Are emotions good for business?

I love Dragon's Den. It's a fantastic bit of reality TV which I enjoy. And I hate reality TV. So this is one of the few I indulge in. It's in season 8 which goes to show how strong the show is. The format of the show is simple enough. Pitch your product to a panel of investors ("dragon's") and if they believe enough in you and your product, they'll give you the investment you're looking for, and take some equity in your business.

The presentations are what I like best about the show. You have to have a good product, but sometimes that isn't enough. If you can't sell it, they won't buy it. In one of the winning pitches last week, the presenter cried because of the praise heaped on her by Theo Paphitis (one of the dragons). I cried out on Twitter that crying is cheating in presentations - and I stand by that.

It prompted a conversation with a fellow L&Der, Stella Collins, around what emotions are allowed to be displayed in the workplace. And this is an interesting topic. So let's have a peek at what research tells us.

The question isn't so much do emotions have a place at work, I think it's more, how emotionally intelligent are your workforce? This also ties in with the Intelligent Behaviours theory I've been working on. First let's look at an emotionally intelligent workforce.

First, it's important to recap what emotional intelligence is. It's a form of multiple intelligences, and Daniel Goleman took selective work and coined the term emotional intelligence (EI or sometimes referred to as EQ). He argues that EQ is distinctly different from IQ in that it can be something which can be learned over time, where IQ is a static ability. Within this, he describes five broad sets of behaviours that you should remain conscious of if you want to be successful in your dealings with others: social skills, self regulation, self motivation, empathy and self awareness. Over the years, a variety of measurement tools have been developed to identify areas of weakness and strength in EQ and subsequent techniques to help develop your overall EQ. Some of these that come to mind are Baron EQi and Consulting Tools 360 EQ tool.

Having an emotionally intelligent workforce means you need a team of people (not necessarily managers) who understand what it means to be emotionally intelligent, how to respond to others, and how to develop others capabilities of being emotionally intelligent. For example, if Bob is angry and is shouting at Berk, the first port of call for most people will be to turn a blind eye and gossip about it later, then for someone to make a complaint to HR, then for some formal action being taken, and all of it on both employees formal records. That's hardly what Bob or Berk want to happen, regardless of how inappropriate their behaviour.

If someone is emotionally competent though, they will be able to deal with the situation immediately, with autonomy and confidence. This means, addressing Bob initially and taking him away from the situation, letting him vent, empathising with him, understanding what brought him to that level of anger, and then allowing him some time away from the desk and team. It's about taking Berk aside and doing the same thing. And then, if both are agreeable it's about getting them in the same room and being open with one another about their disagreement, and once it's been aired and genuinely resolved, they go back to their team.

This sounds all rosy, but this is a blog post and I'm limited by how much I can elaborate. But you can quite comfortably see there is a process driven way of dealing with this, and there's having an Intelligent Behaviour mindset as I've described.

Equally, if Bernie is upset and starts crying, how do you react to this? Typical behaviour may be to just shy away from dealing with it, and probably recommending he go home for the rest of the day, and on his return ask him how he is, but not really deal with it. Or you can allow him to go away and cry, seek him out, and then talk with him to find out why he's so upset. If it's something which can't be dealt with there and then, is it something which will be a barrier to him working for the rest of the day? If it is, then he should go home as there's no sense in him being at work. If it isn't then you need to provide some coaching for him so he can focus on the work ahead for the rest of the day. You then touch base again at the end of the day and find out how he is before he goes home. The next day you catch up with him one last time, just to ensure he's ok.

What some large companies would tend to do in this situation is to send either of the people above to a counsellor of some sort and seek professional help. And that may be appropriate for a small percentage of the workforce, but for most situations on a day to day basis, an Intelligent Behaviour mindset suggests there's a much better way to deal with people when they're displaying strong emotions.

Are L&D losing the battle?

In a summary post earlier this week, I outlined the key points from the L&D2020 workshop with the Training Journal. Today I'd like to address some of the points raised from that meeting and voice my thoughts.

The future skill set

So the one over-riding feature about the day was it was all very present based. That's to say, there was nothing about the future. There was lots about what L&D needs to do today in order to be successful. And I agree with most of the things there. L&D has to be business focused. There's no two ways about this. Gone are the days you can come bounding in saying "I've got a great idea for a training course", and commence to put everyone through it. But this isn't anything new. Businesses are moving so fast and agile these days that L&D has to move with the same pace.

I've been lucky in that my career to date has exposed me to a lot of business practices and ways of working so that I am confident in my ability to consult the organisation, and provide solutions based on the needs, as opposed to my ego.

There was talk of L&D being 'T-shaped' people. There's many an analogy you could use for what an L&D person needs to be like. It does fundamentally come down to the fact that you have to be able to describe what the business does as well as the CEO. There was a great quote from the day which I strongly believe - "you have to love the business you're in as much as, if not more than, learning and development". How true. I quietly believe save the senior management team, I'm one of few people in the business who could accurately describe every function we have, what they do, how they do it, and what their names all are.

No mention of digital

I was surprised there was no mention of digital, social media, Generation Y/Millennials. This was a real missed opportunity. Let's take each of those things in order.

I've spoken about digital in a previous post and would encourage you have a read of that here.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know I enjoy social media. There is so much happening in the interwebs that if we aren't involved in those discussions we're never going to understand the world we live in. It really is a fundamental shift in human behaviour we cannot ignore.

The possibilities that social media and digital open for L&D is immense. Informal learning as we know it traditionally is nothing compared to what is currently available. And it's all free. Open source technology means you don't have to pay for anything and even though some information may need to be paid for, you can guarantee in a short space of time, someone will have found a way to make it free and open for all.

Generation Y/Millennials for those who aren't sure are those generation of people born in the mid 1980s to early 2000's. L&Ders haven't really had to deal with this group in any pro-active way yet, because they're only really entering the workforce in a significant way now and are on the radar as ones to develop. The challenge here is to not be complacent and think they can be dealt with in the same way as other generations. There are characteristics that it's worth learning about, but I'm not going into that here.

What this means for L&Ders though is we have to be far more agile and nimble in our approach to L&D as a whole - not just to Gen Y. Individuals will want more focus on their development as they learn they can grow careers quickly and develop skills in their own time. Does that mean the end of training courses 2 days long, residential and expensive? Not necessarily. It means L&Ders (both internal and external professionals) need to really get into the needs of the business, develop a plan and be willing to adapt as they roll it out.

E-learning and social learning tools will be a growing part of that new learning. Open source technology will allow information that was once premium only to suddenly become free and available to all. Even I, who am a hardened face to face L&D believer, am waning to the fact if I don't learn about what these tools offer, and how to use them effectively, I'll be screwed.

Is Donald Clark right?

Donald Clark is a blogger who is a harsh critic of the current face of L&D/HR/CIPD and education. He has some hard views about things, and unfortunately he may be right on a lot of them. He reminds me of the heckler in the group who is a harsh cynic, not because he doesn't buy into the message, he just doesn't agree with the delivery.

The challenge here is how to prove Donald wrong. Well first I'd like to have him in a room with me. I've had enough mistakes of training delivery, delivered Diversity training to production operators at a car manufacturers, and faced the darkest side of cynicism. And through my training career to date, I'm confident I can engage with my audience, learn what their needs are, and ensure they leave my room having learned something. I'd say my batting average is about 80% success rate in being able to do so.

However, a main criticism of Donald's is his stance on the lack of effective use of technology in delivering a message. And here I fall down. I am a strong believer in the superiority and power of face to face learning over e-learning type events (notice the language I'm purposefully using?). And this is what I need to learn better. How can I hold myself up as a believer in L&D if I'm not utilising the technology available to deliver messages in equally effective ways? Therein lies the nub, which I think is true of many L&Ders in this world.

Is the future bright?

I think the future has a lot of exciting prospects. Coalition government in the UK, new administration in the USA, global recession, China and India on global rise. Digital, ever increasing broadband speeds, social media and new technologies. Climate change, oil spills, being green, corporate social responsibility. All of these things are factors L&Ders have to understand and develop ways of thinking how to provide solutions to these through the businesses we work with.

The stock and trade of what L&Ders do will be the same. Effective management of the L&D cycle. It's the continual learning we have to engage with that the challenge lies in. Short of going to Roffey Park, paying £0000's and learning some core skills, I have very few options open to me to develop this growing skill set. There are few 'learning institutions' aimed specifically at L&Ders. A lot of what you learn is on the job, through those senior to you, and through trial and error.

I'm confident in my abilities as an L&Der to deliver a message, but as I've mentioned above, e-learning and social learning tools are providing so much accessibility to a growing workforce (virtual and static) that us stock and trade L&Ders have to get on that bandwagon or we face a losing battle. And that is a horrid thought for me.

If you're of the trainer ilk that says I have a great solution and it's just right for your organisation, you're old news. You either need to think of 100 variations of that solution, or learn how to develop consultancy skills instead of selling skills.

L&Ders have a great opportunity to help businesses and organisation deliver be successful. As one of the points raised at the workshop, L&D are the best Trojan horses for organisational change. This, I truly believe.

The future skill set of L&D part 1

On Friday I attended a workshop on the future skills needed in L&D. It was hosted by the Training Journal and was part 3 in a series of workshops over the year. I've attended 2 so far this year and will be attending the last in November. If you're in L&D, or have a vested interest in the value of L&D I highly recommend you attend. The next workshop is on the topic of the growing gap between OD and L&D. Sign up here.

Here's a few things from the day that I thought were important.

Next Generation HR

This was an interesting presentation from Lee Sears (co-founder and director of Bridge) and Sue Stokely (founder of Coach in a Box). If you get a chance to listen to Lee talk on the circuit, I'd highly recommend it, he has an excellent presentation style and delivers a message very well. If you were following my tweets on Friday you may recognise the following learnings I picked up:

1. The ability of HR needs to rest in identifying business issues not transactional issues
2. L&OD is no longer about the individual necessarily. It's about identifying the key movers and players in your business and investing in them.
3. High quality dialogue should be used as a key change tool over and above 'models'
4. High quality HR and L&OD = business savvy + organisational savvy + context savvy
5. L&OD are the best trojan horses for organisational change
6. L&OD has become seduced by its own sophistication
7. L&OD must have fundamental skills in diagnosing business issues and creating interventions that suit these.
8. The best L&D people are business people first
9. Greater self awareness does not equal ROI or business change/success
10. Tomorrow's leaders need to look at tomorrow's problems/challenges
11. Companies need to throw away competency frameworks as they are too restrictive and are only relevant to how your business used to operate, not how it needs to operate in the future.
12. Sue reinforced the position that learning takes places in the following way - 70% informal, 20% network, 10% formal

The T-Shaped L&D person

Paul Fairhurst (principal consultant in the Institute of Employment Studies consultant team) then came and presented a talk about L&Ders needing to be 'T-shaped' people. In essence any good L&Der needs to have a broad understanding of what is happening in the business and a deep knowledge of L&D skills to work to business needs. Key to this is the ability to have consulting skills.

The IES have carried out some global CEO research and uncovered the following emerging themes:

1. People are finding new ways to learn
2. Continuous, informal, social learning will grow
3. New technologies provide opportunities
4. Informal learning to be recognised (accredited)
5. Manager and individual responsibilities
6. Boundaries between L&D and OD will blur
7. There will be a shift in L&D professionals skill set

Learning for the next decade

Martyn Sloman is a research academic who specialises in learning and development and author of forthcoming e-book on 'L&D 2020: A Guide for the Next Decade'. He presented a talk about his work with the New Zealand government and an organisation based in Singapore.

His research showed there are some key things an effective L&D person needs to understand and be able to do. First is a list of activities he recommends if you want to make a significant contribution to the organisation:

• determine the skills needed to deliver value
• investigate how they are best acquired/developed
• ask 'who are the key stakeholders in shaping the learning process'
• seek to develop a learning culture
• design, deliver and monitor interventions that promote learning

And you should be able to ask business leaders the following questions (and arguable be able to answer them yourself):

• what is the nature of the business - how do you compete?
• are there particular groups of the workforce who are critical to business value? Is there a cluster of workers? What knowledge and skills do they need?
• how are these key skill required? Is it through: external recruitment, recruitment from within or training?
• if they are trainable (or learnable) skills how are they trained/learned?
• to what extent do you compete on knowledge and skills? How does learning and training add strategic business value?
• looking to the future, what do you see changing on the business skills front?

A snapshot of the market

Francis Marshall gave the last presentation of the day. Francis is managing director of Cegos UK. Cegos have produced their annual international survey on L&d across 2000 employees in France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Unfortunately Francis had the witching hour and half of the delegates had left the workshop at this point (which I might add is very rude - you're not that busy, don't kid yourself). As such he raced through his presentation which was a shame as the findings he was presenting were very relevant to the discussion topic. Unfortunately it also means I have less notes and almost zero memory of the key takeaways from his presentation. This is unfair to Francis as it was interesting, just didn't give the time he was deserved.

I've many thoughts about the day's event and will do Part 2 later in the week. In the meantime if you have thoughts about the above please do let me know.

Whatever you do, don't follow best practise

Here at LBi Towers (my workplace, all opinions my own, blah, etc) we have a theory that best practise is all well and good if you want to identify a 'standard' way of doing something. But, if you want to do something amazing, you need to do more than just best practise.

Essentially best practise is about doing a set of actions that result in a desired result. And in most cases that desired result is pretty staid stuff. We want to increase online engagement, we want to improve retention rates, we want to increase brand perception, we want to be an employer of choice. Those are all fair, and in some cases lofty, ambitions. And for the most part, those companies will be advised to do a set of actions to help them achieve those things. And the cycle is reinforced.

So why am I, an L&Der, concerned about best practise? Well, it's a piece of terminology that has infected both HR and L&D circles so much that I think we've both lost our zest and passion for the job we do. Many in the industry follow what has been outlined by ACAS or the CIPD or because they are the alleged experts that guide what we do and how we should do it. For L&D in particular, there is no direct industry body, but that's something for me to rant about later.

What this has meant for us professionals is we are trying to get companies, in the main, disciplined in the act of following policies and procedures so they do not fall foul of employment tribunals for transgressions they should have avoided. Part of what I'm talking about is reminiscent of a post by a HR professional, delightfully called theHRD, where he blogged about the de-skilling of HR. And also a post I made a while ago on the over-reliance of policies.

Instead what's happened is a field we now call Organisational Development came out of the bushes and said, Hey! You keep doing your policies, L&D, you keep doing your training, and we'll get on and do the exciting company wide development stuff like employee engagement and inter-departmental blending and culture development. I'm not begrudging OD professionals what they do - in truth my passion lies more in OD than it does L&D. But what is apparent is HR and in most cases L&D are given shorter remits of work as other 'specialists' come in to do the stuff which is not best practise.

These specialists push those boundaries of convention and are lauded for their free thinking and challenging ways. And the truth is they should be applauded for those things. But, and here's the crux of it, HR and L&D have an equally important responsibility to shout for the same recognition.

It's not enough that HR manages recruitment, retention, employee relations and policies. It's not enough that L&D creates a training programme, delivers training, and helps staff feel valued. They need to move beyond those restrictions and show companies that they are better than that. And that's not by following the best practise of other companies, or your very good friend who is HR director at Google. It's by identifying which business objectives you can get more involved with that show either HR or L&D can play a more strategic role in the business or organisation. That's a basic tenet of what should be happening anyway, and I'll wager 80% of HR professionals aren't doing this.

In my opinion, the best way to ensure you have someone who is looking beyond best practise is by having a full time in-house resource dedicated to their role. Outsourcing is fine but does not allow the true value of the profession to be realised. I'm fortunate that I have full responsibility for L&D, have no one to steer what I do, am self-reliant enough to get on and do things and have established the credibility of L&D across the agency. It's taken time, but I've done that. If you're not able to do that, you either need to review the responsibilities of your role, rise to the occasion and make your mark known, or seek to develop yourself so that you can step up and not rely on best practise.

Tell your bad worker how well they're doing

An annoyance of mine in the workplace is managers who don't manage bad workers. By bad workers I mean the kind of person who thinks they're doing a good job, but isn't. They're just bad at what they do. This may be because they don't have the required skills, knowledge, aptitude, ability or attitude. However you look at it, they're just bad at their job.

In a previous post I talked about sacking the manager who thinks they're doing a good job when they're not. This is the other side of that coin - dealing with an employee who has no idea they're not doing a good job, but no-one is telling them. Instead, they're being told what a good job they're doing and thereby inflating their sense of self-importance.

I know such a person. Bob is awful at what he does. Bob's manager though, Berk, isn't telling him. Instead of trying to deal with Bob's lack of ability to do a good job, Berk is allowing Bob to just get on with whatever Bob thinks is an effective way of working. This is driving me nuts as Berk is effectively burying his head in the sand staying aloof to the issue of bad work. Meanwhile, Bob is ambling along, being told 'you're doing a great job', where in reality, he isn't.

I've tried to give Berk some feedback about Bob and Bob's ability to do the job, but I've not been listened to. So I have to put up with Bob's incompetence and air of 'I know what I'm doing' when in reality, Bob should not even be here.

Those of you who know me, don't try figure out who this might be. I know many people in the business I work for this could be true of, and as such this is a message to try and convey the sheer frustration I have at this situation.

If you want some 'harder' information about the impact of this bad work here you go:

- workload get spread to the team that should be dealt with by one person

- Bob talks 'confidently' about a given topic when they're actually talking shit

- Bob's perception of his own workload is mountainous and insurmountable - this means Bob rants and is negative towards others that Bob perceives as being less busy

- when team members learn about Bob's negativity they in turn feel negative towards Bob and indirectly towards Berk for not managing him

- deadlines are missed, meetings not attended, wrong information being delivered

So, if you are Berk, please deal with Bob's inability to do the job. If you are Bob, then God help you in your career and life in general.