Monthly Archives: June 2015

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More Differences Between Coaching Entrepreneurs and Corporate Executives

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Last week, we explored some of the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Corporate executives and entrepreneurs share some business imperatives as leaders in their organizations. However, they vary in the way they approach thinking about their businesses and the degree of control they have in operating them.

Corporate executives may have several layers between themselves and the owners. An entrepreneur is the owner often along with some very interested investors who may take close interest in the everyday functioning of the operation.

Last week, a friend and retired CEO who now advises entrepreneurs as part of his ongoing business interests, wrote a note to me and added to the list of issues that an entrepreneur needs to think about when building their business.

Here are more things that the new entrepreneur needs to consider. Most of these things are important to all businesses, but they are critical, do-or-die imperatives in a startup and all within the control of the entrepreneur.

  1. Build structure, not a bureaucracy. Know the difference.
  2. Cash is king, not profitability.
  3. Don’t give away product enhancements. Adjust your price as they are introduced.
  4. Understand your competition before getting started.
  5. Be thorough in establishing your initial price. It’s tough to raise a price, particularly in the startup phase.
  6. Don’t get distracted by outside requests or activities. Your future depends on your new company, not outside events.

When reading through this list, how many of these mistakes do you think a new business will make? Having been involved in a few startups, I have seen a few of these violated without good outcomes.

Which one do you think is most important? Perhaps the most deadly mistake is not realizing that cash is the lifeblood of your organization. Without it, you can’t survive.

As for the others, after you’ve survived, you need to optimize your business’s potential through maximizing operational efficiency, market positioning and pricing by paying attention to the other items on this list. The future health of your new business depends on getting all these things right.

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Talking Leadership Training to Entrepreneurs

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This blog post came out of a conversation today with business coach Hal Alpiar of BusinessWorks.US.  We were discussing the differences between coaching corporate leaders and startup entrepreneurs. I will be joining Hal in BusinessWorks.US to offer co-coaching that brings together our different backgrounds to help clients envision and realize startup success through many facets of business.

 

Many small businesses and startups today are run by former corporate managers. These entrepreneurs bring with them skills and attitudes from big business. This migration is occurring because the business world itself is scaling down from massive lumbering organizations and scaling up to small agile enterprises. Opportunities are in the world of small, nimble businesses.
 

In the entrepreneurial world of startups, all parts of the business process are accelerated and much easier to execute than they were even 10 years ago. The Internet of Everything makes starting and running a business streamlined. Even big, gawky manufacturing, production and logistics have a cleaner line directly to the customer.

Most business processes translate well into the new agile and transparent business environment. However, agile and transparent are not the same thing as quick and easy. A small, agile successful business still requires the same strong business principles and leadership skills of the long path. The people skills and rational decision making behind steering a business don’t lend themselves to short cuts.

Entrepreneurs especially may be susceptible to looking for the streamlined path to leadership and corporate governance. They are focused on their baby. They love the product or service they are developing. They seek sales, not markets. When you are the midst of working in overdrive, obsessed with your creation and trying to make your first few sales, is the most difficult time to step back and look at the longer road.

From Corporate Management to Small Business Leadership

That focus on product development and sales is exactly what baby needs to be nurtured into a viable business.  To organize and sustain that business, though, means strengthening entrepreneurial leadership skills. A little support and hand-holding especially through the first year can help make a smooth transition from corporate management to small business leadership.

Here are some of the issues an entrepreneur faces:

  • When to hire someone and what to look for
  • How to manage a small, possibly virtual, workforce
  • Understanding the difference between cash flow and revenue, and how a shortage of one of those will sink you
  • Why staying close to your customers will help you define your markets
  • Sales, marketing, public relations and corporate communications – what’s necessary and what’s optional when you’re starting out
  • How to maintain a semblance of a personal and/or family life while obsessing over your baby

What are some other issues you can think of that make entrepreneurial leadership training and coaching different than corporate executive coaching?

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Learner Engagement Whenever, Wherever

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Some of the advantages of elearning, on-demand learning, asynchronous learning – whatever you call the ability to access learning at your convenience – are offset by some of the drawbacks such as the potential for learner disengagement during the virtual classroom experience.

Blending Online and Human Interaction for Max Impact

To make sure your learners get the most out of your elearning offerings, take a blended approach and give them credit for participating in virtual environments. Let them know you see them and make it worth their while to take advantage of online learning opportunities. Give recognition and encouragement liberally. Nobody wants to learn in a vacuum.

When computer-based learning first came on the scene, it was a popular bandwagon. After all, a pre-packaged elearning program is a great way to deliver consistent content to all learners on their own time at a relatively low cost per learner. Some online learning proponents predicted  the death of live classes. The rumors of its death were premature.

On-demand or asynchronous learning has earned its place in the training world and it’s irreplaceable. But the live class lives on. The nature of work and the workplace makes means people are accessing learning all the time and so asynchronous learning is needed.  In fact, elearning just makes good sense.  Like other learning modalities, acquisition of knowledge via elearning programs is still best aided by the human factors of getting feedback, asking questions, and having personal support.

Support At All Points Along the Learning Continuum

In light of the importance of the personal interactions, the best uses of elearning takes advantage of its portability, and good program design puts supports around elearners so they have the human connection as well. Here are three ways to use your elearning platforms to maximize their impact:

  1. Pre-learning – As in the flipped classroom. Send information in the form of an audio or video webcast, or a more structured learning program, but deliver this new pre-packaged online information to the student before your live class to enrich the interpersonal learning.
  2. The core experience – Deliver information rich learning in the form of well-crafted elearning modules that are designed around learning objectives, test appropriately at intervals to reinforce learning, and use interactive case studies that demonstrate integration of concepts. Support the online learning program with some flexible human interaction through occasional emails to check in with learners, an online moderated forum discussion platform or a live Q&A with instructors.
  3. Learning support – After a live class, you can support ongoing retention and growth by using a smartphone or tablet-based mobile learning platform to push information to students after the event. Use flexible mlearning platforms to ask your learners questions and gather their input. Push reminders in the forms of small chunks of information. Send a link to a video, audio or pdf with additional information to continue their growth. The goal is to use online individually-controlled and -accessed mini learning events to support your live classroom material.

Ongoing, lifelong, adult learning requires learners to take responsibility for their own growth. You can, however, support their efforts by making information easy to access and by making sure there is a human somewhere along the learning continuum to provide additional information and support.

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2015 – 2020: Five Generations in a Learning Organization

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The workforce is entering a unique period between 2015 and 2020 when fully five generations will be in the labor pool at the same time. Organizational development experts have given much attention to the interpersonal challenges of this circumstance. You can hire any number of experts who will train you how to work to successfully integrate the styles of multiple generations in the workforce. Let me suggest that tensions extend beyond the social implications of this phenomenon.

This particular demographic distribution as shown in the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart below demonstrates a convergence of talents, skills, and attributes that need to be conveyed not from one generation to the next but perhaps from one generation to another that is three degrees removed from it. That transfer presents several challenges including both what and how that learning is relayed. It is also happening in a time of technological advances that alter assumptions about what is important.

 

                                            5 generations in the workplace BLS

Generational filters require that knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA’s in training parlance) not only be captured, but also preserved and translated in such a way that the knowledge itself remains relevant and usable to a workforce with different frames of reference.

In this context, organizations face the challenge of finding their experts and preserving their knowledge in ways that make it accessible to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Start by reflecting on the context of the kind of labor that is leaving your organization. Each business must examine the kinds of KSA’s that built your successful organization so that you can accurately identify what to capture and how to capture it. Then organizations need to create a system for identifying and transferring the critical knowledge and talent that is leaving the workforce in unprecedented numbers.

When people leave, the worst thing that can happen is that they take critical skills sets with them that you cannot replace. The second worst thing that can happen is that, when you discover they possessed irreplaceable pieces of your corporate puzzle, you hire them back as consultants at exorbitant rates on their own time schedule. And the best outcome is that you use their last, best years with your company capturing what they know. If you are shooting for the best outcome, make sure you have a process in place today to preserve your organization’s competitive advantages.

 

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3 Tactics to Gain and Retain Online Engagement

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Hint: Physics holds the answer.

Last week, we talked about maximizing learner engagement during live classes by tapping into the Wisdom of the Crowd. When it comes to deep learning, live classes still have the edge. But we can’t ignore that a lot of learning takes place online both in real time and on demand, and both of those scenarios require different approaches.

People have been learning in real time and space since the first teacher scratched out a picture of a tiger on a rock and told the kids to avoid this animal. Online learning is a brand new medium. We are still learning what we can borrow from live classes and discovering places where we need to have new rules.

One of the biggest challenges in online learning is to keep the learner attending to the program while the distraction of email and temptation of Facebook are beckoning like sirens in their tray.

Beyond “Unmute Yourself”

Most webinars and online classes begin with a simple request: “Please close all your other windows and programs during this class.” It’s a good opening statement. I recommend you use it while you are going over the features of the software such as how to raise your hand and how to unmute yourself.

In addition to the obvious opening directions, a few delivery techniques can keep your learners engaged beyond the first few screens.  To make online learning more engaging, revise some of the rules you use during live classes.

Try these 3 tactics to keep your learners attending:

1. Get feedback. The common wisdom is that if you throw in a few slides with polls throughout the class, you can keep people awake. The reality is that if people are engaged and paying attention, they will participate. But polls alone won’t keep them with you. They are just a measure for you to find out if there are still lucid warm bodies on the other end of your Internet connection.

Feedback is more than a taking a poll, although polls can be very valuable when you use them to gather reaction to your content. When you use them to find out what your class knows, you can direct your presentation in response to gaps and misconceptions that you’ve uncovered. Beyond just finding out what is important to them, use polls, surveys and – yes, the comment box and the venerable microphone – to gather information about what your class understands about your topic.

Uncovering gaps and attitudes will help you provide valuable information. It goes beyond most polling questions that measure what percentage of the class “does this” or “plans to do that” or “prefers thus-and-such”. Find out what they know. After all, it is enlightening when you’ve asked a few questions into silence to find out that the people that have been asked to participate in your class don’t have the background necessary to understand the material. If you find gaps, you can make adjustments to explain difficult concepts rather than just plow through them while your students tune out.

Be concerned about silence and lack of comments. Your students may be bored and talking to friends on Facebook, or they may be in a class that is not appropriate for them and they are lost. Find out which it is and adjust your approach.

2. Keep your online learning to as little as 10 or 20 minutes whenever possible. We’ve adopted the one and two hour online class structure from live events. It’s just not a practical expectation for an online class given the demands on peoples’ time. When a learner is plucked from the work environment and sent to a training room for a morning, they are clearly present. When you ask them to click in from their cubicle or from home, how often do your hear dogs, kids or coworkers vying for their attention? I venture to say most of the time. Knowing this is a fact of life, ask for a small chunk of power-packed time and you are more likely to keep their attention.   Face it, our virtual attention spans are used to 140 characters, click and play, or multi-tasking. Those behaviors don’t change when the content is educational.

By keeping it short, you gain a few things.

First, you are more likely to have their attention for the full amount of content you want to deliver to them. Second, we learn better in small chunks. To pick up the pace of your online classes, schedule a few 10 or 15 minutes sessions and follow it with a half-hour roundup and Q&A session.

3. Provide more slide content. The last holdover from live training that can use an overhaul for online training is our approach to slide design. The live rule is that less is more when it comes to slide content. Some design approaches now recommend that slides have an image and one or two words, leaving the presenter to deliver all the content verbally. Certainly, slides packed with several hundred words of 12-point type are considered verboten in a live presentation.

In an online presentation, let me suggest that you consider the fact that light travels faster than sound. One of the reasons that webinars and online classes drone on for an hour or more is that we are adhering to the slide rule which is usually some version of no more than six words per line, no more than six lines per slide while most of the content is delivered verbally. This approach arose from the fact that very few people can read hundreds of words of agate type from the back of a conference room and concurrently listen to the speaker expound on said content.

Consider, however, that the online learner has the screen directly in front of them and they are staring at your slide with rapt attention (hopefully). Take advantage of this situation. In order to shorten your online delivery programs, both live and asynchronous, the solution is to speak less in an online presentation and give more content on the slide. You still need to avoid squeezing Ulysses onto one slide, but you can deliver an important topline and all the major points on one slide and be very effective. To understand the theory behind this, consider this scenario: when given an option whether to watch a 25 minute video speech or read a pdf transcript that takes maybe five minutes to breeze through, what do you do? Reading the material is a great way to get the same content much more quickly.

Apply this light travels faster than sound theory to your online class to shorten the time you take to deliver content. When structuring slides, place valuable topline points and second level detail on the slides because the learner is looking at the screen and taking in the written material while you are talking. You can make your points even more powerful by adding a few images to reinforce them. Remember, the online viewer is close up to your slide so you can add a few small image enhancements to even further deliver your message. When you speak over the content-rich slides, simply discuss the main points and add a little verbal color, linger a few seconds longer to allow the learner’s eye to find the relevant secondary information, and then move on.

Online learning is an emerging art. These are some observations and tweaks I have been making as I play with the genre. As you test some of these new approaches, refine what works best for you, your material and your learners. As always, the bottom line is respect for your learners and their time.