Apr/120
ASTD 2012: 5 Reasons to Stop By Booth 711
The ASTD 2012 International Conference and Expo is around the corner, and we’re gearing up for a great show in Denver.
Here are just a few of the things you’ll be able to do when you stop by the Herrmann International booth, #711, in the Expo Hall this year:
- Pick up a free USB drive pre-stocked with Whole Brain® resources.
- Spend focused time with Herrmann International representatives to discuss your business priorities and goals.
- Experience sample modules from the award-winning simulation, The Thinking Accelerator®.
- View quick learning videos on various management topics.
- Play “Kinect Adventures” and get the opportunity to win a free Kinect peripheral for XBOX 360!
Get in the Game
“Kinect Adventures,” the game that ships with Kinect, is the first consumer product designed from the ground up using Herrmann International’s Whole Brain® framework.
We’re highlighting this milestone by giving you the chance to play the game and win your very own Kinect.
Top-Rated Speaker
While at the conference, you also won’t want to miss Ann Herrmann-Nehdi’s Trends Track session, Outthink, Outpace, Outperform: Developing Agile Thinkers to Lead the Way.
Ann consistently ranks as one of the top-rated speakers each year at ASTD, and in this engaging, high-energy session you’ll see why. Learn how to develop your leaders’ thinking agility and apply proven learning approaches to accelerate leadership development in a complex world. You will learn practical techniques you can quickly apply to get immediate impact.
Details:
ASTD 2012 International Conference & Expo
Session TU325: Outthink, Outpace, Outperform: Developing Agile Thinkers to Lead the Way (Trends Track)
Presenter: Ann Herrmann-Nehdi, CEO, Herrmann International
Date: May 8, 2012, 4:00-5:30 PM MDT
Jan/120
Engaging Employees: Pay Attention to What Really Matters
Engaging Employees: Pay Attention to What Really Matters
From business magazines to HR publications to health and wellness websites, employee engagement is one of the hot topics of the moment.
The Googles and Zappos.com’s of the world are often name-dropped as examples of companies that are doing it right, keeping their employees happy and, well, keeping their employees.
But what makes them happy? Is it the perks like free food and dry cleaning? The financial incentives? The social activities?
Before you install that coffee bar, take a look at what employees say really matters to them.
While Google offers many perks, the research shows that these aren’t actually the primary drivers of job satisfaction. Referring to the results of his study of more than 1,400 US-based companies, Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, put it bluntly about what motivates employees:
“What they really need is a workplace that isn’t going to irritate them.”
What actually makes Google so successful, he adds, “is the competition of ideas, the pure meritocracy, whoever has the best idea wins.”
Blessing White’s Employee Engagement Report echoes these findings. In their survey of more than 11,000 people around the globe, they found that “employees worldwide view opportunities to apply their talents, career development and training as top drivers of job satisfaction.”
And managers, they point out, aren’t necessarily focusing on the things that matter most to their employees.
No wonder employees are irritated. And no wonder the high potentials at those organizations are looking for other opportunities.
What motivates one person won’t necessarily motivate another, but applying what we know about the brain makes it easier for leaders to understand how different employees prefer to think and approach their work and what they pay attention to. Because thinking drives behavior, it gives leaders the clues and framework to focus on what will really engage, motivate and retain their employees.
If you’re an HBDI® Certified Practitioner, be sure to register for the January 25th THINC™ Webinar, Don’t Lose Your Top Talent! Engaging Employees With Whole Brain® Leadership, for specific tips and takeaways on how to help your managers take action to engage their employees in a meaningful way.
Dec/110
Leadership in an Age of Information Overload
What does it take to be an effective leader in an age of information overload?
In an HR.com webinar last month, Ann Herrmann-Nehdi showed participants how to develop their leaders’ “mind management skills” so they can successfully navigate in an increasingly noisy and demanding environment. If you missed the session, or if you want to view it again and download the slides, the recording is now available on the HR.com website.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to align leadership competencies with the type of nimble thinking skills that are critical in an age of smartphones, overflowing email inboxes and continual change. Ann gives you an easy-to-apply approach for helping your leaders get more strategic while getting more done.
Access the recording and handouts here:
From Mind-Full to Mindful: Developing Strategic Leaders in an Age of Information Overload
NOTE: If you are already a member of HR.com, simply log in to access the webinar. If you are not a member, you will need to sign up for a free HR.com membership, which will take only a moment.
Once you have confirmation of your membership, you will be able to access recordings and register for other educational opportunities, including Ann’s upcoming HR.com webinar, Getting Buy-in for Your HR Initiatives: Applying C-Level Thinking for Faster and Better Results.
Nov/110
The Four Things You Need to Know about The Neurobiology of Leadership Assessments
For more learning and insights on thinking, mindsets and brain science, check out my full video report from the 2011 Neuroleadership Summit.
In our presentation on the Neurobiology of Leadership Assessments at the Neuroleadership Summit last week, Mark Schar from Stanford and I concluded that in this early stage of this field of research, there are four points we have to pay attention to.
We need to define leadership: The clarity of the research on this is cloudy at best. It seems obvious that if we want to assess leadership, we need to have some clear definition of what it is and what we are trying to measure.
Two differing perspectives can be found in the business and academic worlds. Business tends to look at leadership as a vital key to organization success, often citing guru CEOs like Jack Welch: “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
Academia however, is much more skeptical, perceiving leadership as poorly defined, difficult to measure and situational, better represented by a Casey Stengel quote: “The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.”
Defining what it is and what we intend to measure is critical the evaluation of a leadership assessment. In a pilot study we conducted for the session, it was clear the assessments known and most used by business were not the same as those known and used by the academic community. Their reasons for using assessments are also different: Business uses them to make better decisions; academia is typically looking to make a discovery.
We learn about leadership from assessments: Be clear on what YOU want to learn. The hundreds of thousands of assessments processed each year would seem to indicate that we are learning something. Our pilot study showed that those in business had a range of application arenas, as shown below.
Whatever the application, one helpful way to differentiate between assessments is to look at the construct each instrument is based on. The 16 assessments in our pilot study were equally divided between these four construct clusters:
Personality: Individual, intrinsic motivation
Behavioral: Individual behaviors as perceived by others
Talent/Interest: Individual skills and interests
Cognitive: Individual preferences in processing and problem solving
We focused on the cognitive construct to address our next question.
Neuroscience might measure leadership: What do your learners need to know and why? Did I mention this was a huge topic? Assuming we can all agree on the definition of what we are measuring as leadership, our initial scan of the research uncovered two assessments where there is a neurological research connection.
The research on the Neo Five Factor showed a relationship between brain volume and several of the factors. The research on the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument’s (HBDI®) revealed neurological data that related to each of the four factors of the Whole Brain® Model. The real question then emerges: What does this tell us? How do we decide what constitutes “validity?”
We asked the audience to select what was most important for them in the selection of an assessment:
A. Statistical validity, research basis and pedigree.
B. Reliability, administration, practicality, longitudinal studies and references.
C. User’s perceived value and experience, ease of applicability and face validity.
D. Observed insights, visual appeal, discovery/aha’s and conceptual framework validity.
Our audience then split into four groups based on their answer to the above question and discussed what was most important to measure—and how that differed for business and academia. Members of each group* vehemently defended their point of view.
What is yours? How about your learners? What do they need to know and why? How does that impact your selection process?
Academia and business should converge to advance research on the neurobiology of leadership assessments. There is a great opportunity to further pursue research in this domain. We need more research! If the worlds (you might even call them tribes) of business and academia came together we could take this research to the next level.
A special interest group emerged at the conference on this topic. Let me know if you are interested in the conversation or if would to learn more about our findings. Email me at ann@hbdi.com, and post your thoughts in the comments below.
*discreetly sorted based on the four quadrants of the Whole Brain® Model
Sep/110
Sales Growth: The Thought That Counts
When it comes to sales effectiveness, are you paying attention to what really matters?
If you’re not focusing on the thinking that drives sales growth, you won’t get the best from your people and processes. It’s that simple.
How we think impacts everything we do—and the results we get. Our newest white paper will be filled with proven tips and tools based on what we know about thinking and performance to help you sell more, waste less and set your team up for success:
“We don’t have to throw out everything we’ve been doing in our sales organizations. Instead, we need to take a closer look at the engine that drives our sales results: the brains of those who make it happen and the systems they engage to achieve those results. Too many of us are wasting time, energy and effort and risking revenue because we’ve haven’t paid attention to the core—the thinking that produces results.”
You can get your copy by attending our upcoming free webinar, Optimizing Your Sales Organization for Long-Term Growth.
Join us on September 28th for an exploration of how to apply agile thinking and a Whole Brain® approach to drive sales results, and get priority access to this new paper.
Aug/110
Top Young Talent Looking for a Good Mentor
How will organizations succeed in attracting the next brightest minds? By paying attention to their development.
That’s the conclusion of a recent Business Insider article, which references the results of recent global surveys by PricewaterhouseCoopers, explaining that Generation Y employees consider training and development to be a more important benefit than cash bonuses.
PwC’s Millenials Survey also found that 98% of millenials believe having a strong mentor is critical for their development.
It’s no surprise, then, that there has been a resurgence of interest in workplace mentoring programs recently. But it’s not as simple as setting up a mentoring program. Whether or not a mentor pair is successful is highly dependant on the effectiveness of the mentor-mentee match.
A great example is the work that HBDI® Certified Practitioner Lynne Krause has done in creating mentor pairs based on HBDI® Profile data.
Through her work with the US Naval Command and others, Lynne found that matching mentors and mentees with similar thinking preferences led to better communications, faster bonding and increased trust. The result is longer lasting and more mutually beneficial mentoring relationships.
In the US Naval Command project (which is described in this case study), matching mentors and mentees based on their thinking preferences led to a 99% success rate in terms of the pair “sticking,” a huge improvement over the previous success rate of just 50%.
Lynne explained how it works in a recent THINC™ Webinar, Match Point: Creating Mentor Pairs That Go The Distance. If you missed it, you can still view the recorded webinar to learn some of the tools and methods she uses to build successful mentoring, coaching and development programs with a foundation in Whole Brain® Thinking and the HBDI® assessment.
Looking for more on Generation Y? Check out these on-demand webinars:
- Engaging a Multigenerational Workforce: A Whole Brain® Approach to a 21st Century Challenge
- Bridging the Generational Divide with Whole Brain® Thinking
Access our full library of recorded THINC™ Webinars.
Aug/110
Learnings From The Leadership Challenge Forum Conference
Orin Salas, VP of Sales for Herrmann International, checked in from The Leadership Challenge (TLC) Forum in Chicago.
175 people attended The Leadership Challenge (TLC) Forum Conference this year, with participants from across the US, Canada, the UK and Asia. It was a good, enthusiastic group of people who are certified in the TLC methodology or are users of the materials.
On Thursday morning, Ann Herrrmann-Nehdi and I attended several sessions including the kick-off by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the leaders of TLC. There were several breakout sessions featuring companies using TLC methodology.
The afternoon started with the Chicago Comedy Company leading us through a number of improvisational activities in a session entitled, “The Improvisational Leader.” They did a good job of connecting the activities back to the business challenges leaders face.
And with that as an introduction, Ann took the stage for the final presentation of the day, her keynote, “It’s Not Left Brain or Right Brain, It’s Whole Brain®.”
The group took a few minutes to warm up, but less than 10 minutes into her presentation, Ann had full participation. She led them through some background information about the brain, connected thinking preferences to leadership competencies, and reviewed the Whole Brain® Model, exploring how Whole Brain® Thinking is becoming even more critical for leadership success in today’s business environment. As always, the participants were wowed by the handouts and the tools they received.
Friday began with focus groups discussing the future of leadership and development. The groups touched on topics such as virtual leadership, technology, technology etiquette, generational challenges and the “size” of learning. This was followed by an interesting presentation on emotional quotient (EQ) and emotional intelligence.
All in all, it was a learning-filled two days in Chicago with plenty of opportunity for best practice sharing and knowledge exchange about how to develop leaders in an increasingly complex world.
For other participants’ take on the event, you can search the Twitter hashtag #TLCForum11 and read the live updates at @TLCTalk.
Jul/110
High-Performing Employees Are Leaving
Are Your Managers Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?
The latest survey from Right Management reveals that three out of four organizations lost high-performing employees they did not want to lose during the past year.
Good people will find good opportunities, even in a slow job market. The question is, what’s making them leave?
While many factors can come into play, study after study shows that one of the main reasons people leave a job is their boss. If your managers aren’t able to communicate effectively and build connections with employees, they’re helping push those top performers out the door.
A few questions to consider:
- What are you doing to avoid being part of the 75% of companies that have lost top talent in the past year?
- How are you taking care of your top people?
- Do your managers communicate effectively with each of their direct reports? Do they have the tools and skills to engage employees in a meaningful way?
- How are you equipping people to be better leaders and managers?
A number of leading organizations are using the Whole Brain® system to give managers an easy-to-apply, practical framework for understanding what different employees pay attention to and how they prefer to think and approach their work. Whole Brain® Thinking skills not only help managers better communicate with their employees, but they also ensure the organization is fully capitalizing on the potential of high performers.
And when top talent is engaged and able to contribute, they’re more likely to stick around than take up the next offer from the competition.
Check out our case studies to see how organizations like Cirque du Soleil, IBM, Integ and Cookie Time are making it work for them.
May/100
Innovative Learning Takes on Today’s Workplace Challenges
As new challenges place greater demands on businesses to be nimbler, smarter and more innovative, companies are looking for the most efficient and effective ways to rapidly build the capabilities of their high-potential employees.
With the recent announcement of the US Distance Learning Association (USDLA) Awards, Herrmann International’s program, The Thinking Accelerator™ featuring HBDIinteractive™, is demonstrating that a Whole Brain® approach – both in content and delivery methods – is vital for addressing today’s workplace performance challenges.
This blended learning solution received the USDLA’s 2010 Gold Award for Best Practices in Distance Learning Programming. It was also recognized last fall with a Silver Learning in Practice Award for Excellence in Content from Chief Learning Officer Magazine.
Originally developed with IBM as part of its global new leader development program, The Thinking Accelerator™ featuring HBDIinteractive™ gives companies the ability to meet learners “where they are” with insights into their own thinking preferences and skills to apply Whole Brain® Thinking to improve their on-the-job effectiveness. It is now being implemented by organizations of all sizes and industries in a variety of applications.
Some are deploying it to meet individual learner needs while others are finding it useful in ramping up large-scale initiatives spanning continents. We’ve heard about its role in initiatives to improve teamwork, communication and innovation in addition to leadership development – all the critical skills organizations are dealing with in the 21st century work environment.
And beyond traditional elearning, many HBDI® Certified Practitioners are using it in conjunction with classroom workshops. As Deb DeNure, founder of DB Associates, told us:
“Ultimately it helps learners to be self-directed and learn to communicate in an appropriate fashion for the situation.”
The essence of Whole Brain® Thinking and learning.
Tell us: How are you using the Thinking Accelerator™ to get better results?
Haven’t seen it yet? Be sure to contact us to learn more about this award-winning learning solution.
Apr/100
Putting the ‘Fun’ into Functional
It is rare that anyone pushes back on having some fun, unless it feels like we are doing something “too serious.” Fun is, in fact, one of the most effective ways to engage, learn and gain compliance.
Perhaps you have seen the video on YouTube that shows the piano stairs in Sweden, designed to get people to take the stairs rather than the escalator for improved health reasons. Before they know it, subway riders have actually enjoyed their climb up the stairs.
The current issue of BusinessWeek Magazine has a fascinating story about a new approach to childhood education and compliance for those who suffer from diabetes. Didget is a glucose testing meter that plugs into a video console: Why not make the annoying process of drawing blood for testing something fun?
Research done with our partners in South Africa clearly demonstrated the challenges associated with getting compliance from diabetic kids. The typical approach used by educators and parents focused solely on the rules, schedules and other compliance issues (the B quadrant of the Whole Brain® Model). Once they adopted a Whole Brain® approach – which included an element of fun – compliance happened (and parents stopped nagging!).
What are your examples of making functional more fun?
What could you do in your day-to-day that would take an unpleasant activity and turn it into something really appealing and enjoyable? Share your ideas—we will send a “fabulous prize” to the person who submits the best example.
