Last week I did a training/planning session with one of my Job Corps clients. This group is responsible for attracting applicants to Job Corps and then helping them through the admissions process.
These two aspects of the job require very different skill sets. The outreach piece is essentially sales--staff must be able to go out to a variety of applicants and organizations and "sell" Job Corps. The admissions component of the job is more about counseling and preparing young people for the demands of a Job Corps education.
In the course of our planning, we got into a discussion about these two disparate job responsibilities. I asked how many in the group enjoyed the admissions/counseling piece. Two thirds of the group raised their hands. Then I asked who enjoyed the Outreach piece. One third raised their hands. And there was basically no overlap between the groups. They either liked outreach or they enjoyed admissions. Only one or two liked both.
"How many of you," I asked, "spend more time on the piece you enjoy and find that you do a better job at it?" They all raised their hands.
Later I was speaking to the manager of the department. He reported that he wasn't surprised at the results. The people who enjoyed counseling applicants were the ones who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing outreach. The outreach people, on the other hand, tended to not do as well with the applicants and their families.
"Why," I asked him, "do you then split the job this way. If you know you have a group of people who love and are good at doing outreach, why not have them doing that full-time, while the others are doing what they love and do well?"
It was like a lightening bolt had hit him. Like most organizations, his has defined jobs according to organizational needs, rather than the skills and talents of the workers. But as we talked, he began to realize that he would be able to better meet the needs of his organization if he worked WITH the strengths of his staff, rather than fighting their "weaknesses."
This is a common mistake at most organizations. Even those nonprofits that specialize in helping clients with career and job search plans do nothing to ensure that their own staff have a career plan that clearly identifies their strengths. Further, even if they do, little is done to actually capitalize on those strengths.
I've come to believe, though, that if we tap into staff passions and strong points we can actually boost our organizational performance in ways we never imagined. When people love what they do and feel like they're doing what they are good at, they will naturally become your top performers. In many cases this can happen by accident, but why not be more deliberate about it?
Resources for Managing to Staff Strengths
If you're going to explore how to manage to staff strengths, your education should begin with First Break All the Rules (if you don't have time for the book, then at least try this summary). Then follow it up with Now Discover Your Strengths, which includes a free code for taking the online Strengths Finder to discover your own personal strengths.
These two books by Marcus Buckingham describe in easy-to-read terms how successful, high performing managers help their staff identify key strengths and then structure the employee's job responsibilities to capitalize on these strengths and minimize weaknesses. They give explicit step-by-step instructions that can be used by any organization to get the most out of their staff, something I think is key for many nonprofits.
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Tomorrow, I'm going to talk in some more detail on how to use a career planning process to engage staff and management in talking about strengths and engaging them in what their areas of passion. This is another way to approach the strengths process that I think is also very in line with some key themes of the 2.0 revolution.
Michele
On the long flight home yesterday, I was finally able to spend some time reading the latest Fast Company, which features their 2007 Social Capitalist Awards:
Our fourth annual Social Capitalist Awards honor these leaders, who combine savvy business models with solutions to pressing social needs in ways that challenge our assumptions about making a profit and making a difference. . .
On these pages, you'll find evidence of a movement that's not just changing the world, but changing how we think about creating change. Increasingly, we're witnessing the blurring of commerce and charity: Companies now tend to their citizenship; nonprofits hitch income-earning solutions to markets. That phenomenon led us this year to assess the most innovative corporate partnerships among our winners--alliances that represent both business value and a choice about what kind of future to create.
There's a lot to explore in this comprehensive article, not the least of which are all the ways in which nonprofits are incorporating business practices and developing deeper partnerships with business to be more effective at accomplishing their missions. Winners include:
There are also some great resources for social capitalists and a nice slideshow on lessons learned. Well worth a look.
Michele
Kathy has an interesting post on why the U.S. is falling behind in preparing math and science workers for the future. Her point is that the educational system we've set up doesn't teach people the skills that they actually use as mathematicians, scientists and engineers. There's a focus on a rote/drill and kill, problem-solving by recipe approach that has nothing to do with the kinds of right-brained, holistic, design and intuition skills that are necessary for true success in the field.
I think that what she has identified is a problem that's applicable to all workers in all fields. As she points out:
Our educational institutions--at every level--need drastic changes or we're all screwed. The generation of students we're turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. Where we used to prepare students for a "job for life", now we must prepare students to be jobless. We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster("yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it'll kill you.")
The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.
This is where I think nonprofits need to be thinking differently about how they're preparing their own workforce for the future and how they use technology to do this. Reality is that we need structures in place that support knowledge management and "just-in-time" learning. Speed and adaptability are of the essence. We must be unlearning and re-learning on an almost daily basis. But the question is, how do we do create the right kinds of learning opportunities?
According to Jerry Wind and David Reibstein of the Wharton School of Business, in the new world of work, organizations must adapt their training strategies to:
So times have changed. How do we adapt? While I think that nonprofits have been at a disadvantage in the training arena for years, this is where Web 2.0 technologies can finally put nonprofits on equal footing with their private sector counterparts.
Tools such as wikis and blogs are now ridiculously inexpensive to access. A Typepad account is $15 a month. Some wikis can be had for free.
Audio and video options are equally accessible. With a $13 microphone and free recording software, I can create "just-in-time" learning podcasts that can be stored on the web and made easily accessible to staff anytime, anywhere. Decent video cameras can be had for around $200 and through free video hosting services like YouTube and VideoEgg , I can easily and quickly create simple training/learning videos that can again, be accessible to staff as they need the information.
The real issue that we're dealing with here is the paradigm shift in our thinking about learning that we need to make in order to operate in a world like this. We aren't used to thinking that we could create and share audio and video on a dime. We're not accustomed to the idea of having a wiki where staff could collaboratively create knowledge and problem-solve around their learning needs. We simply have not adjusted to the fact that we must be constantly alert to where learning needs to be happening and then considering how we can use technology tools to provide those learning opportunities as workers need them.
Our other problem is that most nonprofits and their staff have not had experience in designing effective learning experiences. Having grown up in the "drill and kill" days, they don't necessarily have the background and skills to design learning experiences that will have the most impact. But again, this is where Web 2.0 technology can step in.
The community aspects of being able to share and access solid knowledge about training and learning ACROSS nonprofit organizations is a huge opportunity for leverage that we're simply not accessing. Yes, it can be expensive to design good learning for a single organization. But why do we have to design it for just one anyway? Why can't nonprofits create learning consortia that allow them to share knowledge and skill development opportunities among many different agencies? Why, for example, can't they share a "learning consultant" who designs learning experiences and manages the tools for delivering that learning for a group of agencies that share similar skill development needs?
I think there is a lot of untapped potential that is just waiting for us to find it. The challenge we're facing, though, is less about learning the technologies and more about changing our thinking about how we use them.
Michele
