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Anke Baak is an experienced manager with a successful track record in HRD consulting, facilitating, training, coaching, and leading teams of senior HRD professionals.

Anke Baak

Leaders need to know what type of leadership makes the difference between struggling on or successfully riding the waves of change.

Playing to Win: How Leaders Successfully Navigate Challenging Times

Who’s Got Your Back? The 6 Stages of Trust

Anne Bruce doesn't just speak for a living, she's also a talent manager and an executive coach who helps speakers and authors including celebrities, politicians, sports figures, and well-known business leaders soar to the next level of their career. With a background in broadcast journalism and years of extensive television work, Anne has written for clients and projects in Hollywood and New York. Her clients have appeared on Ellen, Shark Tank, Steve Harvey, Today Show, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360, and more. She's also carved a niche in coaching talent to write and deliver popular TEDx and TED Talks.Anne has had the privilege of speaking, writing, and conducting talent projects worldwide for organizations like the American Red Cross, Baylor University Medical Center, Sony Entertainment, Sony International, Saks Fifth Avenue, GEICO, Ben & Jerry's, Accenture, Coca Cola, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, The White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Columbia University School of Business, the Conference Board of Europe, and NASA, where she produced a documentary on the lives of women astronauts.She is the author of dozens of e-books and more than 23 books, which have been translated into more than 36 languages worldwide. Some of Anne's books include Speak for a Living: The Insider's Guide to Building a Speaking Career; Discover True North: A 4-Week Program to Ignite Your Passion and Activate Your Potential; Be Your Own Mentor; How to Motivate Every Employee; The Manager's Guide to Motivating Employees; and Building a High Morale Workplace; and Leaders Start to Finish: A Roadmap for Developing Top Performers (2nd edition). She's also been a featured author for Perfect Phrases for Employee Development Planning, part of McGraw-Hill's Perfect Phrases series. Anne also authored and acted as acquisition editor for the Pocket Tool Kit series. She has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, London Times, San Jose Mercury News, Newsweek, and Inc. magazine, among others.Anne's home base is in the greater Los Angeles area at Channel Islands Beach her favorite place to coach clients and film her popular weekly video blog, #30SecondsAtTheBeach. She has also partnered with her co-author Sardek Love, to launch The Speak for a Living Success Academy, a program for aspiring and accomplished speakers.

Anne Bruce

Blended learning is proving to be an effective development strategy. According to ATD Research, 75 percent of organizations are expanding their use of blended learning, and 87 percent of employees value the flexibility it provides.This ATD Research whitepaper explains that implementing a successful blended learning program takes a variety of skills. Furthermore, both internal and external organizational resources need to be balanced.How to do that successfully depends on the organizational context as well as how to motivate your teams. Motivate Your AudienceWhat motivates adults to learn? Clearly, there are different learning theories out there. Everyone has a unique mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. These factors range from perceived reward and social or contextual influences to the quality and flexibility of available training.The UK’s innovation agency for social good, Nesta, details how to design a program to meet your audience’s readiness levels. For example, if you have a group in the precontemplation stage with no interest in learning, you can promote a change in cultural norms.Blended learning can be particularly useful for this type of audience because you can emphasize the “fun” aspect. Gaming experiences or book clubs for greater team bonding are some examples. As mentioned in our blog about why companies are moving toward blended learning, another powerful motivator is to integrate learning into the flow of work. The more people see relevance and the less it disrupts their work, the more they’ll appreciate the learning.Other ideas to motivate your teams to engage with learning:Self-driven blended learning – With multiple learning approaches, it’s easier to let learners lead so they feel empowered. Only then does true curiosity and learning blossom.Digital and leadership champions – Not everyone will have the same digital literacy so it’s important to provide the right guidance. Moreover, make sure you get buy-in and advocacy from your leaders.Career guidance and coaching interventions – Learning needs to be as beneficial for the organization as it is for the individual. With coaches, individuals can better align their personal goals and needs to the overall organizational learning goals.How Does Context Play a Role?Implementing a successful learning program is both about the content and the organizational learning culture.Promoting a learning culture and implementing blended learning encourages flexibility and innovation because of exposure to various learning modalities. As such, people find themselves becoming more curious and they feel empowered as they choose what works for them. Not only do they bring this energy and mindset back to the workplace but they also bring new perspectives. As this article on blended learning and learning culture describes, blended learning offers varied viewpoints and different problem-solving approaches that also nurtures greater diversity.Book clubs are another transformational activity because they create a group setting that boosts collaboration and reflection as detailed in this whitepaper on what separates good teams from exceptional ones. How blended learning supports a learning culture and vice versa:Continuous improvement – With small continuous feedback loops and incremental steps, learners gradually shift their mindset to bring this approach to their everyday work.Knowledge sharing and collaboration – Through blended learning, various groups and forums are created, which naturally encourages cross-learning. As this behavior becomes instilled, conflict shifts into a natural sharing of ideas rather than a competition over who is right.Personalization alongside team focus – How to balance individual with team needs is a constant paradox. Blended learning provides another opportunity to explore this balance, which shifts mindsets back in the workplace.Maximize Your Blended Learning EffortsGone are the days of reading out slides to people in classrooms with the hope that they will improve their day-to-day work. With technology, we have an opportunity to make learning fun, personal, and relevant.Most importantly, blended learning creates a more memorable and meaningful learning experience. It also encourages collaboration and innovation because of the varied multimedia methodologies now available.Don’t forget to watch the ATD webinar recording with more tips for how to apply blended learning effectively. To learn is to evolve and embrace life, so let’s keep moving forward in how we learn.

How to Successfully Implement Blended Learning

What makes this world so complex? Is it globalization with all the information we are bombarded with daily? Or is it the sheer number of interconnected relationships across the world? In many ways, it’s both and so much more.Not only are leaders constantly pressured to make decisions with incomplete information, but they also have to face the flow of information from their teams to the global world. Nothing is secret anymore and customers and shareholders make judgements based on information, hearsay, and more.How can leaders navigate this minefield?The Both/And MindsetAs this newspaper article on how today’s complexity is different explains, we no longer have a focal point in today’s decisions. Moreover, no one can fully understand the multiple interrelations in our complex system. Naturally, this makes most leaders nervous, and a normal reaction is to try to hold onto the familiar. So, many try to break problems down into parts and solve them in isolation.In fact, as this HBR article on How Successful Leaders Think says, a wiser approach is to look at a problem holistically. That means getting as many of the parts together to see how they all fit.Wisdom then lies in the ability to step back and see connecting patterns that can drive innovative solutions.A useful way to think of this is by adopting a both/and mindset.A both/and mindset instead of an either/or approach allows for innovative solutions:Complex systems often hold conflicting demands. Linear thinking can push us to, for example, prioritize individuals over teams or cost over quality. Alternatively, analyze the bigger picture and reflect on all possible cause and effect loops.Let go of either/or thinking. Sometimes it’s tempting to choose cost over quality, but instead, shift your mindset to leverage the benefits of both sides.Practice observing multiple truths. As people, we are all different, but deep down, we are the same. So, practice finding the common ground in all viewpoints.Nurture Empathy As we explained in our blog on how to stop failing at leadership development, leadership isn’t about just building competencies in one person.Today’s leadership development needs to cover both relational and individual aspects. That means giving current and future leaders stretch experiences—new ways of making sense of them and strong diverse networks, as explained in this paper on vertical development.As leaders then mature and evolve away from black and white thinking, they understand themselves better, which leads to greater empathy. Gradually, they gain the ability to hold conflicting stakeholder views more easily.They therefore become more intuitive in leveraging the minds and abilities of those around them to transform conflict and uncertainty into beneficial solutions for all.Nurture empathy and deep understanding to create interdependent teams that drive decisions:Balance emotions and thoughts. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated, the best decisions come from combining both logic and emotions. Leaders need to connect and listen to both.Connect with diverse networks—the more backgrounds we interact with, the more our empathy grows as we gain a wider understanding of the human condition.Explore the ego’s impact. Book clubs, the new corporate classroom, are a powerful way to explore both the ego and decision making for the greater good. Read this paper on transforming organizations through books to learn more.Final Thoughts on Supporting Leaders in Decision MakingAs the world becomes more systemic, we too must operate more systemically. Wise leaders know they don’t know everything, so they tap into the collective wisdom to gather all the parts. From there, they look for the big picture and potential solutions.Together, we can all let go of either/or thinking and move into both/and thinking, where we explore the gray of the world.As such, we need to connect with diverse people whilst deeply exploring the ego’s needs and how it affects our decisions. Let’s also remember to tune into empathy and our sense of playfulness.Or as Carl Jung would say, “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” And after all, decisions create something new.

How Leaders Can Better Deal With Increasing Complexity 

When was the last time you were frustrated that someone didn’t follow through on that project as you told them to? And then blamed it on lack of accountability? I hear this almost every day from leaders, but sometimes it helps to step back and reflect on the environment we are creating, both consciously and unconsciously.Accountability can just as easily induce guilt and shame as it can motivation. Wise leaders move beyond words to focus on nurturing the right environment so people want to take responsibility, from which accountability follows.Drive Responsibility With the Right EnvironmentThe dictionary states that being accountable is when we are “required or expected to justify our actions or decisions.”Conversely, responsibility is “having an obligation to do something or control over one’s job or role.”In other words, being responsible is self-driven where we feel in control, whereas accountability can feel like judgment.Instead, leaders can nurture the conditions for trust and safety that drive both individual and team performance. Too often we focus only on individuals, but the key is to remember that we are our environments and vice versa.As we all know, our organizational environments can get complicated especially with today’s reduction in hierarchy and increase in cross-functional focus. As such, individuals need to be aligned across multiple levels including with their own motivations and drivers.This paper on culture and accountability in organizations further explains how our cultural tendencies toward individualistic or collectivistic approaches also influence our overall alignment with an organization.All this means is that accountability isn’t just a matter of setting KPIs and expecting the system to deliver.How to drive alignment so that people want to take responsibility:Focus on values and needs. While we have different values, we all have common needs including safety and trust. Just like this white paper on psychologically safe teams describes, we need to tame the ego and align people toward the greater good.Promote team cohesion. To nurture responsibility, it helps to bring people together so that they become motivated to support each other. Book clubs aren’t just the new corporate classroom. They are also the platform for creating a sense of belonging and facilitating co-exploration.Trust that teams can fix mistakes. Too often, psychological safety is eroded when KPIs aren’t met and more controls are added. Instead, enable your teams to come up with solutions for how to avoid similar mistakes.KPIs Within a SystemSetting KPIs is like getting your fishing equipment ready and then expecting the catch to simply appear.Just like leadership, fishing is an art.You must consider the weather, the tides, the conditions of the water, and any migratory movements. So, KPIs only work if you consider the environment and how to bring everyone along with the vision. As this article on systems thinking in KPI development further states, the more we reflect on the whole system, the greater the impact on overall productivity.How to support your KPIs within the culture and overall system:Cross-departmental alignment. Step away from analyzing teams in blocks and review the value chain as a whole, similar to the lean Six Sigma approach.Allow team self-determination. The more you allow teams to set expectations and to define the boundaries of their value chain, the more likely they’ll be engaged to own their responsibility.Focus on problem definition. It’s useful to ask the question “Can I measure it?” Of course, we can’t over-measure, but rather than looking for accountability, focus on what problem you are trying to solve. And then, measure the actions.How Will You Nurture the Conditions for Success?It’s easy to throw around words such as accountability and responsibility. Nevertheless, rather than talking about what others should or shouldn’t be doing, let’s look at how we as leaders are influencing behaviors.Of course, it’s hard to create the right environment, especially because we are different. Nevertheless, deep down, we often want the same things, including psychological safety.If in doubt, remember that accountability is an outcome. So, if you feel it doesn’t exist, go back to the root cause. What is stopping your team from grabbing ownership?

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