December 22, 2009

Letter from the Editor

It’s the holiday season and the time for giving. I remember as a sixth-grader back in 1969, I fell in love with music and went through several radios – each getting progressively more high fidelity. As Christmas neared, I focused on what I felt would be the ULTIMATE gift – an AM/FM radio WITH cassette player/recorder. Seriously, this was the cat’s pajamas! It was the ONLY gift I requested (over and over and over!). Fortunately, Santa was good to me on Christmas morning and there direct from JC Penney was my radio. Over the following months, I built a cabinet for that radio/cassette player, hooked up external speakers, and started amassing a collection of albums. That gift – and my love for music – enriched my life. While I’ve since upgraded my equipment, I can point to that gift as one of the pivotal points in my life and thank my parents for giving it to me.

What’s YOUR favorite gift? What gift has changed – or at least shaped – your life?

Another memorable gift I received came from my manager when I was working for Wang Labs as an instructional designer/writer. Carol Nelson had assigned me the task of creating primers (introductory booklets) to help sales reps better understand this new technology called imaging. Being fresh from writing tons of research papers as part of my doctoral studies (and new to the corporate world), I proudly turned over my first draft which represented days of painstaking research, precise writing, and footnotes galore. I was especially proud of the section on the history of imaging. Carol took all of three minutes before berating me saying, “You’re not doing a dissertation. You’re writing stuff for sales people. Make it relevant to them.” My second and third drafts got progressively better as Carol’s feedback got louder and more pointed. 

While not a gift in the “wrapped-in-a-pretty-bow” sense, Carol’s gift of feedback helped shaped my thinking about training – and the philosophy of my company – ever since. While Carol’s delivery may have lacked finesse (and, admittedly, she does get witchier the more I tell this story), the feedback and coaching was truly life-altering!

As managers, leaders, and coaches, we have the ability to provide life-altering coaching to our employees. It takes patience and time; but your gift may be – like Carol’s – one that YOUR employee writes about 20 years later! (By the way, my Imaging Primer was published in over 20 languages and went through several reprints!)

Happy Holidays to you and your families, friends, and colleagues!

Terry

We Survived the Recession. How do We Survive the Recovery?

As the saying goes, it’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end. 

As any manager knows, surviving economic downturns – while painful – is relatively straightforward: cut costs to match income. However, as the economy shows signs of recovery, many companies are finding themselves unprepared for the upturn. Without a plan, the recovery may prove fatal to these companies.

The Economy IS Recovering

In a recent edition of a longitudinal study of talent trends and strategies, Deloitte surveyed 325 executives and found that more of these executives believed that the worst of the recession was behind us. For the first time since Deloitte’s study was launched in January, more surveyed executives (31 percent) now believe the worst of the economic downturn is over as opposed to only 7 percent who think worse times are ahead. 

Deloitte’s study indicated a dramatic reduction in the percentage of companies reporting layoffs last quarter – 48 percent, down from 61 percent in May.

With CitiBank repaying $20 billion in bailout money and even my own state of NH surprised by unemployment numbers lower than expected, something’s clearly happening to the economy. While that’s great news, the question is, “Now what?! We’ve entrenched, slashed, and downsized for survival; how do we build for tomorrow’s inevitable recovery?” 

Retention and Training Now Top Priority

According to the Deloitte study, retention and training is replacing headcount reduction as top talent priority. When asked to rank top talent priorities three months from now, survey participants ranked their top talent management priority as follows:

• Training and development (32 percent)

• Retention (30 percent)

• Headcount reduction (only 22 percent ranking it highest)

Clearly, these executives are seeing the economic dust settle and are now more concerned than ever about retaining and developing their top talent.

With training budgets still slashed, how does a company develop talent and build relationships with key employees so they will stay with the company and help drive it to post-recession success? 

Coaching for Talent Development and Employee Engagement is a program created specifically for situations many companies are facing. While Entelechy’s proprietary coaching model is the center of the program, our flexible approach to customization ensures that the management development program we create is uniquely yours – addressing your unique challenges and positioning you to outpace your competitors as the recession fades.

Entelechy: Your Performance Partner

In addition to Entelechy’s 17 years of customized training development, we’ve worked with leadership gurus to bring your managers training on topics critical to them and the opportunities they face in a post-recession economy:

• Change (John Kotter)

• Innovation (Clayton Christenson and Tom Peters)

• Execution (Jack Welch)

• Spirit (Sir Richard Branson)

• Managing the Generational Mix (Bruce Tulgan)

• Decision Making (Michael Useem)

• Managing Virtual Teams (Mareen and Kimball Fisher)

• Leadership (Warren Bennis, Bill George, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, Henry Mintzberg)

The time to act is now. Contact us today to discuss how to prepare your managers for the recovery by calling us at 603-424-1237. For more information on Entelechy and our Coaching for Talent Development and Employee Engagement program, check our website at www.coachyouremployees.com. For more information about Deloitte’s study, check out http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/additional-services/Talent-Human-Capital-HR/index.htm.

Innovate or Disappear

Quick quiz: what’s the most-needed capability companies need now, next year, and three years from now? What’s the one thing that companies feel they need most? (Hint: it’s also the one thing they feel they have the least.)

If you answered innovation, you’re correct. According to a longitudinal study conducted by Deloitte, 325 surveyed executives clearly understand innovation will help navigate today’s difficult economy, but they are not prepared. By overwhelming margins, executives surveyed responded that innovation is either very important or important to their company now (84 percent) and will continue to be important one year after the recession ends (82 percent) and three years in the future (85 percent).

However, more than 6 out of 10 survey participants (61 percent) acknowledged that they either had no talent strategy currently in place to drive innovation or did not know if they had one. An overwhelming majority of surveyed executives (88 percent) fear they will not have the necessary talent to lead their innovation programs after the recession ends. 

So where does innovation come from – and how can we get some?

Marc Andressen, who developed the Mosaic browser, states, “Innovation always comes from the unsocialized 19-year-olds living in their parents’ basement [who] probably haven't showered for a week and have just some idea.... They never come out of big companies….”

Andressen is correct in his supporting statements that these unsocialized 19-year-olds have “access to all the information they would need to do anything they want to do” and that they have “a distribution vehicle for their ideas.” To get the same type of innovation from employees, companies will need to provide similar access to information and distribution of ideas. Unlike the skunkworks of yore, tomorrow’s innovators will include the entire company in the generation, incubation, nurturing, birthing, and nurturing of new innovations. 

We had the opportunity to work with Clayton Christensen, Harvard Professor and author of several books on innovation including the landmark, Seeing What’s Next. Dr. Christensen lists – and then refutes – common principles about innovation. For example, a commonly-held notion is that you should “listen and respond to the unmet needs of your best customers.” Dr. Christensen argues that your best customers are looking for incremental changes, small enhancements to existing products. THEY are not a good source for the dissonance that creates what Christensen calls disruptive innovation, innovation that changes the playing field for an industry.

Another notion that Dr. Christensen explores and then explodes is the notion that a company should “outsource those activities that are low value-added that are not your core competencies.” Christensen points to company after company that outsourced its low-value add activities only to find that those outsourcers ended nibbling more and more from the company until they ended eating the company’s lunch – literally.

Innovation comes when brainstorming and “what-if”-ing is encouraged throughout the organization, when opportunity is recognized and allowed to grow. 

Do your managers know how to encourage innovation? Do they know how to recognize opportunities – opportunities that may prove to be your company’s ticket to post-recession growth! For more information on customized programs that will help tap into the creativity and innovation lying dormant in your employees, contact Terry at ttraut@unlockit.com.

Coaching for TD&EE: Three Solution Packages

Entelechy’s new coaching website (www.coachyouremployees.com) features our Coaching Solution Packages, three versions of Entelechy’s comprehensive coaching program designed to meet your specific organization’s needs:

Gold Solution (Cultural Change) — designed for the company looking to realize the benefits of implementing a coaching culture throughout the organization.

Silver Solution (Competency Development) — designed for the company looking to develop coaching as a management competency throughout the organization.

Bronze Solution (Skill Enhancement) — designed for the company looking to initiate coaching into the managerial skillset.

We created three versions of the Coaching for Talent Development and Employee Engagement solution because our clients asked for them. Some clients simply want to enhance the skills of their managers and supervisors (the Bronze Solution) whereas other clients wish to make coaching a key cultural element (Gold Solution). Still other clients wanted something in the middle.

You can review case studies of other organizations that have initiated coaching programs to learn of their challenges and how they used coaching – and Entelechy – to address them by visiting http://www.coachyouremployees.com/coaching/casestudies.htm. 

We’ll continue adding features and tools that will help you, the manager and supervisor (and those who support them) develop and engage your employees.

Now is the time to equip your front-line managers with the tools they need to succeed – and help your organization survive today’s economic challenges and prepare for tomorrow’s recovery. Contact Entelechy at 603-424-1237 or info@unlockit.com for more information on Coaching for Talent Development and Employee Engagement and give your managers the tools they need to lead their employees through the inevitable changes they face with the economy’s recovery.