Workforce Learning

A newsletter by Alice Waagen (Summer 2005)
Photo by kramerlevin.com

Pro Bono: The Importance of Giving—and Getting—Back

Doing business “pro bono” is the legal term for donating your time, talents and energy to a cause without receiving financial remuneration. A more universal term for it is volunteerism. Most people I know give back in some form or other to worthwhile causes.

As one colleague of mine said recently, “I always wanted to make a difference in my work, help people or the organization in some meaningful way. But organizational politics frequently undermine the work I do. So I seek out ways to give back in the community. I get much greater personal return for my investment outside of my paying job!”

But, just like our paid work, sometimes volunteer assignments don’t work out as planned. Like any job, it is the match between your needs and the needs of the organization that results in the perfect engagement. And one bad experience can put you off volunteering for a long time.

I’ve had many volunteer experiences over the years — most worthwhile, but a few disastrous. Just this past year I had a painful experience “resigning” a volunteer position that was not working out for me. I accepted this position assuming it was an open-ended engagement. I soon experienced a values conflict over how the organization was being managed and needed to extricate myself. I then found out that this position had a three-year tenure! My exit was viewed poorly by all involved, partly because I didn’t feel comfortable explaining my reasons to everyone.

I am passionate about giving back to the community and did not want to let one negative experience put me off volunteerism in the future. Based on both my positive and negative experiences, and the stories I have heard from others, I’ve developed a set of “Rules of Engagement” for pro bono work.

These rules are the due diligence you need to do before committing your time and involvement to someone else’s cause. They will help you to objectively evaluate a volunteer engagement, and avoid being swept away by the rhetoric of the mission or the flattery of being asked to help out.

• Pre-engagement: Look at this as you would a paid employment situation.
  Ask: What are the job duties? How do they match your key competencies and interests? Are there expectations for you to do fundraising? How do you feel about that?

• During the engagement: Determine if your talents are being fully utilitzed.
  Ask: Does the work match your pre-engagement research? Are you getting something back for your giving? Are you learning new things? Making new friends? Having fun?

• Post-engagement: When leaving the situtation, assess its effectiveness.
  Ask: Did you part as friends? Would you recommend this organization to others?

Certification: The Story Continues

In last quarter’s e-newsletter, I talked about the American Society for Training and Development’s new competency model and how it will be used to develop certification for training professionals. Many of you gave me feedback regarding your views on certification. Some were positive, but most expressed a certain cynicism about why we even need professional certification.

The real question: Will being a Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) really be meaningful to our colleagues and clients or just be a source of revenue for ASTD?

I must admit that I too have mixed feelings about the whole certification process. In general, certification is an excellent way to codify knowledge and set standards for performance. It can also function as a way for a profession to ensure quality control, uniformity of service delivery, and standards of performance. You know when you hire a CPA that you are getting accounting services held to a standard level of training and performance.

But in our profession, training and development, can we define a standard body of knowledge and test for it? Now this is really problematic. The training and development profession, in all its permutations (OD, Performance Consulting, etc.), is a relatively young one, dating from the post-World War II interests in occupational therapy and industrial psychology.

We essentially operate in an intellectual soup, composed of theoretical smatterings from philosophy, education, psychology, sociology and other disciplines. We are not a pure profession stemming from a cohesive base of learning, but rather one built from an amalgam of ideas, processes and procedures. Thus how can we codify a standard body of knowledge?

I applaud the efforts of the folks at ASTD for trying. I personally believe that this step is a natural one in the evolution of a true profession. It is a good opportunity to define what fits, and throw out the fads and flavors-of-the-month that have sprouted up over the years. But let’s not kid ourselves — the primary value of this effort will be for our internal use. I doubt many CEOs or senior leaders will care if someone is a CPLP or not. But we, over time, will have the satisfaction of clarifying and understanding the parameters of what we need to know, and how to use this knowledge in our work.

Books for Leaders: The Principles of Scientific Management

Every now and then, I enjoy mixing my two interests in history and business by rereading a book from the past. One great classic that is still an enlightening read today is The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor – known as the inventor of time and motion studies.

In 1911, Taylor proposed a new and radically different approach to management, called scientific management. His work was an attempt to counter the adversarial struggle between labor and management which was prevalent in his day. As he saw it, workers used various methods to “under-work,” or deliberately work slowly, in order to protect their jobs and those of their co-workers. Management, driven by the need to increase productivity, relied on a series of positive and negative incentives to boost output. Taylor saw this system as flawed, and worked out his revolutionary theories as a positive alternative.

One cornerstone of Taylor’s approach was to study each separate task in a work process and to measure and quantify the time and motions needed to perform it optimally. He was inspired by some of the research being conducted at that time to determine the ratio of manpower to horsepower. Taylor, working in the steel mills, eventually was able to quantify the maximum load for a hypothetical “first-class” worker, as well as the rest times required by such a worker for optimal efficiency. Through this method he was able to increase outputs in the steel mills by a staggering 60-70%, far more than any incentives were able to achieve.

It is a tribute to the soundness of Taylor’s scientific management process that it remains required reading in leadership courses nearly a century later. In fact, the details of his time and motion studies are very reminiscent of the early days of quality programs. Total Quality Management espoused that if you couldn’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it – very Taylor-esque!

And yet, much of what Taylor preached seems archaic today. For example, he boldly stated that scientific management is the responsibility of the manager because the worker is simply too “stupid” to figure it out himself. In his time, perhaps, this was a more understandable conclusion: most workers were illiterate and poorly educated manual laborers who had to base their work approaches on word-of-mouth instructions and by observing others. Their work practices varied tremendously depending on whatever processes were handed down by their foremen. Even given these realities, however, Taylor’s views were extreme: he believed laborers were no better than oxen.

Nevertheless, Taylor has important insights that are relevant today. In his model, success depends on close and intimate cooperation between a manager and his laborers. As he pointed out:

• The manager’s job is to observe, analyze and codify the optimum steps needed for task completion.
• Managers must teach, help and guide workers in effective methods.
• And managers must plan the work in advance, ensuring that each worker is best matched to a particular job according to his or her capabilities.

This ultimate “cooperation between management and workers” results in attaining the basic goal of management: “maximum prosperity for the employer and the employee.”

Taylor also speaks to today’s management issues in that he includes studies on what motivates workers. He tested the incentive practices of his day by simply offering wage raises as a means to increase efficiency. During these experiments he discovered that increasing wages does not produce a permanent increase in output if the underlying processes are not also analyzed and improved. Nearly 100 years later, studies have confirmed that compensation increases, when not married with other incentives, fail to motivate employees beyond a limited timespan.

The bottom line: By recognizing the manager and laborer as partners in the business enterprise, Taylor established the foundation for participatory management — an approach that would not be fully developed for nearly 50 more years. His relevance for us may be less in his time and motion studies than in his revolutionary break from the adversarial, dictatorial management of his times, in favor of individualized performance coaching. (In one rather touching example, he noted that alcoholism would be reduced in the workforce because men couldn’t work at optimum performance if drunk!)

Although it is not his main message, Taylor’s sub-theme that every worker needs to be measured and matched to the best work for him or her is clearly still relevant — and important for leaders to apply in today’s organizations.