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 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 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.)