The point where we begin to discover just how achievable the New Year’s goals we set ourselves really are!

If you find you’re lagging or stuck or losing your engagement mojo, then we’d like to share this presentation created by Sarah Kathleen Peck from www.itstartswith.com. Called simply ‘Do Something’, it presents a number of cues to push us into action.

We hope you find it, in a word… inspirational! The presentation is below.

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Talent Technologies. Taking your Talent to a Higher Level.

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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

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/2011/08/what-is-talent/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-is-talent http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/08/what-is-talent/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:54:50 +0000 admin http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/?p=6950 What is Talent? – This is a question we are asked from time to time and it’s an important one – because rarely has a term been as misunderstood as that of ‘Talent’!

‘Talent’ is the key to understanding how to motivate and engage, form teams effectively, and enable consistently high performance from colleagues – so answering the question ‘what is talent?’ is pretty vital to organisational success!

Of Cells and Synapses

To do so, we must start with the ‘brass tacks’ of what Talent really is – and here is the first subtle but major difference. A person’s ‘Talent’ is in effect a collection of talents (or abilities) that are partly formed in us from birth and complete their formation by the time we reach our mid-teens.

Most education systems put their emphasis on us acquiring brain cells – or knowledge – over these formative years.

And most hiring decisions put their emphasis on the type of knowledge we have acquired, and from which university or institution.

Yet as massive workplace studies have shown (undertaken, among others, by the Corporate Leadership Council and Gallup), this knowledge makes little difference to our motivation and engagement at work. It’s this engagement that directly drives corporate performance.

Instead, we should look to our synapses as the clue for this – yet how many people are aware of this subtle but vital difference?

How talents work

Synapses are not the cells – or stores of knowledge – in the brain, but the ‘information superhighways’ that connect them.

Cells will come and go. But these superhighways have been inherited from your parents and built over the first fifteen years or so of your life and thus change very little. They are fundamental to the structure of your brain and also what make you unique – your ‘talents’.

When these synapses connect, an electrical charge takes place which creates energy. The more connections that are made, the greater this charge. If a person is working to their talents then a brain scan will show these synapses lighting up like a Christmas tree… and in this state a person is naturally engaged and motivated.

It’s for this reason that understanding a person’s talents at work is really critical.

What talents really are

The connections these information superhighways make determine what we are best at.

For example, if you have a ‘great sense of direction’, then that is a talent. If you have a good ear for different tones, that also is a talent.

Those among us who lack these talents, will know that however much we work on our ‘sense of direction’, or ‘tonal listening’ will know that doing so is futile – they won’t improve. Instead we have to rely on ‘tools’ to help – for someone with a poor sense of direction, this would be a map.

There are 18 different talents as identified by the Johnson O’Connor Institute and tested in the Highlands Ability Battery, and when these traits combine in certain combinations, that’s what determines if a person is talented in one area or another.

It’s important to remember Peter Drucker’s saying at this point, that everyone has ‘peaks and valleys’ – if you have a ‘valley’ or a weakness, in one area, you are likely to have a ‘peak’ or a Talent, in another. Drucker incidentally debunked the myth some companies still harbour today that anyone can be a ‘well-rounded’ person, talented in every area. Studies undertaken by the Johnson O’Connor Institute with FMRi machines have shown it just ain’t so.

Putting your talents to work

Whether we ‘love’ or ‘hate’ our jobs often comes down to whether our synapses are ‘lighting up like a Christmas tree’ in the way described above.

To get this to happen, we need to discover where are Talent really lies – and if we can work in that area, then we will love our job more, be more productive and fulfilled, and more engaged at work.

For example, if you are naturally ‘strategic’ but spend most of your time dealing with lots and lots of little problems, then it’s likely you will be disengaged at work.

Or, if you are great at fixing ‘things’ but struggle with ‘people problems’, then that also can lead to you disliking your job.

Again, notice this has little to do with the ‘knowledge’ you may have in your role, but how that knowledge is deployed.

This is why it is critical to know what your Talent is, and what your strongest role can be.

Discovering this and working to it leads to higher engagement at work. If you can do the same with your team members, this can lead to even greater performance in your team.

It’s little wonder, for this reason, that Peter Drucker devoted a third of his landmark book The Effective Executive to the importance of knowing your talents and working to your strengths. Yet, as he lamented, few people know what their strengths are, with disastrous consequences for engagement at work.

There is a solution…

Yet now there is a solution.

The Highlands Ability Battery helps you identify your talents scientifically, discover your strongest roles at work, and play to your strengths.

It is in our opinion the single most important assessment any professional can take.

Moreover, this assessment can be done in the convenience of your own home or place of work.

If you would like to find out more about the Highlands Ability Battery and how it can drive engagement in your job, career, and work teams, you can read more about it here.

Or, ask us for a free introduction to discovering your Talent by emailing us using the form here.

It’s time to let your Talent shine!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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Well, after several months of pondering this question, we believe we have come up with the human resource ‘one page panacea’ packed into the graphic below:

(The above graphic is available in pdf format here)

The ’5Cs’ of the Human Resource

It’s easier to ‘start with the end in mind’ and look at the orange boxes on the right. In a nutshell, this is what employers are looking for when they hire people.

First of all, they want that all-embracing, impossible-to-decipher quality of competence. They also want whoever they are hiring to be able to communicate their ideas and concepts to other people.

This leads us to the importance of concept, the third ‘C’ on our list. How clear is the person’s concept in their field? How well might they be able to develop a ‘shared concept’ in their team? Concept is an effect of grasp on Reality (Drucker’s ‘first task of the manager’) and making sense of it.

Conscience is the fourth ‘C’ and key to leadership. Does the person have an awareness outside of themself? Conscience is an effect of care and choices.

Lastly commitment is the combination of extrinsic (what’s in it for me?) and intrinsic (how much can I give) motivators.

This thing called Talent

This is an easy framework that we feel can be used for talent management all the way from hiring to development and promotion.

The key to this graphic is that while some managers may have a vague idea of what they are buying at the surface, they almost always get lost when it comes to articulating what it is they require at the depth.

It is critical for professionals to understand exactly what ‘Competence’ is, and be clear that Competence is an effect and a combination of Strengths (natural talents) and Skills (learned capabilities) that make a person ‘Competent’ or not. The manager also needs to ensure that the person is in a role that exploits his or her strengths. This previous post may help clarify how they can do that.

So whether you are at interview stage or running a performance appraisal, it is critical to probe for what the person does naturally best (Strength), and what he or she has learner or needs to learn in order to do the job better (Skill).

Do this now!

If you would like to make the most of this framework, you can put it into action straight away by:

1. Making sure your hiring processes assess all 5Cs fairly and squarely

2. Making sure that your HR is strengths-based, i.e focusses on finding what a person does best naturally before ‘fixing gaps’ or building weaknesses.

3. Assessing yourself on being able to deliver the ’5Cs’ and making sure that your efforts link to the company’s strategy, and vice-versa (‘First Who, Then What’)

Was this post helpful? Please feel free to add your comments below!

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Talent Technologies :: Producing Change

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Yet practices that are long outdated mean most HR departments are entirely disconnected from the business drivers of their company – and instead of adapting their performance management systems to the new realities (more anon) – they blindly repeat the mistakes of the past – often facilitated by HR consultancy firms with an expensive and bureaucratic clutter of tools such as competencies and complicated performance management systems.

Put Who before What

Focussing of performance before purpose is a waste of time, as the new study below shows. The formula for success is simple. When it comes to maximising the performance of your employees, companies simply need to do the following:

1. Put Who before What

2. Put Passion and Purpose before Profit

This is not rocket science, and is incredibly simple for forward-looking companies to do by following the approach we detailed here.

If your company struggles to achieve motivation among its workforce consistently, following this approach will not only save you time, it will also boost the performance of your people and contribute to your company’s bottom-line.

Must See – A picture paints a thousand words…

We’re not going to labour the issue, however. Nor are we going to present the reams and reams of research that prove old-style performance management systems are outdated!

Instead, we recommend those who are interested to watch this must-see video that says all that needs to be said – the results of a huge study by the Federal Reserve in the US, colourfully narrated in not one but thousands of pictures…

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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Time to engage your workforce?

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you engage your workforce in Thailand and Asia, simply email us via the form below >>

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Ask us about our Employee Engagement solution here >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Producing Change

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This is not as easy as it seems, however, as our strengths have little to do with our academic background. Instead, we need to know and identify our talents, which, as Drucker observed over 40 years ago, most managers have little idea of.

The development of the Highlands Ability Battery has been a breakthrough in this area. Here’s one aspect of team development which we use in our one day Talent Factor management training programme.

Circles, Squares, Triangles

One of the key challenges strong teams overcome is being able to integrate individuals’ different problem-solving styles.

Again, this has nothing to do with academic background or experience, but talent. As the 90 years of research behind the Highlands Ability Battery has shown, an individual’s problem solving style is hardwired or ‘innate’. So, if we are to build strong teams, it’s essential to identify this style in all the team constituents and then integrate them.

Problem-solving styles can be broken broadly into three main groups: Circles, Squares, and Triangles.

Each of us has a bias to one of these styles, and sometimes to a lesser degree two. But it’s rare that we should have a style incorporating all three: hence the need for a team.

Circles explained

Circle types like gathering information holistically before arriving at a decision or plan of action. They tend to be naturally strategic in approach and will need to see the ‘big picture’. Circles tend to be visionaries.

Squares explained

Squares like things in boxes! They will naturally classify or organise the information before them and make a decision. They tend to do this  methodically (layer by layer, collecting detail).

The strength of Squares lies in their ability to formulate or work to a process, or in a structure. Circles have difficulty with this. However Squares are sometimes prone not being able to ‘think outside the box’, which is where Circles come in.

Triangles explained

Triangles like results! Triangles are execution-focussed, and prefer action to thought. They like ‘management by numbers’ and results. This style is essential to drive vision into reality. These people are doers.

Which style are you?

Each of us has a problem-solving style with a leaning towards either Circle, Square or Triangle.

Some of us have more than one style. For example, Warren Buffett might be considered a ‘Big Square, and Small Triangle’. Another person might be ‘a Small Circle, and Big Triangle’.

It’s not difficult to see that building strong teams is a process of combining all three types. However, as discussed in this post, since many companies have difficulty integrating different talent sets in their cultures, teams are often starved of different types, leading in many cases to disastrous decisions, as well as customer and employee engagement issues on a deeper level.

How you can build strong teams in your company

If you’re interested in team building in your company, then Talent Factor will help you identify objectively the problem-solving styles in your team, and follow a process leading to on-the-job team excellence.

Details of Talent Factor can be found following the link below:

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Find out more about Talent Factor here >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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We saw in an earlier article what not to do when making New Year’s resolutions.

For those of you who would like to adopt winning habits rapidly in Thailand, we thought it would be helpful to share the latest research from Stanford Business School in the US.

The slideshow is self-explanatory and easy to follow, and we have added  it here.

If you liked this…

If you liked this, you’ll love Productivity Factor, our one day productivity training programme which helps you not only adopt winning habits, but also manage your workflow, tasks and projects, and achieve greater work/life balance in your career.

For more details, simply contact us following the link below…

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Please send me more details >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

That framework – Altitude and Latitude (the post is here if you have not already read it) – really helps professionals get control of their day-to-day lives and work purposefully towards achieving their personal vision.

To recap, the axis of Altitude captures time from the immediate present (‘Runway’) until 5 years and more out.

The axis of Latitude meanwhile, covers the ‘Five Pillars’ we regard as the most important areas of everyone’s lives if they are to achieve a healthy work/life balance – the pillars of physical wellbeing, people and family, professional life, passion and purpose and finances.

We’ve illustrated these in the graphic below:

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How Altitude and Latitude can help you soar!

By itself, the above graphic is just a conceptual way of seeing time and the recurring patterns of tasks and behaviours that matter most to us in life.

Where it really comes into its own is when we set up our time management system in order to help us gain Altitude by overcoming the pressures of day-to-day life. Here are the key steps you need to take in order to do that:

1. Conduct a mind sweep, then a desk sweep.

Get everything out of your head and into places where you can start acting on those items and tasks, rather than worrying about them. You can find a great process for that here.

2. Create a filing system that’s simple and effective

One of the challenges professionals face, that becomes a severe drain on their productivity, is that of not being able to manage workflow and locate information when they need it.

Having a simple and effective filing system is a real help to overcoming this challenge, and relieving stress.

Here’s the way to do it: simply buy 6 pocket plastic files and use one each for the 5 pillars above, with catch-all categories. This ensures everything in your desk gets swept into a place where you can track it. Then, every week review and purge your files, either into archives or trash. Job done.

3. Use a Day Planner, Week / Month Planner and Project Planner to get off the stressful ‘runway’ and up to 20,000 feet.

Look out for future posts of ours as we make these templates available – to be sure of receiving them why not subscribe to our posts by entering your email address in the yellow box (‘Talent Talk’) on the right hand side of our site.

4. Use motivators to visualise your goals… and realise them!

In future posts, we’ll also share some of the techniques we use in our Productivity Factor programme that helps you articulate and reach your goals, and bring that ’50,000 feet’ level ever closer!

If you found this helpful, you’ll love this…

If you have found the above helpful and are interested in applying these, then why not ask us about Productivity Factor, our one day time and productivity management programme that will put you – and your colleagues – back in control of your workflow and create that all-important work-life balance!

Simply follow the link below to get more details…

Please send me more details >>>

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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