Christmas is about sharing – and so is Learning

At this time of year we tell each other Christmas is about sharing.
In the rest of the year we should be aware the same applies to Learning.

In many organizations we are good at updating our Learning History whenever we take some form of training, whether it’s formal or informal. One of my friends even described how she received an application for a job where the recurring mandatory ethics training was listed….

So we are good at keeping our Learning History updated, but what about all the times when we learn something by teaching others?

I’m not talking about telling your colleague that the help button is on the top right of the screen. I’m talking about those situations where we are responsible for teaching others – and often finding we learn a lot ourselves during this process.

• Have you been responsible for teaching your group how to create a new set of web pages?
• Have you been responsible for helping a new employee get up and running?
• Have you delivered an outstanding presentation and was asked to tell your group how you organized it?

…then hopefully you helped someone else, but I’m sure that YOU also learned a lot during the process.

So why not start adding this to your Learning History?

If your Learning History includes topics like “Was responsible for getting a new hire up and running in the HR department” or “Trained 12 colleagues how to create user friendly web sites”, then this says much more about your competences than a one-day course in “How to inspire your sales force” you slept through 3 years ago.

So  start telling your group – and yourself – to add relevant instances, where you were the teacher, to your personal Learning History.

This will raise the value of yourself and the people around you!

Merry Christmas
Anders Northeved

Is your compensation hierarchy flexible enough?

 

Deciding on who will get involved in the compensation allocation process varies from organization to organization and there is no fixed formula or hierarchy which suites all of them.

We usually have leads in organization structures to provide work direction to others. However, you may not want them to be included in compensation decisions. Hence, existing supervisory or position hierarchies may not work as your compensation allocation hierarchy for various reasons.

Who will get what in an employee stock options plan is decided by one set of people, usually middle or higher management, whereas how much performance bonus needs to be given to an employee is decided by a different set of people, usually immediate manager or lower management. Different types of the compensation decisions are taken by different people in management chain and it’s not your immediate manager who will always call the shots.

It’s likely that once you start allocating compensation to your people, you will figure out that you don’t have enough information to allocate compensation for some people and it would be better if a better suited manager decided their compensation allocation. You definitely cannot afford to create a new hierarchy from scratch in this scenario as the system is already live.

To summarize, a fully flexible compensation hierarchy is very much needed to meet your business requirements.

Does your compensation system provide this flexibility?

A checklist which can help you to perform a readiness check on the flexibility of your compensation system includes:

•  Ability to support a compensation hierarchy similar to or different from your existing HR hierarchy.
•  Ability to further customize the compensation hierarchy by including or excluding identified people or roles.
•  Ability to realign people within the customized compensation hierarchy on a real-time basis with zero downtime.
•  Ability to have different customized compensation hierarchies for different types of compensation.

Compensation is a fundamental reason people work and the above checklist will help you to put the right compensation distribution responsibility into the right hands, which will result in a robust compensation system.

Why you need to state the obvious

 b

Sometimes, if they don’t see what you see – it is only because they are focused on doing what you asked them to do. State the obvious, and your team will thank you for it.

Tailor the role, not the person

There is no perfect person for a role. There is a perfect role for a person. Smart people know this, and make their role their own. They also play to other people’s strengths.