Posts in category: Consulting Side Up – Theory

The more I get into depths of problems with a client organization, the stronger my belief gets that every organization should have:

– A Workplace #Coach: An in-house coach, who only coaches. Any employee should be able to schedule a session with this coach. 

– Mentors: Well-chosen mentors from amongst internal teams. #mentoring should be a formally run program in every organization. 

– A Communication Expert: An in-house expert, whose job is to ensure #workplace #communication happens across stakeholders. Any employee should be able to reach out to this expert to learn how to use Communication to solve for conflicts, engagement & performance. 

These are workplace enhancement tools, which should be made accessible to employees at all stages of their career. 

I have been working with a client company for the past few days where the #humanresources team does not exist. It is a start up, and they haven’t yet felt the need to invest in a full time #hr team.

In the past few months, they have started experiencing dis-engagement & low #performance levels from their bright & well-educated young professionals.

I came on board as a #consultant and one of the first things I did was to #communicate with each individual of the organization.
And guess what! Just these well-intentioned, specific conversations have already given plethora of data points highlighting the reasons for the dip in performance and #engagement .

As I sift through these data points to make an action plan with the leadership team, I can’t help but wonder- what makes #communication such a difficult skill to acquire?

While it is the only way to achieve goals & revenue, yet the least amount of time & conscious effort is spent on improving our everyday #workplace communication.

They didn’t need a #hrconsultant , they just needed someone to come and have conversations with their teams.

If you’re leading a team, or part of HR team of your organization, then learn & practice effective communication. It’s no more an option, it’s a necessity.

70:20:10 principle of #learning had gained a lot of prominence in corporate world in early 2000s. 

It said that an individual learns in 3 ways:

70% through experiential learning. 

20% through social learning (peer learning, mentoring, coaching etc.)

10% through formal learning courses (training).

Despite being critiqued heavily by management gurus at that time, this model gained a lot of popularity amongst #Humanresources fraternity. I remember clearly that almost every HR event during those times had at least one slide & case study on this learning model. 

I don’t hear of this model much these days, specially in new & fast-paced industries. I wonder if it’s because they have started using other learning models like Kirkpatrick or Kolb for their learning strategy now.

One of my manufacturing clients recently surprised me when they talked about their intent to implement this model. I had a wry smile on my face and left the meeting room thinking how strange it is that some industries invent, adopt, use & discard working models during short spans of their existence and there are some, that prefer to carry on with one model for years.