Author: Bob Bannister

Working remotely? Then you need your own brand! 

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

In this age of increasingly mobile ways of working, it’s becoming highly important to have a distinct personal brand.  The reason for this is simple, being away from the team workplace means you are less visible, especially if this is your main mode of working.  Less visible means being less in the mind of others, the boss, the organisation.  As remote working becomes more common, people are realising that it’s suddenly more difficult to get noticed, to build a reputation and ultimately, even to get promoted. 

What you need is to have a presence, even when you are not physically present.  So yes, on top of everything else, you need to factor into your daily role ways to promote you!  

Now, I’m not suggesting that you have to blow your trumpet at every single opportunity.  No one likes the person who’s always ‘shouting off’ about how brilliant they are.  This requires something much more intelligent than that.  This requires a marketing strategy, similar in many ways to how unknown manufacturers need to create a market presence for their products.  Here are a couple of key ways you can think about this:  

Leave a trail! 

We all know when a snail has visited our garden chair, even though they are nowhere to be seen.  So think about how you leave a (less sticky) trail so that anyone can see what you’ve been up to.  Technology can be useful to us in this regard.  Many systems now leave an activity trail, logging what you and others have been up too.  We use Basecamp, but there are lots of databases and crm tools that do the same thing.  Don’t miss the opportunity to log where you have been and what you have been doing.  If you have a social tool within the business, a Slack or Yammer type facility, don’t be shy about communicating with your team about what’s been happening.  

Work on your personal identity. 

It’s an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to recognise that when you do meet physically with colleagues it’s a much bigger deal, especially when you normally work separated from them.  We would do well to go along to get along.  Using physical meetings as more than a way to get the work done, but also as a way to secure our personal brands in the minds of the others is crucial.  That means you need to sort out what your brand is!  It’s not hard, just think about how you want others to perceive you, even before you’ve opened your mouth, through to the moment you walk away from them.  Write down a few descriptors.  List ideas about the impact you want to leave with others, then use that to inform everything from the way you dress to the way you interact while with them.  

There are many advantages to working in a remote environment, but it’s important to recognise that there are some disadvantages too.  Work out how you can inject back in some of those things that are lost as a result of working in a dispersed team.  There are lots of ways to do that, the hurdle is recognising the need in the first place.  Start to develop your own strategies for being ‘present’ even when apart, it’s a long game of influence, but like any good brand you have to invest in taking it to market.  

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain

Influencing skills – it’s in the minutiae

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Being able to increase your level of influence in almost any situation puts you in a position of advantage.  What most people don’t realise is that influence in business seldom occurs in a single instance, it’s in the many interactions that bring about the outcome.  

It’s pretty hard to influence people in a moment, unless you have a gun or something equally unpleasant to wield!  The reality of great influencers is that they recognise they must nudge outcome in tiny increments over as many interactions as they can. They condition the outcomes that they seek.  Once you understand this you can begin to look for those micro nudges and start to develop your position.  

We all do this all the time, so we are not highlighting anything new, it’s just that we don’t always nudge deliberately.  Often what happens is that we know what works, because the approach has worked for us in the past, so we simply repeat that same nudge next time.  Other times (especially when we haven’t got past experience) we can leave the nudge to chance, not pre planning it.  This will have a variety of results from really good to very bad.  A nice simple example of this would be about asking someone to stay on late and help complete a needed piece of work.  We might say: 

“I don’t suppose you could stay on tonight and help me finish this…”  

Compare this to an alternative nudge:  

“We’ve got to deliver this to the client tonight, I really need your help to get this completed…”

The first is just slightly more easy to turn down, compared to the second.  They both may or may not achieve the desired outcome, but the second version has a much stronger influence towards achieving what I need.  

It’s in the minutiae!

The little things always matter in a big way when it comes to nudging outcomes.  There are some great examples of this.  Take Amsterdam airport who in 2009 introduced an image of a little fly to their urinals giving men a target to aim for.  It reduced mess by 80%.  The UK tax office chose to add messages to the reminders of people in arrears stating, “9 out of 10 people in your area are up to date with tax payments”.  The result was a 15% increase in payments from those who received these messages.  A client we work with deliberately asked for a sample of managers to express higher levels of thanks in the weeks before their company survey took place.  In every case the survey found these teams expressed higher satisfaction with their roles than those who were not included in the experiment.  A quick search will provide dozens of such examples, we are amazingly influenced by these little changes.  

If we are try to influence outcomes, we are always better to plan it.  Preparing the words to say (or email) will nearly always improve the outcome if we have this nudging phenomena in mind.  I often find my self writing emails and using the word ‘just’. “I’m ‘just’ writing to…”.  When I spot it, I always backspace and rewrite the sentence.  Why belittle my message from the start, it’s an unhelpful nudge.  In sales I will never say “if we go ahead with the training”, preferring to use “when we deliver the training…”.  It’s a tiny change, but that’s where influence happens.  

Start becoming more attentive to your nudge choices, it’s good to learn from the past successes and failures, but add to that a more considered approach to changing outcomes and influencing others.  

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain at iManage Performance Ltd. 

Discover effective communication skills to bring about a change

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

The word ‘communication’ has a mysterious quality in the training room – you can use it to answer almost any question and you’ll nearly always be right!  The problem with that of course, is that it’s just so vague, bordering on worthless because, where comms are concerned we have to get specific.  

So here’s a few specifics about communicating for a change.  Any change, any situation where you want the other party to shift their position or behaviour.  This is so useful in change management, influencing, in presentation skills and in almost any situation where you want people to change as a result of your communication.

They need to get you before they get the issue. 

If you want people to get your message, remember that they need to get you first.  This is a simple rule of psychology, often referred to as ‘pacing and leading’.  People will be more willing to be lead by us if we have ‘paced’ with them first.  I like to use the analogy of those 1980’s style trains.  Some of us oldies can remember running alongside the train, opening the door and jumping aboard just as it started to pull out of the station.  The platform staff would be blowing their whistle at us, but we all did it from time to time!  The point is, you couldn’t just get on the train, you had to get up to speed with it (they were a lot slower then and I was a lot younger and faster 😉 ) or you would simply smash into the side of the carriage.  Pacing is similar, we have to get up to speed with other people before they will accept our lead.  We have to build rapport and connection at a human level.  Where communicating change is concerned, I can tell you a specific way to do this… 

Talk first about your connection with the topic you’re communicating.  Give an example, personalise it, show how and why you connect to the subject which is about to follow.  What’s the impact or benefit to you personally.  Show how you are also implicated in the change.  

It might sound something like this: “I don’t know about you, but I find it really frustrating that I need to enter the customers details twice, both on the CRM databases and the accounting software record”. 

Once they’ve got you, they need to get the issue. 

The second thing you’ve got to communicate, is how the topic connects with them.  I like to outline a number of examples of how they personally connect with it.  This is especially the case when presenting to a group, I may not know exactly how each person relates to the topic, so I have to cast my net wide and give as many examples as I can to try and capture everyone in the audience.  In other situations (where I have a better understanding of the listeners situation) I can be more specific.  Either way I would spell out how the topic connects with them by posing a rhetorical question. 

So it might go something like this: “Maybe for you it’s the same as me, but perhaps your frustration is due to how slow the current CRM database is, the fact you have to wait for it to approve after each submission? Or maybe you find the lack of ability to cut and paste a real pain?”

Now shine a light on the issue. 

Now you are ready to position the key detail of the issue, change or topic.  Don’t over do it, remember that most people will ‘zone out’ of a communication if it’s longer than a couple of minutes.  You just need to shine enough light on the topic to illuminate it.  Give the details that matter, you might use a little repetition as well to help people hear, but then cut it off – don’t start to waffle.  

So it might go something like this: “Well I’m really pleased to announce that we are about to introduce a brand new software package for the business.  It’s called… etc.”

Next resolve the earlier tension. 

The next phase of the communication or presentation needs to outline the engagement required to make the change.  We are seeking to apply the issue to the listeners personally, so they know exactly what is expected of them from this point forward.  We should spell out the activity and timelines required to bring about the change.  

So it might go something like this: “To implement this we require all of you to undertake a full database cleansing activity for each of your areas.  This must be completed by June and include the following areas…” 

Finally inspire the action you need from each of them. 

The last part of communicating for a change is to cast a vision of the new future.  They need to see how the proposed change plays into their personal struggles issues or opportunities as highlighted earlier in what you had to say.  So take the time at this point to make those connections overt.  

So it might go something like this: “So once we go live this will mean, no more double entry on the two systems, no more waiting around for the system it will be instantaneous and you’ll all be able to cut and paste into any entry feed you like.”

So there you have it, a way of communicating for a change.  Follow these five content steps for any situation where you need people to come onboard with the change, whether that’s written or verbal comms, an email or a presentation.  Don’t leave engagement to chance, work at creating that buy-in from the start by adopting this easy to follow structure. 

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain at iManage Performance Ltd.  

How to be a smart sales negotiator in a tough market

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Whether it’s #Brexit nervousness or a general downturn, we’ve recently been invited to deliver negotiation skills programmes for a number of clients.  Are we seeing organisations preparing for the a potential downturn by making sure their staff are well equipped to deal with it?  

Negotiating in a tough market is of course a blessing and a curse, it just depends on your perspective; buyer or sales professional.  Let’s face it, the buy side is in its element when suppliers are under pressure. They can capitalise in a tight market and leverage their spend in a somewhat crude yet effective way to get the best deals.  Drop your price or we’ll take our business elsewhere is the typical brick bat approach!  Sales teams however are under massive pressure driven by the scarcity of demand.  You better be a smart negotiator if you’re selling into a tightening market, it can be the difference between results or failures. 

It’s not just about holding your nerve and using every technique in the ‘how to negotiate’ handbook, it’s that you have to step up the market insight in a big way.  

Your market and competitor knowledge is vital

Negotiating blind isn’t recommended at any time, but in a difficult market it’s suicide.  Understanding the position of the competition is the only way that you can be confident about when to hold out, or push forward, or concede whilst in the throws of negotiation. 

Mining for accurate competitor data is a significant task, that’s why many negotiation teams have researchers as part of the crew.  If you don’t have that luxury, then you probably have to step up and work creatively at uncovering as much information as you can yourself.  

One route to a deeper, richer insight about what your competition is doing is to propagate and use a ‘buying advocate’.  

Establishing a buying advocate

This is someone within the buying organisation who (for whatever reason) is positively inclined towards your companies sales offering.  ‘Buying advocates’ occur for a host of reasons; they may have prior experience of buying from you; they may like your offering more than the competitors; they may simply warm to you for any number of reasons.  Sometimes you will not even know why they are positively disposed towards your solution, it’s just clear that they are.  It is also possible that your buying advocate will not be part of the formal purchase decision team, and probable that they are not from the professional procurement community.  Whoever, their contribution to your market research can be invaluable.  

A strong buying advocate can provide you with all kinds of information and insight.  For example, an understanding of who the key players and influencers are in the buy decision, or insights into the buy process and it’s progress towards a contract. But most importantly, they can give you inside perspectives concerning what your competitor organisations are offering.  

In a tight market, having or not having a strong buying advocate can make the difference between winning or losing an opportunity.  Be a little more bold, ask them what they think, what the organisation is thinking, who the other suppliers in play are, how does your offering compare?   You’ve got little to lose, they can always choose to withhold if they like, but often may share gems of information that can help you tweak your positioning to great effect.  

Bob Bannister

 

Three recruitment interviewing essentials to help you hire the ideal candidate

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Agile Course

Getting recruitment selection correct is such an important thing. It’s a costly and time consuming game even before you’ve made any job offer. Add to that the potential of recruiting the wrong person and the significance of getting it wrong escalates rapidly.
With this in mind I continue to find it surprising how many managers I meet who have never received any formal input on the subject. This is especially the case when there are some very simple things that can be learnt which make a load of difference to the end result and your ability to recruit the ideal candidate.
Here are my top three tips to help you add a little polish to your interview technique.

Stop selling the job up front

Do yourself a favour and stop selling the job at the top of the interview. Yes, of course we need to provide the candidates with a good understanding of the role but it’s actually critical that you do this towards the end of the interview not the beginning.
The reason is simple, the more you give away about the job before asking any questions about their competence, the easier you are making it for them to say what they think you want to hear. Just switch the order, making sure you don’t talk much about the role until you have completed all your questioning.

Following trait based answers with a good strong behavioural question

Another essential is to pick up on any candidate trait based answers. For example when they might say “I’m a real people person”. It’s a piece of information, but it does not help you understand whether they do have good people skills or not. It’s their opinion, nothing more. Make it a habit to respond to these comments by asking a good strong behavioural question that drives them towards giving a concrete example. So, you could follow “I’m a people person” with the question “Tell me about a situation where that’s been evident?”.

Score the quality of your candidates answers

Assessment will always be easier if you apply some logic to your candidate scoring. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Rating the answers to each question gives you so much more clarity of comparison when you sit back and start to assess all the candidates you have interviewed. Predetermine a scale like ‘strong answer; OK answer, weak answer’ or just use a 5 to 1 rating. A simple table comparison of candidates responses against the list of questions will serve you very well as you discuss and compare one with another.

 

Bob Bannister

Leading remote workers in the digital era – Thoughts from Dr Petros Chamakiotis

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Having to be a manager of geographically dispersed teams has been a common challenge for many of us for quite some time.  However, these challenges have been heightened further in recent years as workers and organisations continue to new ways of working, such as flexible, virtual and remote arrangements. This phenomenon, primarily brought about through the advancing capability and usability of the technology we all carry, brings with it unique leadership requirements.  It’s these requirements that have been (in 2019) significantly overlooked, leaving many managers to fumble through periods of trial and error in order to discover what’s likely to go wrong.  In many organisations managers are having to revert back to self-taught methods, trying things out, failing and learning to lead effectively all over again.  There is of course nothing per se wrong with this type of social learning.  It’s just that we now have enough remote working examples and experience for academics to have developed some exciting and new understanding, insights and models.  In short, there’s no need to learn by trial and error; we already know many of the pitfalls and trip hazards associated with leading remote teams and new ways of leading are available to managers who do have teams and/or individuals working in geographically dispersed environments.

An example of this can be found in the way people learn from each other.  Social learning is thought to be up to 70% of the way in which adults learn.  We observe, we witness, we listen in on conversations, we see what’s working, what’s not.  None of these things ever get written down in a learning log, but they do form a constant and effective source of development for each of us as we navigate through each day.  Make me a remote worker and suddenly I switch off a significant input to my personal and the organisational learning.  The danger is that remote team workers can slowly become blunt.  Repeating the same practices and even mistakes, but not adding the development of collective social learning that was an unspoken constant.  There is a simple solution, it’s just that managers aren’t aware of the issue until it becomes more significant.  Add to that the fact that many people think about changing jobs when they stop learning, and all of a sudden remote working can inadvertently result in good people exiting the organisation because they are feeling stale / demotivated by their lack of growth.  With this awareness, managers can see a new purpose in the teams’ physical meetings.  When you do get them together, sharing the good and the ugly of what’s been going on can become a vital requirement beyond just doing the job and delivering the traditional agenda points.

There are many other such observations that can be so useful when you are the manager of a remote team or indeed are a remote team worker.

Dr Petros Chamakiotis (@petros_cham) of University of Sussex Business School writes:

The growing popularity of digital technologies has given rise to #newwaysofwork. Ranging from flexible work to remote work, #newwaysofwork enabled by digital technologies are increasingly adopted by companies due to their benefits for both employees and employers. Employees are given more flexibility in terms of where and when to work, whereas employers can cut down on costs associated with office space with employees working from home or other locations (e.g., Jimenez, Boehe, Taras, & Caprar, 2017).

However, alongside those benefits come a number of challenges, raising a number of questions. For example, are traditional leadership practices still relevant in the digital context? How can leaders adjust their style to successfully manage colleagues with whom they have little, if any, face-to-face communication? Academics in the field of human resources management (HRM) highlight the importance of employee wellbeing when aiming for high performing employees (e.g., Nielsen et al., 2017). So what can leaders do to ensure their colleagues are well and engaged without feeling isolated? And lastly, how can leaders boost their teams’ creative potential to maximize the possibilities of generating innovative solutions?

Clearly challenging leadership as we know it, there is a significant need to up skill our managers and teams by, for example, practically demonstrating how leadership can be exercised in the context of remote work (e.g., Zander, Zettinig, & Mäkelä, 2013), sharing what leaders can do to increase their colleagues’ wellbeing and engagement levels (Panteli, Yalabik, & Rapti, 2018), and teaching how leaders can boost their teams’ performance on tasks requiring creativity and innovation (Chamakiotis & Panteli, 2017).

 

References

Chamakiotis, P., & Panteli, N. (2017). Leading the creative process: the case of virtual product design. New Technology, Work and Employment, 32(1), 28–42.

Jimenez, A., Boehe, D. M., Taras, V., & Caprar, D. V. (2017). Working Across Boundaries: Current and Future Perspectives on Global Virtual Teams. Journal of International Management, 23(4), 341–349.

Nielsen, K., Nielsen, M. B., Ogbonnaya, C., Känsälä, M., Saari, E., & Isaksson, K. (2017). Workplace resources to improve both employee well-being and performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Work & Stress, 31(2), 101–120.

Panteli, N., Yalabik, Z. Y., & Rapti, A. (2018). Fostering work engagement in geographically-dispersed and asynchronous virtual teams. Information Technology & People. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-04-2017-0133

Zander, L., Zettinig, P., & Mäkelä, K. (2013). Leading global virtual teams to success. Organizational Dynamics, 42(3), 228–237.

Improve the credibility of your Performance Management process

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Here are three areas that can make a significant difference to the way in which your performance management system is perceived within your organisation.

1. People don’t truly get the vision (and it’s not their fault)

Buy-in from competent people in the business is critical to the successful implementation of any organisational strategy yet John Kotter’s Harvard research suggests that organisations under-communicate the vision by a factor of at least 10 and sometimes up to 1000. In practice this means that many people are unable to make the connection between the objectives that they work to and the goals of the organisation. There will often be plenty of activity and productivity but organisational success will be more luck than judgement as people do what they think should be done rather than what they are certain must be done.

For many, there is no golden thread between the organisations vision, their own functional strategies and the objectives that they are working on. If people don’t truly get the vision then it’s not their fault. There are a lot of places for the vision to become lost and muddled as it cascades down the organisation, but leaders and managers need to do more in order to demonstrate a visible golden thread. The introduction of functional critical success factors can go a long way towards this. Great organisations are good at defining and focusing on what is critical for success. They articulate the links between the vision and the functional strategy by developing critical success factors that determine an individuals objectives.

By detailing critical success factors we produce a barometer against which every single objective and action throughout the business can be clarified. If I am doing anything that does not fit directly into a predetermined critical success factor, then I must question why I am doing it at all.

Critical success factors highlight the golden thread at a functional, or departmental level.

From big picture to small picture, every person must see their part in achieving the vision. The next step is to develop extremely clear descriptions of what has to happen in the organisation to make the vision a reality. These are in every sense ‘critical success factors’.

Here are the key elements in the effective communication of an organisations vision as suggested by John Kotter:

  1. Simplicity: All jargon and technobabble must be eliminated
  2. Metaphor, analogy, and example: A verbal picture is worth a thousand words
  3. Multiple forums: Big meetings and small, emails and newsletters, formal and informal interaction – all are effective for spreading the word
  4. Repetition: Ideas sink in deeply only after they have been heard many times
  5. Leadership by example: Behaviour from important people that is inconsistent with the vision overwhelms other forms of communication
  6. Explanation of seeming inconsistencies: Unaddressed inconsistencies undermine the credibility of all communication
  7. Give and take: Two-way communication is always more powerful than one-way communication

2. People don’t feel appreciated (because it’s pretence that gets all the attention)

In an article “The Ten Ironies of Motivation,” reward and recognition guru, Bob Nelson, says, “More than anything else, employees want to be valued for a job well done by those they hold in high esteem.” He adds that people want to be treated as if they are adult human beings and that the number one reason people leave there jobs is because they don’t feel appreciated. Without doubt financial reward plays a part in motivation. Fair benefits and pay are the cornerstone of a successful company that recruits and retains committed workers. If you provide a living wage for your employees, you can then work on additional motivation issues. Without the fair living wage however, you risk losing your best people to a better-paying employer. We may have read or heard about the surveys and studies dating back to the early 1980s that demonstrate people want more from work than money. While managers predict the most important motivational aspect of work for people would be money, personal time and attention from the supervisor is cited by workers as most rewarding and motivational for them at work.

3. Peoples objectives aren’t worth the paper they are written on (because so much is out of their control)

I have been genuinely surprised over my career just how often I bump into staff that claim their objectives are outside of their control. Why don’t managers switch onto the absurdity of this? Why would anyone perceive this to be motivating? Yet it happens, year after year after year in many organisations around the globe. It is possibly (in my opinion) the single biggest factor in discrediting otherwise useful performance management processes. I am unsure whether it born out of incompetence or laziness, but no one should ever be set an objective which they cannot directly influence. Yes NEVER! There are no extenuating circumstances for such management behaviour. It’s as if people think that SMART really means Specific, Measurable, Awesome, Ridiculous, Terrifying!

Seek success over challenge: Stretch in objective target setting is vital. It is motivating and it facilitates the ability to keep up with ever increasing expectations of our world. However from a motivation perspective the target has to be within the perceived grasp of the owner, if not the balance shifts and most (after an initial flurry of enthusiasm) will not be bothered to attempt it. It is very close in frustration levels to being set an objective that is out our your control and does plenty to discredit otherwise good performance management processes. Managers should not be afraid to ask their staff whether they feel their objectives are within their span of control and influence; then they should listen carefully to the answer. It is beyond me why anyone would ever want their staff performance to be judged on something they cannot humanly achieve. After all, who amongst us would not struggle to find motivation in an objective they cannot attain without the aid of significant divine intervention?

The credibility of your performance management process will in part be dependent upon whether or not these three ideas are managed well within your business. Clarifying the link between operations and vision, secondly engendering an environment within which staff feel valued, and thirdly ensuring that objectives are written at a ‘successful’ level can be transformational when developed as a culture around your existing performance management processes.

The route that facilitates such a culture may require some bold training, the type that doesn’t shy away from the frustrations that exist within the organisation concerning performance management. instead, it squares up to them and shows that when done correctly, Performance Management processes are still a highly valuable tool.

3 Key Reasons to enable your workforce for remote working

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Enabling your workforce for remote learning - Presentation ImageOn the 16th October our own Bob Bannister will be taking the podium to address an audience at the 2018 World of Learning Exhibition at the UK’s NEC on the topic of ‘Enabling your workforce for remote learning’. He writes…

Research indicates that trust is one of the most easily damaged elements for a team who have switched from traditional working space, to remote / virtual ways of working. This means that those managing remote teams and those responsible for remote team development, need to focus specific interventions on engendering and prospering the level of trust between the dispersed group.

There are three key reasons why the level of trust is in danger when working remotely:

1 – The level of relationship between team members is changed and often significantly reduced when remote working. If I don’t know you well, then I am less willing to trust you. This is especially the case with new team members who join the remote team later and so have no prior team relationship from the original co-locate set up.

2 – The credibility of co-workers is less obvious when remote working. When we work alongside each other, we see how others work, what they do etc. We all learn from one another and so improve our practices over time. Both these elements of observation and iterative development (or social learning) take a hit the moment you start working remotely. We trust people who we believe have credibility, so again remote working has the tendency to reduce levels of trust.

3 – The inherent risk goes up.  Both organisational and individual employee risk are often impacted through remote working.  There is potential for less alignment to the organisation, it’s values, goals and direction.  So remote decision making can be challenging and higher risk from an organisational perspective.  But individual vulnerability also moves up, so for all parties the risk is perceived as higher.  We are far less likely to trust in high stake situations.

Click here to download our presentation.

Stop Motivating Your Team!

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

For my whole career I have been under the impression that managers must be the ones responsible for motivating their staff. It stands to reason that if you can demotivate your people by doing the wrong things, you can therefore motivate them by doing the the right things.

There has to be some truth in that. However I’ve always struggled with this idea. Mainly because I am so aware that my own personal motivation levels go up and down like a yoyo and it often has nothing to do with other peoples actions! It comes from within, my own mood energy levels, sugar levels (I’m diabetic), my level of engagement etc. In fact I can be totally motivated to do something one day, but feel woefully demotivated to do the same thing on another. I see it in lots of avenues of my life, a simple example of this might be my motivation in visiting the gym.

If other people’s motivation goes up and down like my own, then how on earth am I supposed to be the one responsible for the motivation of others?

Yes I get that I can impact it, but motivation itself will always come from within the individual. So perhaps as a manager I need to work out what I need to do to create the most positive environment for other peoples motivation to thrive.

I’ve been working at this for a while and want to share with you three things that I find have a significant impact on teams levels of motivation.

Inspire people with purpose

The manager does not need to work at motivation, instead they need to work at inspiring their teams. Just as motivation often comes from within, inspiration often comes from outside. People are inspired when they see something that they admire, desire and or align themselves with.

By focusing on inspiring your staff you will start to propagate the right conditions for motivation to grow and thrive.

What does that look like in practice? The answer is simple, work hard at:

Defining why your team is doing what it is doing and
communicate this all the time.

If the why is clear then it is easy for people to admire it, desire it and or align themselves with it.

Sometimes the purpose will be clear, but most times you will have to work at finessing it. It needs to be inspirational, so it’s no good saying the why is to “line the shareholders pockets with money” or something similar. What we need to find is an inspiring purpose. Here are some possible examples. The finance team might have a purpose to ‘enlighten the organisation with numbers’. The marketing team might have a purpose to ‘excite a specific demographic’. At iManage we’ve defined our own purpose as ‘changing people for good’.

Once you’ve got it, you need to work out how to keep it front of mind, not bottom of drawer. This always takes much much more communication than you imagine. Do what you think and then do ten times that much – you’ll be much closer to what is required. Think through how you make that inspirational purpose live.

Guide people with intent

It’s far easier to be motivated when you understand not only the purpose, but also what is required of you. The key here is to find a way to guide your people even when you are absent from the day’s activities. In short they need to know how you would want things done, if you were present.

This may be easier than it sounds. We use an approach called ‘contextual choices’. The manager provides the contextual choice for the activities of the team – this in turn guides staff in everything they do.

The really clever thing about this technique is it’s simplicity – you have to select one word that speaks volumes about the way you want your team to be guided. Just one word – that’s the rule. Here are some of ours to give you the idea:

For finance it’s ‘safe’.
Marketing it’s ‘fun’.
Sales it’s ‘daily’.
People it’s ‘brilliant’.
Customers it’s ‘thrilled’.
Face to face training it’s ‘challenging’.
Online products it’s ‘simple’. Etc.

You need to give good thought to the choice of word, but once its decided it becomes simplicity to share and embed.

Create commitment in people by giving the authority to where the info is. 

Commitment is such a powerful thing compared to motivation. That’s because commitment is a constant until it’s withdrawn. I may or may not feel motivated to go to the gym today, but I will still go if I am committed to it. It’s the same for almost anything. Motivation goes up and down, but commitment gets things done. So creating commitment is far more important to a manager than always trying to ensure high motivation.

How do we do that? People are committed when they understand what they are committing to (see purpose and intent above) and when they feel able to influence outcomes.

If I can’t control something, if its out of my authority limit, there is no point committing to it – I cant influence it.

So here is what we managers have to do. We have to put the authority where the information is. Which in most cases means we have to stop being the ‘clear it with me first’ person. It’s one of the hardest things to learn as a manager, you have to stop owning the authority and pass it down. Yes they need the skills required, yes they need to get the intent, but with these in place they are the ones best place to make the decisions required.

Let me give you an example: Lets say we’ve decided to carry out some online marketing, pay per click style. Who gets to make the decision as to whether we spend our precious budget with Google, LinkedIn or Facebook or, or? The answer’s not you the manager, it’s the team or individual that have the information. The team that has researched this, that know about it, that deal with it on a regular basis. You have to give the authority to where the information is. Let them make the decision, it will be a faster decision, even a better decision than you would have made because they have all the info.

Ownership for the process and decision ‘rocket up’ the moment you let go and hand it to them. They will be committed to making it work and so committed to making the right decisions at any point in time.

Managers, stop trying to motivate your people!

So there we have it, three things that facilitate a climate which propagates motivation, but do not rely on motivation. Give it a try, begin putting these things in place and begin to release the potential of your teams.

Is Tin Can API the future of tracking learning?

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

As a blended specialist we have been keeping an interested eye on Tin Can, the standard that is set to replace SCORM and finally allow blended to become as seamless as our multi device, multi-platform lives.

A lot has been said about Tin Can in the e-learning and learning tech community but its merits have not been embraced by the wider L&D community. This is a shame as it presents a great opportunity for enriched learning in the modern working environment.

Tin Can API (or  Experience API) allows on and offline learning to be tracked cohesively in one learning record, a highly attractive feature in our multi device, networked world where teams are disparate, stretched but reliant on great training.

This blog is therefore written to introduce Tin Can, xAPI to a wider L&D audience and propose why it is different from other frameworks such as SCORM.

What is an API?

Tin Can is an API which stands for application programming interface. An API acts as the conduit for two systems to talk to each other.

What is Tin Can?

Tin Can is an API that allows learning experiences to be recorded and tracked and reported on from different devices, both on and offline.  This makes it a natural replacement for SCORM which has become highly popular as an e-learning standard and one of the few that became known in the wider L&D world as oppose to the technical e-elearning and digital specialists in the learning sector.

Tin Can is different in that it is capable of encompassing offline experiences alongside online training, creating a new and amazing opportunity for capturing learning journeys.

Why do we need Tin Can?

SCORM, and perhaps AICC, are standards you are likely to know if you are tasked with buying, briefing or administering e-learning content that sits on a learning management system (LMS).

The original AICC was not purpose built for e-learning. It came from a training committee working within aviation. It had various iterations as digital became more mainstream. SCORM was ultimately launched as the web matured but aside from an update in 2004, it never kept pace with how the web was evolving or how we were beginning to use and interact with digital devices.

SCORM cannot easily track activity that occurs outside an LMS, rendering it meaningless in such a multi device world where people want to do training on their commute or outside of the office but where organisations still need to track learning progress. This makes it almost redundant in a world where tablets and smartphones are crucial and increasingly used to access sophisticated web content. Analytics show that mobile browsing in increasing year by year with some websites reporting up to 70% of their overall traffic coming from a mobile device.

The rise of cloud storage and the ability to have courses accessible on demand has also rendered the existing standards as inefficient for modern use. However, some LMS’s have been placed in the cloud but this should lead to users being able to access courses wherever and whenever they want.

This has in part, been made possible through organisations becoming more comfortable with having lots of content in a wide range of places rather than fixed behind a firewall where systems can’t talk to each other. Removing such fixed firewalls opens up the flexibility of the systems and the ability for different systems communicate and in doing so, creating the possibility of tracking a consistent learning journey from a range of different places.

Perhaps, the most important point about the current standards is that they only apply to e-learning which is placed on a LMS with all tracking done within the LMS. This does not take in to consideration any of the myriad of ways that an individual might take on learning, all of which can build up to an effective blended learning experience. Tin Can has the ability of taking offline experiences and learning and track it alongside traditional face to face formalised learning and online e-learning as well as social learning etc. For the first time, all learning outside of an LMS can be tracked as one consistent learning journey.

What makes Tin Can different?

Tin Can is designed to evolve more than SCORM and other standards but there are certain things that will be evident from other standards straight away.

With Tin Can xAPI, content can be hosted anywhere including e-learning which no longer has to be necessarily part of your LMS. You can point to it. This makes externally hosted content from other suppliers now trackable, potentially opening up far more content from other providers.

You don’t need a full LMS or need to launch the course from a LMS in order to track it. A learning record store (LRS), which is not tied to an LMS, can be utilised instead.

Any activity that can output a Tin Can or xAPI statement can be launched from anywhere. This introduces the opportunity of apps which make the user experience enriched when using a tablet or smartphone.

Tin Can allows activities to be tracked without having to be previously programmed in to an LMs. Learners can therefore choose their own content and construct their own learning journey in addition to those prescribed by management or mandatory to their role.

What does Tin Can mean for learners?

For an individual, the biggest advantage is that, for the first time, the user will own their own learning data and will be able to post up things that they have experienced or completed regardless of where the activity took place. This allows a scalable learning log which will be useful for accreditations such as continuing professional development (CPD). It may also be useful to show future employers in much the same way as a CV is currently used to show working history.

The obvious result of moving to a Tin Can standard will be an increase in the amount of data that will be collected via a wide range of channels, devices, both on and offline.  The challenge is then how we manage to process this data.

This will be reliant on certain channels allowing a Tin Can output but this will surely happen as the standard become known.  For example, podcasts, journal articles, kindle files, videos, online courses may include an output.

What sort of information can be recorded in Tin Can?

Like AICC and SCORM, xAPI records time, completion status, score and pass/fail but it can also record experiences; a game changer over e-learning.

This works on an actor-verb-object statement format. SO in addition to something like Bob completed the course, Tin Can will also allow statements such as Bob read an article or Bob listened to a podcast or Bob visited a conference.

This opens up the opportunity of racking an almost endless number of potential experiences being trackable as part of a learning journey.

How much is Tin Can being supported?

Tin Can is out there and is currently being utilised by some technical teams who are exploring its potential. It will only reach this potential if it can be embraced by the wider L&D community and become a part of an accepted specification for blended learning programmes.

For this to happen, those tasked with briefing and buying such programmes need to have confidence in specifying it from their suppliers. For this to happen, there needs to be a wider organisational acceptance that SCORM has moved on and no longer represents the best of breed approach to tracking. For example, some LMS’s may be the remit of hardened IT staff who need to be enlightened and buy in to the wider potential rather than being reluctant in having to learn and use yet another framework.

Until Tin Can wins such hearts and minds throughout all areas of L&D, IT and senior management teams, it will struggle to reach this potential. This may be accelerated by new ways of presenting the outputs in things like dashboards. This will graphically demonstrate the journey and the effectiveness of the standard that will then encourage it to be an ongoing part of the spec for learning content and technology.

Most of the main e-learning authoring tools allow Tin Can statements and some native iOS apps allow content to track rather than the LMS.

It is still early days but in time it will replace SCORM and true multi-device and multi-experience tracking will become not only a reality but a natural, accepted convention reflecting at last how we really learn.

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I'm Bob Bannister, owner, and trainer at iManage Performance, the specialists in training for remote workers and managers with over 20 years of experience in this sector.

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