John B. Bunch

In our November blog, John Rafferty, Tom’s colleague in Taiwan, asked questions about team spirit.How well did Tom know his direct reports?What had Tom done to get to know them on a personal level?How was Tom introduced to the team?What had his predecessor told him about who’s who?Tom couldn’t help but think about what had made him successful in his last position. Back then, he had a great rapport with his team. When he was the sales director for North America team spirit was one of his strengths––everyone was always ready to go the extra mile. Now he seemed to be in a no-man’s land of discomfit.While in Asia for the electronic trade fairs, Tom decided to take the bull by the horns and visit his office in Hong Kong. Just as he thought about that expression, he started to laugh.“I really need to avoid those informal idiomatic expressions,” he thought. “How would someone translate that into their native language? It can’t always be easy for those who speak English as a second language.”Jack Chang, Tom’s direct report in Hong Kong, was pleasantly surprised when he heard about Tom’s 24-hour layover in the city.While on the phone with Jack, Tom suggested, “I was thinking that instead of business as usual, locked up in the high-rise office all day, we could go out for lunch and visit Kowloon. We can catch up with business in the morning.”Before this trip Tom had never been to Hong Kong. During his first layover, he was so busy preparing for the trade shows that he didn’t wander far from the hotel or the office. This time, Jack was genuinely pleased to show Tom around, introducing him to everyone as his boss from America. He was even happy to give Tom his first lesson on how to use chopsticks.By the end of the day, Tom was finally starting to understand the history of Hong Kong. He now understood why the first manager (who was sent from Beijing to Hong Kong) had encountered so many setbacks. In Ohio, the assumption had been that transferring the Chinese manager from Beijing to Hong Kong would be like moving from New York to Los Angeles. Sure, everyone imagined there were some differences, but no one knew how complicated it would be. John and Jack had both shared some very interesting insights into the historical and cultural backgrounds of mainland China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.Now settling in for his long flight home, Tom thought about the advice Carlos, his manager back in Ohio, had given him about getting an executive coach with intercultural experience. An article in the in-flight magazine got him thinking even more about how little he really knew about countries other than the United States. He had never taken the time to think about the impact history had on other people’s culture and perspectives.As he thought about his Hong Kong visit, Tom realized that just by getting out of the office and listening to Jack there had been a definite shift in their relationship. Jack seemed to brighten up as he described some of the memorable achievements of his country and his people.“What do people do to show respect across cultures?” Tom wondered. Maybe it was not really about protocol, but more about listening to people and the feeling they get from being heard. Taking the time to listen to Jack and show his curiosity led to quality conversations, which naturally leads to quality relationships. Isn’t team spirit all about feeling a sense of belonging? How does being recognized and rewarded for how and what we contribute influence team spirit?Intercultural research has defined a wide range of communication styles, which vary from indirect, high context, or implicit styles down to more direct, low context, or explicit styles. The first step to becoming an effective global leader is to be aware of your preferred communication style and how it is perceived by others. Take a minute to reflect on these questions:Do people often comment about how clear or direct you are?Do people often ask for clarification or repeat questions about subjects that you thought you had clearly explained?If you answered “Yes” to A, then you may be perceived as having a direct communication style. If you answered “Yes” to B, you may be coming off as indirect and implicit. Whatever your style, there’s little doubt that communication is key to team spirit, alignment, ownership, and accountability.Communication is both verbal and non-verbal. When was the last time you actually sat silently in a meeting? Did you count to 10 before jumping in and advocating your point of view? This unconscious desire to show enthusiasm, to add our two cents to every conversation can be ill-perceived. Think back to the last time somebody did that to you? How did you feel—empowered or disempowered?While researching for my book, Culture Savvy: Working and Collaborating Across the Globe, I discovered that to build effective communication and trust, human nature relies on the 4R principles of respect, relationships, recognition, and rewards. These make up the solid foundation for successful, high-performing teams. We will go more in-depth on these non-verbal behaviors in next month’s blog.Our continued discussions are helping show what it takes to become an effective global leader. Key ingredients are self-directed awareness, other-directed awareness, active and attuned communication skills, curiosity, and empathy. As a follow-up from our September blog, Tom’s team did meet their objectives. The lithium batteries were delivered on time and trust was now a part of the emerging team spirit. What, in your opinion, did Tom do differently to lead his geographically dispersed team to success? What does team spirit look like in virtual teams?

How Do You Build Team Spirit When Your Team Is Located Around the World?

Chad Udell is the managing director at Float Learning. Float guides industry-leading companies to understand and leverage the power of mobile learning.Chad is the author of Learning Everywhere: How Mobile Content Strategies Are Transforming Training on Rockbench and ASTD Press. You can see the book here.Chad facilitates ASTD’s Mobile Learning Certificate Program course along with others from the Float team. He will be blogging here this month, focusing on mobile learning as a tool for sales enablement training. You can catch up with Chad and the Float team over on their blog at floatlearning.com/blog.Join Chad as he explores topics this month on mobile learning strategy and how to get started on the road to mobile learning with your sales organization.Stop measuring percent complete. Start measuring percent closed.Mobile Learning as a Sales Training Tool – post 4 of 4Click here for post one, two, and three Evaluating training effectiveness is a long-running challenge for our industry. How do we know what we are doing is having a real and lasting effect on our audience’s behavior and, in turn, improving our company’s performance?An entire subset of the training industry is focused around this. Assessment tools and specialists, learning management systems and many other products out there exist to make this easier or more effective. These vendors are doing what they can to help you determine if your learners have achieved what you have set out to do. Common metrics used with these systems include whether the learners have attended class, completed courses, and achieved some level of mastery of the content you have designed and deployed for them to consume and internalize.Does tracking all of these mean that learning has occurred? From a certain point of view, yes, it has.The industry benchmark Kirkpatrick taxonomy of evaluation (currently in a redesign process) devotes the first to levels of evaluation to “Did they like it?” and “Did they learn something?” This taxonomy is certainly not accepted by all to be the end-all be-all of training effectiveness evaluation, but it definitely is widespread in its devotees. There is little in those first two levels to affirm success or even equate the training intervention with real-world performance. Just because they were there, they liked it, and they learned something doesn’t mean that they will sell more or be more productive.Measuring ResultsIn sales, we are a results-driven culture. Coffee is for closers, right? What if Level 1-2 were viewed as being the means to an end and not a valued form of measurement itself? In our community of practice, we are seeking more meaningful relationships between our interventions and sales activity.How do we move past this view of measurement to get to the real questions: “Are our training materials affecting behavior?” and most importantly, “Are our materials affecting organizational performances or results?”A key will be to reexamine the deliverables we are deploying to our learners, and reframe their points of measurement to more closely alight with the processes and tools in place to help our sales team make the sale.With mobile being a new thing for many of us, it offers a place to do a "soft reset." What and how will we measure, and how will we tie to real-world activities? Key components of mobile experiences that can be measured differ dramatically from traditional learning experiences. We are concerned with things like measuring competency or grasp of subject matter in our ahead-of time-learning materials. Just as usage data, goal/funnel conversion, time spent on task and task success rates are more important for marketing activities, these same sorts of actives are useful for mobile and just-in-time learning content.Tying the sales training delivery to an activity in the company CRM or other associated business process platforms directly is a powerful area to explore as you reexamine your mobile learning strategy for sales enablement. By doing so, you will uncover a few things:Do sales people who are stuck need refreshers while reviewing cases?Do high performers access training materials before closing?Are our lowest performers’ pipelines dying at points that correspond with completion and competency numbers for existing content?Are there ways to directly insert job aids or performance tools in problem spots of the pipeline that help pull a potential client through it to make the sale?Are there behavior patterns that emerge between groups of learners? Product lines? Regions? Managers?Another aspect to examine would be the post-support or sales-incident logging.If your sales personnel need to update a CRM or application after a meeting, visit or call, perhaps there is an opportunity to add fields to the ticketing screen that ask if they used mobile help before or during the call. A follow-up field could ask what content they accessed or whether it was helpful.Make these fields a required entry prior to logging the meeting notes and you instantly have data points to track to see if your mobile learning is helping those you designed it for. Use this information to inform your revisions and additions, and continue to check in to see if the overall evaluation of your software improves.Covering Other Aspects of LearningThese are all tips for the formal learning process and content, but social and informal activity is also an area to explore.When was the last time you reviewed your Salesforce Chatter or Yammer usage to correlate sharing with performance? Usage with closed sales? Are our best-performing sales people active in Yammer or Chatter? Do they have their posts favorited or shared? The best chefs are on TV (a simplistic assumption, I know), but these chefs share their recipes with everyone to improve us all. Hopefully your best performers do the same.Measuring event intervention access and assessing if the spacing matches with product releases and other real-world events is also worth exploring. Do new product rollouts require more accesses of just-in-time information? Are job aids for older products available in a format that helps sales people make quick decisions?The lifecycle of your products and services may have some bearing on whether your sales people remember things about them. Just because something is near end of life or not the newest offering should mean that sales tools are unavailable to help close the deal.Putting This Into ActionTying the intervention delivery to the results is a bit of mythical beast in the training world. Mobile learning doesn’t guarantee this, but it certainly gets us closer. This has been a point of disconnect previously, but it’s testable now.Pick one of your low-hanging fruit projects and insert real measurement into the process. Look at mLearning as a performance improvement tool, not a “have to have” for this test.Since it's new and possibly not fully replacing your other methods yet, view mobile as an additional means to reach your audience instead of the only one. It's more content than you might have had before – an augmentation of sorts.Take your learning and measurement hypotheses and do an A/B test. Give the new content to one group and not the other. Do the ones that get the new tools do better? Make more sales? Move leads through their pipeline more quickly? These metrics shouldn’t be vanity metrics (non-actionable, low value numbers), but rather real-world indicators based on the results.Once you know a bit of what works and what doesn’t with this smaller effort, you can then expand it. Pick larger projects, embed your content directly in the CRM, move to real sales enablement tools for mobile, and start measuring metrics that  matter.Stop measuring percent complete. Start measuring percent closed.-I enjoyed connecting with many of you at ASTD 2013 in Dallas. The sales enablement community of practice for ASTD is vibrant, and I look forward to seeing what is around the bend for the coming year.Thanks for following this series of posts. For more great information on how to mobilize your sales enablement program, connect with me on LinkedIn, and come check out the blog at Floatlearning.com. If mobile is new to you and you want to learn more about what kinds of mobile learning options are out there, download our free introduction to mobile learning, The Float Mobile Learning Primer.

Equating Real World Performance with Mobile Learning

Let’s cut right to the chase: Are annual performance reviews really effective for the primary purpose in which they are intended to serve?Yes, performance reviews provide measurable results needed to predicate ill-founded performance incentive plans. Yes, performance reviews are used to substantiate staff performance to organizational leaders. Yes, performance reviews offer one time each year to say that we had a one-on-one with each employee. However, performance reviews rarely review performance.So, if not performance, what do they review?In a January 2012 Forbes article, founder of Ironfire Capital LLC Eric Jackson detailed his list of the top 10 mistakes bosses make when administering a performance review. I think it would prove valuable for us to benchmark ourselves against his list. They are as follows—along with my helpful translation of each tenet (and I speak inclusively as I hold myself to these standards as well):Too vague. It’s obvious that many managers either a) don’t know their employees or b) are too scared to give them feedback. As a manager, we’re in charge of employee development. Therefore, we don’t really have the luxury to lay out a “fuzzy” assessment.Everything’s perfect – until it’s not and someone is fired. Can we say, passive aggressive much? Workers need managers to say what they mean and mean what they say for crying out loud. We can’t have employees thinking their performing work just fine, only to have the rug pulled out from under them.Recency effect.  I understand the frustration that may occur when someone missteps close to a review. I also understand that since we haven’t closely observed their performance all year, it would be really easy for us to rate them based on this one screw up. But, we shouldn’t.No preparation. Really? How can anyone ever take us seriously as managers again? Who doesn’t prepare for a performance review? Managers who cannot prepare should go back to being individual contributors.They never happen at all or “my people know my door is always open.” Oh, I get it. Practicing a little conflict avoidance, eh? I shared before and I will share again, a manager’s job is to manage people. This includes seeking them out to provide feedback.No pats on the back. I believe the rule says nine positives to one negative, or four positives to one negative… something like that. Either way, the bottom line is we can’t just slam our employees. We must give them feedback on where they’ve been successful as well as areas for improvement.No recognition for doing the work of three people. We all know the plight of the post-recession employee: everyone is doing more with less. Because this is the case, we must recognize our employees for this accomplishment. A “thank you” goes a long way, and it could mean the difference between employee retention and a huge turnover problem that puts a target on our own backs.Not being truthful with employees about their performance. When I’m coaching managers, I sometimes ask myself, “What are they so scared of? What kind of dirt does this employee have on you that would keep you from telling them that they are underperforming?” Whatever the issue, we have to overcome it. Not being truthful in any situation—professional or personal—only ends up biting us in the end.No follow-up. When we purchase a car, we purchase it with the understanding that it will require maintenance, right? Maybe, not the perfect analogy, but you get the idea. When we select professionals to join our team, it is with the understanding that we are committed to their growth and development. Therefore, when we review their performance and give them areas to improve, it is our job to follow-up with them on a regular basis and ensure that they are indeed making progress.No discussion around the employee’s career ambitions. Hey, here’s a scary truth: No one wants to work for our companies for the rest of their careers anymore. There, I said it. Pink elephant addressed. Now, what are we going to do about it? As managers, we’re going to help our employees achieve as much as they can and ascend as high as they can go. We do this, and they’ll stay a lot longer. Trust me on this one.This is what you need to know. The performance review can be an extremely powerful tool if treated correctly. As a manager, if we’re conducting one-on-one meetings consistently and keeping the lines of communication open with our employees, the review validates performance, reinforces good behavior and results, and encourages continuous improvement for the future.All in all, I implore you to not be that manager who is known at the water cooler for her passive aggressive performance reviews. Instead, use the performance review as an opportunity to reinstate this tool to its rightful place: a channel for feedback that one needs and deserves to learn, develop, and grow toward success.

John B. Bunch

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