BESTPRACTICES 2013
RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT:
MEETING TOMORROW'S NEEDS
BEFORE TOMORROW ARRIVES
PRESENTED BY SAM ALLRED
DPIRECTOR
UPSTREAM
ACADEMY, LLC
BEST
RACTICES AT
CONFERENCE
2013
WHAT DOES THIS QUOTE MEAN?
“Since professional firms sell skill, talent,
knowledge, and ability, it follows that any
firm that can outperform its competition in
building and creating skills will gain a
significant competitive advantage.”
David H. Maister
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WHAT DOES THIS QUOTE MEAN?
“Competitive advantage does not come
from an ability to hire better people than
your competitors do, but from a superior
ability to develop them.”
David H. Maister
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QUESTION
Is it possible to outperform your
competitors in building and creating
skills?
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TABLE DISCUSSION
What advantages would you
get if you outperformed your
competitors in skill-building
at all levels?
Take 7 minutes and discuss
this at your table.
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 OBSERVATIONS ABOUT TRAINING
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OBSERVATION #1
While we generally do a good job of
providing technical training, we often do
a poor job of training our people in the
skills that will have a significant impact
on their personal success.
Few firms have a process for training
their people in the vital leadership skills.
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“Most firms are pretty good at training
their people in the technical core of their
profession, but few work actively at
developing some of the critical skills that
determine the professional’s success.”
David H. Maister
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QUESTION
What are “some of the critical skills that
determine [a] professional’s success?”
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OBSERVATION #2
One of the fundamental goals of every
firm should be to retain its best and
brightest people.
One of the best ways to earn loyalty is to
help your people make the most of their
careers. Great training helps to do this.
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QUESTION
How can great training help your people
make the most of their careers?
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OBSERVATION #3
Too many individuals view meeting the
annual CPE requirement as synonymous
with meeting an individual’s training
needs.
In some ways this has cheapened the
overall training experience for many
within our profession.
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OBSERVATION #4
Too often, firms commit significant
resources to annual or semi-annual
training marathons that seem to ignore
all we know about the
ability of the human
mind to process and
retain new information.
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OBSERVATION #5
Most firms have not
established written
training standards and, as
a result, the quality of the
training experience can
vary greatly and is at a
much lower level than it
should be.
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OBSERVATION #6
Too often, we send individuals to CPE
courses or conferences with very few
expectations regarding what they are to
learn, do, and bring back.
As a result, we often have minimal results
to show for the firm’s investment in
training.
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OBSERVATION #7
We do very little testing within our firms
and so we really don’t know how effective
our training is.
We seem far more content to comply
with the CPE hour requirement than to
help team members move to the next
skill level.
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 KEYS TO RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT
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KEYS TO RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT
1. Increase expectations. Be more
appropriately demanding early in an
individual’s career that they become an
expert in one of more areas.
2. No tolerance for under-delegation. No
one in the firm should be working below
his/her pay grade. All work should be
pushed down to the appropriate level.
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KEYS TO RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT
3. Willingness to move someone out of
his/her comfort zone. Comfort zones
need to be viewed as career anchors.
4. Proactively schedule your best people
on your best opportunities.
5. Ensure one-on-one shadowing occurs.
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KEYS TO RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT
6. Insist on an effective client screening
process as part of a well-organized,
constant push to upgrade the caliber of
work brought in.
7. Use technology more effectively to
teach critical skills. Consider video on
demand training.
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KEYS TO RAPID SKILL DEVELOPMENT
8. Focus as much
on the necessary
transfer of
knowledge as
you do on the
transfer of
clients.
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Thank You!
[email protected]
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