Category: Articles

The world has changed dramatically over the past three years– and with it, the world of learning and development. Just as trainers and L&D professionals settled into online delivery, we have now shifted back to hybrid workplaces. Some organizations have reintroduced in-person training, while others are mixed or have declared themselves fully virtual. 

The new age of learning is no longer the future – it’s the present. Companies that resist can find themselves struggling to fill open positions as employees take more control of their own careers. Front and center of employee-driven learning is the ability to learn on demand, in an engaging, interactive, personalized way that is as flexible as online learning and yet has the magic and charm of in-person interactions. In other words, the future of learning has to be phygital: combining the best of both physical and digital worlds. How are trainers to pivot to this new training normal?

This new age of learning, training, and development doesn’t have to be one we resist. Forward-thinking companies can embrace the changes and adapt to a world where a commute of several hours is replaced by productivity and where in-person doesn’t have to mean everyone must be in the same room. 

Let’s take a look at how training is evolving and how companies can look to entice, train, and retain employees. But first, how did we get to this point? 

The Year Everything Changed

As 2019 began, there was already a growing disconnect between employees, who for years had wanted more freedom in the way they worked, and their employers. Many employers believed the requested freedoms would create lackluster results. 

The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone indoors. Traditional companies wishing to stay in business were catapulted into a future they hoped was many years ahead. For them, work meant everyone coming together under one roof to move toward the same goal. 

The idea of using a remote workforce for traditional companies meant losing control. How would employers know if each employee was putting in the adequate amount of time each day? COVID left them no other choice. Employees gathered only the equipment needed from offices and created home workspaces in a matter of days to keep things running the best they could under the new circumstances. 

Technology Does Not Stop

It’s easy to blame the pandemic for the changes but remote training is here not because of COVID, but because of technological advancements. Virtual reality simulations have existed for many years. Long before 2019, pilots logged hours in flight simulators before flying real planes with passengers or cargo. The same can be said for military and law enforcement training. 

Technology is also what may have saved the world economy during the pandemic. Without the advancements of the last decades, how would we have kept moving in the midst of this outbreak? 

While VR’s benefits were initially embraced by the gaming community, many knew its real benefits revolved around the technology’s ability to create a real sense of place and community. The VR market is expected to bring in over $12 billion in revenue by 2024. 

Opposing Sides

As COVID becomes a more manageable disease, employers and employees are seemingly pulling in opposite directions. Businesses want everyone to return to the workplace of old while employees now realize much of their work can be completed from home and would like to hold on to the new ways. 

This opposition is what has led to today’s Great Resignation. Employees exercised their value and resigned from companies they feel are refusing to change in search of companies more in tune with where work is heading. In 2021, over 47 million workers quit their jobs. 

Training Must Evolve

Training professionals must always be aware of the changes coming to the workforce. As generations bring a new outlook to work, trainers must be ready to meet their expectations to create an engaged workforce that believes in a company’s values and takes that company to a bright future. 

Think of anybody coming into an onboarding training session today. This person has spent most of their life to this point learning with the use of a computer, tablet, or phone. A trainer asking them to put away all electronics and take out paper and a pencil to take notes would be a bright red flag about this company as a whole. 

Training in Web 3.0

The internet as we know it today is a tool designed to help our machines connect all around the world. Yes, you are highly communicative online, but you are fully aware that it is happening by communicating from one device to another. 

In training, web 2.0 enabled people to train from anywhere with a solid internet connection. They do so with courses presented to them on the screen that ask them to read training material or view scenarios covering the material. A test is usually given to employees after completing the lessons. 

The shortfall of this training is that while it uses the web, it still relies on old methods of teaching developed decades ago. The idea is to memorize what is being taught. The concepts are then repeated as proof of understanding. 

Let’s go back to the pilots in flight simulators example. How comfortable would you feel getting on a plane if your pilot’s only experience came from reading a digital session and taking a written test? 

Enter training in Web 3.0, a new development that promises us a decentralized, user driven, fairer internet. A clear picture of Web 3.0 or Web3 as it is known is still evolving. What we do know is that Web3 will change the face of L&D as learners expect more authentic experiences that they can control and customize to their learning pace and environments (work from home and otherwise). 

Learning in the Metaverse

The metaverse, a key concept of Web 3, is the evolution of the internet. Rather than connecting machines to machines, you will now travel to a central place of communication. The channels for this new level of communication and collaboration are virtual and augmented reality. Together, they form Extended Reality, also known as XR. 

Benefits of XR Training

XR training is the new age of learning. Thanks to XR, your physical location is no longer a limitation. Trainers can live in one country and onboard a group of new employees scattered throughout the globe. The team can work together as if they were in one room because while connected, they are. 

Training in a virtual space is the opportunity we have all dreamed of for a long time. You can now ditch the old ways of teaching in favor of an experiential approach. You’ll cut down training time, engage your personnel, and teach the way human beings learn best.

Who Is Using XR Training? 

Here are some examples of companies already taking advantage of XR training: 

• Ford Motor Company: Worked with Bosh to develop a VR training tool for their service technicians
• Dermalogica: Uses a VR training program complete with an AI trainer for its 100,000 skin therapists
• Bank of America: VR program consists of 20 simulations for its workforce of 50,000

The New Age of Learning: Wrap-Up

The key to successfully training a new generation of people is to look forward and not back. Robert Lambrechts of Pereira O’Dell said it best, “I don‘t think there‘s ‘going back‘ to anything. That world, whatever we did in January 2020, doesn‘t exist anymore.”

The skills gap continues to grow. Traditional schools are not keeping up with the demands of today and online training is not enough. Employees are looking to their employers to coach and develop them using methods not stuck in the past. 

As trainers, it is our responsibility to work to close the skills gap and XR training is one of the best tools available to do it. Edstutia’s trainer certification program is designed to prepare trainers to fully understand instructional design, development, and delivery in XR and to put their best Web3 foot forward in engaging and developing top-notch talent.

Dr Yogini Joglekar is COO of Edstutia and Senior Consultant at PeopleSmart, specializing in change leadership, communication, and learning technologies.

Do you control your phone or does it control you? 

According to a recent study in the US, 66% of people surveyed show signs of ‘nomophobia’ – the fear of being without their phones. Also, the same study revealed that users unlocked their phones on average 150 times per day. This constant distraction can have profoundly negative effects on our relationships. In early 2010 I purchased a shiny new smartphone (for my job of course) and immediately fell in love with having a mini computer in my pocket. I could manage my emails, diary, messaging, banking…everything on the go. We’ve all been there right, but this was different to most of the technology that had come before – it was highly addictive but not like gaming or TV. Even for those of us who felt that we were not easily distracted, the allure of maximising our ‘efficiency’ and being ‘always contactable’ has remained with many of us to this day. The question for a lot of people now is, “Has the technology improved our lives or made it worse i.e; more stressful with increased anxiety?” As I was in and out of meetings a lot during this period, I left my phone in ‘silent’ mode and it has pretty much stayed that way to this day as my wife can confirm! Of course, this isn’t always possible but it highlights a common power struggle that we have vis-a-vis our tech. 

 

Humans still have centre stage – people matter 

Business is about people – our collaborators who we entrust to deliver our promise day in and day out and our customers who believe what we believe and vote with their wallets. Technology is great and laptops and smartphones have revolutionised our professional mobility plus, coupled with a vast array of apps and software, we now can work from anywhere 24 hours a day if we wanted to. It is essential however, to strike a healthy balance. Many of us have a myriad of apps open at any one time and this can limit our ability to deeply focus on tasks without being constantly distracted. Multitasking is an enemy of productivity and the struggle now is how to design into our

daily flow, periods of uninterrupted work. This is a real challenge for many people and it is those who manage to do this well who will ultimately succeed. Without a high level of wellbeing, all of us, both personally and professionally will suffer so we have to act now. 

Rise of AI and the move towards decentralisation 

Two key areas of technological development are shaping our world more than ever – these are; artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. 

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, namely computer systems. Specific applications of AI include natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision. In general, AI systems work by ingesting large amounts of labelled training data, analysing the data for correlations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. For example, a chatbot that is fed examples of text exchanges can learn to produce lifelike exchanges with people, or an image recognition tool can learn to identify and describe objects in images by reviewing millions of examples. AI programming focuses on three cognitive skills: learning, reasoning and self-correction. 

The aforementioned highlights the machine learning element or ‘soft’ AI and most of us are familiar with these types of algorithms working away in the background when we use Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. Who has been on a Youtube video spiral based on the recommendations..? The ‘hard’ AI is the next level and the one of concern as this is when the machines start to think for themselves rather than basing their ‘behaviour’ on being fed information. Great minds of our time such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson have all voiced deep concerns about ‘hard’ AI. 

Blockchain is fast becoming well regarded in many industries and the use cases are plentiful; finance, supply-chain, cyber security, voting, anti-counterfeiting etc. Essentially, blockchain is a decentralised, immutable and secure ledger of transactions that by its very nature, is significantly more secure than a database and has ‘trust’ built in from inception. A blockchain therefore removes the third party from transactions (think: banks, custodians, estate-agents etc.) so it’s turning the centralised world as we know it on its head. 

Mindset for success 

As these two exciting technological advancements accelerate us into our increasingly digital futures, it begs the question, “Where do we as humans fit into the mix?” Here are a few pointers to consider:

• We must remember that our technology works for us, not the inverse, therefore setting rigorous boundaries for its use is key. Create a company ‘Tech charter’, communicate it well and stick to it. 
• When possible, maximise human face-to-face contact as this is where true connection happens. 
• Over communication can easily overwhelm collaborators so agree on ‘how’ different types of collaboration should be conducted and on what channels and platforms. Using three types of file sharing platforms for projects is a recipe for disaster. Focused communication wins. 
• At a Comex company level, don’t be afraid of the technology, leverage it! Set up a sandbox to experiment with AI and blockchain and share your findings with the team. 
• Challenge the 60 minute meeting default. How about 15, 30 or 45 minutes instead with 2, 3 or 4 attendees..? 
• Actively encourage and support your collaborators to disengage to re-engage by building a meaningful life outside of work. Work hard, play hard and foster well-being. 

Jeremy Peter Williams 08.03.2022

Where we’ve come from – The journey to ‘me’

The narrative of the individual has been the dominant voice in our culture since the birth of the Enlightenment (“I think, therefore I am.”) Each person was raised to be individual, autonomous, self-reliant, and high achieving. It has been a glorious age of the individual – celebrating our break from the clutches of monarchy to individual freedom and creative expression that resulted in ground-breaking achievements in science, medicine, technology, and education.

Where we are – where’s that selfie-stick!

The rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s and Web 2.0 (creator culture) ushered in the Instagrammer and Youtuber generation who epitomised the ultimate ‘me’ culture and this has morphed into society – many children now aspire to be the next YouTube star! It’s easily accessible using free platforms to become a ‘star’ but where is this taking us, in society and in the workplace?

Office star shining bright or a full-on galaxy ready to discover?

Let’s face it, the vibe in the office, whether physical or virtual, has a significant bearing on happiness, well-being and productivity so it’s essential to get it right. We all know companies which have a culture of fear where every man and woman are for themselves and this obviously isn’t a recipe for success especially given the current context.

We are rapidly moving into the 4th industrial revolution where technologies (Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and the Internet of Things) are playing a more significant role in our everyday workflow and collaborators are having to adjust their approaches to virtually all aspects of their work accordingly.

It is no longer acceptable to be a ‘me first’ entitled collaborator and a recent study by the University of New Hampshire concluded that in environments of this nature:

• Conflicts are more likely

• Constructive feedback can be more difficult to receive 
• Job satisfaction is lower
• Expectations can be unrealistic
• Passing the blame for failure to others is more likely
• The likelihood of taking undue credit for successes is higher

‘Me’ leaders fared even worse as it was concluded that their effectiveness and ability to lead high performing teams was substantially reduced.

Our future will be determined by our ability to get back to ‘we’ and communities will lead the way – if we embrace this collective power 

Paradigm shifts do not just happen by chance. They are evolutionary, driven by agents of change – scientific, cultural, philosophical and technological. It is now increasingly believed that refocusing a culture back to an inclusive ‘we’ culture is what is needed to successfully navigate our way into the looming 4th industrial revolution. 

Communities will take on more power in organisations and bottom-up, consensus decision making is on the rise. This is surely a good thing but a change of mindset right through the organisation is required for this shift to be realised in an effective way.

5 ways culture-first start-ups are leading the way  

1. Hiring for the best cultural fit is the most important aspect of fostering a community that will be led by consensus decision-making and collaboration. Involving the current collaborators in the hiring process can really help with finding the right cultural fit and also the engagement of existing collaborators. It’s a win-win! For example; pair up team members to interview a candidate around one of the company’s values. 

2. Working environments are also fundamentally important as a basis for a successful ‘we’ culture. Having communal working areas where impromptu conversations or meetings can take place (if face-to-face) and organising virtual coffee breaks if working more online can all help foster a positive vibe.

3. Technology has a huge influence on our work nowadays so it has to be embraced in an intelligent way, but there is the real risk of over-complicating simple processes and the tech can easily switch from being your friend to your enemy if not managed correctly. Tip: keep it simple and clearly lay down the rules for which apps and software can be used and stick to it by creating a ‘tech charter’ which everyone agrees on. This way, miscommunication can be avoided and face-to-face time can be maximised. 

4. Celebrate your successes! No matter how small, make sure to always acknowledge and celebrate the small wins (as well as the big ones of course!) as business should also be fun. Some companies have a bell that they ring when a deal is closed and others arrange social BBQ nights once per week (socially distanced of course now). More and more companies are progressively getting back into having yearly offsite trips abroad to foster cultures of collaboration and inter-team connectivity which goes a long way to building trust and long-term performance. In short, it works so it’s worth the investment.

5. Many KPIs are outdated and aren’t suited to a modern collaborative culture of ‘we’ so it’s wise to take a close look at the underlying KPIs in your organisation as these will be driving a lot of the behaviour that can be observed. In order to install and nurture a community culture of ‘we’ focus the KPIs around outcomes not activities. The team members will hence be more focused on putting their energy into achieving the desired result through working closely with their colleagues with a clear focus. The other benefit is that they will be more likely to take ownership of the outcome of their work which will lead to increased job satisfaction. Tip: this can only be achieved if there isn’t a culture of fear (of making a mistake). 

It’s safe to say that this road to a ‘we’ culture will be long and windy but it is definitely worth starting out on this journey right now as the companies which do so, will surely be ahead of the pack and quite possibly, some of the leaders of tomorrow.

Article written by: Jeremy Peter Williams 

If you are a Human Being reading this article then you are at the right place to understand why belonging to a community is important for each one of us!

From childhood our life is built around them: first, our family, then friends with common interests or passions, then colleagues or professionals that share the same experiences or knowledge and many more in other fields of our life. I am sure you see what I mean here: communities are essential for all humans.

And learning capabilities is no exception.

Learning is necessary and important for each person individually, but it also has many benefits in the business environment – among many other factors it contributes to improved performance. Below I would like to look at WHY to buil a learning community, WHAT is done in it and the ADVANTAGES of creating them.

1. WHY is it important to build Learning Communities in your organization?

• Learning is an experience!
  Do you agree? When you learn something new there is nothing better than putting it into practice. If you are just trying to memorize theoretical concepts, you might not remember a lot. However, if you try and fail and try again the things you theoretically learnt then you are truly learning. And of course, if you succeed in your trials, this is the best part!
• Learning communities improve motivation, collaboration and knowledge-transfer
  What if your learning experience could be shared with a group of colleagues in a safe environment where everyone can share their own practices? Belonging to a community is essential when learning something: we all are “in the same boat”, we can help each other, there is strong solidarity that is naturally created. The people with whom you are sharing this experience are bound to you in some way. Have you ever experienced this?
  In your organization, if you can create learning communities around specific topics it will definitely reinforce your employees’ motivation and collaboration. At Hewlett Packard an informal community of practice emerged around a customer software: employees scheduled a monthly call where attendance was not mandatory. People could come if they were willing to come and available. Thanks to this community, the software significantly evolved and attendance to the monthly meeting was steady, showing the attachment that employees had in this community and the will to help each other to make things better.
  Finally, another great reason to build learning communities is the knowledge transfer from one person to another (known as “peer-to-peer” learning). When you create learning communities on specific topics within your organization you are also mixing profiles and experiences. This is a wonderful way to encourage and support internal knowledge-transfer. This was the case for the US airline company JetBlue which implemented a program with senior employees transferring their knowledge to other employees (program was named “JetBlue Scholars”) and resulted in 86% of employees who felt more engaged and 96% willing to stay in the company.

2. WHAT is done in a learning community?

Wenger defined several activities that can be done within a “community of practice” which can also be a learning community. Here are some of them:

• Problem-solving
• Searching for information
• Sharing of experiences
• Identifying gaps
• Growing confidence
• Brainstorming innovative ideas
• Developing critical thinking

All these activities cannot be done only at an individual level. If you need to solve specific issues for your business you could create a community of practice around the topic to collectively find and test the solutions.

3. What are the ADVANTAGES of learning communities?

The list of advantages can be very long and here are only just a few ones:

• Diversity (views, knowledge, people)
• Take a step back on your own practices and knowledge
• Engagement & motivation
• Integration and satisfaction (promotions in schools
• Friendships
• Opportunity to know and work with people you might have not had the chance to meet otherwise
• Take ownership of your learning (involvement)

4. HOW can I implement learning communities in my organization?

The good news is that you don’t need much to build a learning community! The only thing you have to do is find a topic and create a group of people that are interested in it. Of course, it can start with a “formal” training with an expert, but it is certainly not the only way – the key point is to make people regularly interact and share ideas and experiences on the topic of interest.

Another good news is that you don’t need to have physical communities; people can work digitally (even if the benefits of physical meetings are proved in terms of people’s emotional connections) the key here is that you make sure they have the available tools to communicate properly.

If your learning communities start with a “formal face-to-face” training then make sure that you’ll have at least one facilitator to encourage and bring dynamism within the community.

Do you want to go further? I suggest you read articles and books from Etienne Wenger who has studied in detail the concepts of communities of practice.

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PeopleSmart has significant experience in thought partnership, design and delivery of learning community solutions, so if you would like to know how we could help you build your culture and communities around learning, and so much more, it all starts with a conversation.

Since the onset of the COVID crisis, there has been a very lively and rich discussion around what this all means for leadership under the extreme conditions we have been going through. What follows is a very personal contribution, based on my initial training as a social historian and 37 years of experience in the Learning and Development space.

Even with the tremendous advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, human beings (and by extension, leaders) will continue to play a critical role in the success of organizations. But this raises a new series of questions: who we recruit, who we promote, who we decide to invest in for L+D spend, how we recognize and reward. There are a few leadership models out there with 6 dimensions and perhaps the TALENT “proto-model” proposed below could make a small contribution to how we can collectively consider updating our pre-existing models on leadership for the COVID Era.

Lean

Lean has a well-proven track record in terms of improving industrial performance. Could we apply some of its basic tenets more systematically to Leadership? In my opinion, one of the key learnings of the lockdown is that business performance was not necessarily negatively impacted by fewer meetings, less bureaucracy and the suddenly forced experimentation with remote/hybrid working. When we consider the well-known Eisenhower Matrix (with 4 quadrants – on the vertical axis “importance” and on the horizontal access “urgency”), I think that the lower right-hand quadrant (non-urgent/ unimportant) has proven to be much larger than 25%.

Source: https://theblogrelay.com/eisenhower-matrix-for-decision-making/

In terms of the LEAN dimension, could sociologists help us better understand what we need in terms of leadership for this COVID Era? François Dupuy (whom I had the great pleasure of meeting on a number of occasions) – wrote a seminal work back in 2011: Lost in Management. He very knowingly speaks of how organizations – by creating rules and processes to ensure “homogeneity and clarity” – actually create what he calls “intermediary bureaucracies”. In a famous quotation of the Franco-Austrian sociologist Erhard Friedberg (my loose translation): “Rules are not important for what they say but how the actors make use of them”. In a nutshell, organizations have proven to be very effective in adding layers of bureaucracy and paying people to manage all of this (processes, reporting…). Could we use this period of “forced reflection”, to get leaders to more deeply reflect on the cost-benefit analysis of corporate processes? The clear risk is that our new hybrid working mode – back-to-back Zoom/ Teams/ Cisco meetings – could actually replicate and in fact reinforce existing corporate bureaucracies. Could we rather seize the occasion to re-think, re-set and reframe (something around “Back to the Basics”?). Could LEAN methodology in terms of leadership help us here? There has always been a fine line in balancing the well-founded need to create a robust corporate process whilst fostering innovation (along with getting a maximum out of our increasingly diverse talents). In a nutshell, how can we benefit from adding more fluidity and flexibility to our modes of leadership? We also need to think about what this means for “scaling-up” in fast-growing organizations, where remote working has become dominant.

As we will be seeing in the TIME dimension below, some leaders have difficulties in changing their management practices for COVID-era hybrid working (e.g., continuing to control and supervise the schedules of their team members). These ‘old-school’ leaders already had a preference for spending most of their time in meetings. The ever-provocative Elon Musk has recently pleaded for CEOs to spend less time in meetings and reduce their use of PowerPoint.

Food for thought:
How can we most effectively apply LEAN to our leadership behaviours?
How can we “protect” our teams from corporate bureaucracy whilst maintaining a minimal level of control?

The Covid 19 pandemic has been re-shaping our lives for more than a year now. We had to change the way we work, connect with others, and live our lives. Many were able to actively focus on learning new skills to deal with technology allowing them to continue working remote, others to get organized to home-deliver all sorts of goods. In general, organizations had to quickly make changes to grant their employees to work safely and remain productive.

Change is natural, even refreshing when it is approached in a gradual way. With the pandemic, change struck the world abruptly and unexpectedly.

As the urgency required to focus on the day-to-day necessities, the emotional intelligence part had to be left aside in most cases. That is why today many employees report feeling tired or even exhausted.

Emotional Intelligence is, “The capacity to be aware of, understand, and manage one’s own emotions, mood, time and behaviour effectively” and “Perceiving, understanding and acknowledging the way others feel”

Over the past decade, leaders from all industrial sectors have come to recognize the importance of EI to enhance motivation, engagement and performance. Just as the opposite has demonstrated to occur, that is a drop in performance and disengagement when leaders lack self-management, empathy, and the ability to engage and inspire. It is true that even in the best of times managing emotions and staying emotionally connected to the team can be a challenge for many leaders. But during and following the Covid 19 tragedy, EI skills have gained an even more important role. Remote work and social distancing require an even higher level of Emotional Intelligence readiness and competency for leaders and teams, as employees need to be heard and crave feeling safe and valued.

What strategies can be adopted to help EI grow in organizations?

• Measuring Emotional intelligence in the organization and employ resources to develop EI competencies.
• Start rewarding leaders and employees who demonstrate self-management, care and empathy and use emotional information to make decisions.
• Stop rewarding leaders and employees who get results but break relationships in the process and make decisions that do not take into account the impact of emotions.

That can be achieved by taking some courageous steps such as:

• Providing training, coaching and mentoring to leaders and teams to enhance their emotional competencies.
• Create ways to celebrate leaders and teams for their Emotional Intelligence. For example, how they managed to create engagement and bonding via Zoom or helping their people to get to know each other by intentionally mixing teams and assigning mentors.
• Sustaining trust by creating a climate of openness on feelings, difficulties, or obstacles. Regular check-ins can provide the structure for this kind of authentic sharing and support.
• Use meetings to reinforce engagement. Leaders can build time in meetings to see how smart the team is. For example, showcasing one person per meeting, letting them talk about their work, or highlighting their strengths for them and giving positive feedback in public, or doing quick introductions each week allowing people to get answers to their questions and to the challenges they face. In so doing, meetings become a time when engagement and trust can be built.

To quote Mark Nevins:

“If you don’t have the basics, you’re not going to excel post-Covid.”

We need to realize that we will not go back to the pre-Covid way of working. Many organizations report that they are thinking of creating some sort of mixture between work in the office and remote.

For example:

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, suggests if you have 100 employees
you won’t need 100 desks, maybe 60.

Unilever workers will never return to their desks full-time, CEO Alan Jope has stated.

Emotional Intelligence will be more and more crucial in the workplace and represent the true area of strength for leaders and teams.

Learning and Development

GENOS Podcasts – Check out the latest podcast by GENOS on “Real Stories and business insights on the power of EI in the workplace.”

Exploring EI – Virtual classroom – To help you understand the principles of the Science of Emotions, the fundamentals of EI behaviours and the core EI dimensions – On-demand

Leading with Emotional intelligence – Series of 6 virtual classrooms – To help you explore all the key competencies that can make you an Emotional Intelligent leader, using your EI in your leadership of people – On-demand

Coaching for Resilience – To help leaders and teams bounce back and forward in effective and positive ways with one-on-one or team coaching series of sessions fine-tuned to your needs – On-demand

Since the onset of the COVID crisis, there has been a very lively and rich discussion around what this all means for leadership under the extreme conditions we have been going through. What follows is a very personal contribution, based on my initial training as a social historian and 37 years of experience in the Learning and Development space.

Even with the tremendous advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, human beings (and by extension, leaders) will continue to play a critical role in the success of organizations. But this raises a new series of questions: who we recruit, who we promote, who we decide to invest in for L+D spend, how we recognize and reward. There are a few leadership models out there with 6 dimensions and perhaps the TALENT “proto-model” proposed below could make a small contribution to how we can collectively consider updating our pre-existing models on leadership for the COVID Era.

Agility

The COVID Era has certainly made Agility more critical than ever. VUCA has been around since the US Military developed it in the 1980s, but it is my feeling that the acronym has been abused and misused in many corporate and governmental environments. Most of the time we have been paying lip service to agility, imagining scenarios with say a potential of 15-20% deviations (what we could call “VUCA light”). In fact, we should probably have heeded the advice of those arguing for a more robust model – VUCAE – with an E for exponential. Over the years I have had the privilege of connecting with Singularity University in the Silicon Valley. If collectively we had onboarded their reflections on the incredible exponential element of change, we could have potentially managed the current crisis more effectively. It is my feeling that this “E-dimension” will be critical over the coming years.

During my stint as an L+D leader in a major global multi-national, I had the opportunity to experiment on the subject of agility with a very senior group of VPs. We used the KornFerryHay Agility Questionnaire and were rather taken back by the results. While the individual reports remained confidential, we were provided with a collective picture that demonstrated just how relatively low the overall agility of this very senior sample size was. Based on this experience, I have reflected on the following: are we hiring, promoting and developing the right profiles in terms of agility? Can we in fact develop agility? More on this below in the NOVELTY dimension.

I would suggest that there is a fundamental link between an organization’s capacity to be agile and cognitive biases. Daniel Kahneman has been a pioneer in exploring this for many decades, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 and publishing a best seller – Thinking Fast and Slow – in 2013. During the height of the pandemic this Spring, Olivier Sibony, Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris, presented a very interesting analysis of how these cognitive biases impacted decisions made during this period. [2] To cite a few examples:

1. The bias of our mental model: we focus our analysis of current crises on seemingly similar past events (e.g., SARS 2002-2003). But we are obviously in a very different ballpark.
2. Exponential growth is in fact counter-intuitive – it’s way out of our comfort zone. Collectively, we did not see it coming (an example of “VUCA-light”?).
3. There was clearly an NIH (“Not Invented Here”) syndrome in our initial reaction to the virus (think of Trump’s infamous Chinese virus proclamations). This is what Sibony refers to as “exo-group and endo-group bias”. It could never happen to us.
4. There seems to have been a clear phenomenon of “expert group think” back in the Spring of 2020. Of the 18 top scientific experts cited in Sibony’s study – only one “outlier” was close to predicting what has unfortunately panned out.

In terms of the above, how can we encourage and develop leaders to be more agile – and more aware of their cognitive biases – when we are affronted with the next major crisis. How can make sure that the “outlier” voice is at least listened to? This is most likely going to be a very rich collective learning experience.

A very striking paradox of the COVID Era is that for larger organizations, the corporate planning function has probably become more vital than ever. In our VUCAE era, we need to think more broadly and radically in terms of scenario planning. Perhaps we need to reflect on the profiles in this corporate function – are we sufficiently open to including original thinkers (or to use another term “outliers”). More on this below in the NOVELTY dimension around the idea of Groupthink and “deferring to the creative types”. [3] Finally, what is the relationship between AGILITY and risk assessment? How can we equip leaders to be more “risk-savvy” than ever?

Food for thought:
What have I been doing to become more agile in these challenging times?
How can I help my team become more agile?
And perhaps a more basic question, can we develop agility?

The job of a diplomat is complex and multifaceted. By its nature, it requires one to operate in environments of great diversity. In order to be successful, diplomats, while defending their countries’ interests, must maintain an awareness of the perspectives of host nations. The most successful among diplomats do not rely solely on their own education or knowledge (and perhaps language) of the countries where they serve. Rather, they seek out and rely on the expertise of the diplomatic mission’s locally-hired employees, or LE staff. Indeed, effective collaboration between the two groups requires a clear understanding and practice of the principles of diversity and inclusion.

LE staff provide continuity for the diplomatic personnel and possess local language and cultural expertise. In the case of the United States, LE staff support of foreign policy at more than 270 U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide. They form an integral part of the team dedicated to representing the U.S. abroad.

Beyond providing institutional knowledge, LE staff are institution-builders too, carrying out the daily tasks that enable the managing officer to focus on program management. They represent the continuity of a diplomatic mission and, as such, carry the torch long after their individual supervisors have moved on to other postings.

LE staff not only fulfill their functional duties; more importantly, they are also negotiators, facilitators and no small part of the bilateral relationship. Their native knowledge and understanding of the reality on the ground, and the relationships they build and nurture with a broad range of contacts, are essential elements of informed analysis and pertinent reporting. In essence, they serve to bridge two cultures.

As a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years who worked in seven countries on five continents, I can attest to the importance of building a productive and mutually respectful professional relationship with LE staff. Achieving this, however, does not come naturally. Even seasoned diplomats and LE staff must apply the necessary skills inherent to diversity and inclusion to account for the multitude of personalities they encounter. How, then, to ensure a win-win result?

Practicing an inclusive approach in a diverse environment starts with building trust. Within the first weeks in a new job, a meeting with each staff member sets the initial tone. Demonstrating a sincere interest in them fosters open communication and a fruitful professional relationship. Once mutual confidence has been established, listening to their advice on local affairs and including them in the decision-making process enhances the feeling that they are valued.

Finally, it is essential to recognize that, even within one small country with a relatively homogeneous culture, numerous sub-cultures likely exist. For example, Togo in West Africa is about the size of Denmark (with double the population); the official language is French. Two indigenous languages, Ewé and Kabiyé are national languages and a third, Mina, is widely spoken in the south. According to some sources, however, a total of 44 languages are spoken throughout the country. Woe be to the diplomat who ignores the subtleties in cultural differences between people from the north and the south.

Acquiring a deeper understanding of the diversity around us also adds richness to our own lives. For example, soon after I began working in Togo, I noticed that, following an initial greeting, locals would ask, “et la famille?” – meaning, “how’s your family?”. Before long, I added this phrase to my own greeting repertoire both in professional and social encounters. With three simple words, I not only demonstrated knowledge and respect for a local tradition but also established an immediate rapport that paid dividends on a number of levels. It may come as no surprise that inquiring as to someone’s family is also well received in non-African contexts.

Technology and travel bring us into contact with an ever-growing number of diverse communities. The trend is irreversible, despite recent setbacks resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. We do not have to be diplomats to apply the elements of diversity and inclusion discussed here in order to achieve a higher level of performance. When we do, we create allies, establish more harmonious professional and social settings, and continue to expand our personal horizons. That is a recipe for success no matter how you cut the cake.

Since the onset of the COVID crisis, there has been a very lively and rich discussion around what this all means for leadership under the extreme conditions we have been going through. What follows is a very personal contribution, based on my initial training as a social historian and 37 years of experience in the Learning and Development space.

Even with the tremendous advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, human beings (and by extension, leaders) will continue to play a critical role in the success of organizations. But this raises a new series of questions: who we recruit, who we promote, who we decide to invest in for L&D spend, how we recognize and reward. There are a few leadership models out there with 6 dimensions and perhaps the TALENT “proto-model” proposed below could make a small contribution to how we can collectively consider updating our pre-existing models on leadership for the COVID Era.

Trust

It goes without saying that trust “makes the world go round”. It is the bedrock, cornerstone and foundation of everything we do in both our professional and personal lives. We can think of Leoncini’s well-known 5-tiered pyramid around Team Performance, with trust being the foundation of everything. Beyond the leader-contributor relationship, trust is clearly key in all stakeholder ecosystems (shareholders, suppliers, customers, NGOs…). While trust is certainly universal, there are a couple of important intercultural distinctions: cognitive trust and affective trust. This difference has been very clearly explained in INSEAD Professor Erin Meyer’s very readable synthesis of intercultural theory. According to Meyer, “cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability” (on the extreme end of the scale, we can find Anglo-Saxon cultures). “Affective trust, on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy, or friendship” (Latin American, Middle East cultures, for example). My hunch is that affective trust – even in predominantly cognitive trust countries – will become increasingly important for team leaders when a majority of interactions may be done remotely.

In the current situation, I think it is useful to go back to Covey’s well-known trust equation, where Trustworthiness equals (on the numerator side) Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy, with Self-Orientation on the denominator side. To simplify, leaders who are perceived by team members and other stakeholders as being driven more by the “collective interest” (and the development and the performance of the team) than in pursuing a personal agenda will tend to engender a higher level of trust. In view of this, those leaders with “toxic” leadership behaviours will be even more dangerous for organizations (with a negative leverage effect on employee engagement). Stanford professor Bob Sutton wrote a visionary and deliberately provocative book on this in 2007 – The No Asshole Rule. Even a small minority of bad apples can have a very damaging impact on an organization’s level of engagement. We can also remind ourselves of the well-proven adage: most people quit because of their boss. This is the moment for leaders to take the courage to eject the “toxic leaders” from their organizations. These toxic leaders not only have a very negative impact on the engagement levels of their teams but on those they are trying to influence in their respective corporate eco-systems with what we could in fact call their “fake leadership”.

It is my gut and far from the original feeling that trust will become even more critical in the COVID Era. With the emerging hybrid model of working, travel restrictions and severely reduced face-to-face “quality time” in meetings, seminars, conventions, etc., leaders need to give even more explicit attention to this. Gallup has done some very interesting research in this domain, with a particular focus on employee engagement. This is the first time Gallup has observed macro-factors (in this case COVID-19 and the BLM protests) having a strong influence on employee engagement levels, in strong contrast to SARS, the Avian Flu and even the Great Recession of 2008. In terms of remote working, those with the highest level of engagement work remotely 40-60% per cent of the time. On the extremes (0% or 100%), engagement levels fall dramatically. Another very interesting finding is that “having meaningful feedback on a weekly basis, and not just frequently allows maximum engagement for all degrees of remote working”. But in actual fact, there is a massive gap in terms of employees’ perceptions: only 2 in 10 strongly agree that their managers are providing meaningful feedback and only 3 in 10 state that their managers are good at helping them set work priorities”.

It is clear from this that leaders need to put a much greater emphasis on giving impactful feedback which has been carefully prepared and takes into account Emotional Intelligence which will be discussed in the EMOTION dimension. Multi-dimensional feedback – between the manager and the team member and vice versa as well as among team members- has become ever more critical. Perhaps managers need to ask their reports more frequently: “how am I doing?”, “as your team leader, how can I more effectively enable you and the team to perform and grow?”, etc. This will require both managerial and employee courage to share frankly, openly and transparently on the key issues. We could perhaps learn from our Dutch colleagues who place such an important value on these “real conversations”. We also need to get team members to feel comfortable giving themselves feedback in the most constructive and trust-boosting manner. For a lot of organizations, instilling and/or reinforcing such practices will inevitably necessitate important cultural shifts (with a need for C-Suite sponsorship and exemplarity).

From an intercultural point of view, perhaps we should all strive to be relatively more “low context” than “high context” in terms of how we communicate. These concepts came out of the pioneering work of a couple of Social Anthropologists, Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall, who transferred their research on Native American tribes to looking at business practices around the globe. Low context communication is relatively more explicit (“the mass of information is vested in the specific code”) whereas in high context communication “most of the information is in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message”. [6] As a lot of the research has shown over the past decades, clarity – in terms of such things as vision and purpose, what is expected of me, how I am recognized and rewarded is fundamental in achieving higher levels of employee engagement and team performance. During a very interesting meeting with Virgin Australia a couple of years ago, the HR Director outlined their approach to employee empowerment: “freedom within a framework” (seeking an appropriate balance between giving employees maximum leeway and very clear guidelines in terms of overall expectations). In the current stressful working environments, leaders will need to be all too aware that giving more freedom can also lead to greater employee uncertainty and stress. To put it simply, things need to be really clear, well-prepared and above all explicit.

In my view, one of the keys to maintaining and enhancing trust will depend on more impactful performance management. If we agree that there is a clear causal link between leadership behaviours and business performance, have we gone far enough in ensuring that our performance management systems are up to the challenge? With the rapid acceleration of hybrid working – and the consequence of a greater need for effective delegation and empowerment – leaders will need to deal with team members who are under-performing or poorly-performing (as well as recognize and reward those who enhance trust amongst team members).

Finally, in our digitally-challenged environments, one of the most critical responsibilities of leaders is to ensure that their teams comply strictly with cyber-security protocols. With the new hybrid way of working, there has been a blurring between the private and public spheres. Leaders need to ensure that their teams make a clear distinction between their professional and personal devices. Over the years, I have often militated for embedding “Finance for Dummies” in senior leadership programs (e.g., within my zone of responsibility, what can I do to improve my company’s cash situation?). In the same fashion, leaders will need to be increasingly cyber-aware to lead their teams effectively and protect their respective organizations.

Food for thought:
How can I maintain and improve trust as a leader in this new hybrid working environment?
How can I get feedback on the level of trust I am creating?
How can I best share my “trust learning curve” with peers?

Since the onset of the COVID crisis, there has been a very lively and rich discussion around what this all means for leadership under the extreme conditions we have been going through. What follows is a very personal contribution, based on my initial training as a social historian and 37 years of experience in the Learning and Development space (business school, Adjunct Professor at HEC Paris, corporate and consulting). My 12 years of corporate experience – running the global leadership programs for a major aerospace defence player – have been critical in developing my ideas here. In addition, I am attempting here to add some inspiration from the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, history…) along with some intercultural insights to consider the degree of « universality » of the issues we are dealing with. I will be citing some well-known and less well-known sources for those who want to dig a bit deeper on certain subjects.

How will armchair historians look back at COVID 2020 10 or 20 years from now? Will they view its impact on leadership as truly revolutionary or more of a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn’s immensely influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions published back in 1962?  We humans (and therefore leaders) have a natural tendency to fall back on old habits and behaviours, as those of us in the L+D space know all too well. If we look back at a few cataclysmic events in the past, we can observe that: the Roman Catholic Church survived the Black Death of the 14th Century; that the plight of many African Americans didn’t substantially improve after the Emancipation of slaves in 1862; that those courageous women who “manned” the factories during World War II most often returned to being suburban “Desperate Housewives” in the 1950s; and, to take a more recent example, the Arab Spring (with the exception perhaps of Tunisia) has hardly laid the foundations for robust democratic societies in the Middle East. When the “virus dust” finally settles, will we return to predominately hierarchical, top-down, often bureaucratic, relatively “non-distributed” leadership or will there be a significant or even radical change? Of course, the jury is out – who knows where we will be in even a few months. At the moment of writing, it seems most likely we are moving towards a hybrid mode of working (2/3 days at home with 2/3 days at the office). This in itself will have a very significant impact on leadership, which means that a collective reflection on all of this is more than critical. In what follows, I will try to make the case that we are in for some very major changes indeed. Unlike some recent crises, COVID clearly seems to be in the “perfect storm” category: an unprecedented acceleration in digital transformation (which was of course already well underway); economic turmoil not seen since the 1930s (in spite of the “whatever it takes” approach by most governments), there seems to be a visceral fear regarding future economic well-being and security; and finally, there is a “life or death” layer to the discussion (will I get infected and will I infect loved ones and colleagues?). Even Hollywood might have lacked the creative juices to imagine such a scenario.

Why an acronym?

I have chosen the search for a new acronym as the underlying structure for my reflections on leadership. While acronyms can rightly be viewed as being partially superficial, over-simplistic and artificial, they do have the power to focus our thoughts. Think of the GROW model for coaching or VUCA (which has been perhaps banalized and misused– see below). I would like to propose a 6-dimensional acronym TALENT: TRUST, AGILITY, LEAN, EMOTION, NOVELTY and TIME. As with many models, there are clear inter-connections between each of the dimensions. For example, we can hardly expect Novelty without Agility or Empathy without Trust.

Why TALENT?

Even with the tremendous advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, human beings (and by extension, leaders) will continue to play a critical role in the success of organizations. But this raises a new series of questions: who we recruit, who we promote, who we decide to invest in for L+D spend, how we recognize and reward. There are a few leadership models out there with 6 dimensions – most notably the KornFerryHay Leadership Styles model based on the pioneering work at Harvard in the 1960s [5]. Perhaps the TALENT “proto-model” proposed below could make a small contribution to how we can collectively consider updating our pre-existing models on leadership for the COVID Era. As a final conclusion to the discussion, I will provide a few suggestions on how L+D and other HR professionals can reflect on how they could think about updating their approaches, methodologies and processes (in a word, the “HR cultures” of their organizations). Of course, leaders in general should be actively involved in the conversation and not simply “out-source” the issue to their respective HR communities. In short, leaders (and even more importantly, C-suite leaders) need to take an active role in leading their talents more than ever.

The World Economic Forum has just published its ranking of the top 10 leadership competencies for 2025 [6]. I think that there is a certain fit with the proto-model I am proposing: for example, around the dimension of NOVELTY (innovation, creativity, originality, ideation…); and AGILITY (dealing with ambiguity, flexibility, reasoning…), and EMOTION (leadership and social influence, resilience, stress tolerance…). In the number two position, here is what I would call a hugely important transversal skill of “active learning and learning strategies”. One of the key challenges, as we move forward, is to empower leaders (as well as to get leaders to empower their teams with a true coaching approach) to become “self-learners”, taking full responsibility for their individual and collective “learning paths”, in line with the 70/20/10 learning model.

Food for thought:
How can I share my reflections on of all this with my team and my peers?
In what contexts?
What should we share on?
What are the strengths and drawbacks of models?