On-Boarding: How to Shorten Ramp-up Times for Employees

Please be my guest for a free webinar on Wednesday, August 17. That’s when I  will be conducting a complimentary, online seminar that teaches leaders how to help new employees (or existing ones) ramp-up more quickly for new roles within their organization.

 On-Boarding: How to Shorten Ramp-up Times for Employees

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

9:00–10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, 12:00–1:00 p.m. Eastern Time

5:00–6:00 p.m. UK Time, 4:00–5:00 p.m. GMT

 Presenter: Madeleine Homan-Blanchard, Co-founder of Coaching Services, The Ken Blanchard Companies

Co-Creator: Blanchard Certified, an online leadership development system.

 On-boarding has traditionally been seen as an HR responsibility and it’s easy to let the company’s training department make sure that new employees get off on the right foot.  This is a good start, but research shows that when managers also get involved the process moves along that much faster.

 In this webinar, I  will share three strategies managers can use to get their people off to a fast start including:

1. Painting the Picture: Learn how to create a picture of what a good job looks like and how to monitor that your employee has “gotten” it.
2. Sharing your Leadership Point of View: Take the mystery out of what you expect by spelling out your beliefs and expectations.
3. Mapping Relationships: Help new employees understand how things really get done in your organization by drawing them a map of who is who, and what is what.

 Don’t miss this opportunity to take a more proactive approach to getting people up-to-speed quickly.

 To register for this complimentary event, click on this link:

http://www.webex.com/webinars/OnBoarding-How-to-Shorten-Rampup-Times-for-Employees

I Am So Sorry

The Pleasure of Giving

Just had the most extraordinary pleasure of being a coach for a delightful experiment called a Collaboratorium for TED Fellows.  13 Fellows, all of whom applied to be chosen for the experience, spent an entire day with a team of coaches and business experts.  Each team had a facilitator and each Fellow had an “advocate” to make sure that their charge didn’t get too overwhelmed.  It is easy to get freaked out by the experience of such focused attention on your heart’s desires and your grand plans to achieve world domination for good with your mighty intelligence and creativity. 

One of the consultants, Sunny Bates, truly a golden ray, did a special presentation on networking and raising money, said an extraordinarily beautiful thing: 

“We don’t ache for what we don’t have; we ache for what we can’t give.”

The bible tells us that it is better to give than to receive, and  in fact, the latest research in neuroscience does reveal that the pleasure centers of the brain show increased activation when we have an opportunity to give or to share, substantially more than when we receive something. 

The lesson for the Fellows (and for me!) was that:

• Receiving all the help over the course of day was much harder than it was for all of we helpers to contribute
• As hard as it is too ask for help, or money or support, if you frame the request properly and make it of the right people, they are delighted to help
• And in fact, that for the right person, being able to give is a greater contribution to themselves and their own deep pleasure than it is to you (at least in terms of the pleasure center in the brain.)

More on this electrifying experience  soon.

The 9 Rules of Showmanship for Presentations

I developed a very short – the requirement is four minutes – talk for a SupporTED* conference  (called, delightfully, a Collaboratorium) on the topic of presence specifically for presentations. 

1. Love:

 First rule of presence and showmanship:  Love what you are talking about and let your passion show.  If you are doing your presentation a lot, which can happen when you are raising money or have written a book, it can get tedious so remind yourself how much you care about your topic every time you open your mouth about it.

As important, love the people you are with.  You will be naturally focussed on wanting them to love you.  Cut that out. Find a way to love them up even if they scare you or disagree with you.  Love them and you will be irresistible.

2. Call to Action:

Be clear about what your message is, ask yourself the question:  what do I want people to walk away thinking, feeling, doing?  What is the call to action? Don’t trust people to “get it”.  They won’t. Tell them.

3. Take Risks:

Take risks. If you aren’t pushing the envelope, you are boring yourself.  If you are bored…well.  People have the attention span of sand fleas.  Compete by using all mediums available to you to – leverage the unexpected.

4.   Feel your Feet:

Be in your body.  You will be afraid, that never goes away, so get used to it.  Get out of your head, your amygdale are there and they can hijack you with fight, flight or this context more likely the dreaded freeze.  Stage fright can be literally described as an out of body experience. Lawrence Olivier, one of the greatest actors of all time was tortured for a couple of years by debilitating stage fright.  He said the one trick that worked for him was to feel his feet. So to get out of your head: feel your feet.  Do it right now. Feel the soles of your feet on the floor, in your shoes.  See how it pulls you right down into your body? Remember this trick, it will serve you well.

Be in your body.  Any movement you make, complete.  Don’t commit the sin of half arm movements, (visualize my  forearms waving around with elbows stuck to sides) you will look a science experiment.

5. Practice: 

Practice in front of the mirror, without a mirror, in the car, on the treadmill, in front of anyone who will let you.   Your dog.  Practice until you are bored with practice and then practice some more.  What’s the 5th rule? 

Right.

6.  Start Strong:

Start strong.  Don’t equivocate, hesitate, dither, or for the love of Pete, apologize in any way.  Don’t apologize for your slides, for the room, for the weather.  If you are late, apologize, once and then get on with it.

7.  Sing out!

Talk a little louder than feels natural and find your light.  Don’t try to hide or pretend you aren’t here.

8.  Go toward the Light

Find your heat sources and speak to them.  Fight the instinct to seek out the people who hate you and try to change their minds.  It won’t work.  Find the people who love you and shower them with appreciation and attention.

9.  Finish Clean

Ending is hard because you have built up momentum and it feels like letting go. Just go for it. Never, ever, ever go over your allotted time. Be brief, succinct, to the point and end early and cleanly. 

That’s all.

*SupporTED is the organization that provides executive coaching for TED Fellows.

Cranky Boss Day?

Have you ever noticed that things tend to go in trends?  Well yesterday I had 4 coaching calls, and every single client was inordinately frustrated with his or her boss.  All four of these folks had definitely tagged ‘managing up’ as a focus area for coaching, but things seemed to have reached a fever pitch yesterday – it made me wish I understood astrology to see if there was something in the stars!

All of the complaining (gently called venting by coach Mad) centered on the same things –bosses who try to be decent at certain things that aren’t natural to them have folded under the stress and aren’t even trying anymore.  The general message is “don’t expect me to change my spots – just suck it up and deal with it.”  The result is that unsupportive bosses are less supportive than ever, uncommunicative bosses cease all communication, surly bosses become downright mean.  None of this is improving anything.

Some questions for my clients in pain:

• What can you do to take care of yourself?
• How can you communicate your distress to your boss, if at all?
• As a boss yourself are you potentially weakening the same way?

Here are the takeaways from collective brainstorming and discussion:

1. It takes guts to call your boss out on bad behavior, but if the relationship is there sometimes it is worth it.  Practice giving feedback using concrete observations and neutral language.  Ask how you can help ease pressure.
2. If your boss is folding under pressure and providing you with nothing you need, stop complaining and start finding what you need elsewhere.  Sure it sucks more time, but you can’t go under just because your boss is losing it.
3. If you notice other people – especially your boss’s peers- are also complaining about your boss, keep your ear to the ground for political repercussions.  If people are being laid off, your boss could be on the list and you need to be prepared.  Harsh but true.
4. If you are a boss and you have more work than usual because people have been laid off, and business is down 27% and you are more stressed than you have ever been in your adult life, now is the time to grow.  This is not the time to fold under pressure and revert to bad habits. Under no circumstance is it appropriate to take things out on your direct reports. Now is the time to be more communicative, patient and generous.  It is called “rising to the occasion” – a marvelous expression. Ask yourself how you are rising to this occasion.

Sand Paintings

I recently attended my niece’s graduation from Oberlin. The commencement speaker was Julie Taymore of Lion King fame, and much much more. She talked about leaping into the void to follow your heart. She talked about taking risks – she quoted Michael Eisner (former CEO of Disney ) as saying “the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff.”

She talked about how important it is to stay focused on the goal. But in the talking about striving for a goal, she also stressed that you have to always be listening for input on the wisdom of your dream. She compared the shaping of our pursuits to the creation of a sand painting – that we must plan and carefully place each grain of sand, all the while knowing that a puff of wind could come up at any time to rearrange your work.

And depending on your point of view – you work will either be enhanced or destroyed. I thought it was a nice analogy.

On Getting Things Done Through Others

This article was originally published on Harvard Business Review on August 1, 2005.

One of the hardest things for technically proficient, smart people to realize is that as they assume more and more leadership responsibility, they must continue to increase their dependence on the help of others. Each of these “others” is an individual who needs to be seen, heard and understood by their leaders in order to maximize the potential they offer.

Thus, it’s critical for you as a leader to map your key relationships to understand how well each is serving your aims. Relationship Mapping is an ideal tool to use as you are strategizing a new project, when you begin a new role, or when  you find yourself running into unexpected obstacles in a specific area.

The key is to know and be able to articulate:

• What you are planning to do
• The trajectory you are planning to follow
• Who will be impacted by it
• How each of these people can either help or hurt you
• What you can and will do to leverage helpers?
• How you will manage any possible damage control

What to do?

Taking the time to really think through your relationships requires a great deal of discipline and adherence to a specific process.

Begin by taking a large piece of paper or find a white board.

Next: clearly identify what exactly you are trying to accomplish.  What is the goal?  You may have several, so do a map for each one.

Then draw a box for each person who might be affected by what you are doing.  Don’t worry about going overboard, you can always scale back.  Be sure to include senior leaders, colleagues in your industry, peers in other departments, direct reports, functional reports, and dotted line team leads. Once you have included all possible stakeholders, identify the following for each person:

• What are their main goals/objectives?
• How will it serve them for to you succeed?  Fail?
• What do you need from them?
• How can they help you?  Hurt you?
• What is their style?  How will you need to communicate with them to influence them?

For example:

• Do they like a lot of detail or do they want the executive summary?
• What regard do they have for you?  Do they like, respect, and trust you?
• How do you feel about them?  Do you harbor judgments about them that they might be picking up on?

After you have completed this process for each person, identify what you’ve learned.  You will see that some individuals may be less important than you thought, while others are more important and require greater attention than you’ve given them previously.

Creating Action Plans

To address what you’ve learned in this process, you need an action plan for each individual. Action plans can include spending time together, going to the person to ask for advice, or picking up the phone simply to get their opinion about something.   Or, plan to go to lunch, include them in relevant emails, or make it a point to drop by their cubes, especially those that are not on your regular path.

If you know that you’ve made mistakes with a certain person, and that past misunderstandings are standing in the way of clear communication, take the person to lunch and clear the air.

Your action plan should also include methodically paying attention to how people use language so that you can understand better what is important to them, what they focus on, how they think and how they approach things. How people communicate their understanding offers useful clues to how they process information. If they say ‘I see,’ they are probably, literally, swayed by visual images, graphics, a vision. “I don’t feel comfortable” is often used by kinesthetic learners who will respond better to a document in their hand rather than an electronic copy. If you listen you will hear whether someone wants to be told, or shown, whether they want the detailed plan or the cut to the chase outcome.