In the final minutes of the 2011 movie Source Code, the hero turns and smiles as he looks at a train carriage full of happy, laughing Chicago commuters.

“Look at that,” he says to his newly discovered love. “What?” she asks, seeing nothing apparently extraordinary.

“All that life,” he replies.

All that life. Expressed in all the laughter and the smiles. Nothing extraordinary at all. Except that normally that train carriage (no doubt like most commuter trains the world over) was filled with the same people, but without the laughter. In fact, throughout the movie we’ve witnessed hostility, fear, loathing, insecurity and anger simmering barely below the surface of those same lives in that same carriage.The scene that day on the train, however, offered an alternate reality for those same lives. (That’s not quite a plot spoiler, either.)

It showed that also just below the surface was just as much potential for laughter, fun, acceptance, and friendship. What the commuters had come to expect – and therefore effectively co-create through silent collaboration in the lowest common denominator of expectations – was the fear and anger. And yet, there was an alternative possibility. One that the simple experience of shared laughter set free that day.

“The artful use of humour typifies effective leadership,” observes Daniel Goleman in his EQ-based book The New Leaders (2002). “That doesn’t mean you should always avoid disagreements or conflicts. But the best leaders have a sense of when spending time airing grievances will be useful and when it will not.”

“The data linking leadership effectiveness to laughter come from hundreds of actual incidents … Take, for example, one study of executives interviewing for leadership positions, which looked at how often each candidate got a laugh during the interview and then tracked the candidates’ careers for two years to see which ones became stars. The finding was that outstanding leaders got the interviewer to laugh with them twice as often as the just-average executives. (The leaders’s success was defined by two elements: They were in the top third of bonuses reflecting financial performance, and they were rated as ‘excellent’ by 90 percent of their peers and bosses.)”

Goleman’s colleague, Fabio Sala, “found that top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did midperforming leaders. Being in a good mood, other research finds, helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively. In other words, laughter is serious business.” (“Social intelligence and the biology of leadership” by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, Harvard Business Review, September 2008).

“All that life.” Just beneath the surface of all those lives that commute to and from offices and workshops and schools and worksites is so much more rich potential - so much energy, creativity and contribution. So much discretionary effort that could be tapped and that people typically want to offer. If it’s valued and appreciated. If it’s encouraged. If it’s set free.

It’s  kind of obvious, really. And yet clearly something’s not working when 82 percent of Australian workers identify themselves as being disengaged or disconnected at work (Gallup survey of 45,000 people reported in HR Leader, March 2011).

Effective leadership - leadership that engages and connects - requires a signficant but quite simple ongoing investment in relationship management. “Resonant leadership” is what Goleman calls it - leadership that is attuned to people’s moods and which encourages and generates positive energy between and among people who work together.

The everyday reality of the power of emotions is too easily forgotten or denied in the transactional, busy, and sometimes too-sterile environments many people work in. And so disengagement and disconnection become (costly) protective mechanisms.

Of course not every workplace situation is imbued with the potential for laughter. There’s as much genuinely serious work to be done as there are lighter moments – typically more. Which is even more reason to identify and capitalise upon those life-giving moments in which we can share a laugh.

Do you see the opportunities for a smile, a shared laugh, a celebration? Do you express (not just think about) happiness, appreciation, humour?

In Situational Leadership® we talk about the roles of both task and relationship behaviours. And sharing a laugh is a simple but powerful relationship behaviour. The good news is that there are plenty of everyday situations that offer the opportunity to share a laugh.

So laugh, lead and live. Because sharing and encouraging laughter is a vital part of leadership - a part that creates positive and productive workplace life.

“All that life” can be kept locked down or set free and harnessed for productive contributions. And that’s the task of the leader.

“Developing other people’s talent is the whole company at the end of the day.”

These are the words of Aglient’s Electronic Measurement Group President Ron Nersesian, one of the talent leaders featured in Bill Conaty and Ram Charan’s new book, The Talent Masters: Why smart leaders put people before numbers . His experience - and commitment to developing people - is one of a number of individual and organisational stories described by the authors as they make their case for focusing on talent. 

Their provocative opening to the book - “if business managed their money as carelessly as they manage their people, most would be bankrupt” - is a deliberate attempt to compare talent management with financial management.

As they observe: “The great majority of companies that control their finances masterfully don’t have any comparable processes for developing their leaders or even pinpointing which ones to develop. … How did this come to be? After all, it’s clear enough that people make the decisions and take the actions that produce the numbers. Talent is the leading indicator of whether a business is headed up or down. Everyone agrees it’s the company’s most important resource. But a spreadsheet full of numbers is a lot easier to parse than the characteristics unique to a human being.”

The authors - Conarty worked closely for many years with Jack Welch and then Jeff Immelt at GE to help created that company’s renowned talent machine - argue that talent is the one competitive advantage that can be relied upon to differentiate companies.

“Our products are all time-perishable,” says Nersesian. “The only thing that stays is the institutional learning and the development of the skills and the capabilities we have of our people.”

And that commitment to ongoing learning and development, he says, relies upon a commitment to providing and creating opportunities that allow and enable people to develop.

Talent is attracted to opportunity. And that’s the leadership opportunity - the opportunity our roles offer to create growth and development opportunities for others. And when those opportunities create learning and unlock capability it’s the opportunity-creating leader, the team and the organisation who all benefit.

Consider these three principles for creating opportunities for others to develop:

1. Identify high-value development needs. Everyone has development potential. Whether it’s technical, interpersonal or procedural, the important thing is that we get the intervention, direction and support required for our development.

For example, I was recently told about some young, talented product specialists who don’t like and aren’t very good at writing up reports or proposals for clients. As a result, that work is too often poorly done, must be re-done or is “delegated up” to more senior people. There’s a clear development need that is in the interest of both the product specialists and the organisation. It’s a development need that is aligned directly to business performance as well as individual effectiveness.  (And in the context of Situational Leadership®, it’s interesting to note how often someone’s discomfort or lack of confidence with a task is related to a lack of training - and therefore competence - with the task.)

Development needs - whether technical, interpersonal or procedural - can and should be identified through ongoing conversation, listening and observation. And it’s particularly important to evaluate the impact of behaviours on business - whether that business is external or internal.

Once the high-value development need is identified, the leader’s role is to discuss the commitment to ongoing development, describe the development need (aka “constructive feedback”), determine how the development can be facilitated (eg, training, coaching, mentoring), and then deliver the opportunity.

2. Identify strengths. Working in our areas of strength and being given opportunities to develop them energises, satisfies and rewards us. Growing into our strengths sustains a sense of personal mission and authenticity. Former Gallup researcher Marcus Buckingham says that a manager’s responsibility is to “Discover what is unique about each person and capitalise on it” (The One Thing You Need to Know, 2006).

The reason, he says, is because when you capitalise on what is unique about each person you stimulate individual excellence. In the same way as development needs can be observed, so too can strengths. In fact, observing, acknowledging and developing someone’s strengths is a practical and productive way of leveraging resources and tapping into discretionary effort - all the while providing positive reinforcement.

It seems kind of obvious to tap people’s strengths, and yet Buckingham’s research (analysing the results of interviews conducted by Gallup with over 1.7 million employees from 101 companies across 63 countries) indicates that only 20 percent of employees have the opportunity to use their strengths everyday. That’s a development opportunity!

3. Identify stretch opportunities. In a recent workshop where we were discussing the strengths based approach, a participant observed that focusing on strengths can sound like complaceny - just settling into a comfort zone of operation. It’s a fair concern. But it’s not what working in our areas of strength is about.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the psychology and sociology professor whose work on happiness and creativity led to the concept of “flow” - that optimal state of productivity through immersion and engagement in an activity. To achieve a flow state, Csikszentmihalyi said a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high. In other words, we need to be given the opportunity to work in our areas of strength and we need the opportunity to have those skills stretched and challenged so we increase our skill.

In Situational Leadership® workshops we remind people of the importance for “R4″ performers to be given stretch opportunities - because growth occurs at the edges. No one wants to be left “spinning their wheels” in unchallenging work.

Because talent is attracted to opportunity.

“Stretch opportunities” generally create a desire to learn, as well as communicating a practical sense of reward and recognition. The challenges of stretch situations tend to stimulate rather than stress us. And again, when stretch opportunities align individual strengths and organisational needs the benefits can be compounded.

The “leadership opportunity” is the opportunity to develop any organisation’s “most valuable resource” - its talent. Because the organisation - its products or services, its reputation, its potential and its performance - is defined by its people and the opportunities they have to perform, contribute and grow. And it’s leaders who hold the keys to those opportunities - the opportunities that attract and develop talent.

So … what opportunities can you create this week?

This article was inspired by a discussion at a recent Situational Leadership® workshop and some interesting workplace research in a just-released book.

During a discussion about effective leader behaviours, our group talked about the responsibility of those in leadership roles - at whatever level - to “remove roadblocks” so that team members can more effectively get done what needs to be done.

This observation links well to some research by Anne Kreamer, in her latest book released just this month called It’s Always Personal (also reported in Time magazine this month). Her research looked at the range and effects of emotions that people experience in their work each day. It highlights that the most commonly experienced emotion in the workplace is … frustration.

Frustration at work is, of course, the product of many things - from misunderstandings in communication to bewilderment at processes or decisions; from misalignment of abilities and tasks to lack of role clarity. In one form or another, there are many potential roadblocks creating frustration in our workplaces.

The toll of frustration, though perhaps hard to measure, is inevitably exacted daily in withheld effort, reduced cooperation and stymied innovation.

The idea of intentionally removing roadblocks fits well with the important concept which sadly became an overused management cliche - “empowerment”. Given that organisations are naturally and sensibly structured to distribute, limit and control power, how do you em-power someone who has proven their ability and their commitment? Giving people power sounds like a good idea, but how do you do it? One essential way is by removing some of the barriers that limit their productivity and contribution. Organisational structures should be supportive and protective, not unnecessarily restrictive or punitive. Effective structures are functional and flexible, acknowledging that they are there to serve - not frustrate - the efforts of those who choose to work within them.

Experiencing greater autonomy is one of the things most people seek in their work. Mastering our responsibilities naturally leads us to look for opportunities to expand and extend our efforts, to find new and better ways of doing our work.

Providing appropriate autonomy is a tangible way of acknowledging a person’s ability, competence and commitment. It’s also a reflection of a leader’s confidence in an indvidual or a team.

And, like effective delegation, removing organisational roadblocks is also an expression of a leader’s self-confidence. Holding power to oneself and being overly restrictive is usually interpreted as insecurity and/or a lack of trust.

Which is where another another potential roadblock is worth considering - the leader. Recognising when our leadership has become a roadblock is hard to do - none of us would intentionally block the road to success. But it’s easy enough for us to unintentionally construct or reinforce barriers that make success harder to achieve. To “frustrate”, if you will. For example:
* Not providing timely and constructive feedback on performance issues
* Creating a bottleneck for decision making or the flow of information
* Resisting improvements to processes or systems
* Ignoring or tolerating fears, anxieties or ignorance related to responsibilities
* Withholding or being unaware of the need for resources or support
* Providing unnecessary supervision (aka micro-managment)
* Not providing training or development that improves and extends abilities.

If, as I frequently encourage, leadership is about creating the conditions for success, leadership that inhibits success must be considered a roadblock. And while the old saying, “Lead, follow or get out of the way” can sound harsh, its point is valid: we’re all expected to do things that contribute to success. Sometimes, that’s as simple as getting out of the way - whether that’s someone else’s or our own.

Marshall Goldsmith notes that the late Peter Drucker once told him that at least 50 percent of executives he’d worked with didn’t need to learn what to do, they needed to learn what to stop doing. Because sometimes what we’re doing - or enabling - is just getting in the way. Even well-intentioned practices and behaviours can be counter-productive. That’s why the Situational Leadership® approach emphasises the practical value of learning how to adapt our influencing behaviours to the needs of those we are working with.

So, on a positive note, consider these simple but potentially practical reflections on roadblock removal:
* Where or how could I or my team be more successful?
* What has been blocking us from achieving greater success?
* How can I apply my leadership - formal or informal - to removing the roadblock(s)?
* What leadership behaviours might I need to adapt to enable myself and others to be more successful?

Removing even one roadblock to success can go a long way to reducing that most commonly experienced workplace emotion - frustration - and to creating the conditions for greater success.

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Games & activities have been a part of training for decades. From icebreakers to outdoor adventures, we have probably all experienced them at one time or another.

Like most tools, when used well they can be incredibly beneficial and have a direct impact on ROI. They can also be used poorly with negative results.

So how can you determine when they should be used, and when they shouldn’t?

Three Good Reasons to Utilise Games & Activities

It’s important to understand what contribution games and activities can have on a training course.

1. Accelerated learning is what happens when trainers and teachers respond to sound scientific evidence about the way our brains work and how people learn, and then design their programs accordingly. Proponents advise that the main section of any teaching or training program should predominantly consist of activities.

With accelerated learning, the learner is actively involved in the training, rather than just receiving information from the trainer or teacher. This results in faster, more cost effective learning.

Author Peter Julian states that “the key to true accelerated learning is in finding ways for a student to absorb, filter and actually use the information being studied“*. Activities provide an excellent opportunity to do exactly that, by allowing course participants to absorb the information through a variety of different techniques, and apply the learning through case studies, experiential learning activities and simulations.

2. State changes, as veteran trainer Dr Rich Allen describes so clearly in his Impact Training & Presentation Skills DVD, are the intentional shifts a trainer makes from one style of teaching to another. Dr Allen talks about five different kinds of state changes:

- The use of quick fun activities to surprise people and combat distractions

- Activities that require physical movement (because the longer people sit, the more uncomfortable they’ll become and the less engaged they’ll be).

- Activities encouraging social engagement to help reduce the threat/distraction of being with a group of people they may not know very well (or at all).

- Storytelling which allows the illustration of a point in an interesting way that engages people’s emotions.

- Activities that encourage positive emotions, such as humour, can be used to help shift perspective.

3. Cooperative Teamwork and/or Problem Solving is one of the greatest strengths an organisation can develop. Games, activities and simulations provide an excellent opportunity for participants to practice these skills. Debriefing the activity also allows for “in the moment” learning where challenges can be discussed, solutions found and wins celebrated.

Five Quick Tips on Using Games & Activities

Don’t ever use games & activities just as a time filler - they should always have a purpose.

Make sure they have a direct correlation to the learning content, or are designed to bring about a change in state (see above) in order to help people learn.

Always have a range of activities ready to draw on, so you can be flexible so you can respond to the participants needs on the day.

Make sure you understand the activity before you get to the training room! This includes being clear on all instructions and materials required.

Finally, encourage enjoyment but remember to keep the end game in mind. Fun for the sake of it is great for recreation, but learning is a different matter. If you align your training activities, games and simulations with your training objectives, both your participants and your organisation will reap the benefits - and you can still have some fun along the way.

*You can read more about Accelerated Learning at: http://www.articlesbase.com/goal-setting-articles/the-four-insider-keys-to-accelerated-learning-success-472221.html#ixzz1FyWTI3aw Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

**For assistance finding the right game, activity or simulation for your next training course, Free Call 1800 657 025 and we’ll be happy to help.

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2010 has certainly been an interesting year. At one end of the scale some organisations have faced the ’slash and burn’ approach to their budgets with cuts of up to 80% in learning and development expenditure. Their ongoing commitment to developing their staff has been severely tested, and some L & D professionals are feeling the weariness of what could be classed for some as a tough year.

At the other end of the scale are companies that have continued their L&D with barely a hesitation. They have powered on through the year and continued their carefully planned course to developing their workforce, building on their previous hard work.

However your 2010 may have played out, it is still helpful to learn from the past 12 months in order to build a stronger and more effective learning and development function in 2011.

Here are some reflective questions to help you make the most of the year ahead:

Think about any new initiatives that were implemented during 2010 …

What did they contribute to your department and/or the wider organisation?

What was the most effective aspect and why?

What was the least effective aspect and why?

Is there a better or more efficient way you could achieve the same outcome?

Are any initiatives at the end of their shelf life (eg. is it time to give this initiative up or should it continue in 2011)?

Budget Constraints

What has been the greatest loss to the organisation because of financial constraints in your department (this will be particularly relevant for those with budgets that are still below their pre-Global Financial Crisis levels)? What were you unable to do, or unable to do well enough? What data can you collect to support a business case for budget increases in 2011?

What did you spend budget on in 2010, that on reflection, wasn’t worth the investment (or needs changes made in order to make the investment worthwhile)?

Organisational change

Reflect on where the organisation was 12 months ago, and where it is now. What has changed and have you / your department / your processes changed with it?

Do the roles and responsibilities of the L&D team still reflect the needs of the organisation? What additional tasks have staff taken on during 2010 that may be better suited to another position? Have any of those tasks become unnecessary or redundant (perhaps because of improvements in technology)?

What is on the horizon in 2011?

What changes are ahead for 2011? Is your organisation heading in a new direction, taking on a new product or service, branching out into new markets etc.etc.?Are there major changes ahead for your industry?

Have you taken those factors into consideration when planning for 2011 to ensure L&D services keep up with organisational needs?

Finally, what do you personally need in order to be prepared for a great year in 2011?

Is there baggage you are carrying from the challenges of the past year/s that is holding you back?

While there are plenty of great lessons to be learned from the challenges of the last couple of years, it is important not to camp there. As Thomas S.Monson (a probably not very famous man) wisely said:

The past is behind, learn from it.

The future is ahead, prepare for it.

The present is here, live it.

On that note, we hope you enjoy the present (and the presents) over Christmas and find refreshing in some well earned time away from the office.