Train new employees like a sports coach

All organizations face the challenge of hiring and training new employees to be productive at the earliest. We can design elaborate training programs by making them go through sessions that get through multiple days. By thinking through the process of training as equivalent of training an athlete or a sports person, it can be structured well.

If you are training an athlete, following are things that are done by a coach:

- Teach the basics: rules of the game, what to do, what not to do.
- Show the arena: show the playing field
- Show the goal: What does it mean to succeed?
- Inspiration: who are the past winners and how they did it?
- Beginner Sessions: Show them how to and let them practice. They may fail, falter, loose in this, but that is not important.
- Constant Practice: Let them do it as frequently as possible so that the basics come naturally. Each person takes different time to develop their competency. Sometimes it involves unlearning, throwing away assumptions and get the right way to do it.
- Doing it on the job: This involves participating in practice matches with other players (sometimes experts, sometimes beginners)
- Learn advanced moves: Once the basics are coming naturally, it is time to learn special tasks, tricks. Learning to move from beginner to expert level.
- Play confidently: You are on your own. Understand everything and performing at your best

Your training may have similar phases that walk employees through similar process. Use this as a guideline to prepare your training curriculum.

Mentoring

Having a mentor is very useful. You can use a mentor as a coach. A person who has gained enough experience can act as a mentor and provide guidance. I have always looked for opportunities to mentor in my areas of interest. Some of the articles I have written earlier reflect that. I have written a few articles on career when I was a columnist for a website for a few months. I stopped those columns when the website was stopped.

I have provided guidance through e-mail. It was sporadic. I was attracted to SiliconIndia website as it has a mentor network. It struck to me as unique idea. I signed up and now I mentor couple of people who are interacting with me through the network on SiliconIndia. It is a professional network that has features to blog, connect and communicate with other professionals. Uniqueness of Mentor Network is: you can identify your areas of expertise and you can accept mentors based on their interests. You can engage in a dialog and save all your conversations during the process. I liked the virtual mentoring concept. I hope to provide mentoring to a few people through this forum using my experience and ideas.

You can also do it, if you are keen on providing mentoring. You can also find a mentor for yourself.

If you have known me for years and you wish to get my advice in a structured way, we can use this forum on SiliconIndia. Let me know. I get featured as a top mentor sometimes on this network. I think the concept has not gained enough interest but it has huge potential.

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Transparency Builds Trust

Recently vacuum cleaner I use at home stopped working and I had to go and buy a new one. I bought a new one which has a glass case for collecting dust instead of a cloth one I had before. When I started using new one, I could immediately see how much dust it has picked up within my house and I was impressed by the product. This is when I realized transparency to results builds trust and confidence.

Transparency in organizations is hard to achieve. Transparency into organization can be achieved by using appropriate tools or management techniques.

Communication plays a key role in bringing transparency. In a small company or team, everyone knows what the other person is doing. But as the company or team grows, they get into silos and focused on their team success. This starts building walls among teams and transparency is lost. There is more secrecy of each other’s work and trust is replaced by doubt.

Management needs to remove the barriers and make efforts to bring transparency. A good communication strategy and consistency can help improve transparency.

What tools and systems do you in place to improve transparency and keep teams aligned to company’s success? Even within your organization how much transparency do you have? Is it easy to go on to intranet and find who is doing what?

Wherever you are working, if you don’t have transparency you start wondering whether you are  in right place or not.  Write down what areas you wish there is more transparency and what you can do to improve it.

Book extract: Now, Discover your Strengths

Most organizations are a puzzle put together in a darkend room. Each piece is clumsily squeezed into place and then the edges are grown down so that they feel well positioned. But pull up the shades, let a little light into the room, and we can see the truth. Eight out of ten pieces are in the wrong place.

Eight out of ten employees feel they are miscast. Eight out of ten employees never have the chance to reveal the best of themselves. They suffer for it, their organization suffers, and their customers suffer. Their health, their friends and their family suffer. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can raise ths shades higher still. We can spotlight each person’s strenghts. We can provide him with a manager who is intrigued by these strengths. We can build and organization that asks him to play these strengths and that honors him when he does. We can show him the best of himself and ask him to keep reaching for me. We can help him live a strong life.

With the knowledge economy gathering pace, gloabl competition increasing, new technologies quickly commoditized, and the workforce aging, the right employees are becoming more precisous with each passing year. Those of us who lead great organizations must become more sophisticated and more efficient when it comes to capitalizing on our people. We must find the best fir possible of people’s strengths and the roles we are asking them to play at work. Only then we will be as strong as we should be. Only then we will win.

Are you a scary boss?

You must read this article if you are a supervisor. Supervisors build an image unconsciously. Team members take cues from small incidents and form images.

This article explains factors that create fears about bosses.

Even if you are not a supervisor now, read this article. May be it will come in handy when you grow to be a supervisor.

Article on Scary Boss

Performing at potential

Earlier I have used metaphor of bike for my daughter for understanding performance issues. By understanding the core of problem we can take corrective actions. I will extend the same metaphor for understanding potential.

My daughter has been riding her bike for more than year and it is very rare that I notice her when she is riding her bike. One day I was watching her at play time and realized that she has grown and the bike is becoming small for her. She has been riding the bike without complaining. The idea of asking for a new bike has not crossed her mind.

Only when I noticed that she is doing it awkwardly and she needs a bike, she realized. Then onwards she started comparing herself with other kids who have bigger bikes and realized that she needs an upgrade to enjoy her bike rides. She started looking forward to her new bike. As soon as she got her new bike she could not wait to get on the road with it. Her joy and enthusiasm in bike ride has gone up.

Similar things can happen at work. People at work can be missing opportunities to grow. It takes leaders to understand talents of individuals and see a bigger role for them.

Individuals may be so much focused on their current role that they don’t see opportunities. Some individuals who are focused on their growth can easily spot opportunities and seek role changes.

Evaluate employees in your team for their potential. Make sure you are not missing out on potential and team is performing at a lower performance than they are capable of.

Handling low performance

Constructive Criticism

“Most supervisors or managers don’t intend to deliver a harsh dose of negative feedback. More often, than not, they simply never learned the art of constructive criticism”

Understand importance of feedback. Without this we will not learn. But giving negative feedback is not an easy. This article contains useful tips to doing this better.

This article is also useful for people who are frustrated because criticism is not made constructive.

http://www.one80group.com/articles/ar15.htm

I found this quite useful.

Management Ideas

Couple of weeks back I was going through one presentation on innovation and following ideas impressed me.

Idea 1:

Old Idea: Reward Success, Punish failure and Inaction
New Idea: Reward Success, Failure and Punish Inaction

It is important that management should encourage team members to take action and not be afraid of failure. Instead lack of action should be punished. However, it is difficult to identify Inaction. You can not set a guideline to measure inaction. When you try to identify inaction you will hear lot of excuses. In my opinion, Inaction is lack of action in a timeframe that is considered normal by anyone.

Idea 2:

In a brainstorm meeting, least senior person should speak first.

I think this holds good in many instances and whenever there is a necessity to consider points of view from everyone present in a meeting. A senior person talking first and taking a stand will obviously mean that others will tend to mostly agree to that point than presenting contradicting/different ideas.

This idea is worth implementing whenever possible.

Book Review: The Accidental Manager

I just finished reading this book and it is a great book to understand common mistakes by new managers (may be experienced also make unintentionally). When individuals become managers, in most cases they are not completely trained on managing. Due to this they start making small mistakes that makes the job frustrating for the managers as well as the managed.

This book is a great book that helps understand worst things new managers can do. Each style of management approach is explained with case studies and examples and make a very good and quick read.

The concept of manager adopt a “doing nothing” style is I feel is toughest one. It is always difficult to get things done. I highly recommend reading this book even if you are an experienced manager.

The book starts with explaining All-Time Worst Manager List. Then it goes on to explain the concept of doing nothing. Second half of the book is dedicated to understanding three key skills of developing team members, active listening, giving and receiving feedback and creating a motivational change.

Chapter 2 mentions Ten bad management habits:

1. The Non-communicator
2. The Management Knocker
3. The Task Monger
4. The Best Friend
5. The Limelight Taker
6. The Self-Castigator
7. The Waffler
8. The Braggart
9. The Deceiver
10. The Exaggerator Congratulator

More about the book on AMA website

Tips: Performance Ratings

Man of the Match or Man of the Series

Earlier I have written artcile on performance ratings explaining rationale between various ratings. It is again that time of year when ratings are done and discussed. Major difference between an exceptional rating and very good rating is consistency. It is very difficult to understand the difference.

Think of it like this: If you know a series of games like a cricket series, not every one can become man of series. Player who performs very well in one match and is instrumental in outcome of the match will be given title of Man of the Match. But that player is not automatically given man of the series.

Man of the series is given to player who has contributed to each match played in the series. Consistency in performance in all matches makes one becomes Man of the series. If the player fails even in one match or performs below par, the chance of being nominated as man of the series becomes less.

The same analogy can be applied to performance ratings. An exceptional performance in one area or one project during the year does not automatically entitle a team member to Overall Exceptional rating. Consistency in every aspect is important.

Another important thing to remember is that this rule applies equally to all. Not just team members even supervisors and managers are also rated in same manner.

Next time you are getting into a debate with team members on performance rating, use this analogy to make it easy to understand. Let me know if this helps.