AchieveGlobal's blog

The Trouble with Prima Donnas Is They Know How to Sing

By Jack McDaniel In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage production of Phantom of the Opera, the character of Carlotta Giudicelli is an ill-tempered Italian soprano diva—a prima donna in both the literal and the pop cultural sense. Carlotta gets her richly-deserved comeuppance when she ignores the Phantom’s threats, takes the lead in Il Muto, and is reduced to a croaking parody of herself in front of a full house. And that’s all part of the fun of theatre. The trouble with translating this to the business world is that prima donnas rarely croak like frogs. They’re performers, and they know when and how to sing. And whether we admit it or not, it’s good to have prima donnas on our team. The key is knowing how to manage not only our star performers, but also our supporting players, understudies, stage managers, and the rest of the cast and crew. Balancing these relationships is never easy. When you add in the rapid business changes we’re facing in a world economy in crisis, that balance may seem impossible. How do you mold highly competitive and often idiosyncratic individuals into a smoothly-operating team? The answer is to keep things simple and go back to basics. Treat people in your organization with respect—regardless of their position or relative star status. Focus on issues and behaviors, not on personalities. Always demand ethical behavior in yourself and others. Set the agenda for positive change, model what you want to see in others, and keep the consequences of your actions in mind. These are the Basic Principles at the core of successful businesses. Even with these guidelines, dealing with divas of either gender can be problematic. We need our stars to deliver, yet we also want them to play well with others. One technique for handling challenging star performers is to help them a) recognize the need for behavior change and b) commit to changing their behavior. During this conversation, you can apply five Key Actions from the Managing the Performance of Others™ workshop:

1. Collect background information. 2. Describe the problem. 3. Mutually assess the situation. 4. Agree on an action plan. 5. Offer support.

Every prima donna has an aria to sing. Every manager has a story about dealing with a challenging star performer. I invite you to reply and share your own experiences in managing your prima donnas.

Does classroom or elearning generate better results?

By Todd Beck A couple of years ago I attended a conference where an elearning vendor presented a client case study. After taking elearning, 100% of the client’s employees passed their industry certification exam. Sounds impressive, right? So I raised my hand (couldn't resist) and asked, “What was the consequence if they didn’t pass the certification exam?” The answer: “They lost their jobs.” I didn’t push the issue, but I hope everybody was thinking about the relationship between motivation and outcome. Even if the elearning had been poorly designed with huge data gaps, those employees were highly motivated to find workarounds fast. If the classic complaint about elearning is that “nobody” completes it, then this question becomes moot. It’s like medicine: It really doesn’t matter how effective a medication is if the patient doesn’t take it. So, intuitively, putting me in a training room and forcing me to participate and demonstrate some level of competence will generate better behavior change. As a natural skeptic, I’d discount any research that claimed elearning alone achieves better Kirkpatrick Level 2 and 3 results. I’ll end with another story. The other day a company told me that they don’t want training that requires their employees to come back and do any work after class. “The training should be completely contained in the classroom.” I was shocked. Another company told me that their managers don’t have time to coach employees on using the skills because those managers are too busy running the company. My guess is that those companies would have terrible completion rates. Whether it’s elearning or any other job assignment, people finish what matters to the boss. WIIFM. What gets measured gets done. Put your favorite management slogan or motivational poster here.

Whatever Happened to Transformation?

By Craig Perrin It’s a 21st-century axiom: The sum of accessible information is inversely proportional to the human capacity to absorb it. To illustrate, according to Nielsen, by September of this year the average duration of a web page viewed had shrunk to 47 seconds. That trend applies not just to fast-thinking, fast-texting Millennials, but also to engaged Gen Xers and (maybe for different reasons) to wizened Boomers like me. One of the brightest young leaders I know says she can’t stay with a YouTube video for more than 60 seconds. I get 999 cable channels of news, sports, movies, and UFO programming – and I suffer from carpal-tunnel thumb. So, in a terabyte world, many of us now have a kilobyte attention span. Nicholas Carr explored this phenomenon recently in The Atlantic (Is Google Making Us Stupid?). He quotes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey”:

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.” I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going – so far as I can tell – but it’s changing.

This “remapping” of consciousness is changing my profession, too – corporate learning. At one time, a three-day sales workshop was no big deal. Now, as economic conditions worsen, leaders won’t pull the sales force out of the field. Instead, they simultaneously minimize lost productivity, leverage installed IT, and match shorter attention spans by inserting bite-size learning in tiny crevices of the workday. I’m not saying this is bad. It’s just what’s happening, and it has implications. Clearly, the Google search or equivalent has become a dominant way to learn. A need appears, a question comes up, my memory fails: Who was Vigotsky, anyway? I pull out the iPhone, key in the word, read for 47 seconds, and – oh yeah, Vigotsky – that Russian shrink who laid the groundwork for modern online learning. Yet this instant access to information compels me to ask, Whatever happened to transformation? The historic goal of corporate learning is productive action – application of new skills to boost bottom-line metrics and transform people and culture by realizing dormant abilities. And that question raises other, honestly non-rhetorical questions, some of which I list below – and none of which will likely be answered with a Google search:

• Does information alone bring transformation?
• Is a summary as good as a rehearsal?
• Is knowing the main precursor of doing?
• Does it really take three days to learn how to sell?
• In the future, will everyone be conscious for 47 seconds?

Is classroom on life support? YES!

By Jack McDaniel Technology is here to stay, it just keeps improving, and we eagerly embrace that. How many of us are comfortable without access to email or our cell phones? We’re all proud to be part of the “frenzy of fascination” that Todd mentioned. Technology is helpful. We conduct business in new ways, more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, the upcoming generation of businesspeople are demanding that they communicate, work, and learn leveraging the techniques and technologies that they’ve grown accustomed to. They embrace collaborative environments, virtual classrooms, self-study elearning and knowledge-based systems like EPSS. The Sloan Consortium annual learning benchmarking reports that more than 90% of all post-secondary institutions in the US currently offer some variety of elearning, and that online enrollments are increasing at a rate of more than 18% per year, compared with traditional enrollments at a rate of 4%. Schools that do not currently offer on-line capabilities are considered sub-par. As humans we’re wired to be social, and social communication – including learning – is being shifted to online modes, freeing us from the constraints of formal face-to-face classrooms. Simply put, we’d no more accept a steady diet of classroom learning than we would accept giving up our email, cell phones, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts. So yes, face-to-face classroom training is on as much life support as Pong or rotary dial telephones. NOTE: Is elearning vs. classroom a debate happening in your organization? If so, watch this video in whichTodd and I battle it out on AchieveGlobal Island in Second Life.