The recent impact of storms such as Harvey, Irma, and María prompted us to take another look at how we do our work as learning and development professionals. Consider the following situation.

Lena is the talent and development leader for the implementation of a new customer service application at a bank. The training component of the plan involves four weeks of intensive classroom-based training for the system’s different modules to be delivered by Subject Matter Experts who became learning and development facilitators after undergoing an intensive train-the-trainers session. All sessions have been scheduled weeks in advance to minimize business interruptions. Supporting materials have been printed. A mirror image of the system was recreated so that participants can practice without fear of deleting anything. All eyes are on Lena and her team.

Lena is leading the last meeting before the training’s launch in two days to review logistics and any other issues that need to be addressed. Her assistant asks her to step out for a moment for an announcement: a hurricane warning has been issued. Hurricane and tropical storm force winds will strike the area within 36 hours. At least twelve inches of rain are expected and even more in some areas. Management decided that All employees must prepare their offices and then leave the premises for final preparations at home.

Lena remains calm and thinks about what to do when she returns to her meeting.

What would you do if you receive such a warning? Does your company or emergency team have plans for this type of situation? Are you prepared? Perhaps you were in Lena’s situation when warnings for Harvey, Irma, or María were issued for your area.

Do you ignore the warning? Do you pretend that nothing is happening and send everyone to their teams for instructions? Do you panic and tell everyone to go home and take cover?

As Talent Development leader, you have a responsibility to the business, and, at this time, most importantly, to your colleagues. 

It’s time to stop and think. Priorities are different and your plans will have to change.

Before you make any decisions about the training, consider the following:

• What is the relationship between the training program and the business strategy?
• How much flexibility do you have to reschedule the training program after the emergency?
• Who are the mission-critical participants who must receive training and who can be trained later, or, perhaps, receive the information in another way?
• How relevant will be topic of the training after the emergency?
• What can you do to minimize impact on the business if some of the participants cannot attend the training? Have you identified back-ups either for their regular positions or for their participation in the training?
• Will all of your trainers be able to deliver the training? Do some of them have any potential special needs such as access to transportation in case roads are blocked?
• Do the training facilities have emergency power generators, back-up servers, and water supplies?
• What can you do if power fails in the middle of a session because of lack of stability in the supply?
• Are your trainers ready to handle technology glitches “on the spot”?

Business must continue after the emergency, yet it cannot be business as usual. People’s needs and priorities changed. Flexibility is key.

Here are some suggestions for you to handle the situation after the emergency.

• Contact all trainers after the emergency to check on their well-being and have someone do the same with all participants.
• Verify the status of the training facilities.
• Reschedule sessions based on priorities and ease of access for trainers, participants, and support staff.
• Consider new traffic patterns and shorter regular business hours of services such as banks, gas stations, pharmacies, and supermarkets as you design your new training schedule.
• Reassign trainers and participants to sessions considering their particular needs such as transportation and family situations.
• Relax the dress code as much as possible because many people may have limited access to power and water.
• Make arrangements to provide snacks and meals on site since food services may be limited right after the emergency. Your coffee break may be the only hot beverage that some of them have for the day.
• Include cell phone/Internet breaks so that trainers and participants can handle any emerging business or personal issues.
• Facilitate access to electricity to charge cell phones and other tools during training.
• Allow time to talk about the experience when they get together for the first time so that they can move on to the day’s business.
• Be empathic with those who may have suffered major losses and who may be reacting emotionally.
• Understand that some may overreact when they hear any news about weather while they are in training based on their experience during the emergency.
• Meet with your trainers at the end of every day to get their feedback and make any other changes to your plans as personal and business needs change.

Events such as hurricanes and other similar natural emergencies demand contingency planning, in other words, a Plan B, Plan C, and Plan d. As training and development professionals, we need to think of any possible causes for changes, cancellations, or reschedules.

We invite you to consider the issues that we presented here when you design your own contingency plans for your next project. All eyes will be on you.

Today it is a storm. Tomorrow could be something else. Prepare for the unexpected.

The beginning of the year gives us a great opportunity to take stock of where we are and where we want to be in the next 12 months. Moving beyond traditional New Year’s resolutions, as professionals we need to focus on what is important for us, our careers, and our businesses so that we can plan to take action.
Let’s meet Jill, Brad, and Annette.
Jill is the manager of the mortgage closing department. She is in charge of 12 employees whose functions have different levels of complexity. She already completed their performance reviews for 2016 and identified their development goals for 2017. Each one has an individual plan focused on some competencies that need to be strengthened and others that need to be acquired for the employee to become more effective in their current role. Some have even been identified as high potential employees, which means they will have even more growth opportunities. In addition, Jill has already scheduled a meeting with her own manager where she will discuss the plan that Jill designed for her own development.
Brad is an independent consultant who specializes in organizational cultural change. His business depends on his knowledge and expertise. He must remain current on the latest trends in cultural shifts so that he can be a valuable advisor to his clients. Brad built his brand by being present in different activities many of which, on the surface, do not seem to be development-oriented yet actually are. For instance, Brad hears about what local subsidiaries of international companies are doing by attending networking events where he interacts with clients and competitors. He stays informed about emerging key players reading specialized and general business publications either online or in print. Further, he asks lots of questions about subjects that catch his interest to discover hidden business opportunities.
Annette is an individual contributor at the marketing department of a major automobile distributor. Even though she is not interested in a management position, Annette has made it clear to her supervisor that she is interested in expanding her role in the company. Annette is thoroughly familiar with the business strategy beyond that of her specific department. She seeks cross-training opportunities, volunteers for special assignments, attends meetings of professional associations, networks internally and externally, and reads anything that crosses her desk or her mobile devices. Over the years, Annette has become an expert in targeted marketing and is often invited to speak at local events.
Jill, Brad, and Annette have in common that they place value in development for themselves and for their businesses.
Consider the following key benefits of owning the value of development for you:

• Become recognized as an expert.
• Find multiple ways to contribute to the business’s bottom line.
• Provide better service to your internal and external clients.
• Receive financial and intangible rewards as companies see employee development as a retention tool.
• Have documentation about your activities and their results readily available to showcase or to remind yourself of what you have achieved.
• As a manager, earn a reputation for being a people developer whose employees are ready to take multiple roles.
• As a leader, get recognized for thinking about talent beyond the boundaries of your department.

Here’s how your development benefits your company:

• Companies with a roster of experts build reputations for being knowledgeable, which usually translates into a stronger brand.
• Clients are willing to pay for the expertise that they lack internally, thus they are more likely to support businesses that can provide such expertise.
• You’ll gain higher levels of customer satisfaction and greater employee engagement
• Increased value for shareholders who tend to trust a company whose workforce has solid expertise.

Whether you are an individual contributor, a manager, or an independent practitioner, set up some time to start owning the value of development by asking yourself the following questions:

• Where are you now from a professional standpoint? For instance, is this is your dream job or just a job? Do you feel passionate? What are your strengths? What are your development needs?
• Where do you want to be? Are you satisfied with your current role? What else would you like to do in the organization or elsewhere? (If you don’t know, go to first bullet)
• What do you need to get there? For instance, which competencies will be required and which ones will be “nice to have”? Do you have them at the expected level for expanding your current role or doing something different altogether? What is your assessment of the skills and competencies of your employees or yourself?
• How much time will you need to strengthen or acquire those competencies or skills? Given your current time commitments, how many skills and competencies will you be able to target in the coming year? Will you need to distribute your plan over more than one year so that you can meet all of your responsibilities or those of others?
• What resources do you have available to do so? Which company-sponsored opportunities can you leverage for your or your employees’ development? Who are the key players in the area that you would like to explore? Who can introduce you to those key players? Do you have access to talent development professionals, training managers, career coaches or mentors to guide you along this process?
• What kinds of investments will you need to make? Will you need to postpone some personal projects, such as short term courses, certifications or degrees? Will you need to incur in expenses to join professional organizations? Will you have to upgrade your technological or other tools so that you can enroll in e-learning programs? Will you need to request additional budget to support an employee’s participation in particular program?
• How will strengthening or developing your skills or competencies (or those of your employees) contribute to the bottom line of the business? For instance, which specialized knowledge will be of value for that new product line scheduled for a mid-2017 launch? Will learning another language make someone a more attractive candidate for an international special assignment?

Keeping track of and measuring your success as you own the value of development does not have to become an unwieldy project that could keep you from moving forward. To help track your progress, consider the following tools:

• observation and feedback from peers, supervisors and company leaders
• company indices such as company results, performance evaluations, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement surveys
• percentage of repeat customers
• comments and ratings of products and services
• rewards and recognitions

No matter what else you do this year, taking ownership of the value of your professional development should be at the top of your list.

Every annual conference entails lots of anticipation, preparation, and, simply, running around.  Presenters submit proposals to share their work with colleagues many months before the event hoping to be part of the final program.  As time goes by, checking for that critical e-mail about the status of the submission becomes a daily ritual.  When the e-mail arrives saying that the proposal was accepted, another frantic cycle of activity begins to prepare the presentation, send documents, order giveaways, plan your attire, and meet deadlines.  After all, attendees deserve your best work.  If the proposal is not accepted, then you sit back and begin to think about another topic for the following year.  Either way, you are totally committed to getting the most out of your time at the conference.  Every minute counts!
Meanwhile, logistics must be addressed.  When to register?  Where to stay?  How to get there?  Will the airline take points for this trip?  Would the family enjoy a visit to the host city?
When the program is final, you begin to select which sessions to attend; the new app lets you plan your schedule from anywhere at any time. What’s your main learning goal? Do you want to go deeper into your areas of expertise or explore new interests? Do you want to see well-known speakers or newcomers? Do you need any particular products or books to start or grow your business? Who will be there? Who do you want to meet? Who do you need to meet?
You arrive at the conference full of excitement. Perhaps you met some other attendees while on travel or at the badge pick up line. You discuss your plans. You meet a group for dinner to continue building connections. You use the conference’s back channels to stay up to date on what happens and share your thoughts.
In three days, before you even know it, WHOOSH! It’s over!
Now it’s time to look back and focus on what really matters: what you learned while attending the conference.
Today we share with you our top takeaways from this year’s ATD ICE 2016.

• We are an ageless workforce: look beyond generations and labels
• Succession planning is STILL a scary movie
• Employee engagement remains a hot topic
• Blended learning allows you to reach larger audiences
• The importance of using the “RIGHT” assessment tool for the client’s needs cannot be underestimated
• Storytelling is here to stay
• Participants expect trainings to be shorter, and shorter, and shorter
• Graphics, illustrations, and pictures are powerful to deliver your message
• Brand: “ME” for career development
• Leadership, leadership, leadership

At the end, as Learning and Development professionals, we are responsible for our own learning to mature, to create, and to bring the best of us to our organizations regardless of our role.
Make sure that your knowledge is current. Share it. Become the change agent, the promoter of employee engagement, and the thought leader that the business needs.

See you in Atlanta for ATD’s ICE 2017!

The beginning of the year is an excellent time to take stock of your department’s work, as well as of your career as a learning and development professional. Just as you need to document your department’s accomplishments, you must examine your contributions and document them. We can easily get carried away with the demands of our internal clients. Consequently, we tend to forget that we need to develop ourselves before we can develop others. 

As you reflect on the information that you are being asked to provide to document the learning and development department’s accomplishments for 2015, ask yourself the following questions: 

• When was the last time that I reviewed my job description?
• How have my duties and responsibilities changed since the last time that I reviewed it?
• How are my individual objectives related to those of the department and, in turn, to those of the organization?
• Why are my objectives important? What would be the impact on the organization if I did not achieve them?
• Where do I see myself in this organization in the future?
• What do I need to do to get there?
• How much progress have I made in my development plan? Have my needs or priorities changed?
• What are my strengths and weaknesses?
• How am I keeping track of what I do and the impact of my work so that I can report it easily?
• When was the last time that I updated my profile or resumé in the organization’s database? 

A careful review of your job description and how it has changed will enable you to see what you are expected to accomplish in very concrete terms. The job description can serve as a reminder of what you are supposed to do; all those other tasks that you perform should be fully aligned and related to your core responsibilities. This document should also highlight which competencies you are expected to have and demonstrate. 

As you review your job description and your objectives, you should be able to see how your role contributes to the department and, in turn, the organization. Any disconnects need to be addressed and corrected quickly. Schedule a meeting with your manager or supervisor to clarify those connections and take appropriate corrective actions. By doing so, your career and the organization will benefit. 

Assess your work over the course of the year. How did you contribute to the department’s success? Which actions did you take? Make sure that you use strong action verbs in past tense to describe those actions and that you include any quantitative measures that you have available. For example, instead of saying: “Conducted trainings on consultative sales”, you may consider: “Facilitated 15 sessions of consultative sales training for 225 sales representatives from x, y, and z departments that resulted in an average increase in closed sales of 10 percent.” Remember that the organization’s leaders see the world in terms of numbers. 

Most of us have some idea of what we would like to do in the future. Some of us are very pleased with where we are and would like to continue doing what we do for a long time. However, many are interested in exploring other areas within learning and development or in other functions. 

​Knowing which way you would like to take your career is the most important step towards getting there. Once you identify the role that you would like to have in the future, you need to find out its requirements so that you can take a critical look at your strengths and weaknesses relative to that potential new role. We tend to be good at what we like to do and not so great at what we do not like to do, so those achievements will shed light on your strengths. 

Your development plan is an excellent tool to guide your preparation for that next role or perhaps to reinforce your competencies in your current role. Review it and propose any changes to your manager or supervisor when you discuss last year’s achievements and the department’s plans for the coming year, as well as your own career goals. What about volunteering for a special assignment? Any possibilities of shadowing a more experienced facilitator? Perhaps you can work in the administration of the employee engagement survey or research best practices for the organization’s succession planning process. 

Finally, look at your profile or resumé. Did you include your most recent achievements and recognitions? Does it present an accurate picture of where you have been and of your value to the organization? Does it grab the attention of whoever may be looking for someone with your experience for that new role that you identified? 

​Maintaining an up-to-date resumé is a worthwhile endeavor because it is a way to present your contributions to the organization. It also demonstrates that you care about your career enough to invest time in preparing such a document. 
Remember: Taking care of your career is also taking care of the business. 

In the first part of this article, we shared with you what is a teambuilding and some questions that you should answer while deciding if a teambuilding is the best option to address the situation that your business is facing.

​We will now introduce four types of teambuildings and when it is best to use each one of them. They are:

• Focused on developing specific skills
• Geared towards solving problems
• To get to know the team members’ personalities
• Based on physical activities held in the outdoors

Which one is the best option for your business? The answer lies on the real needs of the group as well as on what you want to achieve with the intervention.
Employees who are working only to address a particular situation could benefit from a problema solving session.

Supervisors who are facing problems with their teams whose members are not following instructions could begin with a training about communications and then have sessions to get to know the team members’ personalities.

A group that is not achieving expected results could focus on solving problems.
Employees who do not focus on the task at hand and yes on talking about each other could participate in a session to get to know the team members’ personalities and others to develop specific skills that would help them to interact productively.

A leader who understands, explains, models, applies, and follows-up on what happens during the team building WILL make a difference.
Remember: if you do not understand the reasons behind those behaviors that you are observing, the teambuilding will only be a band-aid.

For additional information, please visit our Facebook page, The Human Factor Consulting Group Inc. and learn more of our books at www.td.org/noise  and  www.td.org/torch

What comes to mind when you hear: “We are going to have a teambuilding!”?

• Esmeralda, Jaime and Luis do not speak to Pablo (supervisor).
• Sofía insulted Mario in the middle of a project meeting. Now no one speaks to anyone else.
• Osvaldo complains that no one cleans up the kitchen after lunch and he claims lack of team spirit.
• Everyone does as she pleases in the sales department; there is no team spirit. At the end of the workday, they all go separate ways and do not socialize together.
• Many businesses decide to have a teambuilding when confronting situations such as those mentioned above.

However, a teambuilding is not a band-aid… it is an intervention to facilitate interactions and promote cohesion within a team including aspects such as trust, communication, and integration among its members.
Having a teambuilding before carefully analyzing what is going on in the Company could be premature at best.

• So, next time when someone talks about having a teambuilding, stop and seek the underlying symptom.

Here are some questions to get you started:

• What do we want to accomplish with the teambuilding?
• What is going on? Is it circumstantial, incidental, or recurring?
• How do we want to accomplish it?
• What has to change?

​Remember: if you do not understand the reasons behind those behaviors that you are observing, you will not be able to address them.
We will present the different types of teambuilding and how to select the one that will help you to obtain the best results in Part II of this article so that the teambuilding does not become a band-aid.
​
For additional information, please visit our Facebook page, The Human Factor Consulting Group Inc. and learn more of our books at www.td.org/noise  and  www.td.org/torch