director of Learning and Development at Hess Corporation, the group discussed our experiences with leadership training programs.

As part of the discussion, participants shared a number of recommended books. If you're interested in your own leadership development, or are creating leadership training, you may want to take a look at these books, which include useful tools, exercises, and ideas:

* Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

* FYI: For Your Improvement, A Guide for Development and Coaching by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger

* Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars

* StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath

* What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

* Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations by Dannemiller Tyson Associates

NYNP blog post 5-13-09

Creative funding for training projects

Tonight's ASTDNY monthly chapter event featured a panel of representatives from five college-based continuing education programs and one government agency that provides funding for training, the NYC Small Business Services Division.

The top two takeaways for nonprofit trainers from tonight's panel:
1. Our local community colleges are cost-effective resources for providing training
2. Government funding may be available to subsidize the cost of new training projects

Local community colleges as training resources
CUNY colleges such as BMCC, LaGuardia, and Baruch provide continuing education classes, graduate certificates, and customized training to tens of thousands of workers every year. It can be a cost-effective option to provide professional development to your staff through a community college rather than spending the money to develop training internally from scratch, often for only a handful of people.

Government funding to subsidize training
NYC's Small Business Services Division has a competitive application for grants of up to 0,000 to subsidize 60% of training costs for new training projects.

The reason the city offers these grants is to positively impact NYC's economy by developing our workforce, strengthening our businesses, and attracting local customers for local businesses to keep money within the city. Therefore, it can be difficult for nonprofits to make it past the eligibility screening for these grants, which are highly competitive (out of 150-200 applications, 8-10 projects are funded), because nonprofits are generally not focused on activities that bring new revenue into NYC. However, if your nonprofit is eligible, the grant can be significant.

Other application evaluation criteria include a clear business need with expected profitability gains, likelihood that the training will meet that need effectively, impact on low-income New Yorkers, trainee wage increases that will be attributable to the training, measurable proof that the training will upgrade the trainees' transferrable skills, and a reasonable budget with a strong cost-benefit analysis. Grants are not available for mandated training that organizations must provide, nor are they available for training specific to particular organizations, such as employee orientation.

If you are interested in learning more, the application is available at www.nyc.gov/training

The panel
The panel was introduced by Lance Tukell, ASTDNY's President-Elect, and moderated by James O'Hern, Corporate Director of Learning, HESS Corporation.

Panelists included:
- Tom Abogabal, Director of Client Services, eCornell
- Patrick Dail, Director, Continuing Education & Training, Borough of Manhattan Community College
- Ann Kelly, Director of Corporate Relations, Harvard Business Publishing
- Stephanie Robinson, Director of Corporate Relations, Stevens Institute of Technology
- Timothy Rucinski, Director, Center for Corporate Education, LaGuardia Community College
- Sara Schlossberg, Director of Training, Small Business Services Division, New York City

(See my prior blog post "The Value of Joining a Professional Training Association" for more information about ASTDNY.)

NYNP blog post 3-30-09

Advice from senior managers for trainers

A panel of training and non-training senior managers shared their advice for training professionals & training departments at ASTDNY's Training Directors Special Interest Group on Tuesday.

The panelists were all from for-profit organizations, but two of their messages in particular were good takeaways for nonprofit trainers:
1. Be a strategic business partner for your organization
2. Market your results to enhance your credibility

Partnering with business functions to be a catalyst for positive change
As trainers, we are in a unique position to have a major impact on our organizations. The process of designing training requires that trainers understand both our organizations' big picture priorities and the details that will support our organizations' goals. This gives us a rare insight and therefore the opportunity to make an insightful difference.

For example, when we do needs assessments to uncover issues that could be solved by training, we also uncover other challenges that require non-training solutions (such as changing management policies, restructuring, improving internal processes, conducting research, etc.). When this happens we need to be proactive in proposing solutions to management, even if they challenge the status quo, so that we become true partners in improving our organizations.

The panelists also encouraged trainers to talk with the business functions, find out what's important to them, and collaborate on ways to help them solve the issues that keep them up at night.

Marketing our impact on our organizations
How many of us have gotten written feedback on workshop evaluations to the tune of "thank you for this incredible workshop that's going to help me do my job better"? Yet, how many of us have forwarded that feedback to our supervisors or to senior management? How many of us include management when our training teams meet to review our results and discuss successes, challenges, and lessons learned?

The panelists urged trainers not to keep training evaluation information to ourselves. If we're too humble, we're actually doing a disservice to our organization's decision-makers, because we're withholding information that would help them understand the value of training. We need to share information about money saved, value added, performance improved, etc.

We trainers know that we provide a valuable service. We prevent problems, improve service to our clients, increase our organizations' impact on our missions, and enhance efficiency, which saves our organizations time, money, and resources. We need to make sure we're not the only ones who know how valuable we are and how much we contribute.

The panel
The panel was organized by Lance Tukell, ASTDNY's President-Elect and Chair of the Training Directors Special Interest Group (who was also a panelist), and moderated by Diane McCulloch, ASTDNY's Vice President of Programs.

Panelists included:
- Aleksander Scekic, VP of Talent Management & Organization Development, AIG
- Lance Tukell, Director of Global Training and Development, AIG
- Don Decker, Director of Learning and Development, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
- Mark Bottini, VP, Director of Stores, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
- John M. Attinger, Technology Training Manager, Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
- Gina Elliott - Director of Technology Support, Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
- James O'Hern, Corporate Director of Learning, HESS Corporation
- Paul Maccaro, Corporate Director of Talent Management, HESS Corporation.

(See my prior blog post "The Value of Joining a Professional Training Association" for more information about ASTDNY.)

NYNP blog post 3-2-09

The Value of Joining a Professional Training Association
Nonprofit trainers can benefit from joining ASTD or other organizations

In the nonprofit world, most of our organizations are small. Thus, training can frequently be handled by one person as just one part of their job responsibilities, or perhaps by a handful of people in a small department. This means that those of us who are professional nonprofit trainers don't have many colleagues within our organizations.

In order to exchange ideas about training, find out about resources, and learn how others handle similar challenges, it's valuable for nonprofit trainers to join a professional association such as the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).

I am a member of both national ASTD and the local NY Metro ASTD chapter and find value in both, but there are plenty of other professional associations available to trainers in New York City. Since I'm most familiar with ASTD and ASTDNY, I'll share what I find valuable about membership in these.

National ASTD (www.astd.org) is a great source of information and resources, as it hosts conferences, offers professional development, offers a professional certification as a trainer, offers an online community for networking, provides a job bank, and publishes research on training topics, as well as many print & online periodicals. I've used my ASTD membership to attend an excellent workshop on developing quality e-learning, and I read the helpful periodicals that come with membership. I've also published articles in one of their periodicals, T+D Magazine.

The local NY Metro ASTD chapter (www.astdny.org) is a great source of in-person networking and events to help you stay current on developments in the training field. As an ASTDNY member, I've attended monthly Gather-and-Shar e networking events, participated in the e-learning special interest group and the training directors special interest group, and attended monthly chapter events on topics such as interactive training design, training multicultural groups, evaluating training, executive on-boarding, and more.

The February 2009 ASTDNY chapter event featured amazing demos of computer simulations for developing managers' soft skills. The sample simulations were demo-ed by Dr. Glenn Albright, Director of Applied Research, and Ralph Vacca, Chief Learning Architect, of Kognito Interactive. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn about the cutting-edge work being done by a local organization that creates learning simulations and games, and every chapter event begins with time for networking - so if you feel moved to come to an event, I hope you'll say hi.

Upcoming ASTDNY events will cover a variety of topics, including how training professionals are working on challenges due to the economic crisis, what senior managers really think of training departments, and case studies of e-learning that develops soft skills.

For me, membership in a professional organization helps stimulate my thinking about how my team and I can continually improve our service to our organization's clients by taking advantage of the latest knowledge and technology in the training field. It also provides me with context and a bigger picture view of my work.

Are you a member of a professional training organization? If so, which one, and what do you find valuable about it? I hope you'll share.

NYNP blog post 1-30-09

Free Training on Interpersonal Skills
The Mulvaney Group's 30-minute Courageous Coffee Conversations

How many of us could use help with interpersonal skills at work, especially around difficult conversations?

In the nonprofit field, many of us have strong personalities and care deeply about our work. We work hard, we sacrifice our personal time to work more hours or think about our work, and we believe that our work matters. We try to do the right thing, based on both our professional and personal opinions.

We're also stressed about the economic climate right now and what it will mean for our clients, our organizations, and ourselves.

This means that conflicts at work have the potential to be intense. After all, if we believe that we are good people who have our clients' best interests at heart, what does that make the person who disagrees with us?

So, I'm happy to let you know about a wonderful free resource offered by The Mulvaney Group, whose tag line is "To fix the unfixable."

Approximately every three weeks, their founder and president Tim Mulvaney leads free 30-minute trainings based on role plays of real-life difficult workplace scenarios drawn from The Mulvaney Group's 15 years of experience. (Full disclosure: I learned about these because Tim and I are both members of the American Society for Training and Development; he is a past president of the NY Metro chapter.)

These "Coffee Conversations" are done by phone, which makes them easy to attend, and the times alternate between morning, lunchtime, and evening, which makes them fit anyone's schedule.

They are also recorded, edited, and posted as podcasts along with a downloadable pdf of the lessons learned, which makes them useful tools anytime.

I have attended several of these mini-trainings, including one today, so I can vouch for their great quality. Tim makes good use of everyone's time by keeping the 30 minutes brisk and by staying focused on learning. He keeps the role play on track, and he conducts an excellent debrief to extract lessons that we can use.

He also chooses topics that are interesting, relevant, and useful. Examples of recent topics include asking a supervisor about the possibility of layoffs, expressing discomfort with how close a supervisor habitually stands, talking with a coworker about the appropriateness of religious messages at work, and asking a colleague not to talk so much about personal issues at work.

For all the details, for downloads, and to sign up for the email list, you can go to http://www.themulvaneygroup.com/coffee_conversations/