All new exclusive program for elite performers

Learn how to be effective as a man in today’s complex chaotic world.

A Program for MEN!

Get instant access to a free three-part seminar on the 8 Universal Performance Principles that will enable you to reshape your life and reclaim your power as a man. Learn how you can have a life ofpassion, power, dignity, and purpose.

• Learn the principles practiced by the world’s elite performers.
• Discover how you can have a future that you design.
• Reconnect to your essential identity and power as a man.
• This seminar covers this and much more.

AUTONOMY AND DIGNITY IN LEARNING

A common breakdown that people confront when learning has to do with the relationship between the student and the teacher or coach.

It is important to remember that we grant the teacher or coach authority in only one domain of learning. We are not granting universal authority. That is what happens when someone decides to follow a guru. They surrender to the teacher in all domains. This is NOT what we are proposing.

That I authorize someone to coach me in business does not mean I need to listen to their opinion about raising my children, managing my finances, or attending to my health. When we are not clear about this, we tend to move to one of two equally unproductive extremes.

• We refuse to grant any authority and trust to our coach, and thus never follow his advice, missing the opportunity to learn.
• We give up too much authority and trust, and therefore surrender our individual will and personal choice.

As a student, we should always bear in mind that we can revoke a commitment to a teacher and assert our full autonomy and independence at any moment. The process of learning with a teacher or coach should always be time bound. At the end, we must be sure to re-establish our full autonomy.

Ours is a world in which learning is no longer a luxury. It is now a necessity. The current models and practices of learning are insufficient to the demands of our world.  Our intention is to open new possibilities for you in designing your learning and your future.  In these notes we have covered a lot of ground and exposed you to some new ways of thinking about and seeing the phenomenon and practices of learning.  Our goal is to provide you with the means necessary to shape the learning that will be essential to your career and the success of your business.

Where have all the leaders gone…

In almost every sector of society, we are facing a crisis of leadership. This cry is heard in newspapers, magazines, TV debates and at dinner tables across the nation. The need for leadership has become crucial. When we compare our country’s economic performance with that of countries like China and Germany, it’s clear that we have been losing ground …over the last 10 years; our competitors have been doing better.

We all recognize that organizations need strong leaders – People who can shape a vision of what is possible. Over the past few years, the ever-increasing pressure on companies to become more competitive has placed the spotlight on leadership. Thousands of books and articles have been written on the topic, and leadership training courses continue to proliferate. This tells us that no one has a consistent, coherent means to develop leaders.

We propose taking a fresh look at leadership.  Read More…

Productivity and Inactivity

Despite some advancement in modern management thinking, many insidious corporate habits remain, in many instances putting significant drag on productivity and performance.

Take a tour of a manufacturing facility these days, and there are certain things you simply won’t see. Scrap laying on the floor, wasted time and motion, rework and inventory. These are all the wastes of the industrial era, and they have largely been eliminated by the principles and practices of Quality, Lean and Six Sigma.\

On the contrary, enter any office and you will find a new set of wastes that are much more insidious than those of the industrial era — and in many instances no amount of Lean or Six Sigma can change them.

Consider things that happen in many corporate meetings. By design, most meetings are intended to plan for or solve some sort of business problem. But even in an age of stand-up meetings and wellness-conscious walking meetings — design elements aimed to strip away waste and minor disrupters — many of the usual characteristics most dreaded about the medium are poised to show up.

First, there’s the person who called the meeting. Because he or she likes to feel important, a lot of times this person tends to call many more meetings than are necessary. Then there’s the person who loves to hear the sound of his or her own voice and can’t stop talking; the class clown who can’t restrain the need to make wise cracks; the person who shows up late with great fanfare; and those who just can’t put down their smartphone.

There is no clear agenda, no discipline to the conversations, no clear actions designed and thus nothing much gets done — except that, in many cases, everyone goes back to work a bit deflated.

Meetings of this ilk might not happen at every company, but when they do, they serve as an example of things that get in the way of real productivity. This is just a small example of what waste looks like, and there are tremendous financial and psychological costs associated with these silent killers.

But how did these things come to be? What propelled organizations to function in such a way that these modern management disrupters were able to grow into common corporate habits?

Accumulating Coordination Waste

Many trace the roots of such annoyances to the modern management theories and practices first developed in the early 1900s, just as the Industrial Revolution took shape. In those days, work meant going to the factories or the fields. Workers were largely uneducated, unsophisticated and most worked for survival, as there was no social safety net.

Flash forward 100 years. Although the industrial era is far behind, many organizations still think about and practice management the same way. These organizations are essentially working in the net-speed flat world with Model T management practices.

What contemporary management is missing in some cases are the value generators in today’s world of work, “coordination workers.”  Unlike the workers of the industrial area, coordination workers are educated, sophisticated, agile, mobile, creative and innovative, with a penchant to solve complex problems. As such, they don’t respond well to industrial-era management practices based on supervision, control, predictability and standardization, all of which were intended to avoid mistakes, surprises or disruption.

The cumulative effect of these outdated practices is what can be called “coordination waste.” This includes things like unproductive moods; poor listening skills; bureaucratic work practices and structures; marginal leadership competence; teamwork as a slogan but not a practice; inadequate practices for cooperation and collaboration; weak meeting practices; outdated project design and management skills; and a pervasive lack of innovation.

Part of what enables these things to persist is that in a lot of cases our thinking about the nature of waste is still stuck in the industrial era. As a result, companies remain blind to them as destroyers of productivity.

To be sure, there have been many major innovations in the practice of management in the past 50 years. Most have come from Toyota Motor Corp. and its Toyota Production System. Quality, Just-in-Time, Lean and Six Sigma all came from the TPS. These practices were designed by automotive engineers to be effective in manufacturing, where interactions are mostly between machines or man and machine. Each was also designed to eliminate waste. 

However, unlike the wastes of the industrial era like scrap, excess inventory and unproductive time and motion, coordination waste is much more insidious; you can’t necessarily see it, thus their labeling as so-called “silent killers.”

A Deeper Look at Silent Killers

Degenerative moods: A mood is a predisposition for action. Human beings are always living in some mood, as they are an inescapable aspect of life. Moods are the foundations from which people move in the world. Too many organizations today are in the grip of degenerative moods. Some combination of distrust, resentment, resignation, cynicism, arrogance and complacency is all too often the norm.

These degenerative moods become the foundation for a wide range of unproductive behaviors, which in turn consume or waste lots of resources as organizations are forced to work around or attempt to correct them.

Degenerative or unproductive moods are tremendous yet invisible killers of productivity, because people simply cannot or will not perform to their potential when they’re in the grip of them. Current human resources theory has little to offer beyond motivation and engagement work, neither of which is likely to make a difference because they’re treating symptoms, not causes.

Lack of listening: Listening does not mean merely hearing or paying attention, but it is a specific type of active interpretation that shapes one’s reality. Listening is a specific critical skill that is largely unknown and certainly unrecognized as central to the new business environment. By blindly creating or tolerating working conditions in which people do not and often cannot effectively speak and listen to each other, managers kill productivity.

Bureaucratic styles: Bureaucracies pay attention to the correctness of their practices and adherence to their standards. Within a bureaucracy, tremendous wastes may not even be visible.

Current hierarchically oriented structures are relics of the industrial era. They are too slow and rigid for today’s demands. In the emerging coordination era, bureaucratic practices are becoming increasingly dangerous, as they directly kill not only productivity but also the generative moods of ambition, confidence and trust that are essential to building consistent competitive advantage.

Worship of information: As business leaders rush to make their enterprises more efficient, they’ve mistakenly oriented themselves, their actions and their attention around information and information systems. In many instances, business now values data and measurement above people.

Managers have come to tolerate the illusion that the most essential matters of work can be invented, managed and sustained through the creation, storage, retrieval, display and publication of information. But in some instances contemporary information systems are blind to many key drivers of productivity, leaving them to fail in their quest to integrate the diverse operations of a company.

Suppressing innovation: Many organizations have tolerated ways of working that suppress new ways of doing things. In light of this, it becomes all but impossible to develop flexibility and evolve practices for dealing with a changing world.

So what can talent managers do?

Start with the notion that the way to attract and keep top-level coordination workers is by providing them with autonomy, not systems and processes. In bureaucracies everything is about adherence to process. In a coordination-worker company it’s about mobilization, agility and performance, which often means working around or outside of existing processes.

At a more basic level, do away with the annual performance review. This is a throwback to the industrial era. For feedback to be useful, it needs to be timely. Develop a simple dashboard for employees that can be updated and go over it every six weeks. Have clear short-term performance goals as well as long-term developmental goals. These simple reviews don’t take more than 15 minutes and are much more useful.

In the coordination company, work isn’t about making things. It is the effective coordination of action to complete projects and generate results. That means that there is a new set of competencies that managers must learn.

Train Your Workers by Developing Your Leaders

Some managers view training and development as the same thing. Managers sometimes send their employees to training courses expecting them to return with a new set of behaviors that will make them more effective as leaders. Most often they are disappointed by the results.

It is like learning to play an instrument. You start off with training exercises (playing scales, learning chords, etc.), but it is only when you develop as a musician (leader) that you apply your training to making real music.

Emerging leaders, like emerging musicians, need the time, space, coaching, support, and experience to develop their training into mature leadership ability.

At the Human Potential Project we design and deliver developmental programs that produce powerful leadership skills. Our results speak for themselves. We look forward to helping you design and deliver your new future.

www.humanpotentialproject.com

There is a labor storm brewing

We never know how long or how intense a storm will be but generally have a little bit of warning. We may get caught once without an umbrella or ignore the sounds of the siren. But, after getting drenched or seeing the devastation of the storm, we will always be prepared and astutely respond to the siren warnings.

Are you ready to head for the basement when the sirens roar?

To prepare for this storm we need to realize the workforce that we are going to be trying to attract and retain has changed a great deal during the past 3 – 4 years while the economy has been recessed. We won’t be able to use our traditional strategies to recruit and keep our workforce, but rather we will need to incorporate the numerous changes our workforce has taken to successfully survive the storm.

At the Human Potential Project we design and deliver developmental programs that guarantee a 10-fold return on your investment. Our results speak for themselves. We look forward to helping you design and deliver your new future. 

How Do You Measure Success

Everyone always wants to know “How do you measure success?” For us it’s simple. We produce consistently extraordinary results that render those who doubt the efficacy of our work speechless. Yes, it means measurable dollars and cents. We help clients drive the changes that consistently produce substantial improvements to the bottom line.

At HP2 we have had the privilege of working for some of the Greatest Companies in the World. From that experience we have been able to build a body of work that has proven effective across all industry sectors; in companies large and small, and with people of vastly different cultures.

At the Human Potential Project we design and deliver developmental programs that guarantee a 10-fold return on your investment. Our results speak for themselves.
We look forward to helping you design and deliver your new future.

Why engagement programs can’t work

Until we bring management into the coordination era, engagement programs are not going to make the difference we need.  >>read full article<<

 

Leadership in the New World

If the events of the past have shown us anything it is that our current practices for business leadership and management are increasingly irrelevant. It is time for a dramatic and permanent overhaul – Time for a new focus on what people and organizations really need in order to cope and thrive in this new emerging reality.

With authentic leadership we can turn this to our advantage.

If we are going to reinvent ourselves to be as effective in this new world as we were in the old one we must let go of the tired practices of the past and embrace a new view of leadership and management by building new practices for learning. Each day we delay we fall further behind and endanger our future. These are risks that we need not take.

At the Human Potential Project we design and deliver developmental programs that guarantee a 10-fold return on your investment. Our results speak for themselves.

We look forward to helping you design and deliver your new future.