MetaComm Muse

Check out my new website!

altruologist — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 08:58:16 +0000

Howdy- I have a new website and blog. You can check it out here.

Igniting Innovation with an LMS

altruologist — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:48:39 +0000

Innovation is often identified as a key strategic advantage for organisations who have instilled innovation into their culture. Innovation need not be on the scale of a major new product and service, often it is creating a new process or tool that works within the business to support greater effectiveness and performance. One of our clients determined that innovation was going to be a strategic focus for their business. This client has successfully implemented a learning and development strategy that has driven higher levels of performance both at individual, team and enterprise levels. Now they wish to translate this learning culture to support one that includes innovation as well. DOTS LMS is the backbone for the learning and development processes and it was our challenge to explore how we can utilise DOTS to support innovation. This first entry explores the first phase of the innovation project plan and in the second entry I will illustrate the tools used in DOTS LMS and how they were configured to create an effective ‘innovation incubator.’

The first phase was focused on communication and awareness. The management team determined that there was a need to ensure a pervasive understanding of the strategic plan throughout the enterprise. An online course was developed using the DOTS Content Creator that included videos, images, Excel spreadsheets and other file types. This course is approximately 20 to 25 minutes in duration and included an enrolment so that attendance could be tracked. The course included a feedback form and a DOTS Survey to gauge reactions and collect ideas. The other courses in phase one included a course on how the innovation project was going to be undertaken, a course on the concept of innovation and examples of how innovation drives better performance at all leves of an organisation. These courses were developed using a combination of the DOTS Content Creator and Microsoft PowerPoint with Articulate. All of the courses included online feedback and a survey so that ideas could be captured even at this early stage of the roll-out. Since the client already had the employee population in DOTS the course was catalogued so that all persons could access it. In addition to employees, a couple of the courses were made available to key partners and suppliers to encourage their participation in the innovation process. These external users were granted access to the courses but did not have access to any another feature or function within the LMS.

DOTS Libraries were used to provide support resources such as links to external sites, articles, presentations and information about key people involved in this project. To encourage people to engage and participate in the process a number of DOTS Discussion Groups were established. Some Discussions were open across the Enterprise while others were available to specific teams and departments. The phase one timeline was designed for 8 weeks to ensure a good pace is established. The pace ensured there was a prevailing sense of importance attached to this project as well as an energetic level of activity.

In the next entry I will explain the use of DOTS LMS to support the innovation processes.

Are You Coaching? If not, why not?

altruologist — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:16:00 +0000

I suppose there is a need to clarify what I mean by coaching. When we engage in a coaching relationship with another person we are committed to improving that person’s performance. Coaching can be used in any business discipline including sales.

The most common used method to improve sales is to provide some form of sales training. Sales training is done online or in workshops with either a single sales team or a group comprising persons from different organisations and industries. Sales training may be effective if it is implemented within a scaffold of useful ‘on the job‘ tools, follow up, and refresher learning opportunities. My experience shows that in most cases sales training is an event with limited ongoing impact on performance. Sales coaching is much different.

Effective sales coaching is one on one. The sales coach engages with the coachee in a focused process to improve performance. There are many tools available to delivery effective coaching. In sales coaching it is essential that the coach ‘shadows’ the coachee on the job. Just as a sports coach analyses technique so the sales coach analyses technique and behaviours as well as providing the tools and guidance to create change.

Other tools are available and an effective coach will use at least a few if not all of these.

Shadowing (as mentioned above).
360 feedback tools.
Self- assessment tools.
Interviews with clients.
Personality and psychometric assessments.
Role play and situation rehearsal.
Visualisation exercises
Independent and guided external learning (including online learning).

If you are a business owner or manager you may choose to opt for an external coach. there are reasons to use an external coach, among these are:

You need to remain focused on your objectives in the business.
You may not feel confident engaging in one on one coaching with your sales people.
You may not have the skills or experience to execute an effective coaching program.
A skilled external coach is going to be objective and may act as a great relationship builder in the business.

What results can you expect from effective sales coaching? There are many outcomes and some are readily apparent and others are more hidden but still impact positively on your business. You will notice that effective coaching scores fast wins in the engagement and the benefit steadily increase. At some point a tipping point is reached and the coachee’s performance will accelerate dramatically.

An effective professional coach will measure your return on investment. Based on my experience these are a few of the benefits that will be achieved in a sales coaching engagement.

Higher levels of motivation and energy.
Clear alignment with company strategy.
Identified measurable goals and objectives.
Stronger sales pipeline.
Reduced sales cycle timeframes.
Greater innovation and continuous improvement.
Greater trust established between sales person and management.

There are plenty more benefits that can be achieved using coaching to improve the sales performance in your business. If you are interested in learning more or scheduling a free one- hour coaching session for yourself or one of your sales team members, please give me a call or send an email using the form on our website.

Never Assume People Know

altruologist — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:40:08 +0000

I have a client about to begin content -marketing that expressed a sentiment that I think may be very common, “why would anybody read what I write? I have nothing new or exciting.” These feelings are not conducive to a good start at writing content. I will admit that I have often had the same feelings. There are times when I am writing a blog or article and thinking, ‘this is common sense stuff, no person will care about reading it.’ My experience and those with whom I collaborate confirm a different scenario entirely. There are a number of points I would like you to consider if you feel your writing and content will not be read or dismissed. • Your ideas, observations and comments are as valid and worthy as any other persons. • If you really look at what is included in the avalanche of online information, there is rarely anything truly new or ground breaking. • People read online content for a number of purposes. These may include learning, confirming, questioning, innovating, and sharing. You do not need to write the ‘theory of everything’ to make an impact in the online world. • Once you begin it is important to get in the ‘flow’ of content creation. You will make an impact on others when they know you are a producer and the time spent reading your material is worthwhile for whatever purpose they are after. • Write from personal experience and you will instantly have people interested. There is nothing better than something written in first person to capture attention. We are all interested in other people’s experiences as opposed to general information or theory. • My clients are in business. If you read business blogs can you cI have a client about to begin content -marketing that expressed a sentiment that I think may be very common, “why would anybody read what I write? I have nothing new or exciting.” These feelings are not conducive to a good start at writing content. I will admit that I have often had the same feelings. There are times when I am writing a blog or article and thinking, ‘this is common sense stuff, no person will care about reading it.’ My experience and those with whom I collaborate confirm a different scenario entirely. There are a number of points I would like you to consider if you feel your writing and content will not be read or dismissed. • Your ideas, observations and comments are as valid and worthy as any other persons. • If you really look at what is included in the avalanche of online information, there is rarely anything truly new or ground breaking. • People read online content for a number of purposes. These may include learning, confirming, questioning, innovating, and sharing. You do not need to write the ‘theory of everything’ to make an impact in the online world. • Once you begin it is important to get in the ‘flow’ of content creation. You will make an impact on others when they know you are a producer and the time spent reading your material is worthwhile for whatever purpose they are after. • Write from personal experience and you will instantly have people interested. There is nothing better than something written in first person to capture attention. We are all interested in other people’s experiences as opposed to general information or theory. • My clients are in business. If you read business blogs can you count on more that one hand the numbers of time you read something truly new or earth shattering. It is the same with business books. The ideas and information are re-purposed for the audience and you can make even the most commonly understood business ideas more interesting by telling a story. If you are stuck and you need some help getting those fingers tapping on the keyboard, you are welcome to contact me and I can give you some ideas to help you get started. ount on more that one hand the numbers of time you read something truly new or earth shattering. It is the same with business books. The ideas and information are re-purposed for the audience and you can make even the most commonly understood business ideas more interesting by telling a story. If you are stuck and you need some help getting those fingers tapping on the keyboard, you are welcome to contact me and I can give you some ideas to help you get started.

Zen and the art of business judging.

altruologist — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 06:21:43 +0000

Imagine if you were a judge in a business competition that measures your business across dimensions such as financial results, people, processes, technology, innovation, leadership and overcoming obstacles. Detach yourself from your business physically, intellectually and emotionally and view your business as a judge would do when comparing your business to others. I know how hard this is as I am both a business judge and a business owner.

Being a business judge has been responsible for some of the most powerful insights and learning in how to improve my own business. As a judge I also know how difficult it is to detach yourself from your business to gain a clear view of what is looks like to others, be they judges or customers. Despite the difficulty, detachment is absolutely necessary to gain a fresh perspective to inspire new ideas and the motivation to change. Without detachment you can often be defensive and prone to rationalize your status quo.

There are a few ways to make this process effective. If you are a sole operator you probably have the toughest challenge but you can do your research and analysis yourself or get help from a consultant, business coach or fellow business owner.

Establish your judging parameters. It is hard to benchmark your financial performance against competitors but can base your judging on the health of your finances and rate of growth.
Do your research on competitors and similar organizations. You can do this online and in person by visiting their premises. In my judging we look at the office layout, cleanliness, ease of access, and other elements. You can visit websites, visit forums, look through social media (Linked In, Facebook, Twitter) for insights into the profiles of your competitors and feedback from customers.
Set up a scoring scale and use it. For each judging parameter use a scale and score each company you research as well as your own. I suggest you score your own business first and last.
Judge the business and not the product or service. There is an inclination to rate businesses that are engaged in exciting and/or interesting products and services higher. I remember an instance of this with a comparison between and event management firm and a robotics firm. Many judges could not comprehend how the event management firm scored higher. The robotics firm was not as well managed, had immature processes, could demonstrate no focus on people development among other factors that were attributes of a model business.

When you have performed your research and filled in your score cards, it is time to go and spend some time thinking and planning. You do this part of the process away from your business and distractions. I cannot help but give a tip that describes all the contestants in the contest that I judge, ‘focus on the basics and the detail.’

In our next blog we will explain how to convert your business judging to creating better results in your business.

Execution Paralysis

altruologist — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:17:40 +0000

One of our new clients is actually in the enviable position of having a rapidly growing business thanks to referrals. His business supplies a great product and backs it up with excellent service. If you analyse his sales you see that over 80% are referrals within one industry. He called us in when he woke up to the fact that the bigger players were starting to react to his success with more aggressive marketing and pricing strategies. Among our Australian clients this scenario is pretty common. What is unusual with this client is the sophistication of the strategies and tactics he has developed to counter attack the bigger competitors. He and his team have also created strategies for entering new markets and eventually expanding overseas. Great stuff on paper with no execution. When we were called in it was obvious this client was suffering from ‘execution paralysis.’ For some business people this can be a malady that last a day, for others weeks and in this case it was uncertain if they were ever going to recover momentum. Execution paralysis occurs when you have a number of tasks and objective but you fail to execute any to completion. It is like being in a severe snowstorm and only seeing ‘white’ through your windscreen. Individual snowflakes are visible on the glass but beyond that only white. How do you break execution paralysis? It can be hard without external help as often you are too close to the business to take a higher level view of objectives.

Analyse your list of objectives and prioritise based on positive impact to the business. Do not prioritise based on speed or ease. In the case of this client our first objective was to create a new marketing kit for both online and hard copy distribution.
First things first is to create a list of next actions for each objective; in other words break things down. I suggest you get away from your computer and use big sheets of paper and/or a white board. A next action may be a small task such as calling a person or doing a web search. You must break down to small pieces.
Assign accountability and a due date for each ‘next action.’
Incorporate your objectives and next actions in collaborative tool for all persons to access and update. In this case we used Backpack from 37 Signals.
Time block for each next action or you can consolidate with time blocking for an objective. A time block is segmenting time in your calendar to focus on a task or objective. We still find the majority of people in business seem to approach each day in an ad-hoc manner and leave the office feeling they have not accomplished anything. Surprised?
I paraphrase a statement I read in a book by Alan Weiss, “……….we are after success, not perfection.” For our purposes this means finish what you are doing and move on. DO NOT waste more time refining, contemplating or discussing what you have done. MOVE ON.
With our client we are having weekly reviews every Friday. These reviews are pretty intensive and include not only the measurement of progress against their objectives but also a clean up of all the emails, documents and notes collected during the week.

The Benevolent Dictator

altruologist — Tue, 31 May 2011 01:02:49 +0000

It is almost wrong to call this a ‘business book,’ to call it such is to sell it short.

Michael Feuer is the author of this new book that is published by Wiley.

Michael founded and grew OfficeMax in 1988 and grew the business in a highly competitive environment before selling the business in 2003. Office Max grew to have over 50,000 employees and stores in all States except Vermont and operations in China, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico.

Michael’s entrepreneurial odyssey is described in this book as almost a case study and the book is a learning experience that every business person, entrepreneur and those aspiring to be such, will find
incredibly useful and practical. If you are getting tired of the same old material being peddled in the relentless
flood of business books, you will find The Benevolent Dictator a welcome and useful investment for your time and money.

The Benevolent Dictator delivers sound business advice that is elegantly interwoven with excellent story based narrative to illustrate Michael’s opinions and business philosophies. I found the story about the
founding of OfficeMax intriguing for its stark contradictions to so many widely held assumptions about s founding a capital intensive business like retail. In an era when so many people are fixated on a kid in a dorm room with a laptop, The Benevolent Dictator describes the founding of a real brick and mortar business.

Michael does not skimp on being transparent with his personal strategies and tactics. There
is a story about Michael’s planned acquisition of Big Mart by OfficeMax. The tactics employed by Michael to gain
information about the Big Mart business makes for very interesting reading. His decision to abandon the acquisition when outbid by another company should be mandatory reading for its illustration of discipline and adherence to values.

There are so many great lessons in this book. Instead of having a boring list of subject headers with explanatory text chapter by chapter, The Benevolent Dictator delivers a more interesting and impactful learning experience as a true
story. These are some of the areas that have made me really consider my work in my business:

Raising capital and leveraging ‘other people’s
money.’
Managing yourself, your ideas, and your
effectiveness.
Planning and setting goals.
Managing people effectively to support
performance.
Creating competitive advantage.

I read this book on a five hour flight from Brisbane to Perth. As I read I took notes and thankfully the cramped conditions in the 737 were out of mind. I wish I had another book of this quality for the trip home, maybe I will read it again.

Managing Your Sales Team is All About Objectives

altruologist — Sun, 29 May 2011 07:40:20 +0000

One of my coaching clients has been having a hard time managing a sales team that sells consulting services. The sales team is highly skilled on paper and most of them also work as consultants in addition to their sales work. Problems begain to rise when my client took his eye off the ball. He became complacent about his sales team based on the confidence he had in their skills and the seniority of the individuals. The sales team has more or less been running on ‘autopilot’ for about twelve months. Competitive pressures are impacting sales and hence my client sent out the call for help. The remedy to this situation is so simple but yet in this environment may be tricky to implement due to some bad habits developed in the past twelve months. First things first we are working to establish some objectives for each sales consultant. These objectives include revenue targets, target clients, reporting protocols, intellectual property development and marketing activities. These objectives are going to be rolled out in a phased approach along with an online performance system to help the managers and the sales consultants support the process. In the medium term we are going to implement a Customer Relationship Management System, (CRM). We have a couple of contenders for this software system. My client is working on some new behaviours. These behaviours include interpersonal communication skills as well as simple things like taking notes in meetings and recording the outcomes and tasks emanating from meetings. These simple steps will ensure the sales consultants become accustomed to accountability that is going to be reciprocal so there will be less resistance to the new business processes. For example, one key part of every meeting will be an agenda item focused purely on what my client can do to facilitate better performance in the sales team. Recently the sales team has begun asking my client to visit more clients with them and this has paid dividends by opening new opportunities with existing clients as well as forging more durable relationships with clients. The key learning here is that sales (and any part of your business) requires your focus. You need to build systems and processes to aid your focus and not rely purely on a scatter gun approach of focusing your attention on what is top of mind in the moment.

How I Coach Using DOTS LMS

altruologist — Tue, 17 May 2011 03:33:05 +0000

There is an increasing number of our user community using DOTS as the portal to initiate, support and manage coaching in their organisations. There are a number of ways this is being done and below I will highlight one. Firstly, the coaching may be an independent initiative or linked to a Performance Review and/or Development Plan.

Create competencies that are aligned with the objectives of the coaching program. These need not be competencies in the formal sense but rather skills, behaviours, activities that are the focus of the coaching program.
Set up a Course as a Coaching program. There are numerous course settings but the one I use consistently permits the learner (coachee) to set up their own sessions. You can also permit the coach to set up sessions as well. You do not need to use this feature but I like it as a means of tracking the sessions and ensuring they are included in the Calendar so a manager may view the progress of the coaching.
Link to Development Plans. I always use the Development Plans so I have the most flexibility for the different actions and learning assignments included in the coaching program. You can add anything to a Development Plan and the person being coached can record time spent and outcomes of the different actions.
I use the 360 Profile tool to create and deliver self – assessments at various stages of the coaching program.
I support my coaching with a specific Library for each person being coached. This permits both parties to add materials and information in a central repository for collaboration and reference.
The Assessment Builder in DOTS is great to get feedback from the persons being coached as well as providing a means to test new ideas and get feedback on tasks undertaken.
The competencies are added to the persons profile as we progress in the coaching program. This keeps an ongoing real time record of progress as well as great information for the Performance Reviews. DOTS will include the competencies in the Performance Review dashboard so they can be discussed.
Learning content is included in many coaching programs. I create learning content that is both specific to the person being coached but also have a range of general courses that are applicable more widely. For instance a recent addition to the courseware is a short course on creating ‘vision boards’ for strategic business and personal planning.
I have recently been using the Course and Enrolment system in DOTS to canvass interest in coaching and permitting those with an interest to register. The registration usually has an approval process so a manager or other interested person is aware of the interest and can approve or not approve the coaching program.
As indicated this is one way to set up Coaching in DOTS. If you are interested in looking at how you can support coaching in DOTS please let us know – you can reach us here.

Create a Vision for a Compelling Future

altruologist — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:38:05 +0000

Have a look at this short course on creating Vision Boards for your life and business.

http://public.iwork.com/embed/?d=Vision_Board_Course.key&a=p1070430514&h=768&w=1024&sw=458