ASTD 2011 Conference Daily - Issue 1 - (Page 1)

Reporter’s Notebook: Sunday Sessions The key to growing organizational capacity is building individual capacity, said Beverly Kaye, CEO of Career Systems International, in her Sunday session, “Career Maps to Career Apps: Developing Tomorrow’s Careerists.” To keep good talent today, employers may need to bend the rules a bit and look for ways to give talent what they want. At times, Kaye said, “You will have to fight for your talent and decide which you will keep—the rules or the people.” Kaye also provided some tips to navigate today’s high-tech and rapidly changing environment: Know how technology and the world in which you live are changing your profession and what you and your employees need to do to take advantage of these changes. Development 2.0: From Career Maps to Career Apps Marshall Goldsmith urged attendees Sunday at his session, “Leading Your Own Engagement and Stakeholder Relationships.” He shared that engagement begins when employees take ownership of their behavior and work to find their “mojo,” or the experience of meaning and happiness that starts on the inside and radiates out. Participants practiced using active questions (“What did you do this week to meet your goals?”) that focus on what one can do to make a positive difference, rather than passive questions (“How engaged are you?”) that put the engagement onus on a company or leader. “Don’t waste your time trying to engage people who don’t care,” You Can Lead a Horse to Water… Alfredo de Castro and Linda David address attendees at the International Orientation on Sunday morning. de Castro will be speaking at two sessions, M112 on Monday afternoon and W207 on Wednesday morning. Conference attendees lined the floor and aisles, eager to get the edge on emerging learning technologies in the popular session, “Mobile Learning in the 2020 Workplace.” Jeanne Meister, creator of The New Learning Continued on page 2 Mobile Learning Momentum Strengths Lead to Exponential Improvements In his Monday General Session keynote, Marcus Buckingham will discuss the correlation between engaged employees and proﬁts and productivity. Here Buckingham answers a few questions about employee performance and strengths and what to expect from his session. What prevents companies from focusing on building strengths as opposed to improving weaknesses? There are three seductive mindsets that lure companies into focusing on weaknesses rather than strengths. One is negative, one pragmatic, and one positive. The negative mindset is that companies are afraid that hiring a weakness without addressing it could lead to bad consequences. These are legitimate concerns, and if you leave all weaknesses unaddressed, some of those consequences will surely happen. But the problem is that companies that focus on it aren’t managing to win; they are managing to not fail. The second mindset is pragmatic: It’s just easier to believe that people can be changed. Rather than acknowledging that people are enduringly different, and having to deal with the messiness of individuality, it’s a lot simpler to just assume that all salespeople, for instance, can be taught to sell in exactly the same way. Even though it’s not true. The third mindset springs from a positive outlook: Call it a belief in the perfectibility of man. Since everyone can be perfected, but you are not perfect, we will mold you into perfection. If you’re not strategic, we will identify the components that make someone so, and teach them to you. We genuinely (and wrongly) believe that people can be perfected. I’ll throw in a special bonus reason, and it’s the manager. Managers want to feel useful. So, out of a sincere desire to help people improve, a manager can inadvertently end up focusing on the one thing guaranteed to drag people down: weaknesses. How does cultivating employee strengths affect performance? Strengths have three direct impacts on performance. First, they are an accelerant: We learn faster in our areas of strength. Second, they are a multiplier: You are more creative in your areas of strength, more collaborative, more innovative and more insightful. Third, strengths are a reinforce: If you experience a setback or poor performance in an area of strength, you bounce back faster because in that area you feel your highest level of self-conﬁdence and self-efﬁcacy. Acceleration, multiplication, reinforcement: what those three qualities combine to create is an exponential improvement in performance. When you ﬁx weaknesses (which sometimes has to be done), you get incremental improvement in performance. What message do you want attendees to walk away with after your session? Lack of uniformity across human nature is the source of its potency. The future of learning and of training, of all development, will begin with the question: “who Continued on page 4 http://www.astdconference.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASTD 2011 Conference Daily - Issue 1

ASTD 2011 Conference Daily - Issue 1

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