The Table of Strategic Elements is really fun to play with, mentally. Give it a try!

Last autumn, while tinkering about creating the next generation of learning programs in Adobe Romania, came up with the following 6 principles:

1. Leading yourself before leading others
“Self-knowledge, self-understanding and self-management”

2. Self-directed learning
“The only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning”

3. Practice
“Without practice, there’s no knowledge.”

4. Reflection
“Probably the most important single process involved in effective change in the process of learning while doing”

5. Networking
“We develop our own sense of meaning from ongoing communication of perceptions and ideas with others.”

6. It’s a team effort
„Growing together, sharing experiences and learning with your team mates”

They guide two of our current learning programs: ASPIRE – Management Development Program, and EXPLORE – Talent Development Program.

Might serve as inspiration for you as well, happy to take questions in the comments about each of them.

I find it valuable, easy to follow and to use. Hope that it will will help you as well :)

What would you change/improve to this framework?

Overall comments on presentation

0. Overview

Intro -

Delivery -

Closing -

Presence -

Slides -

A. Content – Organization and Development

• Opening statement gained immediate attention?

• Purpose of presentation made clear?
• Previewed contents of speech?
• Main ideas stated clearly and logically?

• Main points explained or proved by supporting points?

• Variety of supporting points (testimony, statistics, etc.)
• Conclusion adequately summed up main points, purpose?

B. Delivery

• Presenter “owned the space” and was in control?

• Held rapport with audience throughout speech?
• Eye contact to everyone in audience?
• Strong posture and meaningful gestures?

C. Visuals [where applies]

• Visuals clear and visible to entire audience?
• Creative and emphasized main points?
• Presenter handled unobtrusively and focused on audience?

D. Voice

• Volume appropriate?
• Rate (pacing) ok?
• Quality of language ok?

• Energetic and included everyone in dialogue?

Adapted from “Guidelines for Oral Presentation”

I don’t know much legalese, the shared materials are not intended for commercial use. Will mention copyright for each cited material or concept.

What’s in it for the readers?

• Access to the latest HR programs that I’m “playing” with

• Possibility to use / evolve the program designs

What’s in it for me?

• The exercise of structuring the programs for public presentation

• (Expecting) Feedback from you
• “Crowdcasting” scenarios for evolving the programs

It’s kind of an experiment, I’m not expecting spectacular results from this.

I’m just following my principle of ‘shared knowledge is power’ and hopefully these shared programs will add some value to the overall HR blogosphere.

Some HR programs that I want to share with you, more details soon:

• ASPIRE – Management Development Program
• EXPLORE – Talent Development Program

• People Pulse – Lite Engagement Survey

• Manager’s Forum

• People Analytics

• Employee roundtable

Each program will have a public-access summary and a password-restricted detailed presentation.

You will be able to access the full-content by contacting me on e-mail.

Looking forward!

The big transition is from learning and development to the more holistical area of human performance.

My former mission was “to have a positive worldwide impact on the learning and development of people of all ages”. Still defining the new one.

I’m enjoying this journey.

As i have recently undertook the exercise of thoroughly analyzing my work, i have also reflected on the business impact and value contributed by an individual in an organisation.

One of the conclusions of these inner debates is that the corellation between value created and time invested is relatively weak.

There are some activities that are extremely  valuable, while short as duration.

As there are some activities that are low-value, yet extremely time-intensive.

Insights on this have started to permeate from self help and time management literature – the Pareto Principle. 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Focus  on the 20% activities that ’cause’ 80% of the effects and you’re set. But is it really that easy in practice?

As an HR Business Partner, my work is a mix of lots of diverse activities weekly

• The challenge is to constantly answer to the question of “How do I bring more value from this role?”
• The challenge is to constantly identify that “20%”

• The challenge is to constantly and drastically de-prioritize low-value activities in order to produce better quality work from high-value activities

• The challenge is to constantly increase quality-per-time invested

• The challenge is to constantly support colleagues to identify and bring value from their positions

Being just another contributor in the organisation is not hard, if there is a good match of skills and attitudes needed “for the job”

Bringing remarkable value regardless of your position in the organisation is really an art and a transformative process, getting past hurdles like:

• Some systems could be just not designed to accept remarkable and maybe disruptive value creators

• Some roles could be just poorly designed, carelessly created by people that didn’t put much braintime in answering “How will this roles produce value?”

• Or maybe it is about the ever present failure originated by bad estimates

• Or maybe it is about the reducing-to-average view on different roles – “An X usually does Y,Z” or “usually there are A employees in the B role for C employees in the D role”

I want to share two ideas that influenced my perspective on things:

“Organisations nowadays weren’t really designed, they just happened” and “Most of the things around you were created by men no smarter than you”

This means that challenging the paradigms of value creation for your current position in the organisation could be the way to go … if you have the drive to really make an impact in your work, to create art in your craft.

Second, if you’re employed, ask yourself if you’re happy at work now. Who is answering? Most probably your remembering self, right?

One important conclusion about HR metrics is that they are chosen to support business objectives.

HR metrics can vary in the same company from year to year depending on the business strategy.

Some questions to think about:

• Who uses the HR metrics after they’re measured?

• What’s the real value of HR metrics?

• Is relevant data gathering easy or hard? Is there a trend for data-driven HR?

One of the metrics appearing often in the discussions is Return on Investment (ROI).

The video about measuring ROI from social media investment shows an example about easily measuring ROI as:

ROI = (Gains – Costs)/Costs * 100

Questions that arise:

• Where do we use ROI in HR?
• How can gains be measured in different HR areas?
• What about costs?

• Is calculating ROI a time-intensive effort?
• What is the threshold that says when it’s valuable to invest the time to calculate ROI?

ROI measurement in the companies

For the companies participating to the discussion, ROI measurements are helpful for prioritizing projects/investment for the HR departments, not necesarilly required by business.

For Danone and Adobe measuring ROI is one of the priorities for learning and development endeavours in 2012.

In Danone, the methodology is known and will be implemented this year.

AchieveGlobal actually has a workshop about calculating ROI. They will hold a session at ITOL’s Learning and Development Summit, where we’re all invited.

Net Promote Score (NPS)

An useful metric originally from marketing, the Net Promoter Score, can be used easily for HR ‘products’.

NPS asks “Based on your experience, how likely are you to recommend product X to your friends/colleagues?” using a scale from 1 to 10 (from least to most likely).

9′s and 10′s are promoters -> they will probably talk positively about the product

7′s and 8′s are indifferent

6′s and less are detractors -> they will probably talk negatively about the product

NPS = (Promoters – Detractors) / Number of respondents

In Adobe HR, NPS is used to measure reaction to training and also in the engagement survey -for team score

“How likely are you to recommend your team to other Adobe colleagues / to other friends?”

Metrics in Engagement

Engagement score is measured at different frecquencies in Danone, HP, Adobe Romania (2 years, 1 year, 1 quarter respectely)

Although each engagement survey targets specific areas, there are some common aspects like asking about job satisfaction, about feedback on manager support or things to improve for better engagement.

Usually there is an action plan tailored for each team/group that participates at the engagement survey and the management of the team/group is held accountable for implementing it.

Metrics in Recruitment

The meetup continued with sharing metrics used in recruitment.

Along with ‘traditional’ recruitment metrics like no. of interviews, no. of offers extended, no. of reqs closed / quarter, candidate database increase factor, we’ve learned that recruitment agencies have metrics regarding relationship-building with the clients and renewal of collaboration; UTI has recruitment metrics targeting competition knowledge and Adobe uses ‘average days to fill a  req’.

While insightful, the meetup ended with the promise of meeting again to continue the discussions, on metrics in other HR areas.

If you’d like to contribute in comments with answers to the questions above, you’re more than welcome.

Organizations exist to bring value.
Value ecosystems are created and all the entities from an organization exist in order to create some kind of value, mainly for the bigger entity: individuals join the organization to bring value in the teams, teams (can be generalized to project teams, departments, business units) are created to bring value to the organization. Some entities bring value internally, and others are the connections with the outer world value-wise [bring value from outside->in or from inside->out].

Links between all these entities are designed (or just happen) and the whole thing adds an unique value-fingerprint in the world.

Humanity is still struggling to find more appropriate tools to measure value [especially the 'intangible' value]. Meanwhile, a “path of lesser resistance” approach to the measurement of value is through measuring the money produced by each entity.

Nonetheless, I imagine that if somebody could measure the value brought by the entities of an organization, he would discover that it resembles a living creature – being born when sub-parts form a new entity (individuals form teams, teams form organizations), evolving while the parts are connected in specific configurations and finally transforming or dying.

Each entity has a range of value that it can add while in a specific configuration.
This is variable on the capability of that specific entity, the perceived capability [outside trust in the entities' capability] and the drive to produce value in that configuration. If the drive is not strong, the potential for high value is wasted or is directed outside the higher entity or even outside the organization.

Complexity is inevitable while scaling the organization with the hope to create more value.
Leaders of each entity are in the position of finding better ways to connect their entity with other peer-entities or to higher entities in order to produce higher value, and also to increase the capability of the entity they lead, the outside trust and the drive to produce value in the current configuration or the new configuration they set by finding new connections with other parts of the organization. You can think about this at individual level [leading yourself] and team level [leading others]. Members of an entity are in the position to support their leader in the quest to maximize the value brought by their entity.

Having this image of value flow in an organization, I’ll focus on placing HR as a value-adding entity in a future post. Until then, I’m curious to hear your opinions about the proposed take on business impact. Are you seeing things differently?