New Year resolutions

One of my New Year resolutions is to try to communicate more clearly, using plain English whenever possible, eschewing jargon, and of course avoiding clichés like the plague.

We all know the sort of clichés to avoid – the ones that come up far too often, such as:

Pick the low-hanging fruit
Don’t reinvent the wheel
It’s not rocket science
Hit the ground running
The elephant in the room
Keep in mind the big picture

… and so on.

I was amused to find a link to the Encyclopaedia of Business Clichés here.

One of those listed at that link (#11) is the new language of Web 2.0. A more historical example, #77, “let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” dates back at least as far as the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men (the line is spoken by actor Robert Webber). So perhaps I’m wasting my time and clichés will always be with us.

But I promise to try.

I’d like to wish all my readers a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous 2009.

Talent Management

Pop quiz. Is talent management about:

a) smarter recruitment,
b) succession planning, or
c) key talent development?

The answer is at the foot of this post.

Can you describe something as flavour of the month if it’s been around for ten years and is still popular? Talent management is one such fashion that has stood the test of time. I can claim this with confidence, having just completed a literature review from the War for Talent (McKinsey report dating from a study in 1997) to the Talent Management Pocketbook, published last year.

And it’s still popular because it makes sense. For the first time, it offers a strategic framework for co-ordinating a range of HR activities, including recruitment, coaching, teambuilding, leadership and management development, and much more besides. Indeed, it goes beyond the remit of HR, to include activities like corporate communications and reputation management.

One of the things I like about it is the positive spin it puts on people’s contribution to our organisations. We’ve had the sterile jargon of “human resources”, which somehow has stayed with us, along with other inhuman expressions like “human capital”. Now we can talk of “talent” (where I come from, in the West of Scotland, this has a slang connotation – talent is what you go looking for at the dancing – but thankfully that sense is unknown to most who use the term). Much better.

What has prompted these musings is that I’ve just written the Talent Management chapter for CIPD’s Learning and Development manual, a subscription-based product that may be found here.

And the answer to the pop quiz question is: all of them, of course.

The learning organisation

Daniel Wain’s latest column in People Management magazine offers some resounding shibboleths about learning.

Learning is as natural to people as breathing
and
Learning is not mandatory, but neither is survival.

But I part company with him when he questions the concept of the learning organisation. Wain argues that ‘learning organisation’ is an oxymoron because “learning involves risk and innovation” (agreed) while “organisation equates to routine and predictability” (er, no it doesn’t - you could perhaps argue that’s what organising equates to, but that’s not the same thing). When he goes on to argue that only people learn, not organisations, it’s clear he’s missed the point about the latter.

Organisations are not impersonal bureaucratic monoliths, albeit sometimes some of them seem like it. Organisations are groups of people, who come together to achieve shared goals. They don’t comprise anything other than people, and the mechanisms people create (and can change). Can you imagine an organisation without people? Of course not - it couldn’t exist.

Peter Senge described the learning organisation as one “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together”. That’s from The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, originally published in 1990, and its sentiments are entirely consistent with those of Wain’s recent column. So it’s a bit puzzling that he rejects the concept of the learning organisation as “unsound” - time for a rethink, Daniel!

Motivation

I have railed before against those who claim you need to be highly motivated to successfully undertake e-learning or distance learning or any form of self-study. It’s not that it isn’t true, it’s just that it’s economical with the truth. You need to be motivated to learn. In any way, using any method. Anyone who thinks part of the teacher or trainer’s role in the classroom is to provide the motivation is making a big mistake.

The only person who can motivate you is you. Others can lead, influence or inspire, but only you can provide the motivation.

I like the story of the football coach who shared his approach when taking on a new team. I paraphrase: “The first thing I do is find out which players need motivated – then I get rid of them”. The point being if they haven’t managed to motivate themselves up till then, they probably never will.

It never ceases to surprise me how much of an industry there is around motivation, including self-promoting gurus of motivational speaking, sources for inspirational quotes and superficial puff, and producers of tacky merchandise to make the workplace feel uncomfortable. In this context, I have been delighted to discover the web offers many posters subverting all that.

There are lots more if you Google “demotivational”. You can even make up your own at http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php

And now seems as good a time as any to plug the Business Balls website, which gives a light-hearted overview of any business topic you care to name. Their take on motivational theory is here.

Management development

The current issue of Professional Manager magazine highlights a new research report from the Chartered Management Institute. Learning at work: e-learning evolution or revolution? looks at the application of digital technology for management development - in my opinion, a relatively neglected subject to date.

Interestingly, the report considers eight distinct technology applications: blogs, e-coaching, e-books, e-learning, online discussion forums, digital videos, audio podcasts and web-based social networking. For me, the inclusion of "e-learning" in that list sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps I'm quibbling over language, but for me, they mean "online courses", so why don't they say so? I'd say "e-learning" is an all-embracing term for all of the applications in the above list.

The good news in the report is that e-learning is no longer the sore thumb of management development. Work-based learning remains the most commonly-used, and most valued, approach, but there have been rises in all of the digital applications since the previous report in 2007, most notably among senior managers and directors, particularly in their use of discussion forums and social networks. The report warns that organisations need to harness these applications to their own ends to ensure management development is on-strategy and not random, inconsistent, or plain wrong.

The report can be accessed here.

Garth Heron, RIP

Last year, in reference to Anita Roddick, I wrote lightly about the phenomenon of going on holiday and missing the death of someone famous, only to be surprised when this is mentioned at the end of the year. I had no idea this could happen with someone I knew.

I was in touch with Garth Heron just before I went on holiday – his last email to me was on the evening of 25 August. On 28 August he died suddenly, and the next day I went on holiday. So it was a bit of a shock when I read yesterday - some two months later - the memorial tribute to him in the current issue of HR Network Scotland magazine.

Clearly, we weren’t close, and it wasn’t uncommon for months to pass without us being in contact, but we went back a bit. Garth was the HR Director at United Distillers when he invited me to his table at a charity dinner in the mid-90s at Glasgow’s Grosvenor Hotel, and introduced me to the then world snooker champion, Stephen Hendry (I still have the photograph). This was around the time he became Chairman of the Scottish Advisory Board of the Open College, where I was Manager for Scotland, and although we both moved on soon after, we kept in touch. I have Garth to thank for putting me forward for two jobs, when I was last in the market (one successful, one not) and we often had a coffee together when I was in Edinburgh.

I’m a bit late to offer a tribute to Garth, as it’s all been said by now, but I didn’t like to think of his untimely passing without at least acknowledging him. Garth was easily the most impressive HR professional I have encountered in my career, and the world is a lesser place without him. My condolences to his family and everyone who knew him.

Change of title

The book proposal I had accepted by my publishers earlier this year was for a work titled E-learning Strategy. The publisher didn’t like that title, and suggested changing it to How to Implement Successful E-learning. This then was the title I had in mind as I wrote the book. Now the publisher has decided to change it again, and the book is instead to be titled Delivering E-learning, with the sub-title, a complete strategy for design, application and assessment.

I can’t say I’m happy with the latest title, as the word delivery is a bit misleading. Those of us familiar with the classic training cycle will recognise delivery as just one of four stages of the cycle (after needs analysis and planning, but before evaluation). This is a familiar distinction for most kinds of service delivery, although in fairness, casual business-speak recognises delivery to have a wider meaning.

But what do I know? The publisher probably knows best, and that's the sanguine view I'm taking. Hopefully the new title will grow on me, unless they decide to change it again …