T E C H N I Q U E
Glen Parker and Jerry McAdams thought they had the answers, when they delivered a joint lecture on success strategies for rewarding and recognising teams and teamwork, at the American Society for Training and Development's international conference in San Francisco. The lecture provided a no-nonsense, business-oriented approach to making the most of people.
Parker, a renowned team trainer told the large audience that he and McAdams — who has built up his career on the best ways to acknowledge employees good work — had formed a duo to demonstrate that teams themselves don't work effectively if there are insufficient reward and recognition systems within the whole work structure. "We're able to create, develop and train teams, get them running and functioning effectively — but what happens is that you eventually hit a wall, and the wall is the rest of the organis-ation," Parker said.
The pair began their session in game-show style, cracking jokes and promising prizes to all those participants who remained until the end. Then they got down to business. Parker outlined the main problems of developing effective teams. He asked the audience: Are teams central to your organisation? Do managers in your organisation believe it, do they function as if teams are critical to success? "Do they help, support, act, manage, supervise, reward, recognise people as if teams were an important part of the organisation?" he said. Or rather: "Is it a hierarchical, functional organisation which makes it difficult for people to participate across organisational lines to develop cross functional teaming?" Parker argued that the latter situation was where the biggest pay-offs could be made. He said it was critical that upper management also worked in teams.
Structure, culture and systems operating within the organisation determine how effect-ive teams could be. He posed the interesting and revealing question: who is valued in your organisation, the individual or the teams, "people that make the crowd look better as opposed to standing out from the crowd?" Teams can even be involved in evaluating each other, Parker argued. He recommended the system of peer review, where a part of an employee's performance appraisal is based on feedback from team mates.
When the microphone was passed to McAdams, he went on to stress the importance of having a leadership committed to teams. He said many leaders have double standards when it comes to implementing teams: top management work by their own model, lower management levels work by the implemented system. "The key to (training) plans is that they are integrated into management systems — they should be a business strategy, not an extra," he stressed. He argued that training can help an organisation even during times of financial crisis. "The training budget is always cut first but I would suggest that you should increase in times of difficulty, as to decrease sends the message that the human portion of that equation is not as critical as some other portion."
Most importantly, people should be able to see a result — not necessarily financial — of their efforts, argued McAdams. That didn't mean traditional types of reward such as Best Employee of the Month prizes, where one individual is singled out from the rest. He said that several smaller rewards were much better. Public recognition of success was also not necessarily the way to reach many employees. Some people would love to appear in front of hundreds of their compatriots and receive a prize or a sum of money for their work, while others couldn't think of anything worse. Recognition could take a much more subtle form of honest feedback in team meetings, for example.
One audience member explained her small organisation's system of giving points to those who performed well. More points brought more rewards. In the case of public organisations, such as government departments, McAdams told his audience: "Don't assume that you don't have the money. Go in there and figure out how you can create an organisation measure in which the improvements are accepted by the county council as being a financial performance improvement." He warned that more than three measures to encourage employee performance did not usually work.
Employees should be able to see opportunities to improve within their organisation, not necessarily by moving upwards in the hierarchy, but instead, moving across it. That way they can develop, work more effectively with others in the workplace and improve the way the whole system functions, he told listeners. "Improvement in an organisation comes when people in the organisations get together and change the system — its the system shift that makes the difference".
Although McAdams drowned out his partner during much of the lecture, what he had to say was well-argued and logical. At the end of a long session, the audience filed out through the back of the hall, eager to pick up their well-earned rewards.
Attending Mel Silberman's lecture on facilitating active learning, was a peaceful, personal experience. Silberman, who has lung cancer, was not afraid to use his own experiences in tackling the illness to illustrate general human difficulties in making changes.
His style was to talk and instruct less, leaving it up to the audience to come up with ideas and learn techniques in pairs, while he directed from the front. Every small exercise was accompanied by calming music, while participants racked their brains over the tasks assigned to them on various coloured pieces of paper and cartoons on the overhead projectors. "I had you read, I had you work and I only talked and gave input in the end," he reminded his students. Silberman's lecture focussed on three main areas to facilitate active learning: Cognitive (information acquired), behavioural (the skills needed) and affective (the attitudes or feelings required). He stressed that it was no good to provide people with information if they didn't save it in their minds. That can only be done by getting students to demonstrate that they have remembered it. Actively learning skills follows the same principle. There should be an instruction phase and a practice phase, Silberman said. To demonstrate he asked a volunteer from the audience to watch him tie a Windsor knot. She was asked to tell him what he was doing and then complete the exercise herself.
Illustrating the third — affective — part of his argument, Silberman asked his audience to think of an animal metaphor but not to reveal it to their partners. Why did he ask them to do that, he said. In fact, that animal represented the secrecy and lack of dialogue in an organisation, which needs to be overcome. "Feedback from other people is held back from us every day, especially at work — that's the reality and its painful, he said." But it can change. "If you and your partner can think of three strategies to encourage other people in your life to give feedback at home or work then I'll let you tell each other the animal metaphor," Silberman smiled.
In an interesting twist at the end he asked participants to fold their hands and then fold them backwards, then to do the same with their legs and feet and even stand on a chair and do the same. "Now we're really out of our comfort zone," Silberman says. Just like when people must take new ideas on board and integrate them into the workplace. "See if you can regain your balance — if you can stay on the tight rope and achieve balance even though you're out of your comfort zone."
As trainers there is nothing that will enable us to do it right the first time. We learn as we experience.
Paxton argued that self-directed learning is the key to performance change. In the old days the student found the teacher and dev-eloped questions together with the teacher. The teacher assisted the student to get all the answers, directing the student in a way that he or she wanted to go. So the student acquired knowledge for a selected career path. Today's self-directed learning is moving in this path, said Paxton, to go out there and obtain our own information.
She outlined a six-stage model to imple-ment successful performance-based training.
Assessment comes first. Initially, we need to identify what are the barriers in the workplace that will block the performance we wish to reach for, including internal barriers like systems, policies and equipment which staff have and need. Then we must assess current performance levels and see what we need in order to overcome these barriers. Interviewing people can be one way of finding that out, as well as helping participants develop strategies to change the situation.
In the second stage, Paxton told the audience they should look at the types of information staff want to learn about, then develop it into modules. That will act as the base to developing your training programme, she said. Then, in the third part of her model, a training programme should begin to be put together. Adult training must have active involvement, which requires the redesigning of existing traditional learning-type training programmes. Learning should be matched to participants' interests.
Next comes the pre-learning phase, where interview questions should be developed and staff should talk with those employees who are capable of implement-ing the envisaged performance. We need to see what happens and evaluate in order to see how to re-work it without the mistakes which occurred in the past. But, Paxton stressed, let people know that it is safe to make mistakes.
The fifth stage is delivery and action planning. One type of performance-type training could involve setting up training labs and letting employees see what they need to be instructed in. Case studies can be done, where the participants come up with a solution and then the trainer does a briefing so participants see where they made mistakes or what issues they may have forgotten, she said.
It is important that training theory is applied right there or otherwise in time it will go. For that, Paxton recommended an interactive application activity, one in every ten minutes of training and at the end of the training to make sure that everybody has prepared some action of performance plan. She said to track the type of performance action we need to see taking place. Be specific on the performance that you need to change, she warned, and put some kind of time period over which change can be identified (remember, it always takes twice as long for a person to change his/her performance so you will need to multiply it by a factor of two). The participant should list the resources they will have access to in order to change their performance. They could be coaching, meetings with their team, constant consultation with their supervisor. Then finally, rate the priorities of the tasks in which we need to see change.
The sixth and final stage of Paxton's model is to change the culture in our work place. In this instance, Paxton argued that coaching is the key to performance. We need to convince our supervisors to be involved in this process, she said. The coach needs to understand adult motivation. She observed that there are a lot of people in our work environment with low self esteem. Engaging our participants is an important aspect of performance improvement, which might for example involve awarding small gifts for successful work.
Paxton told the audience: Change is inevitable in working environments. But peoples' first reaction to change is denial — emotions like anger and fear are common. Anger because we change something that is working for us and that we have lost control of and fear that we will lose something that we have and that we will not get something that we will need. Confusion follows. But from confusion we can progress to renewal, she said. We begin to understand what is our new role and expectations. From renewal we move to comfort and then we can start performing again.