Building the Team
Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.
Last week in my post — “If Practice Makes Perfect, Why Don’t Companies Practice More?” — I described the types of training programs and practice sessions that we use at H.Bloom. The comments that I received at the end of the column were especially insightful and offer a great segue to today’s post.
From James Watson: “Practice,” in my experience, is the most underutilized resource in the world of business. Anyone can practice anything to get better results.
From DanShannon: Deliberate practice is practice with a coach capable of criticizing your performance objectively, specific goals for each practice session, and assessment of how well you reach those goals during each practice session. Deliberate practice is an incredibly powerful way to improve.
From Sheila Bulthuis: I think the key to the approach described in this post is the assignments that are given after each meeting. If those assignments are a chance for the managers/employees to actually apply the skill that was discussed, and apply it in a realistic and job-relevant way, that’s the way you’re going to see actual skill improvement and behavior change.
These comments were a concise summary of the post:
- Practice will yield better results.
- The best type of practice is when someone gives a specific goal and then provides feedback on the attainment of that goal.
- In the H.Bloom training sessions, the assignments after a particular training course are critical for applying a newly learned skill to improve on that subject matter.
As a followup, I thought I would provide details of a recent H.Bloom University management training class.
Reading assignment
In last month’s class, the topic was “data-driven decision-making.” We assigned a reading ahead of time: Chapter 4 of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” which is titled, “Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith).”
It tells a story about the grocery chain Kroger, and how its executive team used data-driven decision-making to outpace its competition, the larger retailer AP. Mr. Collins describes the competition between the two companies as follows: “From 1959 to 1973, both companies lagged behind the market, with Kroger pulling just a bit ahead of AP. After that, the two companies completely diverged, and over the next twenty-five years, Kroger generated cumulative returns 10 times the market and 80 times better than AP.”
The chapter goes on to say, “Here’s what’s interesting: Both Kroger and AP were old companies … Yet one of these companies confronted the brutal facts of reality head-on and completely changed its entire system in response; the other stuck its head in the sand.”
Finally, the author interviewed the then-current chief executive of Kroger, Lyle Everingham, to understand the divergence of performance between the two companies. His response was straightforward, “Basically, we did extensive research, and the data came back loud and clear … once we looked at the facts, there was really no question about what we had to do. So we just did it.”
The data that Mr. Everingham was referring to suggested that American consumers, as Mr. Collins writes in the book, “no longer wanted grocery stores. They wanted superstores – offering almost everything under one roof, with lots of parking, cheap prices, clean floors, and a gazillion checkout lines.” The executives at Kroger used the data to make a decision to become this type of superstore. The folks at AP did not.
Presentation of a topic
I broke the class into two separate sessions – one for our market managers and the other for sales managers – so that each person would be visible on the videoconference. The presentation began with Mr. Everyingham’s quote from above: “But once we looked at the facts …”
After reviewing the reading, I provided two examples of recent decisions we had made as a company based on the analysis of data. The first example was about churn, or turnover, in our corporate subscription business. Our director of sales operations had provided a detailed review of the dynamics of our corporate churn and highlighted anomalous behavior in one particular type of company, which led us to make the decision to stop selling to those companies.
The second example covered our sales pipeline, the exceptional close rate that our account executives have exhibited once they secure an in-person meeting, and the need to supply more leads at the top of the funnel. I’ve written about this analysis and the strategy we developed in previous posts: “How Data Analysis Led Us to Reassess Sales and Open a Lead Generation Center” and “What One Company is Doing to Generate Sales.”
The slide presentation ended with another quote from the book: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Putting the learning into practice
I ended the class with an assignment: a) identify a problem or opportunity in your market, b) analyze any data about that problem/opportunity, c) use the evaluation of data to draw a conclusion, and d) present your findings to the group. The class participants could work on this assignment individually, or in teams, and they were given two weeks to complete the project.
Follow-up
Two weeks after the initial class, I scheduled multiple sessions to review the assignments. These were done by videoconference again, but this time, the participants presented their findings to me. The sessions provided immediate follow up to the classroom training; a chance to put the new skills into practice; real-time feedback on how they had done; and sometimes, the opportunity to adopt a new strategy based on the presentation.
Next, I’ll review some of these presentations, the feedback that I gave to the presenters, and how they provided opportunities to practice the skills of data-driven decision-making.
Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/inside-a-management-training-class-at-h-bloom/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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