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For the fifth year in a row, I attended a learning supplier conference in Phoenix, Arizona. ISA: The Association of Learning Providers is a unique group of peer companies that market employee training products and services to the corporate and government marketplace. There are about 100 member companies of all sizes, with most based in the U.S. but many with operations around the world. Paradigm Learning^® has been a member since 1997, and we’ve been awarded two prestigious awards from the association over the past few years: a Business of the Year Award and a Learning Industry Thought Leadership Award.

 

The annual event is billed as a business retreat. Just as in previous years, I considered not going. Did I really have time for a retreat? We’re busy, we’ve hired new people, we have major customer contracts to fulfill, we’re in the throes of updating a popular leadership development program, we have aggressive goals for the year, etc. etc. etc. I had many reasons and many excuses … but in the end, I knew that a retreat would be a good idea for me. I needed to step back from the day-to-day business of the business and let my mind absorb new ideas and insights. And, because I had attended before, I knew that was exactly what would happen.

 

ISA sets up an environment that encourages interaction with other business owners and leaders. Although they are “competitors” – at least in the sense that we all compete for the same marketplace learning dollars – we also understand our mutual challenges and opportunities in a way that others might not. (I still can’t explain to some of my friends what we do!)

 

One of my VPs also attended the conference, and we got to spend some “out of the office” time together – something that helps personally, but also gets the juices flowing around new ideas.

 

The bottom line is that the retreat helped me refresh and re-energize, gave me reinforcement about some of the things we’re doing in the company, and got me looking at the business in some new ways. Basically, it gave me “critical thinking” time.

 

In Paradigm Learning’s leadership accountability simulation, Impact 5: The Business of Leadership Game®, we work with managers to help them think more deeply about issues, decisions and actions by using critical thinking processes. Here’s the definition we use:

 

So, my own critical thinking time was enhanced by taking the time to attend a relevant conference.

 

My advice? Take advantage of an industry conference this year. If you’re too busy – that’s all the more reason to attend!

In his March 16 blog, Paradigm Learning’s CEO Ray Green wrote about the importance of managers arriving on time to meetings and classroom sessions and about how it demonstrates respectfulness, trustworthiness and personal integrity. Unfortunately, he reported, lateness has become all too pervasive in many corporate cultures. I actually had a very interesting – and positive – client experience recently that conveyed a strong message about promptness.

 

In January I was asked to fill in to lead a session for one of our consultants who had been called away due to a family emergency. I traveled to Denver, Colorado, to conduct a session of Impact5: The Business of Leadership Game^®, Paradigm’s program that helps leaders develop important critical thinking skills and a deeper sense of leadership accountability. Impact5 was being used as one piece of a broader high-potential leadership curriculum for this company. The class was composed of a great group of hand-selected “hi-po” leaders, and they were eager to learn. 

 

The program began in our typical discovery learning fashion with a Power Opening designed to quickly grab learners’ attention. Right after the opening I was politely interrupted by three members of the group who arrived a few minutes late. They proceeded to quietly apologize to me for the interruption, each put a dollar in a fishbowl that was on the front table and then each apologized to the entire room for being tardy. They then took their seats and the session proceeded. Naturally, I was curious about the interruption and apologies. 

 

At the next break, I asked our client contact about the incident. She said, “In their very first session the group created simple ground rules to govern the entire program. They decided to emphasize the importance of promptness, which, by the way, is an important work standard for our company. Anyone who is late to a session or coming back from a break must publicly apologize and put a dollar in the fishbowl. At the program’s conclusion the money is being donated to the United Way. It’s their way of emphasizing being on time while also building in meaningful consequences for being late!”

 

That unique tactic really struck home for me. After a very successful session I reflected on this “promptness incident.” Needless to say, it was great fun to train this kind of leaders/learners who just ate up new leadership knowledge and insights! The other notable point was that from an organizational perspective, it was a very powerful example of reinforcing a learning culture and an “on time” culture.

 

Great news for the organization that gets these future leaders, don’t you think?

I was reading some of the discussions on Paradigm Learning’s LinkedIn customer site the other day. One of our consultants started a discussion around this question:

 

 

Clients responding to that question shared similar concerns about managers showing up late for classroom sessions. Facilitators have to decide when to start (on time, five minutes late, 10 minutes late), how to handle the learners who do show up on time, what to do about latecomers missing the important start of a class, and disruptions to the small teams already engaged in one of our simulations.

 

There were many suggestions: clearer pre-session communication, asking a high-level executive to kick off sessions, “charging” a nominal fee for lateness and more.

 

Once in a great while, I show up late for meetings with staff members. If I am going to be late, I always call, and if I don't, then shame on me. More often, I’ve been irritated by latecomers — for meetings, lunches and events.

 

Showing up on time is about personal integrity. It’s about being respectful of others. It’s about a phrase from my time in the military that says it all for me:

 

 

You’ve agreed to attend a training class? Show up on time. You’ve agreed to participate in a meeting? Show up on time. You have lunch plans? Show up on time. You’ve RSVP’d for a party? Show up on time ... and by the way, don’t decide to cancel at the last minute.

 

In business, what managers and leaders say and do is watched closely by employees. That’s the behavior that will be copied.

 

In one of the posts on LinkedIn, a client said, “… it seems to be in our culture to start everything 15 minutes late. It’s hard to change a culture.”

 

A survey by Proudfoot Consulting (a Paradigm Learning partner) showed that CEOs were late to meetings 60 percent of the time. Sixty percent of the time? Is it any surprise that this behavior cascades down the ranks? 

 

We are currently in the process of enhancing our leadership development program Impact 5: The Business of Leadership Game^®.  Managers participate in a simulation in which they make leadership decisions and get impacted by other leaders’ decisions … all leading to an understanding of a core set of accountabilities that leaders across all organizations share. One of these accountabilities is to “Be a self-aware, authentic, strong and collaborative leader.” Those kinds of leaders use behaviors they want others to emulate — they demonstrate respectfulness, trustworthiness and personal integrity.

 

Showing up on time makes a difference. What do you think?

 

In this month’s Chief Learning Officer magazine (March 2012), Rita Mehegan Smith, vice president of enterprise learning for Ingersoll Rand and dean of Ingersoll Rand University, wrote an article titled “Business First.” The subtitle says it all: CEOs expect business capability from their learning departments.

According to Ms. Smith, the global recession has “… heightened CEO expectations for business-savvy learning professionals.”  She poses several business-first questions that learning teams should be able to answer:

 

 

Also quoted in the article is Daisy Ng, senior vice president and chief human resources officer for Darden Restaurants, Inc. She says: “Learning professionals need to understand the business strategy, how the business makes money, key business metrics, industry dynamics, workforce dynamics and how people play in the equation of business success.”

In her article, Ms. Smith offers some ideas for learning departments around building business capability. It’s definitely worth a read.

 

I like the fact that this message is being broadcast more widely within the learning profession. Several years ago, Paradigm Learning^® customized its business acumen program Zodiak^®: The Game of Business Finance and Strategy specifically for training and other human resource professionals.

  

During the first few hours of this one-day program, learners became owners of a struggling company. As they handled chance events, moved game pieces, answered to investors and made tough business decisions, they quickly developed insights about how the numbers worked (financial literacy) and also about consequences of business decisions and actions on financial success (business acumen).

 

Then, in the afternoon, “connections” exercises built on learning from the game in areas like

 

 

We advertised and marketed the program, our account managers talked to clients about its availability, we wrote an article … and we ended up delivering sessions to about four organizations.  Not a resounding success.

 

Why? I’m not sure. Maybe the message wasn’t out there at the time. Maybe the subject matter was just one that HR people – typically more comfortable with the people side of their organizations – just didn’t embrace.

 

Whatever the reason, we stopped actively marketing of the program’s availability. It is still in our back pocket for those progressive (we think!) learning organizations that want to increase the business savvy of their own training and human resources professionals.

 

Whether our program is used to help develop higher levels of business acumen - or other means are found to do this – I hope that CLOs will take Ms. Smith’s advice to heart. As she says in the last line of her article … “CLOs are increasingly accountable to ensure strategically aligned learning is sustained through a business-first mindset.”

 

It was pretty quiet this past weekend for me and my wife during our Chicago “non-winter.” We settled in front of the TV on Sunday evening to watch one of the most heavily advertised premieres – The Celebrity Apprentice. You probably know the story – a group of celebrities vie to become Donald Trump’s apprentice and secure money for their favorite charities. 

 

After the introductions and fanfare, Trump pitted the men against the women for the first “project.” The men became Team Unanimous, the women became Team Forte, and they were sent off to sell as many sandwiches as they could.

 

The celebrity teams got together and began talking about the project. That’s where any resemblance to real project management came to an abrupt halt! Rather than participate in effective planning that could lead to good execution, it turned into aggression, competition, name-calling, backstabbing, fighting, conniving and chaos. Somehow, the men’s team prevailed, Trump fired Cheryl Tiegs and lots of money was raised for the Make-A-Wish Foundation – a worthy recipient.

 

OK. I know. This show is about entertainment, it’s not about managing projects. But I couldn’t help but wonder (as I drifted off to sleep from boredom!) how much more money could have been raised if these sandwich-making ventures had been treated as real projects. What if the teams had used some of the tools that real project teams use? What if they knew how to deal with project scope, work-breakdown structures, contingency planning and other proven project management techniques, and if they used more effective project team behaviors to work together collaboratively?  

 

I know … I’m biased. I wanted to put all of them through our project management simulation, Countdown^®: A Strategy Game for Project Teams, to teach them what it takes to run a successful project. Maybe the real winner would have been the Make-A-Wish Foundation!

 

What do you say we send someone to meet with Mr. Trump? Think he’d be interested? Me neither.