A Cross Between Mother Theresa and Joan Jett

Many of you know I am the kind of sceptical guy who never forwards chain emails.

The attached is a genuine appeal for sponsorship from someone I know personally, Denis Campbell, and whose absolute integrity I hold in very high regard.

He is running in two half-marathons to raise money for an old school friend of his who has dedicated her career to delivering medical supplies to people in developing nations and deprived areas of the US who can't afford it and now ironically she herself needs medical help and has been refused the travel costs by her (US) insurance company.

Please read Denis' story below and consider visiting the link he provides to make a donation to help this person who has helped so many others.

I particularly like Denis' description of her as "a cross between Mother Theresa and Joan Jett"!

Dave

Dave Bull MBA CTA ATT MInstLM
Dave Bull Chartered Tax Adviser
Team Coaching Network Ltd
Registered in England & Wales No 04654349
5 Valleys Enterprise Centre
Greenway
CAERPHILLY
CF83 8GF
029 20888390

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715268908
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davebull
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davebull

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Denis Campbell
Date: 2009/8/24
Subject: Denis Campbell asking if you could please help me help Paula?
To: Denis Campbell

On 22 June, my high school friend, Paula Persechini-Petitti was delivering emergency diabetes health screenings across the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation. Pine Ridge was economically distressed in the ‘70s. It is now a 3^rd world nation within the USA’s borders with a land mass the size of Connecticut and a road system equivalent to Zimbabwe.

Her car was rear-ended there at 60 mph (100 kph) placing her in a coma. Friends raised $18,000 in cash for an emergency medical life-flight from Rapid City, SD to home in Boston that her health insurance would not authorise. She is awake but requires long-term, highly specialized brain injury treatment. Paula’s case is another example of the broken US healthcare system.

Ironically, she spent her life bringing life-saving medical supplies and doctors to 3^rd world ‘hospitals’ around the world through the BlackRiverProject.org. Now her insurance refuses to cover the $45,000 pre-payment required for a brain injury rehab hospital. They will park her in a nursing home. Such ‘parking’ though will not help her recover and she runs the risk of losing her home and financial ruin. So, she needs all of our help and… would never ask for it for herself.

I am running in two road races to raise funds for Paula’s care. On Sunday, 06 September, it’s the HSBC Cardiff 10K (6.2 miles) and on 18 October, the Cardiff 1/2 marathon (13.1 miles/21 kms). As many know, I had a minor stroke, 9-months ago. I’ve since lost 30 kilos (66 lbs/4.6 stone) through diet and running. My goal is to run in my 1^st every marathon in London (at age 52!) in April, 2010.

Every penny you give helps ease the family’s burdens. We would be extremely grateful if you could consider a $5, £10 or €20 contribution (more, gratefully accepted!) here at the website www.BringPaulaHome.org It only takes a two clicks after entering your credit or debit card using the secure Internet PayPal system. Please insert the words: “Denis runs” in the “add special instructions” field so they can keep track. With your help we can hopefully raise $5,000 for Paula’s care.

I wrote about Paula in several articles (1^st one is third on the page). Paula never accepted “no” for an answer and has done the impossible for so many. She is fighting back and we can’t accept “no” for her. She is a once-in-a-lifetime “force of nature,” what would happen if Mother Theresa were crossed with Joan Jett. This e-mail is going to some 4,000 people with my advance deepest thanks for your kind attention.

All the best,

Denis Campbell

Train me tender? Don't!

I'm concerned.

I've been thinking about the "rational planning model" approach to purchasing training that prevails in many organisations.

This model is promoted by training managers because it provides documentary evidence that they have done lots of rational decision making in appointing a training officer or a training consultancy, and proves that if something goes wrong it wasn't their fault.

This model is promoted by training accreditation organisations such as CIPD, ILM, ALP and ITOL because it is complex enough to be examined and because it requires trainers to go through their qualification programmes that are a major source of income for some of them.

This model is promoted by large training organisations because the overhead resources needed to be sacrificed each time you apply for a piece of work are beyond the capacity of their smaller leaner specialist competitors.

What am I talking about?

At the moment, many organisations buy training the same way they buy toilet roll. Tenders are made and suppliers are approved on the basis of a pre-ordained set of "needs" that have come from an internal analysis and a secret dutch auction - i.e. sealed bids with full details to enable a contractual offer to be made.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST - Team Coaching Network is a small specialist supplier of training and NEVER bids for work in a tender.

Here are some reasons why I think this is not the best approach:

• "Needs Analysis" often comes from appraisal interviews. Managers may be required to tick a pre-set list of training needs to indicate what the employee needs; these are collated by the training manager who then puts the popular ones into a tender specification. If an employee needs to learn how to operate a fork-lift truck or to perform first aid, this is a great method. If they need to become more effective at working in a team this simply isn't going to help. Every learner who has come to me over the past 8 years has had subtly different requirements, many of which couldn't even be put into words in session one, let alone in an interview with their manager to decide whether they get a pay rise that year.
• Many tenders require "accreditation" of the people who will deliver the training. If you're teaching someone to drive, it may help if you yourself hold a full clean licence, but if you're teaching people how to become more persuasive in getting co-operation from colleagues, customers and suppliers, there ain't an exam in the world that can measure the competencies that make you effective in developing those skills in people.
• The very tendering process favours larger organisations who make their profits on economies of scale. If you're learning how to use Sage Line 50, then each participant needs to know the same stuff and every course will be the same so you can deliver efficiently to 10,000 people. If you're helping senior managers lead and shape cultural change throughout their organisation, you need the flexible customised approach that independent consultants are famous for; in fact some research into change management consultancies suggests the quality of independents outstrips all other consultants except the massive multinationals.

A procurement process designed to find the cheapest people to empty your bins may work for some kinds of training but it can run aground pretty sharpish if you try to use it for development designed to change interpersonal behaviour, improve working relationships or influence the organisational culture.

So what should we be doing?

Imagine a movie studio or a west end producer selects their lead actors by asking them to put copies of their drama school certificates, a description of how they would tackle the role, details of their ethical and environmental policies, and of course the fee they want, into a sealed envelope to be scrutinised by a secret committee.

It won't work, will it? Some of our greatest actors failed drama college or never even went. And you can't describe how you'd play the Dane on paper, you'd have to show them how you would do it. And while I've no doubt some actors never get asked to audition because they are beyond the budget, it's hardly the single deciding factor.

We instinctively recognise that acting is different from making sure there's enough loo roll around - it's not about logistics, it's about talent. Great actors respond in the moment, create changed emotional states, take the audience on a journey and leave you with plenty to think about. Good trainers, in the fields of interpersonal behaviours and organisational leadership, have to do the same.

I was once asked to deliver a short "taster" session with the prospect of a piece of work with that group if I was chosen over 3 other consultants. I was a bit peeved at first, but went ahead - after all half a day was far less than the time it would take to write a tender bid! I am proud to say the group chose me head and shoulders above the others, who made the mistake of using their 2 hours to pitch for the work, whereas I rolled out the flipcharts and listened to the team talk about what they really wanted and what they needed to be effective in their roles.

There isn't much time in the world to do this every time you want a training course, but we need a rebalancing between the clinical rational world of choosing a furniture supplier and the complex, personal business of starting a relationship with a trainer who could transform the whole environment of your organisation.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com
Campaign for Real Teambuilding - http://realteambuilding.co.uk

Virtual Team Support

When I asked the question, it was not with any intention of publishing the answers.

But when the answers came back I was so gobsmacked at the replies I got that I just had to share them with you.

These people are part of my wider "team". I work by myself a lot when I'm not face to face with a client or working with a team in a session. Social networking technologies have for me replaced the "people you chat to in the corridor" that I fooled myself into thinking I wouldn't miss when I set up on my own.

So here was the question:

Who's got a story about a time they surprised themselves by being able to do something?

I posted it to my Facebook status update. Why was I asking such a leading question? Well, this is a large part of what I do. Helping teams function properly, helping managers deal with people effectively, helping sales people get through to their customers, all come down to raising self confidence and self esteem. Once we realise what we can do, no-one needs to teach or train us, because we have imense power and capability that for most people spends most of its time locked down by guilt or doubt.

These replies really made my day. If I could keep amazing positive people like this on tap, to see me through the more difficult days, I would. But of course, with Facebook, Twitter and other modern techonologies, I now can. 

Enough wibble: Here's what my friends said:

Brian at 18:25 on 22 April: I just got back from a jog I used to do 10 years ago and I completed the course.( I was shattered by the end )

David at 18:32 on 22 April Hmmm, I worked through my entire shift last night without telling my employers to go screw themselves - does that count?

Joanne at 18:59 on 22 April I lied on my CV with an employment agency and said I knew Powerpoint. Getting to my placement on Monday morning I found out I had to train people in using Powerpoint. I bluffed through it so well they had me training everyone in the office and 6 months later they called me back in to do it again.

Adrian at 22:39 on 22 April I decided to set up my own company - and do stuff that I want to do ..

David at 23:05 on 22 April Got close to setting up my own company - got let down by colleagues - that turned out to be a surprise too - on a lighter note, what surprised me most about myself is walking out on stage and singing in bands with who I regard as being very good musicians...

Jacqueline at 05:26 on 23 April I only went to college to learn accounts because my husband told me I would never be able to do it. I surprised myself by passing every exam first time and even more to have three limited companies up and running 5 years later.

Joanne at 14:54 on 23 April I'm scared of heights and managed to jump off the Sky Tower in Auckland!

Such questions - simple, open ended, story-based - give you really rich answers that talk about people's values, motivations, dreams, problems, issues, aspirations and goals. Stuff that is really really useful to us as managers and team members, yet we never seemt o get this information! This is because you can't egt at it by asking someone "What motivates you?" Yet you can get it easily by asking simple questions that draw out people's stories and experiences.

 

For me, it's a basic technique - I use it in teambuilding, in management development, confidence building, presentation skills, influence and persuasion courses, sales training. It's so versatile. Here's a challenge for you:

 

Go and ask 6 people my question, listen, and thank them for their answers. Feel free to email me and complain if you don't learn something interesting about at least one of them!

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Turning Learning into Profit

I have recently connected on Twitter with Dr Ed Holton who is a professor of HR in the States. This led me to his blog, in which he argues passionately for more attention to be paid to how learners in the workplace transfer the benefits of their new skills so that they and their employers can benefit from it.

I think the problem is with the whole concept of training. 

What the organisation needs from its staff is changed behaviours, and what the staff need is more engagement with and fulfilment from their jobs.  Asking the question "How can we transfer learning from the workshop to the workplace" could be taken to imply that there is nothing that needs to change about what actually happens in the seminar room. In which case all we need for focus on is how to make teh trasnfer of learning happen.

Well, I think we all knows what comes next!

You'd think the Human Resources departments woudl be focused on the word "human". Many of course do, but sadly we often encounter the mechanistic approach in such departments. In short:

"Thank you for attending the training course on XYZ. You will be contacted in 4 weeks time to evaluate the amount you learned and the extent tow hich you have trasnferred your learning to the workplace. Your next 3 quarterly appraisal meetings with your manager will have (yet another) form to fill in assessing the extent of application of learning. Keeping your job after the next round of redundancies will be partly dependent upon your completing a detailed record of acheivement demonstrating the times and situations when you applied the learning and evaluating the financial benefit to the company."

Crazy? Well, yes, because I made it up and I tend to exaggerate, as you know.

What we actually need is a shift to what many of us are trying to do, which is to move away from training as an event and towards development as an ongoing relationship between a team and the trainer.

I work with teams over a period of time, in short sessions with lots of contact between sessions in a combination of face-to-face, email, telephone, and Moodle. In each session, learners are coming back knowing they are accountable to the rest of the group to verbally report back on applications of learning. Spread over time this becomes a habit and the team can take over where I leave off.

The downside for HR departments is that it is more complex to purchase and manage an ongoing development programme than to send employees on a "sheep dip" training course, make them fill in forms, then complain that senior management don't appreciate the value of training.

As training consultants then, I guess it's our responsibility to make the purchasing and management of longer-term ongoing team development programmes easier and even more transparent.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Read a Good Book Lately? Keep it to Yourself!

We've all been there - the boss comes in one Monday morning with a pile of books and an evangelical grin on his face.

You exchange glances with your colleagues. You all know what's just happened, and you know what's going to happen next.

He's just spent the weekend reading the latest management book. He's full of enthusiasm for the idea he's got and he wants you to be full of it too.

And there's the problem.

A few years ago there was a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a firm of estate agents in London. The chief gathered the sales force in some hotel for a weekend staff conference. On the Friday afternoon, everyone was given a copy of Who Moved My Cheese and told they had to read it by Saturday morning's first session.

Now to be fair, it is a short book. Reading it in the time isn't the problem. Nor is it a hard book. It's a simple parable of two mice in a maze, one of whom adapts to change, the other resists change. Not terribly taxing even after a week of trying to steal customers from your colleagues. It was that kind of firm.

The team were not keen to "do their homework" and those that did failed to see the point. There was friction, resentment and disagreement the following day between the team and the boss.

You see, when we get a great idea from a book, we sometimes think that it was the book that did it. This is what philosophers call "post hoc" thinking (Latin: "after this"). It goes like this: "I had the blinding revelation of what we should do in this company / team after starting to read this book, therefore it was the book that gave me the inspiration. If I make everyone in the team read the book, they'll be inspired too."

post hoc is a fallacy, however. It wasn't the book that had the idea. Like a teenager falling in love, you've projected your own emotional state onto something outside yourself. And like a teenager falling in love, you expect all your mates to agree that she/he's the greatest in the world. Even if she/he has never actually looked at you twice!

If it wasn't the book that had the idea, where did it come from?

Your inspiration came from a combination of sources, one of which was the book or training course, naturally. The other sources were nothing to do with the book: your business circumstances, a recent issue you faced, where you were when you read the book, what you'd had for breakfast that morning - all these things added up to put you in exactly the right frame of mind to have that "wow" moment. And you can't replicate that for other people.

I'm not advocating ignoring all business ideas that you get - I'm suggesting that the means to propagate them is not by handing out copies of the book. Ideas and inspiration are human, and they are specific to you and your team in your current circumstances. The best way to share them is not to impose on other people's free time by handing out homework - it's to get up in front of them and explain how you got the idea, why you think it's important and to ask them for their support and ideas of how to make it work.

(Declaration of interest: Dave Bull designs and runs management courses designed to help you get that message across in a confident, enthusiastic, assertive, positive, inclusive manner. Dave has not (yet?) published any books.)

The real source of the inspiration was inside you. To pass it on, you have to show them you, not the book.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com
Campaign for Real Teambuilding - http://realteambuilding.co.uk

How to repair your team after downsizing them

Tough decisions are being made all over the world at the moment. Very few managers enjoy having to cut jobs, and there's a whole profession dedicated to ensuring that when you have to outsource or when you have to make redundancies, everything is done as smoothly as possible.

Ignoring the survivors

What we sometimes ignore however is the impact of downsizing on the people who are left behind. Things would be much easier if the survivors thought: "Well, aren't I lucky! I'm really motivated to be one of those chosen to stay! I'll work really hard to rebuild my internal networks in the company!" In reality, that is a completely unreasonable expectation.

How they really feel

Your survivors are having serious mixed emotions right at this point - yes they are relieved that they don't have to try to find a new job straight away, but on the other hand:

• you have just shattered their illusion that the organisation will never make people redundant
• they have lost some of their close working friends and contacts
• they may be having to pick up extra work or go without support services they were used to
• old habits (and humans are nothing if not habitual) have been disrupted, from who you call with a particular problem to who you eat lunch with.

How would you feel?

What this means for your business

Everybody knows the stuff about sad employees = low productivity, poor quality, customer service problems. I'm not going to insult you by repeating all that here.

The other issue is that the working links people have made have been shattered. Teams have been broken up, and networks have been fractured.

(I know some teams need breaking up, but we're often talking about all teams, or at least many teams here.)

Teams develop over time (Bruce Tuckman, remember him?) and develop their own internal understandings about who does what, how people interact, how decisions get made and how things get done.

Break up a team, even by just removing one member, and you send that whole process back to square one. Add to that the fact that people are concerned about their job security - no amount of reassurances from management can prevent that. Bingo! One recipe for a team that fails to face up to the challenge, doesn't re-develop those working links.

You can imagine the impact of teams that don't operate smoothly, in a company that's already made job losses.

Prevent one lot of cuts turning into another

The good news is that you as a manager of the team can do something about this:

1 Recognise their pain

For something that doesn't pay the bills, recognition is massively valued by humans, whether we acknowledge it or not. We've all met people who say they "don't care what others think" of them, and we've all seen what a massive lie that is. Always.

Recognising the pain is easy: get them together for a team meeting. Explain that you want to do whatever you can to help them rebuild as a new team. Crack open a flipchart pad and ask them to tell you what they think is positive and what they think is negative in the current situation. get the whole lot up on the board.

2 Help them re-establish team processes

Health Warning: Never under any circumstances try to suggest that things will be the same as they were before. "Nothing's really changed" "It'll be just like the old days" are not true, don't help and simply destroy your credibility.

Health Warning 2: Don't give them your prescription of how things should work; a high-performance team creates its own rules and you have a unique opportunity here to help them do that from scratch.

It's far easier to have people accepting change and finding new, better ways of working together if they're already out of their comfort zone than two years ago when everything was sunny and everyone was complacent.

Put your flipchart sheet up on the wall with all the stuff that they've told you; now get them working on the really big questions:

• who does what,
  
• how people should interact,
  
• how decisions get made and
  
• how things get done.

When I work through these questions with clients' teams, the creativity and openness that I get back from the team members is always amazing and without fail leads to shared understanding, new agreements and more effective working cultures.

This is what we call Real Teambuilding - the team building itself under our facilitation. At its best, it's as much fun as a social event, and more productive than a team meeting.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

How to lose a sale - what not to do when asking an independent consultant for money

I get a sinking feeling when I answer the phone and this happens:

1: a brief pause
2: background office noise
3: "Oh, good morning, Dave, this is X X from IBDG, can I just confirm I'm speaking to Mr Dave Bull?"

The question is designed to make you say Yes - a standard sales technique that I myself teach in sales training. Teaching it makes me very aware when it's being used on me. Its purpose is to set up a psychological trend in your brain so that when he asks you to buy you'll still be in Yes mode.

Like you, I feel really really resentful if I think I'm being manipulated. So instead of answering I ask him what IBDG stands for - International Business Development Group. Hm.

He tells me they are consultants and he's working with the training managers and directors of the top 450 companies in the UK and asks if that would be a good target audience for me. Another Yes question. My response: "Are you telling me, X, that you are consulting with 450
training managers?" He backs down - first to say that that's between his whole team, then: "Put it this way, we only deal with companies that are in the top 450." Well, that could be just one company, but to be fair their website says they work with "over 150 top companies." Glad that's consistent then!

Finally he tells me what they do - they ask these managers what training needs they have, then match them up with "very carefully pre-vetted specialist consultants" at a kind of "dating seminar" and the managers can decide whether to engage you or not. More Yes questions follow, forcing me to call him: "So where does IBDG fit in, what do you get out of it?"

No straight answer at first, lots of waffle about packages and return on investment, followed by the bombshell: their smallest package (a two-person package - despite telling me that these training managers were specifically asking for independent consultants) is...

...a five-figure sum annual membership.

I laughed out loud at him, which he obviously didn't like because he then asked me if that was "a little out of my league".

Sales lesson No 1 - insulting your prospect is a fantastic idea if you love making phone calls but hate closing sales.

I apologise for laughing and advise him to move on to the next name on his list, but he tries to recover himself - more questions, more justifications. Too late. I repeat that he's wasting time on me and needs to move on. He puts the phone down on me. No goodbye. Rude.

Checking the company out they seem to be reputable enough - they complete their accounts and returns on time, for a small company. They've been registered for a few years, their registered office is on an industrial estate in Milton Keynes, not in someone's bedroom in their mum's house.

But the very business model is suspect - why would I pay the salary of a telemarketer to get into 17 "beauty parades" a year? Why would they build their package around a single upfront fee, when they could earn more than they asked me for with a percentage commission? I can only assume that it's because they don't really believe they can actually get me the business.

===

Now I have to apologise to you too - I don't usually use this blog to have a rant! Here are some of the lessons, please comment if I've missed anything else.

1. Obviously scripted calls put people off. Obviously scripted pep talks and appraisal meetings are exactly the same. We can only truly get people's buy-in and co-operation by connecting with them and if you're reading a script you're not connecting to the person. Be yourself, tell your team (or your prospect) about your vision, your hopes, your dreams for the the team and what you see as its potential.
2. Share risk - if you're telling me you can win me business then I will only believe you if you're willing to share in that reward and risk - I'll give a commission to anyone who comes to me with a customer I haven't already got - and do the same with your teams: you can reduce conflict by sharing risk and reward. Make your production department and your Quality department share in one reward rather than setting them up against each other.
3. It's awfully easy to put people down - if you watch TV or films you'll see it happen all the time, and unconsciously we pick up these patterns of interaction all over the place. I don't imagine for a second he intended to insult me with "out of your league", but he did. An open question like "What was it that made you laugh, Mr Bull?" would have got him further.
4. Get your story straight. If you have to backpedal on statistics within your first minute of a conversation, you've lost all credibility.
   

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com