Workforce Learning

A Newsletter by Alice Waagen (Winter 2007)
Photo by takomabibelot, flickr.com

Take Time to Establish a Communication Bill of Rights

How is it that we can we be so poor at interpersonal communication in the workplace when we have so many new tech tools to aid in communication? We are now paperless, right? And aren’t BlackBerries great at instant communication?

Yet we are finding that making communication faster and easier can actually degrade message quality. Faster often means shortening the brain time, the time we need to take to be thoughtful, careful and just plain accurate about what we need to say and to whom we say it.

It is becoming common to hear people bashing the “CrackBerries,” but I rarely see any proposed solutions to the imperfect communications that have been enabled by instant communication technologies.

Joe Robinson has a short article in this month’s Fast Company magazine that advocates putting some controls in place to manage instant communication. He proposes that organizations create their own E-Tool Bill of Rights — one that allows workers to reclaim their right to time off from the barrage of messages.

I love this concept because it is one step closer to returning to the simpler days when, if you left work, you really left work behind and had an enriching and rewarding private life. I wish more organizations would give their employees permission to turn off work when they are at home.

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

When I first looked at Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I felt it had two major obstacles to earning a place on my “Books to Recommend” list. First, it is a book about teams and second, it is a book about leadership. That’s a double whammy right out of the gate: given the plethora of written material on leadership and teams, I find it a rare occurrence when an author can present new information on these topics.

Although I cannot honestly say that Lencioni gives us new and original information, his presentation of the material is innovative. He unveils a simple model for team effectiveness by telling a story about a small business that is saved from disaster by a new CEO who transforms the senior team from isolated, individual contributors into a high-functioning leadership team.

And, the model Lencioni presents has one unique twist: it explains team characteristics as negative attributes which he calls “dysfunctions.” This concept is easy for most of us to understand and apply, since we often see examples of negative behaviors in the workplace as well as their impacts on our businesses’ success. So, for example, when he presents “absence of trust” as the first dysfunction, it is easy to understand as well as to cite numerous examples that apply to team behavior.

Lencioni’s model is presented in the form of a pyramid — which harkens back to a well-known behavioral model, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Like Maslow’s needs model, Lencioni’s team dysfunction model is hierarchy-based. Thus the first dysfunction, lack of trust, must be resolved before a team can tackle the second dysfunction, fear of conflict. When positioned in a hierarchy, the model makes perfect sense and has good “face validity” in its simple, common-sense language and presentation. In all, the model is practical, easy to understand and makes sense.

This leads me to the aspect of the book that seems to be most controversial among readers: the “fable” story line. I read this book for one of my book clubs this fall and found that our group had opposite reactions to the fable format. Half the group found the storytelling device engaging and easy to read. Half (and I was in this group) found it insufferably didactic and preachy with a slow pace and condescending tone.

As one of my fellow readers put it: “I got annoyed at having to read through the whole book in order to get the model drawn in its entirely at the end of the book. I would have liked to have had the overview of the model first, then the story (which I could choose to skip if I wanted to).”

Advice for readers: Skip the first 185 pages and go right to the model.

The bottom line: All in all, I liked Lencioni’s model. By positioning absence of trust as the foundation of organizational dysfunction, he clarifies why so many teambuilding interventions fail by focusing on interpersonal issues, such as conflict resolution. Trying to resolve disputes without first addressing overall lack of trust gives us a “cotton candy” fix: it tastes good at first but can leave us feeling sick later. By contrast, attacking team dysfunctions using this sequential, holistic methodology can create more lasting impacts on team performance.

ASTD Research Report: Closing the Generational Divide

Every now and then, someone will ask me why I belong to national associations like the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The query usually is accompanied by complaints about the high cost of dues and the perception that one doesn’t get much for the money.

One research report worth reading is Closing the Generational Divide: Shifting Workforce Demographics and the Learning Function, published by ASTD in 2006. The authors highlight the critical role that the learning function can play in helping us deal with impending labor shortages due to retiring knowledge workers. The report is based on a survey of 239 learning execs, jointly authored and conducted by ASTD and IBM.

The report cites five major findings. The one I found most sobering is summarized as “important issue, little action”: 43% of the survey respondents said that changing workforce demographics will have significant impact on their organization in the next 3 to 5 years, and an additional 38% expect moderate impact. Yet when it comes to dealing with the impacts of this demographic shift and knowledge loss, other responses reveal that many organizations’ learning functions are ill prepared.

I see evidence of this in my work with major organizations in the Metro DC area. There is constant talk about labor shortages and the exodus of retirees, and yet I see little change in the content, structure or media of learning. Is this another example of the absence of our voice and influence at the top of organizations?

The good news is that once the critical nature of knowledge loss is appreciated, learning professionals have the skills and abilities to do something about it in the years ahead. I will continue to look in my wanderings for viable solutions to knowledge transfer and retention.