Adventures in Corporate Education

or, how my graduate studies are affecting my job in corporate education

HPT competencies mirror Social Media management competencies?

November 14th, 2009 by gminks in social_media · 1 Comment

Check out this list of competencies for an HPT professional as listed in the HPI Essentials book (by ASTD press):

  • Analysis Skill
  • Business Knowledge
  • Change Management Skill
  • Facilitation Skill
  • HPI Understanding
  • Influencing Skill
  • Project Management Skill
  • Questioning Skill
  • Relationship-Building Skill
  • Systematic Thinking Skill

It also lists these attributes:

  • Behavioral Flexibility
  • Comfort with Ambiguity
  • Objectivity
  • Self-Confidence

That sounds like what people want social media managers to have! If you are looking for someone like that, I know lots of people graduating with this sort of degree in the next six months….

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Big Question: How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?

November 14th, 2009 by gminks in big question · No Comments

I’m going to make this post quick, because I’m actually supposed to be working on a gap analysis for one of my classes.

A colleague and I have been presenting this presentation:

Basically, remember to:

  • Tie this to business needs
  • Show how it enables informal learning
  • Explain it will still require resources to supportT

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Working on a report on Geary Rummler

November 14th, 2009 by gminks in grad school · No Comments

My partner and I are doing an oral report on Geary Rummler. Remember, I am in a 100% distance program, so this should be interesting.

Actually, lots of what I do and consume at work is 100% distance.

I found a video of some of Rummler’s lectures at Motorola, and I am finding myself very annoyed that I never got to meet him. That he isn’t around for #lrnchat.

I know this is quite selfish, but I would have loved to have had the opportunity to talk to him.

If you have any suggestions for what my partner and I need to include in our report about Rummler, let me know. Maybe I’ll set up a wiki to collect more info.

Here’s the link to the videos I am watching. Rummler seems so straight-forward and real.

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Where I’ll be in November

October 30th, 2009 by gminks in events · No Comments

Besides working on my two performance classes, I’ll also be attending a couple of Boston-based events.

Tues Nov 3 I’ll be at the Mass chapter of ISPI to hear Cammy Bean talk about eLearning authoring tools. Several other #lrnchat folks will be there too.

Tues Nov 17 I’m planning to go to the Greater Boston ASTD meeting to hear Dave Wilkins speak about Social Learning and Social Networking.

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McKinsey Report: Using technology to improve workforce collaboration

October 29th, 2009 by gminks in performance · 1 Comment

As you know if you are following me on twitter, this semester I am taking two performance classes. This means I’m paying more attention to things that measure performance and performance gaps. Since I’m always hyper-focused on social media, I’m also looking at how emerging tools can be used to close performance gaps.

This report from McKinsey talks about the importance of collaboration to knowledge workers. Interestingly enough, they did an analysis on how things are right now, or the current state of performance of knowledge workers. The report says in some industries knowledge workers make up about 75% of the workplace. The authors found a “performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. So organizations with knowledge workers have not figured out what sorts of remedies need to be apply to close performace gaps for knowledge workers.

Its actually worse than that – the researches also found that measurements for effective “collaboration productivity” doesn’t really exist. Everyone says they want a highly motivated, highly collaborative workpace, but no one knows how to measure what’s going on now and no one knows how to get people to that highly collaborative state.

The report has a neat tool that breaks up well-known roles by tasks and possible social media tools that could help them be more effective (in a tag cloud no less!).

The report also suggests a very strategic approach to choosing the tools to create the desired collabortive state:

  1. Understand the specific requirements of interactive tasks
  2. Identify which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
  3. Determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

It is a great report. More and more we’re talking about disruptive technology, but this technology is also going to disrupt our known ways of doing things. We’re going to need folks to get their arms around this idea of measuring performance by what is really going on, not by how things used to get done. And this approach seems like a practical way to blend the new technology into current organizations.

What are you seeing?

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