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The Accountability Company
- Accountability
- Employee Engagement
- Professionalism
- Leadership Skills
- Multi-Generational Issues
7308 South Alton Way, Suite 2J
Dry Creek Business Park
Centennial, Colorado 80112
800.282.3374
  
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Work the System
Sam Carpenter’s book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less (Greenleaf Book Group, 2009) asks us to wrap our minds around a common sense concept; that both personally and professionally everything we do, see, feel, and become is a direct result of a mechanical processes or systems that intricately intertwine to make up our life and world fabric.
The book’s argument is that we complicate matters and unconsciously resist solutions by maintaining a macro viewpoint. “Working the system” means creating a strategy, setting operating principals, making adjustments, and keeping your eyes and ears focused on the micro level in every situation – Office, home, or otherwise.
Carpenter does a solid job of going beyond simply telling us why it works, and actually breaks down the steps for implementation in granular detail – a weakness of many books that has certainly been turned to a strength here.
The book reads fairly well if the concepts are appealing to the reader, and they should be of interest to most. At 230 in-depth pages Work the System isn’t a quick read, however if you take the concepts to heart and apply them appropriately the book is time and money well spent.
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The Biggest Blind Spot in Almost Every Organization
 We have spent over 30 years working with organizations to help them develop the core skills that elicit the best performance and increased personal effectiveness from their employees. We have helped thousands of people become more accountable, productive and engaged in their workplace.
Thank you for being part of the EDSI community!
Regards,
The EDSI Team |
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Riding the Wave of the New Economy
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Although there are many signs that the economy is beginning to look up, the current US unemployment rate is looming at 10%, and your training budget probably hasn't recovered to its previous levels.
So what can we learn from the swing in the working environment, and, by necessity, the drastic paradigm shift that is taking place in the way we do business?
The first thing we can ask ourselves is, "Where did all the training go?" In the 1980's mid-1990's we saw extensive management development programs, often organized as executive or management retreats. They were usually anchored with ongoing mentoring programs. This kept the learning going, and development plans were made according to personal career plans and corporate human resources plans.
As time moved on, those management development programs became too costly, and the mentoring model has gone out of favor. That leaves us with a lot of new and developing managers who have come up the ranks from IT, sales or other areas. How are they learning to deal with the executive management issues of today's environment? If this training black hole is not mission critical for your organization, it should be.
The second issue your organization will likely need to address in this new business universe is the cultivation of your resilience. In the new environment, a premium is placed on elasticity. How are you injecting resilience into your organization and its employees? Your resilience meter could include the ability to recover from sales setbacks, get more done in less time and at a lower cost, and support organizational recovery from human resources changes.
Creating a smooth training course for your maturing management class and building in a culture of resilience are two of the most critical ways in which you can learn from and adapt to the next wave in the economic tide.
Click on the Action Steps below to get started addressing these major issues, so you can ride the wave!
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Bring on the Excellence!
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How do you bring excellence to your job each day?
Oftentimes, the difference between a champion and a near champion can boil down to the details.
No one knows this better than John Woodman, the first man to make it to The Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach and as a player. He points out that seemingly innocuous things make the difference between champions and near-champions. For example, he would begin the first squad meeting with the same demonstration, year after year. What do you think that demonstration was? It was about socks. Really.
As he says in his book, A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court, "I wanted absolutely no folds, wrinkles, or creases of any kind on the sock...I had a very practical reason for being meticulous about this. Wrinkles, folds, and creases can cause blisters. Blisters interfere with performance during practice and games...These seemingly trivial matters, taken together and added to many, many other so-called trivial matters, build into something very big; namely, your success."
Wooden's sentiment can easily be put to work in a business context. What about all those details? The follow-up calls, the paperwork or the gesture of gratitude toward your coworkers? Although we don't want to lose sight of our overarching goals, it is often the details that carry us to the next level.
So, instead of concentrating on your next promotion, position or raise when you get to your desk each Monday morning, consider spending your energy on taking care of those (seemingly) small details that will carry you to the spot you desire!
Click on the Action Steps to get started!
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Author Interview: Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick
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Our author interview this time is with Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick, co-authors of Training On Trial, due to be released by AMACOM Publishing in early 2010.
Jim Kirkpatrick is the Vice President of Global Training and Consulting for SMR USA. Jim has co-written three books with his father, Don Kirkpatrick, the developer of the Kirkpatrick Four Level Evaluation Model.
Wendy Kirkpatrick is the director of Kirkpatrick Partners, LLC. She is a certified instructional designer. Wendy draws on sixteen years of experience in the business world to make her training relevant and impactful with measurable results.
The Kirkpatrick Four Level Evaluation Model is rather famous in the training industry. You have carried the torch on your father’s work by continuing to educate trainers and corporations about the essence of this model, and its critical steps. You recently released a white paper that takes a new look at the Kirkpatrick Model. Can you tell us about that?
The key to implementation is starting at the end with the expectations of the stakeholders, and backing your way through the levels. We wanted to honor Don, but show new thinking, with the new Kirkpatrick Business Partnership Model.
What do you mean by “business partnership model?”
We believe that the “us versus them” mentality in the organization is not good. Using the training events as a foundation or cornerstone is great, but leveraging that training to maximize the effects is critical.
We have a specialty intransferring learning to behavior, it is s our expertise. We would like to continue the training effort by adding executives, mentors, and middle managers as coaches, executives as sponsors and champions, IT, HR people, all in alignment with enablers or “drivers” that will leverage learning.
The only way to get to level 4, Results, is through Level 3 Behavior, which is often overlooked. It is a critical component to long-term learning and assimilation of behaviors or information.
Our new book, Training On Trial, is really about many companies that implement these principles internally, and all work together. The first challenge is to ensure that everyone has a stake in the training, and to leverage that across the company, in order to arrive at measurable results.
This can involve outside or internal training resources, but the heart of it is that the training organization also needs to garner upper level support.
What is the intended audience for your latest work?
We have worked a lot with business leaders, and also will be working with consultants to help them create a differentiator, and help them create value and build business partners that will build a chain of evidence (of training results) that they can build on.
What is your response to naysayers that claim your work is too ethereal for the everyday work world?
We are very practical. We try to make our models simple and easy to understand. We preach and teach the things that work, rather than simply what looks good to colleagues.
What final thoughts would you like our readers to remember?
“What success looks like” is one of our flags in the ground. Trainers are often enthusiastic and well meaning, but are not clear on results that are expected. When the end in mind is fuzzy, all of the activity may or may not hit the mark. Once we worked with a health care company whose corporate moniker was "drive to excellence" but no one could really describe what that looked like.
Imagine how difficult it was for training professionals in that setting to accomplish their goals! So that is where measurable results take their place at the head of the table.
Thank you both for your time!
Read more about Jim at smr-usa.com and Wendy at kirkpatrickpartners.com. They can contacted at: jim.Kirkpatrick@smr-usa.com and wendy.kirkpatrick@kirkpatrickpartners.com
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Welcome to the Situation Room!
You are the Human Resources Manager for an auto parts manufacturing plant.
One of the line managers quit and you replaced him with an innovative thinker who has already come up with two efficiency ideas since he started, two weeks ago. Here are the details:
-You hired Jim in the hopes that he could help reinvigorate the team. There is a lot of cynicism on the floor, and Jim's attitude could help change the atmosphere.
-Instead of acting as a catalyst, the rest of the floor managers have not accepted Jim. His presence seems to antagonize them.
What do you do?
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