Resources

Consulting is about asking the right questions. Good consultants ask good questions and great consultants ask….well you know where this is going don’t you?

The future is going to get invented with or without us. The capacity for business to adapt to change has never been more important. Developing the right strategies to deal with those changes have never offered such rich rewards. The challenges that our changing times present are merely opportunities for adaptive and responsive businesses and teams.

CQ Tools™ have been specifically designed to equip individuals and teams to respond resourcefully even in a world experiencing exponential change.

If you want to receive a free downloadable eBook visit the homepage and sign-up for the Getting Clever Together newsletter.

Collaboration is an Inside Job (Article #1)

Team collaboration success stories indicate that as far as collaboration goes – all is not well in the workplace. Have you ever found yourself wondering “How can I keep up with all of this?” You have 35 emails to reply to, 12 voice mails and three meetings scheduled for the day. Then a close colleague pops into your office and asks for your urgent help.

There is no denying our society is changing rapidly. One of the most obvious and life-impacting areas is our workplaces and work practices. A senior manager in the social services lamented to me recently the amount of email he had to deal with each day. I asked him what was the most stressful part, without hesitating he replied that he missed the ‘authentic connection’ with other people.

Team collaboration success stories show that workers feel severely stretched between the three channels, email, phone and face-to-face meetings. These three channels are presently in a three-way struggle for our attention. No matter which channel triumphs we are still frequently left feeling as if we are losing ‘authentic connection’.

Virtualization

Team collaboration success stories demonstrate that the quality and quantity of connection in the work place is shifting rapidly but not necessarily being turned into productivity. But is communication-technology and the associated changes in the workplace really enabling us to be more effective? This process could be referred to as ‘virtualization’. The virtualization of teams and groups is changing the way we achieve our team and individual objectives. It began when we developed language (or earlier), then the emergence of the Guttenberg press, followed by radio, telephone and most recently the internet and email technology.

My definition of ‘team virtualization’ is any process that is introduced or expands to replace more traditional ways of communicating with other people. For example when phone calls replaced some or all face to face conversations, or when teleconferences replaced some or all physical meetings.

Interestingly the challenge of how we connect to each other has inspired the creation of a foundation – the ‘Peer2Peer Foundation’. Created by Michel Bauwens, the P2P Foundation is a meeting place for people interested in exploring peer-to-peer communication alternatives. This foundation is small but growing fast as the challenge of virtualization continues to grow.

Two Kinds of Growth

In his book ‘Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads’ Ervin Laszlo states that our species is changing in how it develops. He claims that we are moving from an era where the three “C’s” of conquest, colonization and consumption are giving way to connection, communication, and consciousness. Laszlo claims that these “C’s” constitute two kinds of growth and that we are presently transitioning between the two. Connection and communication are on the up swing, for sure.

The proliferation of cell phones and internet access is making sure of that. What is not so certain is the shift in consciousness that we also need to make. The question I hear so often in my consulting work is “How can we continue to embrace technological changes and maintain ‘authentic connection’ with both clients and colleagues?

Obviously there isn’t an easy answer to this. However, one of the most useful assumptions we can adopt is that building a highly collaborative work environment is everyone’s job. It’s first an ‘inside job’. But how do we do that? A list of some of my solutions to this tricky question can be found in an article at this Blog.

Below are ten ways to increase collaboration in the workplace:

1. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions. Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Individuals are not the only ones who operate this way; teams do it too.

2. Check your own assumptions before and during the project planning phase. Your own assumptions will effect how you interact with others and deal with the inevitable challenges of working with other people.

3. Intention is the keynote. Just as a team’s attention is important – so is your own. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality.

4. Encourage team members to find out about each others’ roles. The more they know about each others’ perspectives, the more likely they will empathize with them when the going gets tough.

5. Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity. Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do.

6. Plan to use all of the experience in the team. Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience.

7. Celebrate your successes along the way. Celebration acts to reinforce the progress being made. When it done at the team level it empathizes the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives.

8. Invest resources in your own learning and when possible encourage others to do the same. Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole are embracing continuous change with continuous learning..

9. Real change only comes when people change how they behave as well as think. This is just as true for the workplace. Never was it truer that we need to be the change we wish to see.

10. Model what you want to see more of. Providing our colleagues and clients real-life demonstrations of collaboration at work is the strongest incentive and inspiration you can provide to others.

There are things you can do to change the level of collaboration we experience within your team. Team collaboration success stories that there are no ‘silver bullets’ that will create over-night results. However by taking collaborative intelligence as a principle to live by you can change how your team operates. That’s why I say collaboration is (first) an inside job.

Ever wondered what your workplace would be like if everyone collaborated more effectively? Stephen James Joyce, the best selling author of ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch’ and a recognized authority on collaboration, shares crucial insights on one of the most pressing questions in business to-day: How can we develop a greater sense of collaboration in the workplace? This free downloadable e-Book , ‘7 Easy Ways to Build Collaboration in the Workplace’ is packed with practical solutions to an important challenge every business team faces.

Collaborative intelligence has become an important issue lately because of the need in business to respond more quickly to a rapidly changing environment. Technology rushes to the rescue. Will a piece of software enable collaborative leadership or enhance employee retention all on its own? Everyday we hear promises about what a piece of ‘collaborative software’ can do for our team. But have we heard this before? “A PC on every desk will lighten your work load”, “becoming networked will enable us to share the work more equally”. We all know that these promises haven’t always turned out the way we thought they would.

If you are working in a team that’s ‘just not working well’ you’ll know what I mean immediately. No matter how sophisticated a piece of software is – there will always be the human factor. At either end of the interaction, there is a person, each with their own likes and dislikes and personal quirks. Collaboration intelligence depends upon the right tools but also the right attitude.

In this free downloadable eBook you will learn how to:

• Develop great collaborative leadership

• Reduce the strain of working inside a team

• Achieve more through people and less through politics

• Solve problems with greater creativity /flexibility

• Raise the level of employee retention and stabilize your team

• Accomplish more with your team using less effort

• Increase the leadership skills of the entire team

Collaborative leadership further enhances the sense of connection people have with their team. So developing collaborative intelligence (defined as the ability to harness the energy and intelligence of a group or team) should be the prime objective of any business or team wishing to ‘up their game’. Collaborative software is part of that strategy not the complete solution.

When you develop leadership skills through out the entire team more can be achieved with less effort. Employee retention is raised by higher levels of collaboration within an organization. Nothing succeeds like success. When collaboration and collaborative leadership is high, team members feel much less inclined to leave for another company. As a result employee retention is much higher. Your team has become a ‘team of choice’ and people want to join it.

Experience tells us that breakthrough performance is not just about the skills of individual team members. Special team efforts come from galvanizing each member around a clear and highly challenging objective. This kind of performance does not depend on a ‘secret ingredient’. In fact when a series of specific factors are put in place, collaborative leadership for example, it becomes inevitable.

The result of applying the tools found in this free downloadable eBook is higher collaborative intelligence and in the long run, greater employee retention and team stability. Of course there is the side benefit of a happier workplace.

If you want to receive the free downloadable eBook visit the homepage and sign-up for the Getting Clever Together newsletter.

Train To Retain

A not-so-quiet revolution is in progress within Canada’s workforce. And yet most companies are aware of the following demographic facts:

• Labour force growth is slowing: projected at under 1% for the remains of this decade
• An aging workforce: 33% are over 45 years old
• Baby-Boomers are starting to retire: the percentage of workforce eligible for retirement is rising rapidly

There is a strong link between the above statistics, training, team development and staff retention. Two major surveys conducted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) show that a shortage of qualified labor is a significant problem for almost half of all small and medium sized businesses in Canada. The survey went on to conclude that this shortage was not just an inconvenience, but a real hazard to business productivity and company bottom lines. In some provinces demand for skilled workers is at its highest level since CFIB began monitoring this issue 25 years ago.

Not only are good staff going to be harder to find they are going to be harder to hold onto. The connection between shortages of suitably skilled employees and staff retention problems is self-evident. Competition between companies for the available workforce will increase proportionally. Retaining staff in such a ‘sellers market’ will soon become one of the touchstones of business success factoring.

As this trend continues, staff replacement costs will become more obvious as a significant drain from business performance. According to the American Management Association, the cost of hiring and training a new entry-level employee can vary from five to ten thousand dollars. The costs associated with positions requiring greater technical or managerial skills would be many times this sum. The costs took into account funds spent on recruitment, hiring, training and supporting new employees. It did not factor in the less visible costs of customer disruption, loss of morale, burnout / absenteeism among remaining employees, loss of experience, and continuity.

If that were the end of the story, it would be downright depressing. However, well planned and targeted staff training and development can have a very positive effect on finding, growing and retaining the right staff.

Training will improve employee morale, and company reputation. This will lead to your organization being considered an ‘employer of choice’.

Improving communications and enhancing working relationships produces a more productive and harmonious workforce, this contributes to reductions in costly employee burnout.

Training and development opportunities rank as one of the most important predictors of retention and reduce costly turnover within the organization. (1)


When companies are struggling with the bottom line, traditionally training budgets have been the first place to take cuts. Maybe because the cost related to staff turnover are difficult to see or the training budget so visible. Quantifying the ROI of training and development has never been easy. Nevertheless it is becoming more obvious that, with the changes in the Canadian economy and labour force, investments in staff retention programs are no longer a luxury. They are an investment in protecting the bottom line.

It is not uncommon for companies to invest in technical training only to find that the improvement in performance expected never materializes. The foundation of ‘softer skills’ was not in place to ‘fuel’ the use of the technical skill.

‘When asked what skills were most in need of improvement, technical skills ranked sixth out of eleven, after ‘softer’ skills such as problem-solving, communication, teamwork and interpersonal skills. These soft skills constitute a basic platform on which more technical skills can be built.’
(Canadian Federation of Independent Business – 2003)

The skill sets required for people to play the most effective part they can within your organization are:

• Self – Leadership
• Systemic thinking
• Strategic thinking
• Relational skills

The question is not ‘what is the cost of training and development?’ rather it is ‘what will it cost us if we don’t train and develop our staff.

Customized Learning Paths

Zenergy PD offers customized, practical, experiential programs that are available to your entire leadership chain and are delivered onsite at your corporate offices.
Our individualized learning paths for leadership and team development consist of ‘appreciative assessment’, facilitation, training, coaching tools and methodologies. Key learning paths include:

• Supported Self Development
• Ongoing Coaching and Mentoring
• Coach The Coach
• Train the Trainers
• Project-Based Learning
• Development Workshops

Our capacity to adapt to change has never been more important and training for the future has never offered such rich rewards. As the rate of change continues to accelerate, so does the advantage provided to those who are able to adapt to those changes.

Ref. (1) Canadian Federation of Independent Business 2003

Contact our office for further details: (403) 912 5210 or email us