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 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 11-2-09

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 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.)