Disturbances from Art
.
Art Turock
Elite Performance Provocateur
HELPING CLIENTS PRACTICE WITH A
HEALTHY DISREGARD FOR THE UNREASONABLE


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Stay tuned for new Blog entries as I work through the process of getting 'COMPETENT IS NOT AN OPTION" published.
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am always trying to learn more about how disturbances are impacting the workplace where people are taking on the challenge to go beyond just competent performers and enter the space of elite performers.  

Art Turock

Disturbances from Art

Building Capabilities While Work Gets Done

 by Art Turock on 09/17/11

Game changer strategies solve tradeoffs few companies manage well.  One pervasive tradeoff is the non-stop demand to get work done buttressed up against the vital need to build capabilities.  

As an efficient but unsatisfactory compromise, talent development gets treated as a workaround, as managers shoe-horn in ritualized slots for performance appraisals, 360 peer reviews, off-site training, and riding along on sales calls.

Game-changer strategies are driven by illogical and audacious standards that disturb widely-held mindsets that cement the status quo.   In conceiving Total Quality Management, Edwards Deming harbored bordering-on-bizarre notions like "Zero defects" and "Doing things right the first time" to solve the forced choice of either improving product quality or lowering prices.  Accordingly, the talent development quandary, "We don’t have time to improve capabilities since work must get done,"  is solved by a similarly counterintuitive notion "All there is at work, is time to get better."

Let's presume your calendar is jam-packed with meetings, you're consumed by a 60-hour week, and the only skill you're getting better at is multi-tasking.  What I call a counterintuitive notion seems like a far-fetched fantasy.  But consider the generative question:   How do you design a culture where work is a process of growing capabilities, while engaged in producing results in order to be better able to produce future results?

In this culture, work itself offers a free-admission seminar with potential teachers including customers, bosses, team members, resource constraints, and competitive threats.   With this plethora of learning occasions readily available, take two steps to orchestrate "job-imbedded development opportunities."  First, conceive occasions for performance improvement by addressing these questions:

  1. In what situations could your proficiency in preparation for or debriefing a meeting be described as "winging it?"
  2. Where are you saying "We’ve always done it this way," where "this way" is short hand for good enough?
  3. Where are you adopting the same performance standards as competitors with no regard for bringing added value to your role?   
  4. Where are you hoarding expertise instead of sharing your skillful process?
  5. What are your ineffective habits which won’t change without deliberate focus?

Here's a sampling of answers from my clients which you might find useful: 

  • Instead of using trite-to-the-point of meaningless phrases in interacting with customers, deliver unexpected value.  Imagine a grocery bagger, carrying your groceries to the car who says, “We want to improve your shopping experience.  What did you like and what can we improve, including products we don’t carry?  I report customers’ feedback to my manager.”
  • When you frequently notice yourself impatient while listening to team members’ suggestions, you break from your patterned response by asking open ended questions and summarizing to demonstrate your respect and understanding of their input.
  • Instead of expecting colleagues to rubber stamp your presumed superior solutions, you invite people to point out vulnerabilities of your solution, diagnose blind spots, and share alternative ideas.
  • While participating in a meeting, you listen for taken-for-granted strategic assumptions that are antiquated or possibly ineffective and bring them to your colleagues’ attention.
  • When you finish a conference call, you summarize key learning points and send an e-mail to call participants, colleagues, and customers who might also derive benefit.
  • When your team blames unfavorable circumstances for an unwanted result, you take accountability for your choices and actions that contribute to the outcome including your own attempts to cast blame.

And that list constitutes the tip of the iceberg.

To maximize your learning results drawn from such job imbedded development opportunities, plan to get feedback on your skill practice efforts.  One method is introspection, where in the midst of performing a task, you simultaneously observe your own effectiveness in executing predetermined improvement goals, noting your behavior and its impact on others.  A second approach is to distribute performance criteria for the specific skill you're practicing to your associates and invite their feedback. 

Does the notion, "all there is at work is time to get better," seem more plausible than when you read it several paragraphs earlier?  Do you notice that leveraging job imbedded development opportunities hardly interferes with work getting done and doesn't cost one thin dime against the training budget?

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