Management Training Thailand - Talent Technologies

Some hard facts about Emotional Intelligence

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:15:48 +0000

While most managers appreciate the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI) to performance at work, few realise that numerous studies have been conducted analysing the benefit that employees high in EI bring to the company in terms of ‘hard numbers’ .

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand emotions within yourself (‘Know Yourself’), to enhance your ability to choose the emotions that are most positive and useful in any situation (‘Choose Yourself’) and then be able to apply these abilities to be better able to fulfil your talents interpersonally (‘Give Yourself’).

So we thought it might be helpful to list some of the standout benefits companies can expect by both hiring employees high in Emotional Intelligence, and training them in EI.

1. Task Execution & Productivity

In tasks of medium complexity, a top performer is 12 times more productive than those at the bottom and 85% more productive than an average performer (Goleman).

2. Sales Effectiveness

At L’Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies significantly outsold salespeople selected using the company’s old selection procedure, selling over $91,000 per person (Spencer & McLelland).

3. Teamwork & Change Capability

The Center for Creative Leadership found that the primary cause for derailment among executives involved a deficit in Emotional Intelligence. The three primary areas of problems included difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.

4. Staff Turnover

At American Express, two control groups of managers – one which underwent EI training and another group which did not – discovered that after one year the first group had less than half the staff turnover than the group of managers who did not participate in the EI training.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that not selecting and training your managers based on Emotional Intelligence is likely to have a major impact on your business results.

Other research has shown that employees much prefer working with managers high in EI / EQ than those high in IQ, and that this relates to areas such as

→ Motivation

→ Leadership

→ Communication

→ Teamwork & Collaboration

→ Attitude

If you’re interested in finding out more about how EI can transform your business in Thailand and Asia, feel free to contact us here, or check out our Emotional Intelligence programme here.

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

Make your HR strategic using this simple concept

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:45:08 +0000

Almost every company of 100 employees or more has a Human Resources department.

Yet, over the decades, the role of the HR function in companies has changed. As HR Departments evolved from ‘Administration’, to ‘Personnel’, to ‘Human Resources’ and now to ‘Talent Management’, it’s clear that expectations have changed.

CEO surveys have shown that almost all business leaders want their HR departments to be more strategic. Specifically, to add ‘intangible value’ to the organisation instead of preoccupying themselves with the purely functional low value-add tasks such as processing payroll or sending procedural memos by email.

But there is a problem with this expectation. Or should I say, two problems. Two major problems.

Unstrategic HR

The first is that the HR discipline itself – HR as taught in Business Schools and Universities – hasn’t evolved and is as unscientific as the days when universities taught that the sun revolved around the Earth.

The second is that because the ‘science’ or understanding is flawed, the people going into the HR function are ill-equipped to tackle the challenges of modern business, and when they do, most of their results can’t be measured.

The result: HR will never be strategic until it first understands the situation, namely, the science and understanding of what a human being is, and how it operates.

Ecce Homo

Complexity – medieval style

When scientists taught (for centuries) that the Sun revolved around the Earth, they did so because that was what they wanted it to do (because The Bible said so) rather than that was how it was (and is).

It is like trying to understand human beings and human doings, before understanding their beings!

Unfortunately, the HR discipline then tries to justify its doings by generating more and more elaborate and complex theorems, with little or no practical use, in the same way the scholastic professors generated more and more complex charts to prove that the Sun really did go around the Earth in medieval times.

Why understanding the human being first truly matters

The key is to understand and then conceptualise – based on research – the human being before we start to work on what we would like that human to do.

This is essential if we value the following:

employee motivation
leadership
productivity
teamwork
effective communication
customer experience, and
employee retention…

…among the other factors on companies’ ‘wish lists’ that we often receive.

By creating a simple concept that brings together what we have learnt from observation, we are then able to empower our managers and employees, set up our talent management system in a people-friendly way, and deliver on the intangible objectives in the bulleted list above.

This in turn leads to enhanced profitability, better customer satisfaction, greater efficiencies and more valuable innovation, among the other factors that drive a company’s bottom-line results.

‘Character Factor’ – The human being as a concept

In the diagram below, we see four spheres radiating out.

The Human Being – ‘Character Factor’

(click on image to enlarge)

Sphere One – Consciousness and Will

At the core, we see Consciousness and Will. This is our nature to be aware or sentient, and to be able to choose which actions we take. The key theme here is choice. We can choose what we see and hear and experience. We can choose how we act every time.

Sphere Two – Personality & Talent

Unfortunately, the HR discipline’s understanding of human nature ends with the first sphere. So often, we hear again and again the erroneous belief that all humans are capable of all things.

This is why competencies are popular. Management can create a wish list of what it wants its employees to be and then… hey presto… most employees fail to be that ‘model employee’ management wants.

This is because individuals are exactly that: unique. They are not nor can they be robots. This concept may seem simple to grasp and agree with, but the sad fact is that, with so many of their competencies, corporate head offices again and again try to create that robot.

This is where the second sphere comes in. It’s a fact that, because the brain is subject to 2 million pieces of information every second, it cannot process it all!

We learn that growing older. Watch a baby. It’s brain is overwhelmed by the dazzle of information it receives. Growing up is more about cutting out, not putting in. So what happens? In order to function, the brain selects, and creates synaptic ‘information superhighways’ in order to enable us to process information (a function of the consciousness) and act (a function of the will). By doing so, we change from being a ‘vegetable’ (baby state) to a functioning ‘human resource’.

This forming of the ‘synaptic connections’ in our brains or ‘hard wires’ creates our Personality and Talents. By our late teens, we have fully cut out whole areas of our potential future, but we have also refined other areas in which we are uniquely gifted.

Sphere Three – Values and Behaviours

This is where HR typically gets busy again. In most cases, HR tries to change this sphere while ignoring the second sphere of Personality & Talents. All the spheres are interconnected, in the same way that gears in a car are on a cog. Ignoring the sphere of Personality and Talents is like trying to take a car from 1st gear to 3rd without going into 2nd. The result? The car stalls.

We need to understand behaviours in the sense they are almost always and effect, not a cause.

It’s nigh impossible to ask people to ‘behave’ in a certain way over an extended period of time. But it is possible to put a person in a role (eg close to their Talents) that evokes positive emotions that in turn evoke positive behaviours, or train them to understand emotions, for example through our breakthrough Emotional Intelligence programme.

In order to be strategic in the ‘intangible’ field of behaviours, CEOs and HR professionals need first to understand what can be achieved, and how effectively, within the sphere of Values and Behaviours.

Sphere Four – Perception and Beliefs

This sphere relates most to the outside world. Because of the process of growing up involves ‘cutting out’ data and information as we have seen, we often react to the world making quick judgements in order to function ‘more effectively’.

We all know that at least some of the judgements we make, based on our perceptions or beliefs fo what we see or think we see, are flawed.

This is why it’s important to train ourselves to open up the ‘space’ between perceiving and acting, so that we can increase our choices in life. Importantly, this also helps managers and employees deal better with the stressful situations that they experience day-in, day-out as part of their jobs – stress that undermines their capability and effectiveness.

How to apply Character Factor

Over the coming weeks, we will look at ways of applying ‘Character Factor’ effectively in the following ways:

→ To simplify companies’ HR and Talent Management systems and improve results

→ To help with key corporate objectives such as employee retention ‘Stay’, employee motivation ‘Strive’ and creating a great workplace ‘Say’

→ To enable companies to identify and groom leaders early, and create meaningful and engaging talent paths within organisations

We hope this article has been of interest. As ever, feel free to comment below – we’d love to hear your feedback!

For more information on our training programmes, including Emotional Intelligence and Talent Factor, contact us here

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-EastAsia

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9 tips to defeat stress at work and home

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 06:21:20 +0000

Stress is a ‘silent killer’ with numerous symptoms.

If you have time over the Thai holiday it’s worth taking a few moments to read this article with 9 useful tips on overcoming stress.

Or why not consider Talent Technologies’ training programmes including Emotional Intelligence and Productivity Factor which offer a comprehensive approach in getting control of your life and managing negative circumstances and emotions!

We hope you find the article useful!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

6 key sales talents

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:45:38 +0000

Working with over 2,000 sales teams in numerous countries, using both qualitative and quantitative interviews and assessments, Derek Gatehouse knows a thing or two about sales teams.

His book, The Perfect Salesforce, is a great summary of his research and well worth the read.

One of the themes of the book is that high-performing sales teams have one thing in common: they play their salespeople to their key sales talents.

Talents are those things that we are born with and can do little to change, so it makes sense to identify them and work with them. Ignoring them usually leads to serious performance issues. Affirming them is the surest route to success: especially in sales.

The 6 key sales talents

The six key sales talents identified by Gatehouse are:

Quantity vs. Quality sales. Salespeople broadly fall into two types: those who thrive in ‘quantity’ sales – where the selling is often repetitive & structured; and those who thrive in ‘quality’ sales, which usually involves fewer clients and where near-perfect performance is required.
High pain tolerance / threshold. A key driving talent in sales is the ability to be able to do things many others do not like. Being able to handle rejection, for example, is vital; in most cases this is something not learned but born with. In the words of Albert Gray ‘Although hard work, good luck and astute human relations are all important, the successful person has ‘formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do’.
Advisers vs Pleasers. This is critical in persuasion. Some people are born ‘pleasers’ – which is on the whole ineffective in the field of sales, while other people are born ‘advisers’. This latter group use their persuasive talents to close effectively.
Executive Rapport: High vs Low. Some salespeople bond instantly to the ‘common man’; others are more naturally suited to ‘high-level’ executive sales.
Need: created versus established. Some salespeople do poorly when creating a need but excel when it is already established. Others thrive on the challenge of creating need. It’s critical to put the right type of salespeople in the role that plays to their strength.
Obvious vs. Concept. The last sales talent is the inclination for some salespeople to be better at selling a tangible good (‘obvious’) or an intangible Concept. Again, it’s critical to get your salespeople in the right role.

Top sales teams learn the rules of human behavior; they understand that it is the conditions that create the desired behaviors, and that by establishing the perfect performance conditions in the sales department they automatically create an autonomous growth machine.

Derek Gatehouse, The Perfect Salesforce

Getting your sales team playing to its strengths

Getting your sales team playing to its strengths is a critical (but just the first) step to developing a high-performing sales team.

If you would like to get your sales team playing to its strengths and performing at its best, feel free to contact us here and we will be delighted to help!

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-EastAsia

Carlos Ghosn at Sasin – main points

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:52 +0000

Yesterday featured a talk by the ever-effervescent Carlos Ghosn at the Sasin Graduate School of Management.

As we have come to expect from Mr Ghosn, it was a great talk, lively, with some probing questions from the floor. Titled Managing in a Time of Crisis the good news for those of you who missed the talk is that we have the main points for you here:

1. Great managers get people to do what they don’t want to do with enthusiasm. This is especially true during a crisis.

2. Going through crisis or change, the key is to have limited priorities and objectives. Too often management bombards its people with numerous, often conflicting, priorities. The more priorities you have, the less impact they will have.

3. Don’t have a plan B. Plan Bs tend to invite complacency as the workforce fails to commit wholeheartedly to plan A, because it may hope there is a fallback option. Instead, says Ghosn, say There is no plan B!

4. Crisis is a great opportunity to transform your organisation. And always remember: every crisis has an end. In the middle of a crisis we often forget that.

5. In a crisis, conflict is not the worst thing: indifference is. With conflict, at least people are buying in emotionally. With indifference, they have not!

6. The more complex the change is, the more simple you need to be, leading to the key point that…

7. A manager’s job is ‘out of complexity to make things simple, and out of chaos to make things clear’.

Our Take

Ghosn’s management philosophy chimes closely to the approach we like to take with our clients, which includes the ’3 S’s’ of:

Simple. Any initiative, message or change you are trying to deliver must be as easy for a front-liner to grasp as for the CEO
Specific. Any initiative, message or change must also be specific to each role or individual for which it is intended, and concepts must clearly relate to the contexts those individuals are in (as opposed to the contexts the CEO or strategist finds themself in!)
Strategic. The initiative must, of course, deliver the strategy and that must ideally be measurable. Too many initiatives have elements that are not strategic!

We hope the above is a useful summary for those of you who missed the talk, and strongly recommend you seeing Carlos Ghosn the next time he comes to Bangkok!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

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A Complaint is a Gift

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:24:20 +0000

Are your service complaints getting through?

If not, it could be because your front line people are treating customer complaints not as an opportunity, but as a threat.

Research conducted by the customer service company TARP has found that 50% of customers don’t complain when they encounter a problem. More alarmingly perhaps, the complaint handling process of the other 50% who do complain is poor. Few of these complaints are reported to management.

This has a catastrophic effect on business value drivers such as customer loyalty and advocacy. Poor customer service experiences (and especially service recovery) destroys brand value and severely impacts company profitability, as the report shows.

A copy of the report is available in pdf format here.

If you would like to improve the customer service at your company (including service recovery), then look no further than our Frontline Platinum training solution.

If you would like to set up your system for success, creating a memorable customer experience, then you may be interested in Customer Experience Maximisation.

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

Talent Technologies in Big Chilli Magazine

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:14:18 +0000

Great to see our article Encouraging the Heart featured in the latest issue of the Big Chilli magazine!

If you didn’t catch the article, we’ve uploaded a pdf of it here

What are the ingredients of a high-performing team?

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:02:34 +0000

It’s official! High-performing teams really are the result of individual differences, not similarities.

This study of 144 short-term project teams has discovered that ‘maximising differences in types of knowledge, skills, and abilities, while minimising differences in job-related beliefs, attitudes, and values might create especially effective teams’, as concluded by the study’s author Dr Harrison from Penn State University.

Yet – time and time again – as we are still finding in Asia’s high-growth market that companies are doing the opposite: selecting and forming teams based on similarities, not differences – and that this is creating serious performance issues down the line in vital areas such as innovation, collaboration, leadership and initiative.

First things first – get the roles right

It’s not difficult for companies to rectify this. But first they need to have clarity not only about not about what they are trying to achieve but how they are going to achieve it.

This ‘how’ happens through people. Yet only rarely do companies think about the composition of their teams in terms of trying to get people to ‘stand out’ as opposed to ‘fitting in’.

As Jim Collins pointed out in his landmark book Good to Great, ‘standing out’ is not about knowledge, intelligence or skills, but Talents, specifically our ‘innate abilities’ that make us unique.

These talents include such abilities as concept organisation, idea productivity, spatial relations visualisation and tonal memory, among the 19 key talents as assessed in the Highlands Ability Battery.

Teams that try to diminish differences in their talents will underperform, as Dr Harrison’s research has demonstrated.

The Behavioural Dimension

Dr Harrison found the following were the greatest barriers to team effectiveness:

An inability to agree on strategic goals
Personality Conflicts
Different levels of commitment

The first is common in teams, and often takes place because the team members don’t discuss, or aren’t allowed to discuss (by, say, the team leader) the strategic objectives.

Personality Conflicts are often an effect of not knowing our talents, and ways of problem-solving and working (which is why a tool such as the Highlands Ability Battery is so valuable).

Different levels of commitment are usually an effect of the combination of the above.

So by starting at the root, teams can develop effectively into high-performing units. But there needs to be a team consciousness of how to do this.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Patrick Lencioni has provided a great framework for this, based on his research, in Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a programme also facilitated by us here at Talent Technologies.

Simply contact us here if you would like more details!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

From Good to Great

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:42:32 +0000

It is now eight years since Jim Collins penned the results of his research into what causes ‘mediocre’ companies to make the leap from Good to Great.

Taking over five years to complete, the research project is perhaps one of the most in-depth ever conducted in business.

One of the most interesting findings of the study is that the key difference between ‘Great’ companies and their ‘Good’ counterparts lay in ‘intangible’ factors – areas such as ‘talent’, ‘leadership’ and ‘discipline’: areas that companies in Asia typically struggle with.

How Good to Great relates to you

The conclusions drawn are not only relevant to companies, but can also be used by people in their careers. Take the Hedgehog Concept, for example.

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‘Great’ organisations are those able to engage their employees ‘bottom up’, with a keen awareness of their talents and natural abilities:

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Whether someone is the ‘right person’ has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background or skills.

(First Who, then What)

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Working with his research group of over a thousand multinational companies, Jim Collins discovered that the ‘Great’ companies attached huge significance to an individual’s natural abilities (as opposed, say, to the unnatural demands and expectations many companies make, for example through competencies).

On an individual level, this makes sense. To be effective, it’s essential for us to be clear on:

What we are most deeply passionate about
What we can be best in the world at
What drives (or can drive) our economic engine

Where these three intercept, lies our ‘Hedgehog Concept’.

Discovering your ‘Hedgehog Concept’

Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation

Aristotle

There are many ways (including by experience!) that you can discover your ‘Hedgehog Concept’. But by far the quickest, and arguably the most effective way, is through the world’s ‘gold standard’ talent assessment: the Highlands Ability Battery.

The Highlands Ability Battery helps you identify your talents (natural abilities) objectively through a ‘battery’ of worksamples. Over 90 years of research by the Johnson O’Connor Institute using MRI machines have shown these to link to the ‘hardwired’ synaptic connections that identify our talents and the Hedgehog factors such as ‘what we can be best in the world at’ and ‘what we might be deeply passionate about’.

In other words, the Highlands Ability Battery helps us identify our strengths – the number one factor, as discovered by huge surveys incorporating hundreds of thousands of employees in different companies and countries, that drives our engagement at work.

Good to Great starts with you!

If you would like to find out more about the Highlands Ability Battery, and how it can help you make the leap, feel free to contact us here!

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**Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia*

Avoid these traps when making decisions

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:36:46 +0000

Do you recognise these decisionmaking traps?

Organisations are little more than the sum of the decisions made by their people. Yet while many of us may believe that decisionmaking is ‘rational’, here are 7 common emotional traps that can result in poorly-conceived decisions…

Trap #1: The Bandwagon Effect

This is the idea that it’s okay to follow the herd because so many other people share the same belief. It’s irrational because it places its faith in the safety of numbers, while completely disregarding the facts of a situation.

Trap #2: Risk Aversion

People to have a strong preference for avoiding losses over potential opportunities and gains. This is also a cultural trait as identified by Geert Hofstede – more prevalent in Asian societies. The result is a widespread aversion to make decisions, execute on plans and strategies, and a lack of desire to look out for opportunities

Trap #3: Outcome Bias

This happens when we judge a decision by its outcome rather than the quality of the decision itself and alternative possible outcomes.

The outcome is always ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

Trap #4: Recency Bias

This is when we weigh recent data more than experiences further out… often a consequence of adrenaline addiction!

Trap #5: Anchoring

This is when we rely too heavily on data that is readily-available when making a decision.

Trap #6: Belief in the Law of Small Numbers

This is when we base our conclusions on a slice of data that’s too small. It’s the equivalent of making mountains out of molehills…

Trap #7: Confirmation (and disconfirmation) bias

Confirmation bias happens when data backs up an a priori belief we have. Disconfirmation bias happens when we do not like information that contradicts our beliefs…

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

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