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

Growing faster than Facebook

Was 2012 the Year of the MOOC?  That’s the title of an article from the New York Times in November, but if that’s the case, what are we going to call 2013?  And is MOOC pioneer Andrew Ng right that it’s “growing faster than Facebook”?

 

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses, which already seem like such an obvious development one wonders why they haven’t been around for much longer.  They open access to learning, by offering free enrolment to unlimited numbers, and they offer scalability by automating the teaching side of the teaching/learning equation.  These were goals of the Open University (OU) in the 1960s, blazing the trail for open learning, and perhaps the technology has only now caught up.  Indeed, the OU announced in December the first UK-based MOOC, Futurelearn, to rival the US initiatives from Coursera, Ng’s initiative on leaving Stanford, edX from Harvard and MIT, Udacity and others.

The numbers are staggering, with hundreds of thousands (actually 2.3 million and counting at Coursera) taking up these free courses, which genuinely deliver everything that open, distance and e-learning ever promised: learn what you want, when you want, where you want, at the pace you want.  They also ask questions of the e-learning industry, and pose challenges to those seeking commercial benefits from learning.  The challenge they pose to traditional universities is not so new, but I wonder if they may be the last straw on that particular camel’s back?

As with the likes of Facebook, questions are being asked about monetising MOOCs, but the exponential growth numbers will take care of that, one way or another.  See, as an aside, Donald Clark’s blog on this the other day.

 This is definitely one to watch. I would go so far as to say that MOOCs are the first new game-changing development to emerge since I wrote Delivering E-Learning four years ago. This was something I did not foresee.

 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my clients, followers and readers. I hope 2013 brings everything you want and need.

 

My thanks are due to Bob Little for my inclusion in his list of 2012 "e-learning movers and shakers". I'm not sure what I've done by way of moving and shaking in the past year, but I'm no less grateful for the mention - sometimes recognition lags performance, so maybe this is influenced by past achievements.

 

My book, Delivering E-Learning is still available!