Best Practices

 INTRODUCTION  Get over it
 Personal Vision
 Use Myers-Briggs
 Be proactive
 Job description
 Quarterly discussions
 Collaborative skills
 Read
 Improve presentations
 Better meetings
 Build your team
 Learn to partner
 Reprint

Jokes, Quotes

 Statisticians do it...

Discussion Board

 Commune with geeks

Our Programs

 INTRODUCTION  Our Approach
 Leaders Circle
 Management Skills
 Consulting Skills
 Presentation Skills
 Teambuilding
 Change Management
 Partnering

Contact Us

 Questions, Jokes
    and Requests

About Us

 Experience, References

Geekpix Contest

 Enter Now

Home Page

 Geeklead Home Page

Our Programs

We consistently earn high ratings from the most challenging geek participants: engineers, statisticians, researchers, computer programmers, developers, architects of systems, biologists, mathematicians, auditors, chemists, and of course, the artificial intelligentsia.

Satisfied client organizations feature the AT&T Labs, the Centers for Disease Control, Cinergy, Compaq Computers, Eaton Corporation, Eli Lilly, Fairmarket, Genetics Institute, Nortel Networks, Opus Telecom, Parke & Davis, Polymer Technologies, Reichhold Chemicals, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and many more.

See the following for more information:

Lasting Results: All our programs are designed to achieve lasting results. While most training programs use a one-time "car wash" (put-em-through, clean-em-up) approach, we use a much more effective continuous method. Leaders Circle: We work with small groups from a mix of backgrounds in ongoing programs, tackling both strategic and interpersonal leadership concepts and skills, to deliver lasting leadership development programs. Management Skills: Ever since the first geek walked the planet, geeks worldwide have struggled with balancing management tasks with technical responsibilities. We provide effective strategies, skills and insight. Consulting Effectiveness: How many excellent geek ideas fail to get implemented because geeks lack the consulting skills to translate concept into organizational practice? Our strategies and skills increase consulting effectiveness. Presentation Skills: Too few geeks can present their ideas as effectively as they can develop them. Our programs use a combination of group and video feedback to achieve lasting improvements. Teambuilding: Putting brilliant people in the same group in no way ensures that they will function optimally as a team. Our programs help geek teams improve communications, strengthen mutual understanding and trust, build on each others' ideas and achieve high levels of synergy and productivity. Change Management: It is natural for organizations and people to resist change. Our programs help geek groups implement new methods and technologies to achieve to reduce resistance and maximize buy-in and support. (The US Navy had access to steam power for many years before they put it to use.) Partnering: Increasingly, it is important for geek groups to partner outside their own department with other departments and organizations. Our programs provide effective strategies and skills to increase partnering effectiveness.

Back to Top

No "Car Wash" Programs

Most training programs use the "car wash" model: they focus on "putting people through the program." Like a car wash, they achieve brilliant results that don't last long in the real world. In the worst (and too familiar) versions of the car wash approach:

• Senior managers or some other department (a training department, a human resources department) get an idea for a program based on complaints, concerns or problems they perceive. They plan a program based on their best guess of what the issues are.
• Trainers are hired who focus on program activities. Program outcomes, results, goals and objectives are not clearly defined.
• For the sake of "efficiency" programs are scheduled as intense, one-time immersion experiences, often two or three-day seminars.
• Participants cannot fully identify with "canned" examples and situations.
• Programs are supposed to be interactive but a vocal minority dominates discussion and many participants are passive or silent.
• Programs bring in intact groups to work on skills to use with other groups e.g. help desk groups learn skills to work with customers.
• Management support is implied but not specified.
• The link between what people learn and how they actually perform their job is neglected.
• Participants rate the program favorably, describing it as "interesting."
• Actual lasting results of the program are minimal.

Our approach differs from the car wash from the very beginning and at every step along the way. We deliver programs that are especially useful for technical professionals

• We begin programs by clarifying program outcomes. What do the program sponsors want to achieve? How will we know that the program is successful?
• We involve participants in program design from the outset. We begin most programs by interviewing all participants to discuss their issues and interests and to test the relevance and completeness of the draft program agenda.
• We spread programs over time, building in opportunities and expectations for participants to apply what they learned and return to monitor progress and take next steps. We often redesign a traditional two-day seminar as a on-day seminar with two half-day follow-ups, or as four half-day programs.
• We draw extensively on participants' real experiences and interests for case material.
• Using our extensive experience in facilitation and case method teaching we ensure that all participants participate actively and comfortably to ensure hands-on learning.
• We work closely with senior management to support programs and help participants understand how the program impacts their everyday work. We may ask senior managers to: actively participate in key topics in the program, introduce the program, write a brief memo to the group explaining why the organization is having the program and what outcomes the senior manager hopes it will achieve.
• We often involve other groups in key parts of the program. For example, if we are training on how effective performance discussions, we often work together with the managers and employees who participate in these discussions instead of just working with the managers

For more information, go to the Contact Us page on this Web site.

Back to Top

Leadership Learning That Lasts

Our Leaders Circle programs depart radically from run-of-the-mill leadership seminars to produce more effective learning and lasting results.  Our programs feature:

• Ongoing monthly half-day workshops spread over a year. Each workshop features leadership training and discussion of group members' business cases. Group members host meetings in rotation in their own organization's facilities.
• Small groups of 6 - 12 participants so that group members get to know each other and develop an ability to comment intelligently on each other's issues and opportunities.
• Strategic mix of participants from a cross-section of organizational backgrounds form a community of practice. Participants work with others who understand their business but do not directly compete.
• Learning blend of leadership skills, strategies, communications skills, peer group feedback, 360-degree survey reporting, analysis and support.

Who Should Participate

The Leaders Circle approach is especially relevant and effective for technical professionals. Any manager will benefit from the Leaders Circle program, but some managers in particular will achieve outstanding results. The program focuses on more experienced managers and technical professionals who are often overlooked in management training and development, the core of senior staff who get the job done, the 20% of the people who are responsible for 80% of their organization's success. These are people who:

• Have reached a plateau in their development and growth
• Constantly strive to improve and want to acquire new ideas and skills
• Are looking to broaden the definition of their jobs and responsibilities
• Want to add more value to their organization

The Leadership Circle provides important, unique outcomes and benefits both for individual participants and for the organizations that sponsor them.

Outcomes and benefits for individual participants include:

• Professional and career development
• Increased promotability and growth
• Enhanced job performance and productivity
• Development and often, enlargement of job responsibilities for maximum value
• Increased perspective to identify key issues and emerging opportunities
• Increased job satisfaction and motivation
• Improved, enlarged skills base and performance of key leadership tasks
• Development of lasting peer resource network

• Participants' enhanced job performance and productivity
• Participants' skills development and increased perspective
• Participants' ability to redefine and enlarge their job for maximum value
• Participants' strengthened working relationship with their managers
• Professional development needs met for key staff
• Improved organizational retention, reduced turnover of key staff
• Enhanced organizational learning through the influx of new ideas and skills
• Enlarged, strengthened networks with other organizations

Back to Top

Former New York Yankee manager Casey Stengel expresses the frustration many technical managers experience. Despite their best intentions and strenuous efforts, they achieve minimal results. For many if not most leaders, even experienced ones, their technical and professional expertise exceeds their management skills. Ever since the first geek walked the planet, geeks worldwide have struggled with balancing management tasks with technical responsibilities. We provide effective strategies, skills and insight to achieve this balance, build essential skills and competencies and increase technical professionals' comfort with leadership tasks and responsibilities.

Our programs feature both strategic and interpersonal skills:

• Clarifying management and leadership roles, responsibilities and opportunities
• Building awareness, mutual understanding, respect and trust; valuing diversity
• Improving one-on-one skills for giving feedback, motivating, listening
• Managing performance, coaching and counseling
• Managing time, clarifying and following priorities
• Running more effective meetings, improving group communications skills
• As a special feature, we often use 360-degree perceptions surveys to provide participants with confidential data on their management and leadership effectiveness

Our programs produce both tangible performance measures and more intangible gains:

• Improved performance of everyday tasks and responsibilities
• Definition and pursuit of new tasks
• More effective job performance by people participants manage
• More effective communications within and between participants' groups
• Professional development, reduced turnover
• Building of a career identity that effectively includes management tasks

We have worked in over two hundred situations to improve management and leadership performance. Cases include:

• Software developers in a dot.com
• IT managers and executives
• Statisticians and quality assurance professionals
• Auditors
• Researchers and analysts
• Technical professionals and managers e.g. programmers, software developers, analysts, researchers, engineers, improving management, communications and organizational skills
• Manufacturing managers and supervisors improving performance management
• Architects, engineers, accountants, building skills in managing other professionals
• Experienced professionals (architects, engineers, programmers, technical writers, analysts) moving into management positions

Back to Top

This is the question thousands of technical professionals in consulting roles ask as their clients accept their reports but fail to use their ideas. Increasing numbers of people function in consulting roles in IT, quality, statistics, analysis, audit, finance, engineering and many other fields. They bring a wealth of experience and skill to their positions, but often fail to achieve the potential they offer. Often, they confuse consulting with "giving advice" rather than "adding value."Our training and development programs provide participants with the strategies, skills and insights to increase their overall effectiveness in consulting tasks. Programs feature:

• Clarifying consulting problems, roles, and opportunities
• Developing tools to better understand client needs and priorities
• Improving one-on-one skills for giving ideas and suggestions and incorporating client input
• Using a collaborative approach to involve both consultant and client without compromise
• Contracting strategies that clarify expectations and create a solid collaborative client relationship from the very beginning of the project
• Leading group discussions for maximum involvement and positive discussion
• Developing strategies and skills to increase partnering success
• If possible, we involve clients by having them participate in parts of the program. We can also survey clients prior to programs and use data to focus training.

Our programs produce both tangible performance measures and more intangible gains:

• Improved value-added of the consulting function to the organization
• Increased client satisfaction, repeat business and use of consulting ideas
• Lasting processes and materials to improve communications and performance
• New projects that benefit both client and consultant
• Reduced frustration, improved job satisfaction by consultants

We have provided over fifty effective in-organization consulting effectiveness programs. Cases include:

• Consulting departments with strong technical skills that want to improve their effectiveness in partnering and working more effectively with customers e.g. consultants e.g. quality, statistics, audit, IT, R&D, analysis, engineering, etc.
• Government agency employees working in consulting roles across agency lines increasing their clients' buy-in to fully implement their recommendations and ideas
• Consulting departments clarifying their vision and mission and translating that vision into everyday staff priorities and tasks
• Consulting departments in monitoring roles e.g. audit and quality, that want to work in a more collaborative way with customers

Back to Top

How many excellent technical ideas get lost because they are presented ineffectively? Unfortunately, the joke about the extraverted engineer is too true to the facts. Technical professionals of all types struggle to communicate their ideas effectively in many forums but the struggles are most poignant and most visible in presentations.

It's not all the fault of the technical professionals. Presenting complex technical information is a challenge. How much should one present? In what form? How much detail is too much? Too little? How intelligent is the audience? Intelligent enough to understand the concepts?

Participants in our presentations skills programs significantly improve their effectiveness as a because of our unique program design.

In an initial workshop we discuss basic presentation issues, concepts, problems and best practices. We also explore participants' personality profiles and how those profiles influence participants' starting points in presentations.

Participants then present an excerpt of a real presentation to the group. We videotape the presentation, then discuss the participant group's feedback using our balanced scoresheet. We also record the feedback. Participants leave the session with scoresheets from all the participants and the videotape.

Responding to the feedback and their own analysis of the video, participants return several weeks later to do a second presentation. We video and discuss these as well, focusing on where each participant has made progress and where they still need to work.

Our presentations skills programs differ from others in that we:

• Focus on the special problems and opportunities technical presenters face
• Emphasize deciding what to present and what not to, distinguishing between the overall "argument" and less meaningful details
• Address how to integrate audiovisual interpretation and tools
• Explore how to develop a style that is both natural and effective, whatever your personality profile may be
• Develop comfort and confidence as well as technical skill in presenting
• Examine how to involve an audience effectively
• Explore how to facilitate a balanced, positive discussion of what you present

Our programs produce both tangible performance measures and more intangible gains:

• Improved performance in all kinds of presentations
• Increased ability to participate in marketing and sales activities
• Increased comfort and confidence with making presentations
• Expansion of business development activity resulting from increased communications effectiveness
• New projects resulting from increased communications
• Reduced frustration, improved job satisfaction
• Increased application and implementation of technical concepts

We have provided numerous effective in-organization presentations programs. Cases include:

• Researchers presenting findings to client groups of 10 – 20
• Scientists working on improving presentations to large groups (100 – 200) at professional association conferences
• Analysts presenting their ideas at monthly staff meetings of 35 – 40
• Developers presenting their ideas at client meetings of 30
• Architects presenting proposals in bid situations

Back to Top

Teamwork does not happen automatically, it takes a conscious, thoughtful effort. Our programs bring team members together to work on clarifying team vision, improving communications skills and hand-offs, building mutual understanding and trust and increasing competence in group problem-solving. Our teambuilding programs feature:

• Program design of several workshops to build in applications and follow-through
• Extensive interviewing of participants and stakeholders prior to workshops to ensure workshop relevance and focus
• Clarifying vision, roles and responsibilities and exploring opportunities
• Building mutual understanding, respect and trust
• Running more effective meetings
• Developing skills in solving problems and reaching consensus

Our teambuilding programs include both tangible and intangible improvements:

• Improved performance of everyday group tasks and responsibilities
• Definition of new tasks and opportunities for the group to explore
• More effective handoffs and sharing or information among team members
• Less duplicated work, more individuals working with each others' ideas
• Less conflict and miscommunications
• More agreement and focus of shared vision and focus

We have worked with over a hundred teams to improve performance, quality, productivity, problem-solving and communications. Cases include:

• Technical teams e.g. statisticians, analysts, researchers, engineers, software developers, accountants improving communications with each other and with their customers
• New product development teams strengthening skills in innovation and creativity Multidisciplinary teams increasing mutual understanding and trust
• Project teams improving communications, hand-offs and sharing of information
• Management teams developing and implementing common vision and goals

Back to Top

It is only natural for people and organizations to resist change. The US Navy failed to place steam-powered ships in their fleets for many years after the ships were proven conclusively to be superior to sail. The French government similarly failed to implement pasteurization for many years. Every business school library has at least a row of books chronicling change management failures.

At the same time it is essential for organizations of all types to develop competence in implementing change. It is especially important for the technical professionals who develop new technologies and processes to have those technologies implemented.

Part of the problem lies with organizations, which usually have more departments that can kill a new idea than departments that can implement one. Few organizations have effective mechanisms to pilot and roll out useful new technologies, methods and innovations.

In an era when the entire life cycle of a new technology can be less than a year, it doesn't make much sense to have employees complaining "I wasn't hired to do this" when asked to tackle new challenges. Yet most organizations lack an effective mechanism to help managers and employees continuously update job priorities and manage performance effectively.

Program

Our program on change management provides participants with two essential tools:

• How to develop organization-wide focus and strategies to clarify the outcomes of new methods and technologies and their links with organizational issues
• A mechanism managing change at the grass-roots level by "contracting" with employees to update and redefine everyday job priorities and outcomes

• Understanding why and how organizations of all types classically resist change
• Understanding why and how individuals, even risk-averse ones find change threatening
• How to develop an overall organizational strategy for implementing new methods and technologies
• How to redefine all employees' everyday job priorities to reward using new methods, innovations and technologies
• Having participants draft goal-based work plans for themselves and their subordinates
• Establishing a collaborative framework for change to increase acceptance and buy-in

Our programs produce both tangible performance measures and more intangible gains:

• Clear, ongoing organizational change implementation strategies
• More effective knowledge management
• More effective organizational and individual use of new methods and technologies
• An ongoing mechanism for employees and managers to write and update everyday job priorities
• Increased alignment between employees and organizational work effort and organizational goals
• Reduced conflict resulting from clear expectations

We have worked in over fifty situations to improve change management. Cases include:

• Implementing groupware applications to improve project communications
• Implementing project start-up processes to improve communications and syergy between two conflicting departments
• Changing project manager job definitions and priorities in an established telecom corporation
• Outsourced service professionals clarifying new job performance customer service metrics

Back to Top

However, many partnering arrangements fail outright or fall far short of expectations. In some cases, problems arise because the managers who establish the partnering arrangement fail to clarify what "partnering" means or because they didn't take it to mean very much in the first place. In others problems arise despite manager's best efforts to have partnering succeed.

Problems

Often, partnering problems follow a pattern:

• Customer organizations cancel contracts with technically qualified service providers because the service providers don't listen and communicate effectively.
• Mergers and acquisitions take many (expensive) months beyond plan to be implemented because of confusion, miscommunication and conflict in the field.
• Strategic alliances fail to "gel" because managers and employees in the different companies are unable to work effectively with each other's ideas.
• Working relationships among contractors on a large project become tangled. Each contractor performs its own tasks well but the contractors disagree about handoffs, gray areas, roles and responsibilities.
• Companies outsource critical internal functions (real estate, audit, quality, human resources, even strategic planning) to external service providers because the internal departments failed to respond to the needs and priorities of business units.

Many people think design and construction projects suffer from conflict and miscommunications and rightfully so. Up until ten years ago the litigation costs for large projects often exceeded the direct costs of project work. With ten to twenty different organizations working on a project and no clear chain of command or leadership, conflict and miscommunications were inevitable.

Yet the design and construction industry has also spawned an effective methodology for increasing partnering success. About twenty years ago the Army Corps of Engineers developed an approach to partnering that has proven so effective that many government agencies and large corporations now require it. The major professional associations in the industry --- Associated General Contractors, American Institute of Architects and American Council of Consulting Engineers --- all endorse partnering and provide materials to train their members.

We have led over a hundred successful partnering programs for design and construction projects, written a standard text on partnering (W Ronco and J Ronco, Partnering Manual For Design and Construction, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1996) and enhanced the original Army Corps of Engineers approach. We have also successfully applied our approach in over a hundred non-construction situations: outsourcing, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, sales, support, government agencies and interdepartmental alignment.

Our partnering programs provide the structure and skills necessary to increase partnering success. Effective partnering usually means bringing together multiple layers of participants from the organizations involved to work on clarifying goals, developing communications procedures and building mutual understanding and trust. Our partnering programs typically feature:

• Program design of several workshops spread over time to build in follow-through
• Active involvement of multiple levels of participants from the organizations involved
• Extensive interviewing of participants and stakeholders prior to workshops to ensure workshop relevance and focus
• Work on clarifying issues, building consensus on common goals, clarifying roles and responsibilities and exploring opportunities
• Building mutual understanding and trust
• Developing specific processes and procedures for ongoing effective communications
• Work with participants between workshops to assist in implementing commitments

Partnering programs achieve both tangible/ quantitative performance outcomes and more intangible/ qualitative results in improving relationships:

• Achieving tangible performance measures for goals in ---
  • Revenue and profitability
  • Productivity and performance
  • Quality and reliability
  • Cost reductions and efficiencies
• Clarifying partnering goals and objectives
• Building mutual understanding and trust
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities
• Developing lasting mechanisms, processes and procedures to enhance communications

Our partnering case portfolio includes:

• Strategic alliances among multiple service providers
• Mergers and acquisitions in software and telecommunications
• Internal service departments including quality, research, audit, graphics, facilities and their internal customers and business units
• Government agency alliances in public health and housing
• Global partnering alignment of different regions within the same company participants manage
• More effective communications within and between participants' groups
• Professional development, reduced turnover
• Building of a career identity that effectively includes management tasks

Also visit our Web site completely dedicated to effective partnering at www.improvingpartnering.com.

Back to Top