in this issue
	Icebreaker: Picture This Stacking the Deck Strategy: Redefining Your Role in Development Self-Directed Learning for Sales Managers

Icebreaker: Picture This

Thanks to my friend Gail L'Esperance for this idea. She does a lot of distance learning, and one way she makes a connection with students is to post a picture of herself involved in one of her hobbies. Through the learning technology, all students can see her photo when she's speaking. She also encourages students to bring similar photos of themselves to post. This helps people make a connection with others they may have never met. And it's fun to learn about the interests of the other learners.

Stacking the Deck

Here's an exercise that illustrates for managers the importance of treating all direct reports fairly. Set up a competition between teams. Explain that you will ask each team a question about managing people. Questions can be related to legal issues, performance reviews, or whatever topics you address in the training. You will want some really easy questions, some moderately hard questions, and some very difficult questions. For example, an easy question is, "True of False: It is illegal to base a promotion on someone's race or gender." A difficult question is, "Name a law that protects women's rights in the workplace and the year it was passed." Divide the class into teams. If you have some participants with more experience than others, put them on the same team. Then ask teams questions and track correct answers. Now here's where it gets interesting. You want to stack the deck against the experienced team. Give them only difficult questions. Give another team only easy questions, and give the remaining teams the moderate questions. Continue the game long enough that people recognize the pattern of questions and get vocal about how "unfair" the game is. Debrief the game by asking, How did you feel about the game and why? When the team that got the hard questions complains that it wasn't fair, explain that they are a more experienced group, so they were more capable of answering the difficult questions. Then ask the team that got easy questions how they felt about winning. And ask the other team(s) how they felt about the game. Finally, ask if they have ever experienced something similar on the job (getting the "hard" stuff, or observing others who get the hard stuff). Explore how that made them feel. Summarize that the job of a manager or supervisor is to treat all fairly. It's natural to give more challenging projects to those most capable of handling them, but it's not good to overload the strongest people and go easy on the weakest. Each person should be equally challenged. You might follow this with an assignment in which they analyze how they assign work to each of their direct reports. That will bring the game back to their own world.

Strategy: Redefining Your Role in Development

We hosted a Think Tank this month for people in training and organizational development. One of the observations we made about trends in training is that the role of the training professional in people development seems to be changing. Many years ago, managers had primary responsibility for the development of employees. They had the technical expertise and were expected to develop that expertise in their staff. Then the responsibility shifted to professional trainers, people with training or HR degrees rather than technical experience. Managers sent employees to training and expected them to return "trained." Now things seem to be heading back in the other direction. Many of the companies we work with are cutting training staff and expecting managers to again take a bigger role in both day-to-day training and formal classroom training. So where does this leave the training professional? It does make sense that managers should take an active role in people development. But some managers don't know how to train, others don't want to. And even if they did, time is limited and they don't know how to create good training. The need to develop talent is still strong, and the barriers still exist. Strategies have changed, which means that we "training professionals" must adapt. Our organizations need different things from us today and in the future than they may have in the past. In our meeting, we identified three roles for the training professional. First, manager development. We must help managers develop the skills and desire so that they can develop their people. They need to understand how people learn and how to facilitate a training session. So we must train managers. The second role for training professionals is support. Managers don't have time to develop training materials. We need to provide them with the tools to create strategic development plans, and actual training materials they can use on the job. You might create a series of short training modules they can implement (similar to the ones we've shared in past newsletters). It may also be helpful to act as a clearinghouse for finding outside training vendors and acquiring course materials needed to implement strategic plans. The third and final role is one of an organizational change agent. We must work on changing the company's culture so that it supports and reinforces the manager's role in developing people. As you begin identifying strategic plans for 2007, consider how your role might be changing. Are you seeing a shift in the expectations of training and managers? Should there be? How can you help your organization think differently about the way people are developed? What resources should you be offering next year in support of business goals? Be proactive in assessing your current and potential role, and propose something new and different next year.

Self-Directed Learning for Sales Managers

One of the challenges presented at our Think Tank was how to provide Sales Managers (managers of managers) with resources to independently develop their own skills. As it was explained, a competency study was completed and training has been developed and is being offered. They want to supplement training with a series of exercises, activities, and resources for managers to continue their development after training. So we did some great brainstorming. Here are some of the ideas offered. Suggest that they work on or lead a cross-functional team. Encourage volunteer work to either develop new skills or mentor someone else. Take on the role of project manager for the annual sales conference. Interview leaders from different departments, business units, and locations to learn about what they do (provide them with a form or list of questions they should explore). Work in another department for a day, and document what they learned. Lead a book club on managing or leadership. Participate in virtual case studies online where a case is posed to "members" who write in how they would deal with the situation. Publish/subscribe to a manager's newsletter. These were just some of the ideas generated. Once we had these great suggestions, it led to discussion about how to provide the resources to managers. Tools would need to be created that offered structure around each activity. A web site/intranet could be created for managers to assess their needs, set goals, find independent activities, and track progress. And some marketing would be needed to let managers know what was available and how to use it. This strategy and the one described in the last article involve creating tools so that others can implement training and development. Think about trends in your organization. Will these ideas work for you? Let us know. And let us know what we should be writing about in future newsletters to support your training objectives.