Lives are On the Line
People are depending on you. They depend on your organization.
People are depending on you. They depend on your organization.
Your mission is important.
With the world relying on you and
your team, it is vita l that you stay
relevant, effective, and connected.
History is strewn with examples of
organizations that failed or are struggling to respond to a changing world.
Here are just a few:
- Borders Books – dig
- Blockbuster Video – same thing with dig
- US Education System – poor results for many due to
misalignment with current realities including non-agrarian civilization,
increased need for knowledge workers, and out-of-school support required
for extreme urban / suburban students.
- Figure skating programs that aren't including quads
for male skaters
- Banking organizations that invested in bundled
securities whose actual value could not be determined and which could not
be sold
- The Jedi Council when the Sith take over (just
checking if you're still reading – but for you Star Wars fans, Yoda does
ultimately realize he had been training Jedi for the past, not for the future.
For everyone else: I promise no more Star Wars references for the rest of
this post.)
The Antidote to Decay
Organizations that stay relevant,
effective, and connected do one vita l
thing consistently:
They learn.
The people in them learn, their
leadership learns, their teams learn.
Learning (and action with that
learning) is the antidote to decay and irrelevancy.
The 18 Truths
1. Learning is not
"squishy"
Lives are at stake. Your mission
is on the line. Learning is vita l –
not a ‘soft skill' to be left to chance or a training department.
If your outcomes are important, so
is investing in people.
2. Learning requires action and
action requires learning
Take action, learn from it, then
act again.
Or…
Learn, take action, then learn
more.
Action without learning is
busyness. It is ready, fire! (no aim).
Learning without action is
disconnected and will not produce change.
So Learn.
Then Act.
Then do it again.
3. Learning starts Day 1
When people join your team or your
organization, how are they greeted? What investment do you make in them? How is
the commitment to learning demonstrated?
4. Learning belongs in
organizational values
One of the values in my current
organization is innovation. We explain it like this: "Mission
Is learning a part of your
organizational or team DNA?
5. Learning is everyone's
responsibility
Effective learning organizations
ask everyone to contribute. Everyone can share what they are learning and can
teach it to someone else. You can create peer accountability for individual and
team learning.
Can your team see you learning?
What was the last thing you learned and applied? What was the last lesson a
successful project taught you? How have you implemented that learning?
6. Every project requires
"make us smarter" time.
Personal and team reflection is
essential.
After every project (or during big
ones) take time to ask:
What went well?
What worked that we didn't expect?
What would / will we do next time?
Incorporate the answers into the
team's future operations.
7. Learning reveals itself in
language
Strive to infuse learning language
in all your interactions. Work to ask the right questions rather than give all
the right answers.
What have you learned? What was
most surprising? Most challenging? Most rewarding? Most helpful? How will you
handle that next time? How can I help? What do you need to know to make that
decision?
8. Show me the money!
What is your people development
budget? What books are you giving people? What training courses? Are you
supplementing coaching?
Effective organizations invest in
their most important assets. If you truly don't have money, invest time.
It doesn't have to be a ton of
money, but is it there? As part of a small nonprofit team, I started with
handouts until I had budget to buy books.
9. Performance evaluations are
useless if they're not based on strengths
No one will be perfect at
everything. We're not made that way. Structuring performance evaluations to
highlight "weaknesses" is a waste of time.
More effective are two questions:
What are this persons strengths?
How can they better leverage their
strengths?
10. We need to keep outcomes in front
of our eyes
We naturally work at what has our
attention and what motivates us. Just regularly seeing outcomes is naturally
motivating and produces curiosity, investigation, and the learning to
accomplish them.
See 5 Ways Angry Birds Will Make
You a Better Leader for more…
11. Experiments are Vita l
Effective organizations
continually try different solutions, explore new ideas, and respond to changes
in the world outside the organization.
For experimentation to succeed,
you need a few things:
- Make it safe – if no one's experiments are failing,
then you're not pushing the boundaries with creativity. If you punish
"misses", people will shut down and you will not get creative
effort and new ideas
- Establish criteria to asses the effectiveness of the
experiment – what objectives does it need to meet to be considered for
more resources or wider use?
- When an experiment doesn't work, either make changes
and reinvest according to lessons learned or else shut it down. Don't
leave it hanging out there with everyone wondering what happened.
- Celebrate experiments – including the ones that don't
get replicated! This helps build the safety to try new ideas.
12. Pilot for Effective Change
When an experiment works or your
team has a sure-fire idea, roll it out in a couple different environments, take
notes, do the review in truth #6, and learn from the pilots. Then roll it out
across the organization. This will save you and your team countless hours of
frustration.
13. You can't delegate investing
in people.
Integrate leadership development
and professional growth into the fabric of the organization. Leaders develop
leaders. This can't be outsourced to another department or just one person in
an organization.
Some people are gifted teachers,
coaches, and mentors – but even for those who are not, they can still help
their teams identify areas of growth, match staff with the appropriate
resources, celebrate growth, and be growing themselves.
14. Servant leadership doesn't
happen by accident
There are generally four reasons
people seek leadership positions. The first group are the three "P"s:
power, prestige, and purse (money). While all are understandable, none of these
reasons are a strong foundation for effective leadership.
The fourth reason is service.
You're looking for people who genuinely want to help their team perform, who
take personal and organizational responsibility, who have high integrity. They
live out Hunter's ultimate test of leadership: their people are better off
today than when they met.
As you're looking to fill
leadership roles, seek out people who are already doing these things. It is
unlikely someone will magically begin serving others because you change a few
words following their name.
15. The Elephant Corollary –
Optimize the System
In talking about systems, Peter
Senge said that if you split an elephant into two pieces, you don't end up with
two baby elephants.
The idea is that your organization
and team are part of a larger whole. Each task or project they do is part of a
larger system. Trying to extract one team, one project, or one task out of the
larger system and focus on it alone is like trying to split an elephant in two
and expecting two small elephants as a result.
I refer to optimization as the
elephant corollary: your goal is to optimize the system, not to make one part
exceptional. Here's a quick example:
If you serve people, you can spend
all your time meeting their needs and no time on the needed paperwork to ensure
your funding continues. Despite being 100% awesome at serving the people, your
organization would fail.
Same problem if you maximize your
paperwork energy. Being 100% perfect at paperwork would result in less time
with your clients.
You want to optimize: find the
right amount of time with people and the minimum amount of time on the
paperwork needed for funding. The organization as a whole – that's your focus.
16. Learning takes time
Bulbs planted last fall may bloom
this spring or they may bloom next spring. It will be 6 – 18 months before you
see the results of your actions.
Organizations can be similar. You
want to allow enough time to examine the natural consequences of changes you
make.
Every organization has its own
change cycle. Organizations in a traditional academic environment might have to
wait an entire year to see the results of changes.
You can and should monitor what's
happening along the way, but know your own organization's lag time between
change and results.
"A society grows great when
old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." Greek
Proverb
17. Learning requires humility
Curiosity, the willingness to
admit there might be a better way, and to actually try it – these all spring
from humility.
By humility, I mean the awareness
that this is a huge world we live in and an incomprehensibly giant universe –
and that I'm not the center of it. There is so much we don't know collectively,
much less as individuals.
Humility is vita l for individuals and organizations that want to
learn. We can't look for new ideas or incorporate them if we think we already
know all there is to know.
Cultivate your own humility and
your team's. Whether through spiritual practices, time spent in nature, or
activities for which you have no aptitude – do what it takes to maintain a
sense of awe and wonder.
18. There is never an ideal time
or circumstance
Some of you will be reading this
and wishing your organization was practicing the truths on this list.
My challenge for you is to start
where you are. If you have a team, begin implementing these truths with them.
If you don't have a team, begin with yourself. Then develop your influence with
others who are willing to join you in learning.
If you're not part of a learning
organization, create pockets of learning – learning teams, learning
departments, and learning work groups. The organization may or may not learn,
but you will.
You and your team will be better
off for it.
The Author Profile
David M. Dye has
twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth
service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. David
serve as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift, a nonprofit youth service
organization with replicated affiliates in Oregon, Florida, New York, and Arizona
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