This program initiative supports a wide range of training options, including one-on-one coaching, leadership training, process and workflow reviews, sales and customer service training, and communication and collaboration workshops.

The main goal is to help your employees improve their performance, and improve the overall performance of your business. Typically, owners of small businesses would not normally be able to afford the type of training this program covers, since it is customized, delivered in-house, and uniquely tailored to each individual business’ needs.

The program does not cover training on the following: regulatory, health, safety or workplace orientation.

To appreciate my point, consider a quote attributed to Dr. JoAnn Hackos, president of Comtech Services, Inc., “... the top reason CMS projects fail is ... non-adoption by users.”

Consider also the findings of the 2006 LISA Global Business Practices Survey, that states: “Staff resistance to change is a factor that complicates roughly half of all technology implementation projects and severely threatens about one in ten.” (See also the graph below)

The important question - rarely asked - is: why then, do users fail to adopt the new technology? The answer is that there are many more reasons to resist change than to embrace it - a very common and natural human response to uncertainty. In practical terms, the reasons could be any or all of the following:
* Nobody asked them for their opinion; implementation is top-down, driven by the business requirements, without input from frontline staff
* They’re scared they’ll lose their job if they ask too many critical questions
* They’re not sure they’ll have the right skills to remain valuable
* They’don’t see the benefits for themselves
* They’re worried the savings to the company will result in lay-offs
* And so on

In short - we’re dealing with emotions, worries, anxieties and other “soft” issues, that are difficult to quantify, and even more difficult to address. A linear mind-set, fairly common in the technology-focused arena, doesn’t help - since explaining the logic of a step once, and expecting everyone to “get it, and move on” is unrealistic, because, well ..., because emotions defy logic.

So what to do? Thankfully, help is on the way. Help in the form of the Human Performance Consultant (or Technologist), whose field of practice addresses the systematic analysis of performance gaps (the non-adoption of a new system) and who designs interventions to close those gaps (workshops, training, coaching). One of the premises I base my work on is that every member of staff goes to work with the full intent of doing the best job they can. When the results fall short of expectations, the complex of systems and processes is at fault --- somewhere, somehow. Finding the faults, and coming up with strategies to overcome them, is what performance consultants do. Closing the gap between intent and impact.

Instead of attacking just the symptoms of non-adoption, we search for and uncover the root causes, using a wide range of exploratory techniques, and then deal with them. The causes vary; from
* “Don’t exactly know what is expected of me” and:
* “My boss micro-manages my job and makes me feel irrelevant” to:
* “If only someone would tell me what to do” or:
* “We don’t have the tools, the technical skills and/or the staff to do an adequate job”

The interventions can be made up of formal classroom training, seminar-style training, or soft skills training and workshops. Sometimes it is necessary to tackle broader issues. It may be that developing an alternate remuneration system, in concert with the company’s HR department, with which to attract and retain talented staff, is the required intervention. Or we find that redesigning company policies, so they no longer unintentionally reward people for non-performance is the solution to these issues. Whichever the nature of the intervention, all are firmly based on the front-end analysis, and are designed to have measurable effects on individual and team/group performance.

Fear of change, and resistance to change, come from the inability to see into the future. Metaphorically speaking, when staff can see only roiling grey impenetrable murky clouds ahead, the quite natural reaction is to seek shelter and wait for the storm to pass. Take away the obscuring clouds, and bring out the sun to illuminate low-hanging branches full of fruit, and the fear evaporates, as well. The point to this little parable is: communication, communication, communication. Not so much about what is happening, or about to happen (the change scheduling takes care of that), but about how it will impact each individual, how it will impact the workflow and require changes to long-time habits and customs, and how it will benefit each team member, individually and collectively. And most importantly: explaining, training, coaching on how each individual team member can make those changes in thinking, behaviour, and attitude.

This then, is real change management. Managing the required changes in human behaviour, of staff individually and as interacting members of a team, in order to transition successfully from the “before CMS state” to the “after CMS state”.
This type of change management cannot conceivably be done “on the side” by a most likely already overloaded line manager. Nor is it realistic to expect a line manager to have the focus and attention, or the coaching skills, to do justice to the task.

Unless your organization is large enough to support dedicated organizational development and/or performance specialists, you will need to bring in a performance consultant to help you manage the real change. The change most people forget about, until it’s too late.

Updated and expanded article, November 2009; previously published in 2006

What was Tom thinking in the meantime? "That’s the last time I ever speak up with an idea. If I’d known I would get 15 hours of extra work piled on top of my already overloaded plate for that week, I’d have kept my mouth shut.”

If the line manager had been working with an executive coach, this disasterous outcome probably would have been avoided. We would have come up with a better plan. Consider this scenario:

Instead of closing the meeting, what if the line manager had continued: "Now, I know you have some tight deadlines you’re dealing with, Tom. Let’s look at how we can free up some time for you to work on this project. Sally? Do you think you could pitch in with Tom for the research part? And Jack? Perhaps you can go over the deliverables for this week with Tom, and take some of them off his hands; maybe Ruth can help out, too. Tom: I don’t need ‘War and Peace’ – but if you could write up some bullet points for me, outlining pros and cons, then I can take it up the food chain, and if we need to rustle up some budget, I’ll have the data and the facts to get the funding. Good work, folks—let’s all pull together on this. If you run into any snags – you’ll let me know, right?"

The difference after the coaching intervention: This time, the line-manager took the time to not only motivate Tom to succeed, but to enable him as well. Needless to say, things would have gone much better, and an example would have been set for the other staff members to follow.

The secret to a happy life as a manager is this: you are not the star player anymore, you’re now the team’s coach. As such, it is more important that you know what your players are capable of individually, and where their strengths as a team lie, than that you can do their work. Your job is to “point them in the right direction, and then get the heck out of their way”. Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls’ coach during the Michael Jorden / Scottie Pippen streak of 6 consecutive NBA championships said in a FastCompany interview: “Michael’s job is to get the ball in the basket. I don’t care how he does it, whether he throws the ball, dribbles it there, or carries it in his teeth. He knows how to do his job, and I just get out of his way.” Whoever said “There is no “I” in team”, had no clue what they were talking about. Initially, there are only “I’s" on your team. And your job is to shape all these individual talents into a “We”.

There are lots of books out there that will talk about “Leadership” and “Management”. They’re not what you need. What you need is a guide for coaches; practical advice that you can apply immediately. Invest $35 in this book: “Coaching for Improved Work Performance” by Dr. Ferdinand Fournies. It will rock your world, and help you become a better manager, but above all, a better work coach. And it will make your life a lot easier!

Not only is it now useless as a guide to navigating the company through the rough seas, it has become a liability. Based on assumptions and projections, and virtually locked in for the next year or so, it becomes not the guiding beacon, but the dead weight of a drag-anchor off the stern, slowing the ship down, snagging on unexpected obstacles under water, and greatly hindering its maneuverability. To continue the metaphor just a little bit further: we’re no longer sailing on the open ocean. Somehow, the vessel has entered into the shallows, and there are jagged reefs all around. Even slow speed ahead will crash it into a reef sooner or later.

The Strategic Plan is no longer the appropriate vessel to steer the company safely. Instead of a large, ocean-going ship, what we need in these times is a sleek, nimble, highly maneuverable small boat, like a motorized canoe or skiff. How does that translate to the strategic planning process that organizations have come to rely on? Here’s my suggestion:

Borrowing from the world of software development, I am going to coin the phrase “Agile Strategy Development”. Instead of an annual process, that takes many weeks to complete, and that is captured in a weighty document called “The 2010-2012 Strategic Planning Document”, what organizations need to start doing is initiating an Agile Process, with monthly “Strategy Scrums”, where the company’s goals and targets are redefined, reset, adjusted, revised and/or scrapped. Then, for the next 30 days, the so-called Sprint, the company runs flat-out to get as close to those re-jigged goals as possible. At the end of each sprint, evaluate, discuss, and adjust during the next Strategy Scrum. And so another cycle of 30 days execution on goals begins.

While we’re on the subject of Scrums, it may also be a great idea to start involving more than just the top C-level executives in the - now Agile - strategic planning scrum process. You’d be surprised at how many great, innovative ideas can bubble up from the rank-and-file and the line managers. It also helps greatly in the execution sprint if the ones doing the actual work feel they were part of the discussion and co-creators of the solutions.

For this interdependence to take hold, and for interdisciplinary teams to function, barriers must come down, territories must be relinquished, and frank and open discussion must replace the often defensive responses to feedback—whether on content or style.

What used to be a key positive quality in knowledge workers: the good ones felt a sense of ownership for their part of the project, is rapidly becoming a liability. See also my next point:

2. Working in the same area, but each in their own cubicle is not conducive to collaboration
As a method to maximize the number of people per sq. ft., the cubicle has no equal. As a method to shut one’s self off from one’s surroundings, to barricade one’s self within a cocoon of “my space”, complete with the trappings of home (photos of loved ones, be they children or pets, strings of Christmas lights, humorous figurines, in short “personality") the cubicle has no equal, either.

I’m going to say it as plainly as I can: in an interconnected workplace, where collaboration is the goal and the norm: the cubicle has had its day; it must go.

Frankly, cubicle-dwelling discourages and even stifles the kind of cross-over involvement necessary for collaboration. To collaborate with others, you need to know what they’re doing; you need to be able to eavesdrop on their telephone conversations, you need to be able to pull up a chair and join a discussion taking place between a team mate and a content specialist. For the creative potential of collaboration to be realized, you need to be facing one another, not holed up in a box, with your backs turned to each other. Check out what these folks have to say about the cubicle: Design Lines Blog

The good news: this is easy to do: have all the hutches, panels and dividers removed, and group desks in threes and fours. Shove all the storage and filing cabinets to one or two of the outside walls of the area. Create a reference library area (bookshelves) with one or more tables and some chairs somewhere in the middle, and designate this area as the collaborative meeting area, as well. And close your ears and minds to the deafening howls of protest. Just do it, make it a group activity, with everyone pitching in, and explain why. Explain often, and praise everyone for trying hard. Encourage discussion about the pros and cons, and point out the benefits whenever you can. Do what you need to do, but don’t back down. This is the layout of the collaborative team—the team of the future.

3. Privacy and quiet are overrated; if you want privacy—don’t come to work.

Knowledge workers (software engineers, creatives, writers) have maintained that—in order to produce—they need privacy and a quiet environment. Perhaps because these professions have an overrepresentation of people with an MBTI preference for introversion, this line has been swallowed like the gospel. Strange, then, that journalists—writers, too—can function perfectly well in a noisy newsroom, with phones ringing off the hook, printers whirring away, people walking by their desks talking, and assorted deadline-driven mayhem around them. Likewise, manufacturing engineers can do their jobs just fine in the midst of the clanging, whirring, banging and humming environment of a production plant.

Collaboration is about looking over the fence, not at it.

Certainly, there are times when people legitimately need some distraction-free time—but that’s not all the time. In the new world of collaboration, a distraction-free zone may only be necessary for a few hours per week. For instance: to work out a rough first draft of notes taken during a development meeting—perhaps for 3 hours. And perhaps once again, if a final—definitive—edit needs to be done, maybe another 2 hours?  In other words, instead of ‘leaving your individual work area (cubicle)’ to ‘go to a meeting with your team’, you will temporarily ‘leave your collaborative work area’ to ‘work on your own for a few hours’. Management guru Tom Davenport has even compiled all the research on this topic: Tom Davenport on Collaboration and Office Design

This legitimate need for a distraction-free zone is equally easy to address. Create one or two areas, set back from the main hustle and bustle area, where one can temporarily sit and work in relative quiet and isolation, until the task is done. Don’t create too many of these areas—they need to be a scarce commodity that your people must share. No need for any kind of storage capability in these areas—no-one will stay there long enough to need storage. Just a desk, a chair, a networked computer - or just an Ethernet cable to hook up a laptop. Simple. If your company can go wireless: even better.

Collaboration is more than working in the same area; it is more than sharing resources. True collaboration involves getting to know all aspects of the work, your own, and those of your collaborators. And thinking about, commenting on, and contributing to areas that are not within your primary scope of expertise—simply because you are a collaborator, and therefore it’s your work, too. Agile software development already operates on many of these principles, and can be a great model to expand outside of a particular job group, to include other disciplines.

How will you know when you’re there? When your people comment freely and constructively on each other’s work, when a SME offers to come and sit with a writer during an editing round, when an illustrator offers to go down to the production floor to see and capture with her own eyes how the product is manufactured. The key words are: “freely” and “offer”.

Collaboration is the strategy to develop self-directed and self-managing multi-disciplinary teams: the multi-talented work teams of the future.

Since most knowledge intensive industries and corporations proclaim that “their people are their greatest asset” it makes tremendous sense to draw the parallel with production machinery.

In other words, what’s the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of this machine? Not just the sticker price, but what does it cost to keep it running smoothly for say - the next 10 years? The answer a plant manager, or manufacturing engineer, is likely to give, is “between 4 and 8% annually”. So the maintenance budget needs to be an average of $4 - $8K per machine, per year. This is starting to make the discussion nice and simple - not easy, but simple.

Now picture a specialist or a manager, earning an annual salary, bonus and benefits of $70K. Or a CEO, earning $300K. To keep them running smoothly from year to year, the budget for preventative and scheduled maintenance should probably be in the same range, don’t you think? In fact, in my experience, an average of 5% is usually sufficient, except perhaps for highly specialized technical workers.

It also makes sense to put in a minimum and maximum for the individual maintenance budget; after all an executive making $300K is not going to need up to $15,000 annually for development and training. Correspondingly, your entry level clerk, making $24K, may need a little more than $1,200.

It’s also important to discuss what exactly gets covered by the maintenance budget. My recommendation is “tuition and directly related learning expenses ONLY”.
So, if you send someone to a 3-day conference, the registration fee is of course covered by the training budget, as well as the purchase of any books or materials required to participate at the conference. Ditto for a 2-day off-site application course for the new ERP system. But travel and accommodation are not covered by a training budget. How could they be? Think of those costs as similar to the cost of flying in a mechanic to fix your CNC Router. Your Finance Department would not assign that expense as a capital cost to the TCO of the machine; they would book it to Operating Expenses.

The good news: People actually require less preventative maintenance than machines, and respond to the maintenance (=learning and development opportunities) with greater productivity and higher quality output than before the scheduled maintenance. In this respect they are much, much better than machines!

Think of how much learning and performance improvement we could achieve if companies finally budgeted for human maintenance appropriately?

Measured over time, the average minimum effort to retain their job (i.e. to not be fired for performance issues) is roughly 30%. Go below that, and they’re out. Looking at the top performers, we see that on average over time, the effort they put forward is roughly 80%. The difference between the two - 50% - is defined by the term "discretionary effort". This is the amount of extra effort individual team members may choose to put towards their tasks.

And the most influential person to affect that discretionary effort is the team’s manager, both in positive and negative ways.

All the extrinsic, i.e. external, motivators in the world cannot make up for a lack of intrinsic, i.e. internal, motivation. The expression “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” applies here, too. The team’s manager is responsible for “making the horse want to drink”. As the manager of your team, your job is to make your team members want to put in more than the minimum effort.

This means you will have to listen to your team, observe and probe to find out what motivates each one individually. It also means that you will need to learn to think like a coach - each player may have great individual skills, but what do you need to do to make them into a great team? A one-size-fits-all approach will never work, because as the then-coach of the Chicago Bulls famously said: "No, I don’t treat everyone the same - Michael Jordan shoots hoops against all odds and when we need it most; why would I rotate him through primarily defensive positions? He inspires the team, pulls everyone together, and then we all win”.

Making the switch from an operational, individual contributor role to a leadership role requires you to become the ex-player/coach. You know the game well enough to share your experience and insights with the players, but you no longer actively play the game.

The opposite of the manager as coach/motivator is the micro-managing, doing-your-job-for-you, controlling manager. The guy in the suit who jumps off the bench, races onto the court (in his dress shoes), takes the ball from Michael Jordan’s hands, aims ... and then misses the shot. Ridiculous in basketball. Ridiculously ineffective at the office, too. 

Richard Hamilton has succeeded in coming up with a book that - quite effectively, and covering a wide range of topics - answers this ubiquitous question. In a very real sense, Richard’s book is the voice of experience and wisdom that should have been made available when you first got the promotion…

The topics are covered in three main sections of the book: Managing People, Managing Projects, and Managing Technology. Because my field of practice focuses primarily on human performance, I paid particular attention to the material in the first section. And frankly, I was very pleasantly surprised with the overall eminent practicality and applicability of his advice. Richard clearly writes with the authentic voice of battle-hardened experience. Reading between the lines of the examples he provides as case studies, it’s obvious he’s “been there, done that.” He’s made his mistakes, learned the hard way, and with this book, he’s sharing the accumulated wisdom of decades of operational line management.

Refreshingly, Richard doesn’t succumb to the gimmick of “10 Easy Steps to Becoming a Great Manager”. No flavor-of-the-month management theories, no arrogant top-down definitions. In all, his approach is a common-sense one, full of practical tips and insightful advice. He’s also researched the topics he writes about extensively, particularly in the sections on Projects and Technology.

This unassuming little book (238 pages, plus templates and index) is a MUST-READ for new and existing managers of technical communication teams. For the price, $24.95, it is a steal; an absolute treasure-trove of valuable information. Trust me; you will go back to it again and again. And it will make you a better and more effective manager.

NOTE: The expression “Showing someone the ropes” dates from the era of the tall ships - the great ocean-going vessels powered by wind and sail. To sail such a large ship, it was essential to know which rope led to which sail, and when to tighten or loosen the ropes to increase speed and correct course, and to stay safe in a raging storm.

The title of this review, then, is entirely appropriate. Well done, Richard.

If you want to discuss - and adjust - your recruitment strategies, call me 1-604-317-2234. I’d be delighted to ask you some deceptively innocent questions.