Learning at Work with Canon

To celebrate national Learning at Work day today, we've been spending the afternoon with sales managers at Canon, sharing the results of our past 12 years of research into the innate qualities of the highest performing sales people.

Everyone joined in and shared some very valuable insights from their own experiences, and five lucky managers won a signed copy of the book, Genius at Work.

Our research into the underlying thought processes and perceptions of the highest performing sales people shows that they have six consistent secrets which you can test for at interview and also develop in existing sales teams.

It's not uncommon to find sales teams where the number one sales person outsells the entire rest of the team put together. At Canon, the difference between the number 1 and number 2 sales people in a team was similarly significant, with the number 2 hitting 150% to 180% of target, and the number 1 hitting 250% of target.

In Genius at Work, I show you how to model high performers, which means getting inside their heads and understanding the unconscious decisions that lead to high performance. If you only copy what you can see, you create two problems.

Firstly, you don't know the difference between what's important and what isn't, and secondly, you can't see what's going on inside the role model's mind.

Imagine that you have never cooked anything in your life, but you would like to learn how to bake a cake. You find a chef who always bakes perfect, delicious cakes and set out to copy everything that he does. You watch carefully how he sets out his kitchen table. You write down the ingredients and how he combines them. You note that he stirs the ingredients together. And you carefully observe how he dances round the kitchen, singing, "don't stop me now" using the wooden spoon as a pretend microphone.

Because you have no idea how he bakes cakes, you have no way of knowing which of these steps are important and which aren't.

Once you have a little knowledge, you start to make assumptions. You see the chef mixing the ingredients and you don't write it down because it's obvious.

You just write down the ingredients because that's all you need to know. You know how to bake a cake, so the secret must be in the recipe.

Yet, when you try the recipe out, you don't get the same result.

Why not?

Perhaps you mixed the ingredients in order to mix them, so you mixed for five minutes. However, the chef didn't mix the ingredients to mix them, he mixed them to aerate them. He mixed the ingredients for fifteen minutes.

The same is true of a high performing salesperson. She spends the last ten minutes of every day making tomorrow's 'to do' list.

You don't write that down because it's got nothing to do with selling.

When she closes a deal, she asks the customer when they made the decision to buy from her. You don't write that down because it's irrelevant, you only want to know how she closed the deal. You just want her recipe; what she said, what she did. You want a short cut.

There is a short cut, but it doesn't come from copying the obvious stuff. It comes from learning how she chooses which of the obvious stuff to do at what time. Learning the obvious stuff is easy.

Anyone can mix the ingredients and bake a cake. But to create a masterpiece? That takes real genius.

Learning at Work with BI Worldwide

We've just spent the day with managers at BI Worldwide, sharing the Genius at Work methodology with them.

HR Director Karen Minto says, "It was very  thought-provoking, and yet was also run to demonstrate and prove how extremely simple it is to apply and achieve results!

The interaction and participative examples you gave us were great for bringing home the message/s. Without exception, we have come away with techniques and ideas of what and how we can apply our learning to make improvements in our various areas of the business.

Thank you once again for a very useful day’s activities that we can all utilise in our different roles."

Behaviour and Results

We were speaking recently at a sales conference in Kiev on the subject of sales management, and one of the important decisions that a sales manager has to make is whether to direct behaviour or results.

If you direct behaviour then you have to be sure that your directions are perfect and that the world doesn't change in between you deciding what your sales people should do and them actually doing it.

Directing behaviour is the sign of a controlling sales manager who essentially says, "I'm perfect and I know how to do your job so just do what I tell you and it will work".

The biggest problem is that when your directions don't work - and they definitely won't - your sales people will hold you accountable. By trying to take control, you actually lose control.

In Genius at Work, this approach creates Rituals and Incantations; magic spells which must surely produce results. Except they don't work.

The alternative is that you direct results. You dictate what the end result needs to be, such as the sales target, and you leave the sales person to decide how they should achieve it.

However, this approach has its problems too.

When you don't specify any conditions for hitting target, your sales people may employ questionable methods in getting there.

Therefore, the ideal option is to specify the end result and set rules for how to get there. Once you've done that, you need to regularly measure activity and refine your rules as you go along. It's no use waiting until it's too late and then saying, "I didn't want you to do it that way so I won't pay your bonus". You have to bite the bullet at every measurement stage, accept responsibility for the targets you've set and then refine them for next time. The shorter you make those measurement periods, the more quickly you can make changes. However, short measurement periods doesn't mean weekly targets and bonuses, it just means that you review the results that the sales people are achieving and adjust activity as necessary to get the right result in the right way.

The Unsticker is Back!

My unique and, frankly, amazing problem solver, The Unsticker is coming back!

An Android and possibly iPhone app is being developed as I write this, and it will be available very very soon through the Google Play Store (and obviously iTunes if you are an Apple fan and if we decide it's worth the extra trouble).

The Unsticker is a problem solving tool. Not only that, users regularly report that after only 4 or 5 questions, they can't even remember what their problem had been, and they certainly feel very differently about it.

You'll be able to use The Unsticker with yourself to solve everyday problems and dilemmas, you'll be able to use it with your team for creative problem solving sessions, and if you're a coach, you'll be able to use it with your clients to literally unstick them.

We'll also be sending the app to some carefully selected reviewers so if you have an Android phone and you would like to be considered, get in touch.

Genius at Work joins BI Worldwide for Learning at Work Day 2013

This year's Learning at Work Day is on May 23rd and Revelation Consulting Ltd will be supporting the Campaign for Learning's annual celebration of workplace learning by spending the day with BI Worldwide, helping a number of their managers to understand how to use the modelling toolkit from Peter Freeth's book Genius at Work.

Karen Minto, BI Worlwide's Head of HR & Development, said, "I felt the offer was very topical for us as we are in the midst of some real growth in the business and are on course for a stretching set of targets and goals in 2017. Going hand in hand with this, the managers have been so busy managing the work and operational perspectives, the people side may have been overlooked, or not running as efficiently as could be. This is confirmed in some of our Best Companies results we are just starting to review."

Peter Freeth of Revelation says, "All too often, companies look externally for knowledge and skills, bringing in consultants and trainers to provide easy answers. However, the most valuable knowledge of all is already within your business, and it's evolving every day as staff interact with customers, solve problems and make business processes more efficient. Getting access to this tacit knowledge means that the whole business can benefit from this ongoing process of learning that always takes place within any organisation, and the skills to do so can easily be learned so that staff don't just know 'what' to do, they also know 'how' to do it successfully."

Revelation's research over the past twelve years shows that the performance of an individual is the result of a unique combination of their attitude, their practical skills and the culture within which they're operating, so part of the Genius at Work modelling process also involves mapping the organisation's culture so that it enables high performance rather than getting in the way.

"One thing that we have consistently found about high performers is that their results are achieved in a counter-intuitive way. They rarely set out to achieve the result that they are recognised for, and so it's understanding these hidden thought processes that is at the heart of the Genius at Work approach.", adds Peter. "When organisations work so hard to develop intellectual property and business processes, it's absolutely vital to protect and develop that knowledge so that it continues to serve as a valuable asset, supporting current and future staff and helping the business to deliver real value to its customers".

Culture Transplant?

"There have been a lot of stories written over the last few days analyzing the departure of former Apple Inc. executive Ron Johnson from the top post at J.C. Penney Co... The New York Times cast Johnson’s stint as a clash between fast Silicon Valley ways and the stodgy culture of a 111-year-old retailer."

In researching high performers in different industries for the past 12 years, we have always found that high performance is not solely down to the person, it comes from a combination of a person within a culture. Put a person in Apple and they get results because their attitudes and behaviours are aligned with the culture. Put them in JC Penney and you see the opposite; the culture becomes a barrier.

I agree with someone who commented on the above story; that the problem is related to attribution error. When people perform badly, it was the culture's fault. When they perform well, it was all down to their personal excellence and, surely, they can apply that anywhere, right?

Wrong.

Read the full article on LinkedIn 

National Learning at Work Day - Free Workshop

Peter Freeth to Support National Learning at Work Day this May

In partnership with the Campaign for Learning, Peter Freeth is supporting this year's national Learning at Work day on May 23rd with the offer of a free Genius at Work workshop for one company.

Learning at Work (LAW) Day is an annual awareness campaign organised by the Campaign for Learning (CfL) since 1999. LAW Day promotes and supports workplace learning events across the country, and this year’s theme is 'Many Ways to Learn'.

In partnership with the Campaign for Learning, Peter Freeth is supporting this year's national Learning at Work day on May 23rd with the offer of a free Genius at Work workshop for one company.

Peter says, "In any business, there are individuals whose performance is head and shoulders above their colleagues. They seem to have a gift for delighting customers, or motivating staff, or gaining commitment from even the most evasive customers. And yet, on the surface, it's not immediately obvious what they're doing that's different. If you've ever wished that you could get inside their heads and 'clone' their talents then this is your opportunity to do just that."

For Learning at Work Day, Peter Freeth, author of Genius at Work, and his team are offering companies a free training workshop for their business leaders and managers to show how they can develop the performance of a team or business by discovering and sharing talents. The workshop can also be delivered to a cluster of small businesses.

Visit www.askrevelation.com to find out more about Revelation Consulting Ltd and the Genius at Work book and talent modelling approach. Learning at Work Day is co-ordinated nationally by the Campaign for Learning as part of Adult Learners' Week

See the press release over at PRlog

Corporate partners sought for book launch

Now that Genius at Work is out there and getting good reviews, it's time to run some book launch events, and I'm looking for corporate partners to work with.

The concept is very simple. You want to get your customers into your offices and you also want to provide important new learning experiences for your staff. So I run a workshop to launch Genius at Work in your office and you invite your customers and staff.

Simple!

Learning Styles

The issue of how people learn is often debated, usually by training providers who want to show that their way is best so that they can continue to make money out of it. Also, Universities need research projects to fund new buildings and foreign trips, so what better subject to research than how people learn?

Kolb's theory of learning has been around for almost 30 years, and is, in my mind, analogous to Newton's laws of motion. Newton didn't invent the laws in a cave and then impose them on the universe, he merely thought about what he observed and found a way to encode patterns so that they could be shared with others. A few hundred years after he did that, NASA were able to throw a tin can out into space and make contact with the moon, all using Newton's calculations.

Book Launch: Corporate Partners Wanted

I'm planning a book launch series for Genius at Work, and I'm looking for corporate partners.

Here's the deal.

You supply a room and an audience, I run a daytime or evening educational event.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, let's say that you want to get a group of potential clients together, in your offices. They're not going to come for the offer of a sales pitch from you, are they? What about the offer of a free event where they can learn:

What saved Somerfield 25% on graduate development costs?

What increased Parker Hannifin's profitability by 700%?

What doubled Domestic & General's sales conversion rate?

What gave 83% of Babcock's future leaders a career jump start?

The opportunity to learn about the methodology that underpins these results, the methodology contained within Genius at Work, is a great reason for them to spend a couple of hours in your company.

Of course, for this to work for you, your target clients have to include people such as HR Directors, L&D Managers, Talent Managers and so on. If that sounds good to you then visit www.askrevelation.com and let me know.