Action from Training for Improving Long Term Performance

Here's the action from a program I did for a group of new employees from sales with varying years of experience (1 yr to 20 years).  The objective was to get them to think on how and why to go about improving performance in the long term.

Some of the topics covered were Personal Brand, Motivation, Resilience, Mindset, and how to develop Power Habits that make one successful.  The time allocated was less than optimum to cover such topics in detail, but I managed to get them thinking with the help of facilitator-led group discussions and processes.

The participants were alert and full of questions and insights that made the workshop fun and interesting and gave positive feedback about me to the organization.

Here's some of the action from the session.

Expectations

Habits that make us unsuccessful

Habits that lead to success

Building Resilience

Learnings of the day

The Reality of Carrot and Stick motivation

Both are temporary.

The carrot makes the employees adopt a kind of mercenary mindset. Nothing wrong except that it is too short termed for any sustained impact.

The stick makes the employees fearful, and kind of wreck the culture where you have more lip service than engaged and passionate effort.

The interesting part is that the employees first would feel the lack of energy to move, before any manager or leader.  The manager or leader sooner or later gets the feeling that things aren't moving as fast (a slightly vague term that doesn't always account for the environment factors) as they should, and so proposes more incentives.  

I recall a leader in one organization wanting to put sales people on PIP if they were at 70% of their monthly target. You can guess what those employees got motivated to do.

Surely the revenue an organization earns can be utilized in more effective areas than carrots and sticks?

Your thoughts on this?  What do you think are the best ways to improve performance?

 

On board the HRM Committee of Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry

I am extremely thrilled and honoured to be a member of the HRM Committee hosted by Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

I'm thoroughly excited to work towards contributing innovative, cutting edge HR practices to enable organisations to enhance their success . Lots of learning opportunties on the way. Thanks to #BCCI

My views on DEI

 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - these words are creating a lot of noise, especially on social media.

Here are my basic views on DEI.

Action from IAF Mumbai Hub Session - The Art of Focused Development Discussion

Feedback as an activity, is not looked at with pleasure.  Try telling someone that you have "feedback" for them, and watch their expression and body language.  If you happen to be their manager, then you may get grudging acceptance.  

Few team managers and leaders are comfortable giving feedback.  This is mainly because they haven't been trained on how to do it.  I recall in my career, during the months of February or March, we in HR were running training sessions on the appraisal process. These appraisal sessions were for both managers and employees.  They consisted of a slide deck, and comments by the HR presenter - that was all. 

Employees were told how to accept feedback from their bosses. Bosses were given information on the Appraisal process, and feedback was considered a side effect. Appraisal Feedback anyway tends to focus on past performance, and little is discussed about future.  The employee is focused on getting the best possible rating for themselves and so any form of Development Feedback takes last place.  Bottom line - the development discussion is not given much importance for the future.

With this knowledge, Varsha Chitnis and myself decided to put together a session to enable a Focused Development Discussion.  Our experiences told us that individual biases and trust have a huge impact on how a development discussion can be conducted. So we incorporated these aspects into our session design and called it The Art of Focused Development Discussion.

Here are some images of the action on that day.

Desired Outcome for the session

Our Session Flow

Harvest from our First Activity

Clustering of behaviours

Clustering of biases and behaviours

Connections made between biases and behaviours

The Blueprint for the FDD

Learnings and Feedback that we received.

The enthusiastic learners

We thoroughly enjoyed designing and running the session. Our sincere thanks to the International Association of Facilitators - Mumbai Hub for the opportunity to do this session.  We are grateful to all the participants who took the time to attend and contribute their experiences into the session.

The Power of Meaningful Recognition Using CliftonStrengths

 Great points in this article about #recognition of employees. I like how there are links to #maslow's model. Here are some quotes from it that resonated with me:

"Positive reinforcement indicates for people exactly what you value -- what benefits the team and the organization -- and how they can do more of it."

"Employees want to know that their unique impact has been seen and valued. Writing “great job” in an email is not individualized #praise."

Read the rest of the article here.

The Recipe for Effective and Long-term Collaboration

Photo Credit: pexels-alexander-grey-1212407

Have you ever watched a movie with friends, and then later realize that each of you liked and disliked different parts of the same movie that you just saw together, at the same time in the same place?  A similar thing happens with real life people. Have you wondered what causes this difference of opinion? I am sure you noticed that this happens in other areas of life too, including the workplace.  Well, you are not alone in this.  Have a look at this snippet from the world of tennis.

From Facebook - "US Open 1981 final...who thought it would be their last match? McEnroe wrote in his book he could not motivate himself for 2 years after Borg quit. He tried to persuade Borg to comback. When Borg was in Chennai in Feb 2023,he was asked about his rivalry with John in a press meet. Borg recalled the interaction he had with McEnroe in 1982 and 1983. This is what Borg said.

"When I stepped away from the game, I was very young. I played an exhibition in Tokyo. John came to me and said, ‘You cannot stop playing tennis.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘No. Because I need you there!’ ‘But I don’t wanna play!"
“But he was always pushing me because I think, as long as I was there, he was pushing (himself). He liked it, he enjoyed it very much and that was very important for him. And he was very sad, disappointed. And he called me year later and said, ‘You sure you not going to come back to tennis again?’ ‘I’m sure. John. Listen, you do your things. I do my things.’

A similar sentiment was expressed by Freddie Mercury in the movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" when he said that while his solo career was successful, he missed the pushback from the Queen band members when they were writing songs. This pushback helped them deliver some of the best music that has stood the test of time.

If you think about it, this is not unusual at all. You would find this kind of team behaviour mentioned in the Storming, Norming and Performing stages of the Tuckman Stages of Group Development model. Every team tends to go through all the stages. Looking at the Storming stage, team members start to display more of their true selves and their differences while working together, which can lead to conflicts.  In the Norming stage, the team members have worked through their differences and establish some consensus (norms) about what and how things will be done.  There may still be disagreements, but are unlikely to derail the work.  In the Performing stage, the team members understand and accept each other better, enabling them to deliver great performance.  These stages aren't linear and team members are likely to revert to the earlier stages in case of new projects, disagreements or changes in leadership. As the leader or team member, the model will help you understand the stage that your team is in, thus enabling you to make relevant adjustments in your behaviour. You can read more details about the model here - https://hr.mit.edu/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development

I have seen this kind of scenario in other situations too. I've learnt that it's important because if you don't have someone who is good enough or better than you to work with, then you cannot improve more than what your mind comes up with.  We know that the seven colours of the rainbow combine to give us many more colours. Similarly, the mind gets it's ideas and inspiration from the points of view that are different / unique / contrary more than the homogeneous.

This absolutely drives home the need for interacting and being with people from diverse  ways of thinking.  We have diverse ways looking at the world and making our strengths come to life (i.e. using them) because we come from different homes, cultures, education, experiences and upbringing which have combined to give us a unique worldview.  This is a practice followed by masters through the ages. Most of the time, however, we're not fully aware that we're doing this.

Could this be because we tend to see things as we are, not as they exist in reality?

So, we must first accept that there are things we prefer to do and things we prefer to NOT do - not try to do everything.  NEXT we have to identify them. If we are able to identify and filter out some of the censorship that is invariably there (fear-driven, cautious behaviour from our Imposter Syndrome being a key culprit) that exists in our minds, we give ourselves the opportunity of asking "why not" or "how about" and exploring possibilities while experimenting with different ways of doing things.  You will find your tasks / work sparking into experiences filled with fresh learning and success.

As a strengths strategy coach, I help teams understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and enable them to build the necessary synergy (and engagement) for creating magic at work.  I use PRISM Brainmapping Inventory or the CliftonStrengths assessment as a primary aid for this.

If you want to know how to get your team to collaborate by complementing each other's weaknesses with their strengths, write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com or call on +91982155778.

 

Conversations that Leaders must have with their people

Here's an indepth read about the #conversations that #leaders need to have with their people.

From the article - "three key conversations for leaders will be : career conversations, performance conversations and engagement conversations."

Some of the questions mentioned in the article can definitely be used to build a #strengthsbased organization.

Read the full article here.

Meritocracy and Performance Management Ratings

https://www.iedp.com/articles/the-road-to-meritocracy-at-work/

If you ever wondered why performance ratings don't mean what they are supposed to mean, and make everyone unhappy, read this super article.

From the article "different managers can have significantly different views of what is meant by merit—based on their individual evaluation experiences when they were employees, and this can in turn influence how they perceive #merit  in their employees."

Read the article here.

 

Create a Growth Culture, Not a Performance Based One.

Superb article on the need for a #growth #culture instead of a #performancebased culture.

From the article- 'A performance culture asks, “How much energy can we mobilize?” and the answer is only a finite amount. A growth culture asks, “How much energy can we liberate?” and the answer is infinite.'

Read the entire article here.

Little Ways the world works

This is an outstanding article about finding ways to excel in your field, that is more relevant to the world we live in, than the field we are in.

From the article - "John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Fields are studied individually, but there are so many common denominators across topics. The more fields a lesson applies to, and the more disparate those fields are, the more powerful and important the lesson becomes."

Read on here! 

Building a culture of Accountability.

 https://situational.com/blog/building-a-culture-of-accountability/

Here's a super article on how to bring in a #culture of #accountability within your organization / #team.

What I particularly liked from here is the lucid articulation of the distinction between accountability and #responsibility

Time to take stock of L&D’s hybrid learning journey

How has hybrid learning worked for you and your organization? Honestly, what is the best thing that you can say has happened for your business or organization culture?

This article takes a really honest and practical look at the #hybridlearning #journey - what worked well, what didn't and what next. There will definitely be some insights for all #HR and #learninganddevelopment folks.

Here's some points that interested me:

1) I don’t think passive listening to lectures is ever the answer to a learning need. 

2) Discuss/integrate/practice – what does this new idea mean for us, how does it work, what does it sound like, look like, feel like? Can I try it out in a safe space and gain feedback?

Please share the points resonated with you.

Click here to read the entire article

My Igniting Performance Certification

 Another new certification I obtained is the Love Your Work: Igniting Performance and Energy from #PeopleAcuity - A Strengths Strategy Company.  Strengths Strategy Inc is where I studied for my Strengths Strategy Coach Certification.  

It was easy to decide to sign up for this course, because it also ties in with my work to help my clients improve their performance.  I wasn't disappointed.  I liked the course and the exercises of self-reflection were really powerful.

Doing this course has uncovered new insights for me in improving my own performance and the performance of my clients, especially those who want to design a career based on their strengths.  Thanks @DeannaMurphy for this amazing course.