Networking

I attended the Hr Network Scotland annual conference for the first time last week, and it's fair to say I was blown away.

I don't know what I had expected, exactly. I knew it would be a decent conference, but I was unprepared for just how good. Ten years ago, Iain McMillan, the Director of CBI Scotland, told me that anyone who could bring together 100 people for a one-day event in Scotland was doing very well indeed. A decade on, times can't have improved, and yet Hr Network Scotland must have had about three times that number, and of a strong calibre too, featuring many heads of HR, OD and L&D, along with senior representatives from the supply side of the market. All of which made for great networking opportunities.

Hitherto, I had assumed the CIPD Scottish Partnership annual conference was the only game in town. How wrong I was.

The conference contributions were of an excellent quality too, from Jane Sparrow's keynote on culture and performance, through case studies of good practice in fostering employee engagement - and I say that in all due modesty having chaired the e-learning session, featuring the case study of Midlothian Council.

In passing on my congratulations to Lee Turner of Hr Network Scotland, I may have erred on the side of emphasising my former misconception - I hope he wasn't insulted! Perhaps I can make amends by recommending next year's conference to anyone interested in HR in Scotland. I certainly plan on being there.

A book a year

I’ve been doing a lot more writing in the six years since I launched this blog.  After an eight year gap from my first book to my second, I’ve had three books published in the last four years (see sidebar links), and I’m planning to step up that rate.  Not that this is the season for resolutions, but I’ve decided to aim to write and publish one new book every year.
 

Later this year - within six months - I’ll be publishing my next work-in-progress, and I’ll be blogging further information in the coming weeks.  Next year, Alasdair Rutherford and I plan to publish our first print book on learning evaluation and impact (last year’s Total Value Add: a new approach to learning evaluation was an e-book only) – we’re collecting content, and we have a title, although that’s under wraps at the moment.  After that, my next solo effort will be in 2015 (I have a couple of ideas for new books on learning and development), and so on from then.

One area I’d like to move into is writing/publishing for the academic market.  I’ve just completed an undergraduate course for the University of Sunderland on Contemporary Developments in Business and Management (book length – about 80,000 words – but not counted towards my book-a-year target), and I’m about to start a postgraduate course on Managing and Leading People (similar length).  I’ve also co-written a postgraduate course on Strategic Action and the Environment for the University of Bedfordshire, and edited some Scottish Qualifications Authority management courses for Opus Learning. I’m open to offers!

I'm Spartacus!

In the current issue of Management Today, Nigel Nicholson offers “A New View of Leadership”.

Some of what he describes is not new – he offers a triangular model of seeing (vision), being (identity), and doing (action), which may be considered an attempt to bring together visionary, authentic, and action-based approaches to leadership.  Nicholson calls his contrivance “The Leadership Formula”, but it seems to me to contradict the much more interesting opening to his article.

Describing the collective behaviour of animals and birds, in herds and in flight, Nicholson asks “who is leading?” and characterises this as a “very human question and presumption”.  We can all, no doubt, recall instances where managers (aspiring leaders) see the key to teamwork as effective leadership (their leadership). Instead, Nicholson argues, teams that lack leaders do not lack leadership, because “leadership is not a thing (nor is it necessarily embodied in a charismatic individual) but a process”.

I’ve written before that anyone who has served in the forces, or has played a team sport, knows that leadership is often exercised by individuals other than the designated leaders, and sometimes by a collective. There is an increasing understanding that leadership is not the exclusive preserve of senior managers, something exercised from the top down – rather it is something anyone can do, in the right place and the right time.  We are all (potential) leaders, we are all Spartacus.

Nicholson seems to me to have carried this argument a step forward, emphasising that leadership is more than an individual quality, it is a condition to be cultivated in a work team or organisation, a pre-condition for success.  I am grateful for his insight and analysis, even if I feel he does spoil it a little by decrying “recipe books”, then going on to offer his own individual-centric “formula”.

Reason overcome by emotions

If you’re not interested in football, you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about recently-appointed Sunderland coach Paolo di Canio, and revelationsof his fascist sympathies.  In a nutshell, many people involved with Sunderland Football Club would prefer they did not employ someone of such an extreme political persuasion. Less well known was the recent attempt by some supporters of Hamilton Academical Football Club to remove a stadium director who was once a member of the British National Party (BNP).  I suspect there are many other examples.

This is not confined to football, of course.  The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that a Bradford bus driver sacked (nine years ago) for membership of the BNP had his human rights breached (and by implication was unfairly dismissed).  Since the leaking of a BNP membership list in 2008, there have been calls for BNP members in many occupations to be sacked.

One correspondent to People Management argues that BNP members should not be admitted to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Fascism (like its bedfellow racism, with which it is often confused), is understandably repugnant to most people, but does that mean its adherents should be driven from employment and society? Of course, it may be very upsetting for employees to find a colleague holds such views, but the emotional public reaction to fascism does not help judgements as to whether this is acceptable on a case-by-case basis.

The very word “fascist” is akin to “paedophile” in its capacity to evoke outrage, and provoke ill-considered responses – the modern equivalent of a medieval burning at the stake.  Surely in an enlightened society, a modern civilization, we should have better ways to combat people with these attitudes, using reason, and a measure of understanding and compassion?

Human resources professionals have to advise on, and manage these instances, in pragmatic terms.  The solution to many problems among people in a workplace lies in learning and development, but how much time and resource can we legitimately spend guiding emotional fascists from their intolerant views towards a more co-operative working relationship with colleagues? This is the real business issue, obscured by political campaigning against fascists, confusion of fascism with racism (highlighted by the Di Canio case), and reason overcome by emotions.

The State of Learning Evaluation in Scotland

 

My learning evaluation business, Airthrey Ltd, is conducting research into the State of Learning Evaluation in Scotland.  Our aim is to find out who’s evaluating learning and development in Scotland, who’s doing it well, and what it is that makes them successful.  We believe this will provide a useful benchmark for studies of learning evaluation in other countries.

This takes the form of a Success Case Method investigation, as I blogged in November. We believe this will be the first time such an investigation has been conducted at a national level.

The research is endorsed by Robert Brinkerhoff, Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Michigan, and originator of the Success Case Method:

"This research project, utilising my Success Case Method, is an admirable exercise in taking the temperature of learning evaluation in a discrete territory. Not many organisations conduct learning evaluation effectively, and so it will be good to know what's working well in Scotland, who's having success, and why. The report of this project should provide a landmark exemplar for the UK, Europe and perhaps further afield. I am delighted to endorse it, and look forward with interest to studying the results."

If you have people/operations in Scotland, please take a little time (it should be less than five minutes) to complete the survey.  And please forward it to anyone else you know who may be interested.

The research report will be published this summer (2013), and everyone who completes the survey will get a free copy of the report summary.

Survey: www.survey.bris.ac.uk/stirling/learnevalu

 

Thank you.

Skill development

A few years ago, I wrote about Roberto Moretti's Practice Made Perfect system, as an approach to helping people learn skills. I've recently found a useful follow-up in an unlikely source.

As a football fan, I'm aware of the shortcomings in coaching, training and all-round education for professional players, so it is surprising to find what I would describe as cutting edge thinking in the arena of football coaching. European coaches have introduced a lot of new thinking and techniques to British football, and perhaps none more so than the two great Portuguese coaches Jose Mourinho and Andreas Villas-Boas.

Now I'm reading about how players can be trained to move beyond the tasks they perform automatically to acquire and add new skills. Have a look at this blog and see what you think. I especially like the idea of training players to concentrate better towards the end of games (when they are tired and less focused) and avoid losing late goals. I'm sure there must be similar applications to less glamorous work contexts, including leadership and management.

The Shared Academy

When I wrote the corporate universities chapter for CIPD’s Learning and Development subscription manual (published 2007, but no longer available), I wrote: “That is not to say that the corporate university (CU) is the sole preserve of the large corporation.  The larger the organisation, the easier it should be to establish a successful CU, but small-to-medium-sized organisations can also benefit from this sort of approach, and can also aspire to their own CU.  Where potential learner numbers are small, as with organisations employing fewer than 1000 people, then partnership working can help achieve the critical mass needed”.

In the six years since I wrote that, through a global recession, the argument has become more compelling.

In the same piece, I suggested “training vendors, or traditional universities, or economic development bodies, may be able to catalyse collaborations among geographical neighbours, companies in the same sectors, or organisations with similarities but no directly competing interests”.

This ought to be the way ahead, but catalysts are needed.

In a few weeks, I shall be acting as a catalyst and announcing a proof-of-concept project for a new academy based on a collaboration among like-minded organisations.  Among the benefits we anticipate are:

• Better value support services for people development (directors, employees and volunteers).
• Lower cost learning and development, through sharing resources with the other partners.
• A marketplace to sell learning services devised by each partner to the other partners and to wider audiences (charitable, public and private).
• A branded online learning platform at low cost.
• A share in income from selling online services and spare places on courses to a wider audience.

I hope this academy will serve as an exemplar of what may be accomplished when organisations set aside their differences in favour of what they have in common, and create something of mutual value and benefit.  I hope to create a prototype of the Shared Academy, and to blog about the experience.

For further reading, see:

http://www.learnforever.co.uk/articles/The_Seven_Pillars_of_the_Corporate_University.pdf

and two of the tools in my book 101 Learning & Development Tools

http://www.learnforever.co.uk/books.htm