Steve Roesler published a great post (then again, has he ever written a bad post?) titled Talent: Accurate Self-Awareness or Karaoke Feedback?. The main focus is feedback and he offers suggestions on how to give it as well as how to receive it.

For me, I find the hardest thing to remember about feedback is that it is a gift. Yes, sometimes that gift is like receiving tube socks for Christmas but every so often I get the kind of feedback that is right up there with receiving a first edition signed copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Feedback is learning and I have to remind my ego that learning is good if I want to grow (it helps to talk to my ego like it’s a five year old).

It also helps to frame the experience of receiving feedback in this way. Steve notes:

And remember: Feedback is more indicative of the person giving it to you than of you yourself. It tells you what’s important to them, reflects underlying values and expectations, and reveals ‘how you measure up’ in their eyes.

It’s a terrific post and made even more so by the addition of Wally Bock’s comment where he tells the story of how his father, a Lutheran pastor, asked for and received feedback from his family after each service and sermon. His experience offers additional elements that are vital in making feedback the powerful learning tool that it can be.

How are you practicing good feedback to those around you?
Are you asking for candid feedback and taking notes?

As I vaguely mentioned in my last post, after a few months of hustling to get all of my application items together, I’ve finally been accepted to the business anthropology master’s degree program at the University of North Texas. Along with my background in workplace coaching, organizational management, and leadership development, I’m excited at the prospect of adding an applied anthropology discipline to my portfolio (shoot me an email if you’re curious about what business anthropology is). My program is almost entirely online so it will be interesting to experience this type of learning and how different it might be from the traditional classroom experience.

But now comes the dawning realization that this program actually costs money (who knew?). Once upon a time I worked for a non-profit that offered a pretty sweet tuition reimbursement package in their benefits. The only condition was that you had to have a B grade or better in each class to be eligible for the reimbursement. Interestingly, the program didn’t necessarily have to be aligned with your job role (which is also rather rare). So, for instance, if you were in customer service and wanted to earn a degree in accounting, you were free to pursue that path.

I’m beginning to realize just how uncommon tuition reimbursement is in today’s organizations. Perhaps it’s always been this way or just a reflection of the current economy. Maybe you’re facing the same situation: you’re an employee planning on going back to school or a manager with staff who are interested in pursuing an advanced degree of some type…but your organization doesn’t have a tuition reimbursement or assistance program. While the financial aid is a nice benefit, there are some other ways to support academic learning in your organization:

Executive sponsorship
Think of this as an academic adviser within your organization. Each program typically assigns a faculty member to help students align their courses and learning with their professional direction. Well, apply that same type of role within your organization. Ask a senior manager or seasoned professional within your organization to be a mentor. This sponsor would ideally be someone who has the background, experience, and network related to the student’s field of study. Their purpose would be to offer insight and help connect the classroom study to the day-to-day world of work.

Workplace Learning Cohort
If you work in a big enough organization, there will likely be others pursuing a degree along with you. Why not develop a learning cohort and pull all the students together? The cohort doesn’t have to be grouped according to field of study – unless it makes particular sense to gather all the MBAs together. But, there is a strong possibility for additional learning if the group is a collective from multiple disciplines. If for no other reason to form, the cohort can be a support group for balancing the demands of work, school, and home lives.

Mini-Internships and Work Integration Options
Unless your ultimate goal is to be the prince of an ivory tower, you’re probably going back to school in order to advance your professional goals. And there’s nothing more frustrating to get all of this academic learning with no application to the real world of work. There needs to be a balance between theory and application. If your degree is directly aligned with your current work, then talk with your executive sponsor or immediate manager about how you can best integrate your academic work with your daily professional work. If your degree is not aligned with what you do daily, make a case for a mini-internship in another department (or at another organization if you can make a convincing argument). Just be prepared to show how your current work assignments won’t suffer and that the mini-internship will make you more valuable to your manager, team, and company.

The big idea is to be creative in how you integrate your professional development and your work even if there are no established programs in your organization. Anyone have other ideas or programs they’ve run across for how companies can support the learners in their workplace?

Steve Roesler applied the tag to me last week for a book reading meme. I’m kind of a sucker for anything book related so here she goes… 

The object of this meme’s game is to share what I’m currently reading and sentences 6-8 of page 123 of that book. I’m actually reading three books right now, two of them contributing to my professional learning: Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting and Pamela Skilling’s soon-to-be-released Escape from Corporate America. Here’s the page 123 snippet from Pamela’s work:

However, it is the immediate manager you work with every day who makes the biggest impact on your job satisfaction. Great companies cultivate great managers. They also give them the tools and the autonomy to lead their teams effectively.

What else is currently in the queue? Here’s my bookpile in the order I plan to read:

The Halo Effect – Phil Rosenzweig
Weird Ideas That Work – Robert Sutton
Get Back in the Box – Douglas Rushkoff
Excellence by Design – Turid H Horgan, Michael L Joroff, William L Porter, & Donald A Schon
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – Marshall Goldsmith

Dang…that’s a bit of a load and I’m not at all sure that I’ll get through all of these books by the end of the summer. The problem for me is that I’m the king tortoise of reading…I read reeeeaaaal slllllooooow. And I’m also starting my Master’s degree in Business Anthropology in July so there are no guarantees. Honestly, I imagine there will be course prescribed reading that will trump my bookshelf selections. 

So, who’s next? I’m curious to see what kind of book reading projects on are on the minds of…

Jenny Ward
Pamela Skillings
Judi Sohn
Jason Alba
Frank Martin

Want to know the power of a system? Consider this…if you place a good manager within a bad system, they will founder nine times out of ten. Same goes for individuals; a bad system will dilute a superstar employee’s potential. Yet, how many times are we willing to give up on, demote, or release an individual rather than take a good hard look at our own systems? Right…I thought so. Perhaps because it’s easier to level the blame on a person than do the more intensive work of analyzing and overhauling a system that’s ineffective or downright bad. But by focusing on individuals rather than systems, managers maintain the idiotic charade that makes it look like they’re being proactive by rooting out the crappy people when in reality they’re just reapplying lipstick to the pig.

In Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton write that systems trump individual effort on a regular basis. They argue that “bad systems do far more damage than bad people, and a bad system can make a genius look like an idiot. Try redesigning systems and jobs before you decide that a person is ‘crappy.’”

What are examples of bad systems? Here’s one that plagues non-profits and for-profits alike: silos. I’ve personally witnessed innovative and resourceful individuals rendered ineffective within a siloed organization. Yet, when it was time for the annual review (there’s another example of a bad system), these individuals had to take the lion’s share of the blame for their performance failings. It’s rather like giving a racer a Ferrari and then telling them to perform at their highest level on a dirt and gravel track.

So, then these individuals are labeled as crappy people, the kind you want to figure out how move off your team or out of your organization. But here’s the thing…that outlook will never lead to anything other than mediocrity in your organization. Consider again what Bob Sutton wrote a couple of years ago on the subject:

The worst part about focusing on keeping out crappy people, however, is that it reflects a belief system that “the people make the place.” The implication is that, once you hire great people and get rid of the bad ones, your work is pretty much done. Yet if you look at large scale studies in everything from automobile industry to the airline industry, or look at Diane Vaughn’s fantastic book on the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the well-crafted report written by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the evidence is clear: The “rule of law crappy systems” trumps the “rule of crappy people.”

If you’re a senior manager and all of this sounds achingly familiar, don’t despair…let’s improve the system. Begin doing something that most organizations don’t do which is take a holistic and deep-penetrating assessment of your people-systems.

• Review your organization’s structure. Is your organization siloed or structurally ineffective?
• Review your organization’s social networks. Do your employees have quality relationships with others outside of their working groups? Do they know how to communicate effectively, have constructive conflicts, and build new connections?
• Review your organization’s knowledge management infrastructure. Can your people access other individuals easily and openly? Can your people access not only the knowledge of others but expertise that may exist outside of the job description?
• Review your organization’s learning systems. Do your employees know how to learn and share that learning in ways that benefits others in the organization?

These four assessment points of your people-system signal just the beginning of change. There’s still much to do to initiate and follow-through with the changes…issues to be addressed in future posts (or contact me for how I can help your organization). But the next time you rant about the underperforming employee or underachieving team, think first about the systems that got them there.

Right now, my new faddish pastime is LinkedIn Answers (I’m a renaissance soul so give it a couple of weeks…it’s likely to change). I dig how some fairly simple questions can generate some interestingly diverse opinions. I’ve been posting some questions and receiving some responses that I’ll likely incorporate into upcoming blogposts.

Recently, someone asked this question:
Does past performance guarantee future results? If not, why it is so often used as a criteria for raises and promotions?

I was surprised by the responses. Many opined that there are no guarantees, yet the past usually indicates the future and this is the only option we have. To which, I must call bullshit. This sounds an awful lot like a collective “that’s just they way things are.” Really? I just can’t accept that. Here’s the answer I offered:

No and this is exactly why the structure used for raises and promotions is flawed. Our own successes often get in the way of future success. See Marshall Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

However, I think what the responses here show is that few organizations have figured out how to build in raises and promotions. So, we’re still dealing with an old system that may no longer work. Here’s an idea…scrap past performance as the key indicator for whether someone gets a raise. Make it based on the number of new ideas conceived during the year, the number of innovations to improve processes, etc. Something that actually is forward-looking rather than backward facing. And let’s change the idea of promotion. What’s a promotion…change from line employee to manager? How about adding work that fits the strengths of that employee rather than just giving a title promotion.

So, am I on to something here? Completely full of crap? What’s your take? And if you’ve managed to change the criteria for compensation and professional acknowledgment, what’s your story?

Today Annette Clancy, Johnnie Moore, and Matt Moore published a terrific podcast focused on confidentiality in organizations. It’s based on a post started by Annette a couple of days ago called In Confidence. While the podcast is aimed at the consulting experience, there’s some juicy insight here for managers and leaders, as well.

Among the topics discussed are:

The relationship between confidentiality and trust in organizations

Secrets as a source of power within organizations

An assumption that confidentiality creates more truthfulness

The podcast lives here and lasts about 30 minutes. Enjoy!