Pursuing the Leader-Employee Education Revolution- September 27th, 2015

21st Century Business Ideas 

 by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“Today in factories, offices and other work places, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to.” Article ‘Rethinking Work” by Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College; in NY Times Sunday Review, August 2015.

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“Economists who study retail distinguish between ‘low-road’ and ‘high-road’ employers. One group keeps labor costs down, the other invests more in workers and reaps the benefits in higher productivity. Cost-conscious Wal-Mart is trying to move toward the high road.” Article ‘Wal-Mart tries to Skill-up’ by Tamar Jacoby, President, Opportunity America, in Wall St. Journal Review, September 2015.

 

    If you’re a leadership development professional and also a member of LinkedIn, you will be aware of how many major companies are staffing up with leader and employee development-training professionals. Perhaps US companies are returning to where they were during the mid 1940s to late 1970s?  Back then they were the leaders in company career and staff training. And it showed in their tremendous success and profitability at that particular time.

 

All of that seemed to go out of the window when the Germans, Japanese and others came into the US market with cheaper, higher quality products. In order to match this fierce competition, many companies abandoned their in-house programs and went for quicker results by hiring “experienced” people – aided by headhunters and recruitment agencies – along with often costly, performance incentive programs for fully-trained professionals. Are we now beginning to witness a return to those earlier, heady career-training investment days?

 

Financial executives are now coming to terms with the fact that their “low-road” employee approaches are offset by the  substantial costs of employee turnover and lack of productivity. Standard turnover  in retail is 50% during the first six months and is not so much better in many other industries. Incentive programs have proved to be expensive, especially as they have a ratchet-up effect to meet people’s more mercenary side and therefore nullify any savings made.

 

They’re beginning to realize that, if they can get people to stay more than 12 months, they will save substantial sums of money. By rule of thumb, turnover costs 20-30% of entry level salaries in the first 6-9months. In Wal-Mart’s case this computes to at least $5000 within the first three months. Multiply that by 50% of all those hired in a company with tens of thousands of employees and numbers become significant. A lot of this is also caused by inadequate hiring practices, too.

 

Wal-Mart hopes that substantially more new-employee training will also result in better customer service and happier shoppers. There’s no doubt that competent staff helps customer relations. On top of that, Wal-Mart is also revolutionizing its approach to empowering its “managers” to lead people versus just control and discipline their people. This includes more responsibility for coaching and maximizing team roles. Such people leaders will be focused less on efficiency tasks – like displays, ordering produce, completing charts and keeping efficiency stats.

 

At this point, it’s a shame we don’t see a revolution in work-a-day language by companies or journalists so as to complement any changes. Instead of supervisor or department manager, it would be great to see team or program leader. Usually less than 25% of people within a given team need “managing” or “supervising.” The rest need coaching, challenging to utilize their deeper talents, or mentoring. All three are related to leadership or the ‘high-road’ approach.

 

Additionally, the articles are infected by words such as “chain-of-command” – high-road equivalent is levels of leadership, since people-leadership needs to be practiced at all levels. Or we see the word “accountable” – high-road equivalent is impact-outcomes, since the benefit-outcomes for all company constituents – both internal and external – is far more motivational.

 

Or the words “teach or train”  –  high-road equivalent is two-way education, since two-way education is about fully engaging trainees. To teach or train in the traditional way is often a one-way, rote learning approach, where trainees retain relatively little of what is being taught. Our drive for computerized training is in the latter category and experience has taught this writer it works best when used as a revision-study tool only, not for learning new material.

 

According to the quoted NY Times article, traditional thinking was framed by Adam Smith’s philosophy -father of industrial capitalism – where he viewed people as inherently lazy and they would only work for pay. His philosophy has

been highly influential for nearly 250 years, hence we have conditioned workplace people to only work for money.

 

Enlightened leadership shows us otherwise – like offering people a really engaging purpose;  regularly consulting and including them; giving them a sense of regular accomplishment; enabling them to be part of a genuine team; letting them be empowered to make suggestions or enhance situations; and providing education to maximize their contributions. In high-road enterprises, where many of these factors are practiced, people are open to work for less, if the above mentioned ingredients are  in place.

 

The quoted articles make the case that such thinking applies at all levels, including entry-level service workers, cashiers, janitors, cart pushers, dish washers and sales associates.  To this extent,  organizations need to become deadly serious about rewarding people with more than just money; like:

» Career Progression –  This could be in the form of people leadership or senior specialist, following some intense in-house education, where participants receive competence certificates that they can also share with future employers. This includes modules enabling them to become experts or masters within either their leader or specialist role or field.

» New Competence Areas – Educating and exposing them to totally new competence areas – that is, going from cashier to sales; going from cabin steward to ship-board client relations; going from operations into systems programming; and so on. We all too often type-cast people or allow managers to hang onto their people, rather than allow them to make transitions after 3-5 years. Type-casting is a significant shortcoming within so many enterprises and encourages people to become stale. Where transitions are made, the expense is far out-weighed by the productivity and goodwill of the re-tooled person.

» Special projects – Growth projects normally abound in every organization’s year that could challenge volunteer groups of 6-7 people to focus on. Such duties will be handled beyond their regular roles. With the right projects, extra participation will become inspiring for even the most hardened workplace person. For such groups, figuring out an optimum approach, putting together an effective implementation strategy, and leading the way on making effective changes can be immensely satisfying.

» Organization perspective – Engaging people in 6 or 12 monthly “big picture” briefings not only provides valuable education, but allows people to make suggestions or volunteer their time, where appropriate. Participation should be encouraged rather than discouraged. The latter is too often the case in “command and control” enterprises.

» Inclusive communication – Tied to the prior item, is the whole issue of executives more effectively communicating with their frontline people. Reality attests to the fact that executives communicate in one language – albeit in strategic, financial or logistical terms –, while their frontline people talk  in another – today’s micro-challenges, team-mate bug-a-boos, tabloid headlines, and so on. Without careful and insightful translation both-ways, both sides  talk past each other. This is the next frontier for so many organizations to cross, with no silver-bullets to hand. Every enterprise has its own linguistic challenges and there are tremendous gains to be made by addressing them.

 

So education, especially two-way education, is likely to be the cornerstone of building successful enterprises, and it shouldn’t be restricted to the above suggestions. Traditional training is just like covering a ring with gold: plate the basic metal and it appears to look good in gold. Whereas, done properly, education is like melting gold through the whole product. Then it has real, substantial value. Those really valuable, high-road organizations stand out. You can make your organization stand out, too. Let the revolution continue.

To learn more about insightful, two-way education by talking with: