September 1, 2006
“No workshops!” That’s my admonition to students in management class
when I ask them to develop a “90-day Action Plan” for an imaginary
problem employee. That plan, broached during their hypothetical
one-on-one performance appraisal meeting, is to help the employee get
back on track or, lacking improvement, to help assess further
remediation and build documentation for disciplinary action.
Why make workshops verboten? When a workshop is prescribed to
remedy something other than a technical shortcoming – especially
problems like poor teamwork, ineffective communication, resistance to
change, bad attitudes, or lack of leadership - it is often both a cop
out and a vain hope - active avoiding.
Instead of the supervisor’s committing to work with the employee, he
sends her to someone else to deal with. I’ve discovered, the weaker the
Action Plan, the more likely there’s a workshop in the picture. By
weak I mean a plan in which the supervisor makes himself scarce
after the one meeting with the problem staffer. Instead of a daily check
in, scheduled interactions may be two weeks or more apart. And, when I
ask the supervisor/student if they’ve explained to the staff member why
she is being sent to the workshop and what is expected, the “Well, ah …
not really” response suggest more than a little avoidance.
In the real work world, the problem staff member may well regard being
sent as a reward (an unsupervised day off – hallelujah!) – likely, her
co-workers will see it that way - or she may suspect vaguely that it’s a
punishment for which she has been unjustly singled out, adding to her
growing perplexity about why this job sucks. The truly troubled
might even see it as hitting the jackpot with their bad behavior, a
definite reason not to change anything.
Also, it is slightly delusional to think that a problem staff member
will be charmed out of an ingrained pattern of behavior by
attending a six-hour class.
The workshop facilitator likely has no idea about participant
backgrounds, the circumstances of their being there, or what each of
them is hoping to accomplish. At best, the leader may succeed in
engaging the dysfunctional employee and temporarily alleviating the
burden of that chip on the shoulder. As a result, she may learn
something about herself and make a change or two; however, what she
learns may have nothing to do with the Action Plan.
Is this avoidance phenomenon limited to students? Apparently not.
Invariably, a few workshop participants – real supervisors - when
developing next steps for a problem staffer in a small group activity,
do exactly what the students do: Call Greyhound! What is encouraging is
that other participants question that action step – priceless coaching!
- and suggest more direct ways to help the problem employee.
As a workshop leader I’ve come to believe that “Those Who Are Sent” -
the TWAS - stubbornly resists learning, regardless of how well the
workshop is designed. Worse is that their alienation can impede others
from learning, not to mention the skewing of the overall workshop
“experience.”
I like to kid about a nightmare workshop scenario: facilitating a “Bad
Attitudes” session for a room full of surly TWAS!
My country song title derives from the TWAS phenomenon. The supervisor
is thankful in the short term: it’s a day off from the person making his
job miserable! If timed right, the workshop is on a Friday, so the
relief extends into the weekend. And, the supervisor can report to his
boss that he has taken action: the problem person is at a
workshop! Of course, unlike the song’s one way meaning, this Greyhound
ticket is a roundtrip.
The workshop triangle:
Surely, a workshop’s falling flat is not always the result of a roomful
of TWAS. Nor can boorish behavior – persistent tardiness, cell phoning
and bored disengagement, all come to mind - by a few participants be
blamed totally for a workshop that flops. That kind of annoying behavior
distracts but does not occlude learning.
From what I hear from the people who manage regional T&D programs for
librarians, numerous workshops struggle to “make;” they fail to attract
enough participants to cover costs and are canceled – even sessions
facilitated by well known names. Why?
Every workshop has at least three interdependent parts: the
participants, the facilitator, and the design or agenda for the day.
Like a triangle, a weak side can cause a cave-in, a collapse. If
participants come to be entertained and become resentful when asked to
think, the day can be a loss. The best workshops are a not a spectator
sport – they are a contact sport. You are a player. Unlike a cruise
where the crew caters, the best workshops are a windjammer adventure in
which you hoist sails and mop decks, and help in the galley and keep a
bright-eyed watch in the early hours. This type of workshop can panic
participants who come to chill out.
And, if the facilitator is superficially prepared, arrogant or bored or
if the design is not what the participants want, the outcome won’t be
much better.
The room or venue in which the workshop takes place needs mention. While
ideally neutral, a workshop’s success or failure can be enhanced or
degraded by the quality of the venue. Inadequate sound proofing,
equipment failures, extreme temperatures, and shabby furnishings all
contribute to the experience. While workshops can succeed despite these
limitations, a failing workshop will fail more miserably. If the room
temperature is in the mid 80s, the quality of the learning is going to
be less than it could be regardless of the brilliance of the
participants and facilitator.
The organizational culture surrounding the workshop triangle adds more
complexity. Indirectly enough, I’ve picked up on what seems like a
profession-wide ambivalence, even skepticism, about T&D, particularly
when it comes to workshops on change, facilitation, management and
supervision, teamwork, and leadership. For short, let’s term this
management T&D.
Is the librarian’s apparent lack of interest in management T&D due to
the fact that much of it is derived from the world of business? I have
encountered more than a little disdain for business models – of any sort
– among librarians, suggesting a tacit acceptance of the dominant and
potentially stifling bureaucratic model. An expert in staff development
told me: “Librarians don't seem able to generalize from other
professions to their own - I'm not sure why!”
A colleague tells me that the statement, “libraries should be run more
like a business,” evokes an antiquated image of a Theory X business
world, so popular in movies from the 1940s and 1950s. Even today the
phrase may result in stark images of “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap gleefully
handing out pink slips in the corporate parking lot or of Jack Welch’s
heartless annual “rank and yank” staffing purges at GE.
Those miserable images overshadow the progress made by humanistic
businesses. When someone calls for not-for-profits to be more like a
business, they may be recommending the delegation of decision making to
the level where the work gets done to cut through the red tape and other
bureaucratic folderol. They may be for empowering – genuinely - and
rewarding staff at all levels to deliver the best kind of service to our
users. They may be recommending that all leaders make judicious
decisions about resources, using qualitative and quantitative
methods.
While some companies espouse “greed is good” and much else that is
dodgy, there are some businesses with humanistic and positive values
which are relevant to libraries. It is to those companies and what they
do to succeed that we should look for inspiration to improve our
workforce. Their T&D programs are well worth our understanding and
emulating.
As you may recall in my Unstodgy Airline column, T&D never stops
at Southwest Airlines; they abide by their credo: hire attitude, train
for skills. (1) Southwest invests significant dollars annually into
weeks of training for everyone and the training is not only about
operating procedures and industry regulations; it is about customer
service, teamwork, and leading.
Still, many librarians are dubious about the purpose of any
management training. At the start of every semester, I hear it from my
students: “Why do we have to take this management class? I will never be
a manager.” My explanation that the course will help them understand
being managed, gives them something to think about even if they
still don’t want to be there. A required course, they take it and are
often pleased by its relevance to their work lives and what they can do
to help themselves be better managed or, maybe even be better managers.
More worrisome to me is that many perfectly able mid-career librarians
are not drawn toward management. A librarian colleague told me why
management holds little excitement for her and her circle of mid-career
librarians: “Management jobs are more stressful than satisfying. We
don't have any happy, effective manager role models.” In other words,
the prevalent hierarchical pecking order style of organization - in
which these librarians function - is a turn off for our best line
librarians. Nor, are they interested in management workshops.
On occasion I hear from participants that “those who would benefit the
most” – they mean their administrators - are not in the workshop,
one they found especially relevant. The administrators may well
believe they already know management and leading and teamwork, and
implementing change, etc. I suppose these are the TWANTs: “Those Who Are
Not There,” and, who, according to their subordinates, just might
benefit from having their assumptions challenged. And, if the workshop
is the type that mixes and matches numerous small groups it is a
powerful camaraderie builder. The TWANTs regular absence is a missed
opportunity and a less-than-positive-indicator of how much support they
may offer for practicing workshop learnings.
Leaders and T&D:
Count me in with the believers, with eyes wide open. I too have sat
through sessions conducted by facilitators who had no experience with or
in-depth understanding of the concepts they were glibly espousing. And,
management T&D can be faddish, even disingenuous, with simplistic
metaphors and claims for improvements that are as intangible as the
“vaporware” one hears about in information technology.
Yet, I have experienced personal growth through T&D and I have seen a
few organizations improve in tangible ways. In fact, I have always
learned from workshops, good or bad. If they have been less than ideal,
I’ve gained ideas from critically thinking on how I would present the
concept. And, invariably I benefit from other participant views.
The effective leader, one who is trying to improve an organization, will
benefit from an established T&D program. I have seen too many effective
leaders try to bring along staff toward a new model of organization
without providing the necessary training to help that staff follow
alongside. From personal experience, I support the idea of more T&D than
less. When I was involved in a major reform to move a rigidly structured
library to a loosely knit organization, we made good progress but not as
much as we could have had we invested more in T&D. We made progress
because the leader was clear about his vision and he gave permission to
the staff to make decisions for improvement. Mistakes were opportunities
to learn, not occasions for punishment. Where we came up short in the
reform was in not fully infusing a shared vision and values. T&D might
have helped get us to the next level. Instead our T&D was highly
episodic, perhaps less so than the once a year Staff Development Day in
many libraries, but not consistent enough nor was it delivered to enough
people nor did we have the best trainers.
While I am calling for more T&D, the library’s executive correspondingly
has to want a new model of organization to achieve tangible goals. If
the executive is comfortable with the current model – the “before” -
then no amount of T&D will change anything organization-wide, beyond
some ephemeral personal growth among participants. Without the leader’s
support, newly hatched organizational ideas will fly only so far, caged
in by the status quo.
Worse, tantalizing staff with new models and concepts of organization,
while continuing with the “same old, same old,” suggests a mere academic
interest, not the seeking of practical applications. Staff quickly
figure out, with increasing discouragement, that regardless of the
models illuminated in T&D, the status quo will prevail.
Truly effective leaders embrace the opportunity and the obligation to
use T&D with firm and realistic outcomes in mind, to budget for T&D, and
to participate in learning alongside others.
NOTES:
On Managing: LA&M
Volume 21, Number 1, Winter 2007
“Thank God and Greyhound, She’s Gone,” (to a Workshop,) and Other T&D
Matters.
by
John Lubans, Jr.
My musings about the TWAS phenomenon are by way of introduction to
every facilitator’s question: Why do some T&D workshops sizzle and why
do some fizzle?
Corporations like Southwest seem to understand better than we do, that
investing in people is the best way to improve service.
Maybe one’s level of support for T&D all comes down to a personal
belief: T&D does good, or, T&D is a waste. It does seem that either a
person has faith in T&D or believes the concept simply not worthwhile.
No evidence persuades you otherwise. You either believe it works or it
doesn’t.
1. John Lubans, Jr. “Southwest: the Un-stodgy Airline”
LA&M volume 20, #3, pp. 142-146 Summer 2006