Today, we offer you a simple answer to this question, coupled with a powerful graphic, that blows away the whole employee engagement conundrum.

So What is Employee Engagement, exactly?

As an employee or an individual, you can be said to be ‘engaged’ when 3 factors are at work together:

• Your Head is engaged on the task. In other words, you are concentrating on the task in hand and have a good understanding of it.
• Your Heart is engaged on the task. When your Heart is engaged you want to complete the task you are working on, and you want to do more tasks of that kind.
• Your Hand is engaged on the task. When your Hand is engaged on the task your body physically commits to doing that task, and often forms a habit of doing it repeatedly.

These three factors of Head, Heart and Hand explain what engagement is – simply! At this point you may find it helpful to download and view the graphic that illustrates the engagement process here.

Engagement: not a destination but a cycle

One mistake organisations make is when they consider employee engagement as a destination. It is nothing of the sort. The reality is that engagement is an ongoing cycle, and happens by the millisecond.

The good news is that employee engagement is really no more complex than the graphic attached. And, as long as managers ask themselves and their employees the right questions, then they can get a good handle on how engaged they may be at any one time.

What are those questions? We will cover this more extensively in a future post, so make sure you are subscribed to our free email updates that will keep Taking your Talent to a Higher Level!

Also let us know what you think about the Engagement Cycle graphic attached by posting a comment below! Helpful or not? Let us know!

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

The training programmes below are our hottest sellers in Thailand and develop your people’s skills in the ‘core 5′ areas of Communication, Customer, Leadership, Talent and Teams.

Have a look – and if you’re interested in any of them – fill in the form below for details of our Special Offer now running for these 5 key management training programmes – with a 20% discount for all orders received before the 10th February 2012!

Special Offer Management Training Programmes (Thailand only)

	Communication – Presentation Talent! Presentation Talent! is an enjoyable and intensive two day presentation skills programme that takes your people through all the steps to make their presentations shine. * With video clips and exciting, hands-on activities as well as plenty of speaking assignments, Presentation Talent! is essential for those making management presentations and sales presentations alike.
	Customer – Customer Experience Maximisation Would you like your people to create an outstanding customer experience at every touchpoint? * If so, then you need Customer Experience Maximisation! CE Max gets communication and buy-in from multiple levels and functions of your organisation to innovate a blowaway customer experience!
	Leadership – The Leadership Challenge The world’s bestselling leadership training programme is now available in Thailand – exclusively through Talent Technologies If you would like your managers to learn and practise what it takes to lead across cultures as well as up and down your organisation, then The Leadership Challenge is for you! Make 2012 the year you join the world’s best. Run The Leadership Challenge in your company!
	Talent – Talent Factor Getting your team playing to their strengths is the #1 engagement driver in companies. But how do we identify those strengths? Using the world’s only objective assessment of talent (Highlands Ability Battery) Talent Factor enables you to identify not only your colleagues’ talents, but also a career plan and natural team roles – making this another must have training programme for 2012!
	Teams – Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Don’t be misled by the title! Your team does not have to be dysfunctional to benefit from this, the world’s bestselling team development programme! Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team equips your team players with all the tools needed to create effective, engaged and high-performing teams – a much-needed management skill in Thailand!

So there you have our top management training programmes for 2012.

If you would like to take advantage of our Special Offer which must end on February 10th 2012, simply reply using the form below with ‘Special Offer’ in the ‘message’ box >>

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Please send me your Special Offer details > > >

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic offers lessons of courage, decisionmaking in the most difficult of circumstances, and leadership in the face of stubborn and unrelenting adversity.

This collection of video contained also in the movie South takes our readers to the icy wastes of the Antarctic and offers heartwarming and inspirational lessons on leadership.

Why not watch the whole series – you won’t regret it!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrjiODxJC2g

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

And the question is a very valid one, since companies are trying to upgrade the capabilities of their teams and leaders at the same time. But is there an order in which this should be done?

Often, clients will note that ‘leadership’ is the gap that needs most urgent attention in their companies, and thus prioritise training this specific skill set.

But so often, this ‘direct’ approach backfires in Asia. Let me explain why.

Leaders are only as good as their… teams

We’re probably all familiar with the movies where a charismatic leader is able to inspire his or her team to heroic efforts. And, given that most of these movies originate in America, it’s not hard to discern the very individualistic strain that runs through them.

The Anglo-Saxon concept of leadership tends to glorify this type of leader. Think of Maximus (played by Russell Crowe) in Gladiator, or Mel Gibson’s character in Braveheart. It’s easy to be seduced by such chest-thumping examples of leaders.

However research conducted by the world’s leading cross-cultural authority, Geert Hofstede, should serve as a caution to companies wishing to use Leadership as a starting point for their management training. This is because his very extensive research has discovered that most Asian countries don’t share this individualistic concept of leadership. In fact, they are as a whole more collective or ‘group oriented’ in character (those interested can see the difference between individualism and collectivism here, as well as the data for select countries).

What this tells us is that people from countries with high collectivist orientation prefer to move forward as a group, rather than as a number of individuals.

Why fight when you can flow?

Last week The Daily Reckoning proposed a new theory of government. It goes as follows – ‘I can’t lead. And I don’t want to follow.’

This struck a chord with us here at Talent Technologies, because it’s a mode of thought that is becoming increasingly prevalent here in Asia.

More and more professionals – especially those in the Gen Y category – don’t want to lead, and also don’t want to follow. Or rather, don’t want to follow in the traditional sense of following rules and regulations, and bosses etc.

Yet this group of professionals do seem to work more effectively as part of a team – when a team is formed. The problem is, as we saw in a previous post of ours here – teams are actually a rarity in Asia. ‘Groups’ predominate, but a group is not a team.

Given this, does it really make more sense to go from group to team, or group to leader, first?

Teams must come first…

From our experience teams must come first. This is not only because the step from group to team as opposed to group to leader, outlined above, is the more natural one. And this is not only because Gen Y tend to be serial responsibility-shirkers.

It’s also because the conceptual gap – i.e. the number of concepts and behaviours required to ‘change’ to ‘become a leader’ are so many that it’s no surprise that most leadership training programmes fail miserably to achieve their goals.

And most of all it’s because – and please note this carefully – that the medium of a strong team itself makes the work of leadership easy!

In other words, get the team right, and you won’t have to lead (so much!)

If you’re thinking of developing your team, then look no further than the world’s #1 team development programme here. And, once you’ve put your team through that, why not work on the stuff of leadership in this award-winning training programme – The Leadership Challenge?

Happy teamwork, and happy leading!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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นำเสนอทักษะอย่างมืออาชีพ เพื่อที่จะบรรลุความเป็นเลิศในการทำงาน โปรแกรมการฝึกอบรมการบริหารจัดการของเราครอบคลุม 5 หน่วยหลักของ ‘ทักษะเสริม’ ในรูปแบบที่น่าตื่นเต้นและมีปฎิสัมพันธ์

5 หน่วยหลัก >>

พรสวรรค์ – เพื่อบรรลุความเป็นเลิศรายบุคคล รู้จักจุดแข็งของคุณ จัดการการทำงานของคุณเพื่อให้คุณสามารถเล่นบทบาทกับจุดแข็งของคุณได้อย่างเป็นปกติและการสร้างการบริหารจัดการเวลาและระบบเพิ่มการทำงาน เพื่อช่วยให้คุณสามารถจัดการทุกๆวันของคุณได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ เพียงสามหัวข้อของหน่วยหลักของเราที่ช่วยให้คุณประสบความสำเร็จในที่ทำงาน — ทุกวัน โปรแกรมการจัดการพรสวรรค์ >>

ทีมงาน — การทำงานร่วมกันได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ ความสามารถในการทำงานร่วมกันอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพในทีม การเป็นผู้นำและพัฒนาทีมและส่งเสริมพฤติกรรมการมีส่วนร่วม คือทักษะศูนย์กลางของหน่วยการฝึกอบรมของเรา นอกจากนี้ยังรวมถึงทักษะการบริหารจัดการข้ามวัฒนธรรมอีกด้วย โปรแกรมการจัดการทีม >>

การสื่อสาร – สร้างการเชื่อมโยง โปรแกรมทักษะการสื่อสารของเรา ช่วยให้เข้าใจรูปแบบการสื่อสาร พัฒนาความฉลาดทางอารมณ์ (EQ) ของพวกเขาและสื่อสารอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพในด้านบุคคลและในการเขียน โปรแกรมการสื่อสาร >>

ผู้นำ — การบรรลุเป้าหมาย การก้าวกระโดดจากผู้จัดการสู่การเป็นผู้นำเป็นหัวใจของหน่วยการอบรมนี้ นอกจากนี้ยังมีภาวะผู้นำยังสร้างทักษะในการฝึกและการจัดการต่อการเปลี่ยนแปลง โปรแกรมภาวะผู้นำ >>

ลูกค้า — การส่งมอบประสบการณ์ที่ดี สามารถออกแบบและนำเสนอประสบการณ์ลูกค้าที่โดดเด่นภายในบริษัท และพัฒนาทักษะการบริการลูกค้า ซึ่งถือเป็นสิ่งสำคัญของการฝึกอบรม โปรแกรมการจัดการลูกค้า >>

Contact us here for more details > > >

We think there is…

What’s really holding companies back from executing on their strategy?

A landmark study of over 1,500 face-to-face interviews with Global CEOs conducted by IBM in 2010 (the link to the study is here) discovered that one issue stood out above all others: complexity.

Basically, the world, their organisations, their customers, their marketplace… all had become terribly complex for Global CEOs, and it was stopping them delivering on their strategy.

Asia may well be the world’s most lucrative region, yet (and we return to that old Human Resource issue again), companies routinely find it difficult to ‘link up all the parts’ that form this web of complexity. Is there anything they can do?

Big picture, small picture

One of the challenges of complexity is when a top-line strategy needs to be broken into goals, actions and processes.

Getting your people to understand their part in the ‘big picture’ is critical for the effective execution of the strategy yet we have seen this fail so many times in companies in Thailand and Asia.

Customer Focus

The second challenge is ensuring constant customer focus. As we’ve seen in a previous post here, the more companies expand, the more the layers of management grow between themselves and their customers, the more disconnected their Customer Focus becomes.

But effective strategy demands a mentality to ‘begin with the end in mind’, and that end is always the Customer… or bust!

This tool helps you execute your Strategy, organisation-wide!

The challenge is often one of cross-functional teamwork: basically getting everyone in your organisation on the same page, no matter whether they are in Finance or Sales, in the Chairman’s seat or on the front line.

We’ve spent a lot of time pondering this problem and realised what’s needed is a Marketing Model that applies for every type of organisation in any field or industry. And here it is!

The Marketing Model enables you to orient your team around any strategy, goal or objective your company may have, with a clear understanding of what gives your company its competitive advantage.

It’s the essential document for cutting through the complexity, eliciting the on-the-ground realities from your people and teams at every function and level, ad, ultimately, making your Strategy come to life.

In future posts we’ll look at how to use the tool, in the meantime why not make sure you don’t miss out by subscribing to Talent Talk here.

…Happy strategic execution!

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Talent Technologies. Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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But increasingly, management training needs to be seen in a different light – one central for companies wishing to execute more effectively on their strategies. Here’s why…

Conceptual skills are what Thai employees lack the most!

Regulatory burdens and technical skills shortages are often cited by both Thai and multinational companies alike as being serious barriers to doing business in Thailand. However there is another factor (leaving aside English language skills for the moment) that trumps both of them.

That factor is ‘conceptual skills’ – the ability to be able to work using language, numbers, and abstract ideas as part of one’s work. We’ll explain what this means and why it is so important in concrete terms in a moment!

In its massive study of the competitiveness of Thai & Malaysian companies, The World Bank in its PICS report discovered an interesting thing. While Thai employees were ranked nearly 60% as effective in Technical Skills as their Malaysian counterparts, when it came to conceptual skills, this figure fell to below 25% when it came to conceptual skills. Put another way, the Malaysian employee was judged to be able to problem solve, use numbers, generate ideas, communicate concepts and define issues over 4 times more effectively than his or her Thai counterpart!

What conceptual skills are, and why they are so important

Have a look at the chart below. As you can see, the higher an employee progresses up an organisation, the more important conceptual skills (in the dark blue boxes) become.

This stands to reason. After all, front-liners are mostly ‘doing things’ or ‘making things’. The more one manages, though, the more one has to make connections between things – and that’s where those conceptual skills come in!

If your company needs or expects its staff to know or use the following words in any shape or form – then that means you will need your people to have good conceptual skills:

Teamwork     KPIs     Processes     Attitude     Leadership     Behaviour     Talent    Trust

Accountability     Issue Resolution     Customer Service     Customer!     Communication

Now, how many Thai companies routinely struggle with the above?

…That’s why Training is so important in Thailand!

This is not to suggest that Thai or Multinationals now need to go ‘all in’ on management training. However, it’s essential that they (in our opinion) address these shortcomings in a strategic and systematic way.

This means getting the very best programmes that turn these concepts into images and experiences and link to your business’ realities.

You can find a list of our management training programmes here that make understanding these concepts and then turning them into behaviours really easy.

Also, why not stay on top of developments in Thailand and Asia by subscribing to our newsletter Talent Talk here.

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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We’ve seen before the challenges of forming a team in Thailand and, while the group culture can be a challenge to some, it is not insurmountable. However the human resource challenge we are writing about in this post is very difficult to crack, and, unlike group behaviour, has few positive attributes.

What we’re talking about is Face.

Most managers will be aware of ‘face’ and the challenges it presents them with. In short, they are provided a list of ‘don’ts’ in their cross-cultural course and many leave it at that.

However, we do not think such an approach is that healthy given our experience in the Thai workplace, and the damage that ‘face’ does in a daily basis – not only to companies – but, it’s critical to understand, Thai individuals themselves.

What is ‘Face’?

Face is another way of saying ‘reputation’ – though it goes a lot further than that. In an interaction in Thailand, both sides will take care to manage the representation of themselves, so that neither looks ‘bad’.

However, in the rough and tumble or business life, where multiple players operate on a stage at any time, and where relationships can change in a nanosecond, maintaining Face is extremely difficult.

Also, change the ‘level’ playing field of friend-friend into the commercial one of manager-staff or customer-service-provider and the problems really start to come in.

The trouble with spending so much time managing Face is that it can leave precious little focus on other unseen players (think ‘customers’, ‘colleagues in another department’ and then mmore conceptually – ‘strategy’, ‘process’ and ‘standards’).

Another problem with Face – and one we do not think many Thais have adequately thought through – is when respect for another person is confused for the other person’s representation of themselves, until – chaiyo! – a relationship between two people suddenly becomes four. We soon enter a weird and wonderful world of make-believe, a hall of mirrors where it’s impossible to distinguish the Character from Personality, and where all players get totaly confused. What follows is so often a charade, where, mimicking actors in a Thai Soap, the players then create a persona that ultimately becomes untrue.

Why playing the game of Face is so damaging to business in Thailand

So what? We can almost hear our readers ask.

Well, playing the game of Face is creating huge costs to businesses in Thailand every day. Consider the following:

• A service rep will typically be more concerned of maintaining Face with a colleague than with a customer, thereby subordinating the customer to a low priority concern.
• When collaborating, all sides will seek to make sure that Face is maintained, and not only that, that the representation of Face is maintained. All uncertainty being avoided in Thai culture, this will typically lead to meetings that generate precisely nothing. But hey – as long as no-one has lost Face – we have achieved our objective, right?
• Peter Drucker said that the first role of the manager is ‘to define reality’. How easy is it for the Thai manager to do that, when he finds himself in situations that are so often only representations of reality, leading to…
• …the easy option. Thais will tend as a result to avoid anything that may give rise to conflict or uncertainty. This typically leads to managers not correcting their direct reports, and direct reports not giving feedback to their managers. In short, a void forms that severely impairs corporate performance and is characterised by under-management.
• When a serious mistake occurs, it is the (Faceless) group that must be held accountable, so that the individual concerned does not lose Face.
• Because Face engenders Fear, and Fear prevents Action, Face holds employees back from making decisions, trying new approaches, innovating, taking initiative, learning, growing, and developing themselves.

One piece of advice we would give to Thai and expatriate managers alike is that conflict is an essential dynamic of progress.

Conflict-avoidance and face-saving in advance only leads to bigger conflicts down the line – and these are the ones that really derail organisations. The key is to learn how to encourage safe conflict that achieves a team objective, as opposed to a charade of face-saving that only achieves individual ones. And not even that, as we shall see…

Why playing the game of Face is so damaging to individuals in Thailand

If we give our readers the feeling that Face is somehow self-serving in Thailand, then perhaps we should clarify ourselves.

Mental health admissions in Thai hospitals are currently soaring.

Now we are not so foolish as to attribute all of these cases to Face. But we would like to share a top psychiatrist’s explanation that many of his patients are ‘confused’. Sound familiar?

Face is the one great unspoken challenge not only for Thailand’s human resource capability, but also for Thai society. Ex-PM Abhisit Vejjajiva lamented that the problem with reconciling Thais lay not with practicalities but that Thai people ‘paint themselves into a corner’. We can see how avoidance, in this case, leads to polarisation and bigger problems down the line. Given this does being respectful of ‘Face’ really help anyone?

Face in our view harms Thai individuals in the following ways:

• An obsession with Face physically, leading to an almost neurotic obsession with looks. In our view this leads at first to vanity and in turn creates personal insecurities, feelings of dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and confidence issues.
• This insecurity in turn feeds the unhealthy conflicts that are happening we feel with greater frequency in Thai society. A typical cycle – which we see happen regularly in the workplace – is described by the Karpman Drama Triangle here.
• Face leads to such a need for recognition and fear of not receiving it in Thailand that we have advertising campaigns like that recently of Aum Patcharapa who suddenly has found the courage (being movie star and all) to ‘dare to be me’.
• More than anything else, we wonder whether Face, by denying reality and personal responsibility, is on a societal level heading towards a precipice?

What you can do to make sure Face doesn’t derail your organisation…

The good news is that all the above happens if managers don’t do their gardening!

And doing your gardening means implementing a structured training programme.

Two programmes we offer that specifically overcome the shortcomings of Face are Personality Factor – where participants discover their personality type and the types of others, enabling them to collaborate more effectively – and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team – where, among other skills, participants learn how to master conflict.

You can find details of Personality Factor here and the world’s #1 team development programme Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team here. Or why not drop us a line with your specific human resource challenges using our contact page?

Lastly we hope this post has been useful and give you pointers how to make your organisation in Thailand more dynamic and harmonious – and deepen your understanding beyond that introductory cross-cultural course!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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This recent article over at The Telegraph highlights some of these errors, and it’s true these problems are not limited to Asia alone.

The Talent Management mistakes companies make

It all starts with the hiring process, as the article identifies. It’s amazing that managers routinely complain ‘we just can’t find the talent’, when what they really mean is ‘I didn’t like the interviewee’.

In Asia’s collective cultures, ‘liking someone’ seems to be an essential, if unspoken, hiring criterion – yet it’s one that starves companies of perfectly good Talent. Worse, multinationals seem to encourage this with their demands to hire people with ‘good cultural fit’ – which is usually interpreted as ‘liking’ someone. As innovation expert Stephen Shapiro notes here, ‘hiring people you like’ is so often an organisational innovation destroyer.

If ‘hiring for personality’ is the #1 mistake companies make at hiring stage, then ‘hiring for experience’ comes in close behind at #2.

Peter Drucker, of course, was  sceptical of experience saying that an experienced manager ‘could just be one who has done the same thing over and over again (unsuccessfully) multiple times.’

We won’t go into this in detail – though it’s worth noting that HR professionals value experience because in many cases it helps them ‘cover their arse’ by being able to point to track record.

The #3 mistake companies make is hiring for Education. Again, HR departments will typically display a strong bias to candidates from a good school because, as the saying goes, no-one got fired for buying IBM.

However, hiring for Education doesn’t necessarily give companies the Talent they require.

What companies can do

So there we have the 3 most common mistakes companies make when hiring in Asia: hiring for Personality, hiring for Experience and hiring for Education.

What should companies be looking for instead?

The answer: hire for Strengths and Skills.

In a previous article we looked at the key components of the human resource globally using an easy-to-understand, one page graphic.

The sad thing? – Show this graphic to most HR professionals in Asia and they will not understand it.

This is why, time and again, perfectly good candidates are being rejected because the interviewer ‘doesn’t like the person’ (read cultural fit), or thinks they ‘lack the necessary experience’, as the Telegraph article touched on.

We have witnessed dozens of companies that are dysfunctional in Asia simply because the managers ‘hire after themselves’ – i.e. in the same personality type. However, as The Telegraph article has shown, this can lead to a serious lack of innovation as well as big service gaps as the whole corporate culture becomes monotype.

Companies wishing to change this state of affiars and seriously improve their talent management processes can do the following:

1. Run Talent Factor with everyone your management team. This powerful one day programme will identify their Strengths, Skills and Talent Gaps in their departments and business units.

2. Develop a Talent-grade hiring process using the ‘First Who, then What’ template from Jim Collins’ Good to Great. We help you implement that.

And the alternative is…

Leaving things as they are – with the serious wastage of Talent that we are seeing in Asia among companies, will continue to doom companies to missed targets, high staff turnover, poor customer satisfaction, low engagement levels, skills gaps and poor innovation. In sum – a basketful of headaches and costs.

Given that talent management gaps are felt more acutely in Asia than in the UK or the West, is this a state of affairs that can really go on?

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Talent Technologies :: Producing Change

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]]> http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/08/talent-management-managing-talent/feed/ 1 http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/07/e-learning-thailand/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=e-learning-thailand http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/07/e-learning-thailand/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:45:08 +0000 admin http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/?p=6736 Talent Technologies introduces The Leadership Challenge E-learning in Thailand!

If your managers are frequently busy but your organisation needs to develop leadership capability urgently, then you may be interested in this e-learning programme now available in Thailand.

Teaching the key attributes of effective leaders as identified by over 30 years of global research, it’s little wonder that The Leadership Challenge is the world’s bestselling leadership development programme.

Now learning and living the Five Practices of Leaders has just got a whole lot easier – with The Leadership Challenge now available in an e-learning format which can be used either as a standalone, or as part of a blended learning experience.

Encourage the Heart – in your company!

Combining the best of The Leadership Challenge as well as easy-to-follow practices and activities, every company should make this resource available to their managers.

The e-learning programme features:

• Course work that can be scheduled around personal and professional work
• Modules that enable participants to learn at their own pace
• A variety of activities which appeal to different learning styles
• Action Plans that ensure the learning is applied to your company!

Contact us now for more details

Feel free to contact us now for more details using the form here, and if you have time why not check out the video below!

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Ask us about The Leadership Challenge e-learning here >>>

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsRdKHJhQ8

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Talent Technologies E-learning :: Producing Change

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