SPECTRUM 2001 CONFERENCE NOTES

Back to Index Page

Herding Cats: Training and Professional Development

Moderated By:

Lea Smith
Director of Performance Improvement
Que-Net Media

Operators or in-house employees tend to respond to team-oriented training programs and organization. Team-orientation is very much about relationship based training services. Accountability is pushed to the lower level, and there needs to be competitive differentiation. David Peterson of Banta Digital Group said that a great team has several characteristics, including flexibility, responsiveness, and accountable, and they have results that are measurable. Furthermore, teams must be responsible. By organizing staff in to customer-centered teams they have improved customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. They also have improved profitability.

Independent workers respond to light direction through command chains. They are best managed by setting expectations and are motivated by success and recognition. Jerry Cacciatore, Senior Vice President of Que-Net Media has managed field sales representatives and they fit into this category of workers. They are inspired through your support as a manager, which may include mentoring or even getting HR and admin support to them. In Jerry's experience, these people need to have clear direction and managers need to be able to listen, formulate, and communicate. Sales reps have a variety of char-acteristics. There are hunters and nurturers. The hunters need "stoking" and while the nurturers are more stable. There are responsive sales reps and illusive reps. Sales reps can be aggressive or passive, aware or oblivious. There are also reps that deal with fact and those that deal with fiction. Each re-quires different amounts of prodding or handholding. There are sales reps that are listeners and those that talkers. In contrast, facilities managers, who also tend to be individual members, tend to have high levels of experience, a willingness to learn, and strong organizational skills. They tend to need ongoing action plans and action items.

In both cases, many methods of communication must be used, to in-clude:

• Conference calls
• Video teleconferencing
• Voice-mail
• E-mails (tends to get out of hand)
• Staff meetings
• Annual meetings
• Personal visits (still the best method, particularly by surprise.)
• One-on-one conversations

Critical areas to success include:

• Accountability: hold people accountable for what they promise to do.
• Expect results: It's not what you do, but what you get done.
• Locate and Utilize resources
• Share knowledge: insist that they talk with their peers.
• Communicate constantly: at least several times a week
• Listen, listen, and listen! · Provide positive and negative feedback.

Creative people respond to variable, creative environments and are demanding workers. They are best managed by cooperation and involvement. Training programs must be fun and creative, and the crea-tive process itself motivates them. According to Virginia King, President of King Design, creative people can be adversely related by changing environments: they need a "safety" zone to work within. They are often not good at time and process management, and require many reminders. King continu-ally assesses changing staff needs for motivating "carrots."

Sometimes you don't have lots of bonus dollars to spread around. King set up a motivation pro-gram that allowed teams of creative employees to earn Friday afternoon off if they meet certain criteria and she found this to be very motivating. You also need to communicate directly and frequently with creative staff. Criticisms of creative work must be concise and constructive, and sometimes managers need training on how to provide constructive criticism. She also recommends that managers of creative people provide crash courses in time management and process management. To get creative people to buy into management programs it is important to include them in the creation of your department or company procedures. Finally, King suggested that you provide creative personnel with continuous technical and creative education. She instituted a program called the "Artist Way" series and found that it doubled productivity for the teams that went through the program and she later expanded it for all creative departments and teams.

Smith concluded that trainers and manager must adjust their structure to suit goals, not process, and you must adapt your training the characteristics of your group: one training program doesn't fit all personality types. Also, be sure to get in-house folks away from their phones and computers so they can focus and not be distracted. In the case of independent employees, your training must be flexible and portable. Finally, fun is the key for creative folks.

TOP