4 February 2010

A Good Foundation? The ‘Exceeding Expectations’ Report

Posted by anton franckeiss under HR, authentic leadership, behavioural change, coaching, communication, leadership development, leading performance, line managers, motivation, psychometrics, relationships, talent management, teamwork | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Last month, The Work Foundation published ‘Exceeding Expectations’, a report from the first Phase of their own empirical research that is, in their own words “a major qualitative study centred on what leaders themselves believe leadership to be and how they practice it”. One of their drivers for doing so was to move our collective understanding of leadership beyond simply having faith in what we belief to the case in the various historical models of both leaders and leadership:

The problem is that in most cases these thoughts about leadership are not empirically derived rather they are conceptual. In fact it is really rather striking that what we know about leadership is on the whole derived from informed belief.”

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2 February 2010

ASK Elsewhere …

Posted by don't compromise under HR, leading performance, management, organisational development | Tags: , |
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As well as adding a new downloadable article in PDF format to the Elsewhere page in this blog (Anton Franckeiss’ Managing Change … upheaval and resolution, publishing in Developing HR Strategy in January 2010), you can also read a recently published article by Robert Terry – Retail therapy? Training buyers beware! – online at TrainingZone.

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2 February 2010

Measuring success: evaluating evaluation

Posted by matt evans under behavioural change, evaluation, learning transfer, line managers, relationships, reward and recognition | Tags: , |
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In early December last year, a member of the Training Zone website posted a query about measuring success that addressed one of the eternal issues of training and development – impact on business performance.

I am looking to try and find the best way to evaluate the success of my training sessions – by success I mean the affect it is having on the performance of those being trained.

The training I deliver is usually on fairly technical topics based in legal and medical areas – there is a lot of theory to cover but also how to apply that theory to real life, I suppose what I am trying to get at is that its not really procedural type training.”

Already testing learners two weeks and three months after the training, and getting informal managers’ feedback, the TrainingZone community provided tips and advice in a follow-up article, Measuring Success, last week. But it struck us there were some hints and tips missing. So, if we may so bold …

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2 February 2010

The Underlying Symptoms: National Sickie Day

Posted by don't compromise under HR, communication, leading performance, line managers, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management, teamwork | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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Yesterday was apparently National Sickie Day. Naturally, I was at work, so I didn’t get to read the papers or watch/listen to the news till I got home (the national broadcasting services having decided announcing this on the morning news would obviously have been dangerously suggestive), although I did notice that today is Groundhog Day. (Radio 4 decided it was safe to mention that, although it got a little sidetracked in climate change.) When I did finally make it as far as yesterday’s news, I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn’t the only one who saw some kind of possible connection.

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28 January 2010

Maybe I should leave my name off this: the role of anonymity

Posted by don't compromise under behavioral change, behavioural change, psychometrics, relationships, talent management, teamwork | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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I’m not the first to observe that we live in an increasingly observed and monitored world. As we leave for work, CCTV follows our journey – for many of us to the office door. Swipe cards and key codes then follow us round our buildings, tracking our location and our movements. (In a sense that brings home just what ‘too much information’ can mean, that last item can even be taken very literally: I’m struck by the number of buildings that require a key code to get from a desk to a lavatory: there’s a poor joke about emergency evacuation procedures there somewhere, but let’s carry on …). Further systems track our access: what we’ve opened, actioned, read, sent, received (and when and for how long). They say that in any Internet forum, it’s only a matter of time before someone mentions Hitler or Stalin, but these are levels of observation that put twentieth century totalitarians to shame. (I’m disconcerted that this blog has now mentioned Hitler on five occasions, and that one of the pioneers of the digital age will make some interesting points on totalitarianism in a few paragraphs time.)

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26 January 2010

Like a Virgin? Or just innocents abroad?

Posted by naysan firoozmand under HR, behavioural change, coaching, leadership development, leading performance, learning transfer, talent management | Tags: , , , |
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We couldn’t help but notice just before Christmas news items at both Personneltoday.com and HRMagazine.co.uk announcing the launch of Virgin Media’s new leadership development scheme, aimed at turning its business into ‘a talent academy’. This struck as simultaneously a very encouraging development and an audacious, brave – and potentially foolhardy – one.

We’re optimists, so we’ll start with the good news. Virgin Media’s leadership development scheme will be based in personal and (reading between what are currently a few brief lines) psychometric profiling, judging by the Personnel Today news item: (more…)

 

26 January 2010

Fresh Crackers (16)

Posted by don't compromise under HR, crackers, talent management | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Three for the price of two in today’s entry in our on-going Crackers series, each of which gives us a moment to see the world of work from a less than usual angle. (For more useful, provocative or just plain life-enhancing snippets from around the web, see our full Crackers list.)

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21 January 2010

Boolean logic – going beyond binary

Posted by don't compromise under behavioural change, communication, life, relationships | Tags: , , , , |
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In a recent Crackers article, we provided a link to an excellent piece at the HR Bartender blog, Thinking Both/And, or – to give it it’s fuller and less ambiguous title – “Moving beyond ‘either/or’ thinking to see the future of work”. Sharlyn Lauby, its author, was inspired by the work of Luis von Ahn in human computation, and how it moves:

the relationship between technology and humans from a ‘either/or’ to a ‘both/and’.  It’s not about either a computer does the work or a human does the work.  It’s about how humans and computers can use their capabilities together to make things happen.”

 As I already commented on Sharlyn’s blog, this isn’t a way of thinking that should be limited just to our relationship with technology (although it surely has a bearing on the problems of qualitiative vs quantitative measurement we’ve addressed here before). “Both/and” – as an alternative to “either/or” – could be a powerful tool in many situations where an oppositional approach leads to either the undue detriment of one party or the stalemating of both.

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