Instructional Design & Facilitation Skills Workshop For Practitioners*

• Mumbai: April 27th to 30th, 2010
• NCR: May 19th to 22nd, 2010

The programs are centered around the belief that training effectiveness is fundamentally dependent on some Big-Ticket items (by which we mean constructs that substantively alter the quality of a training intervention). One of these beliefs is that only when learning travels from the head into the heart and then to the feet can it be called real learning – else it is mere knowledge.

With Vyaktitva consultants having successfully delivered more than 15,000 Hours of training over the last 11 years, this belief has been translated into paradigms, tools and methods that have been used by Organizations across the country to raise the effectiveness of their learning interventions dramatically.

It is these time and intervention tested paradigms, tools and methods that make our Big Ticket. Vyaktitva has facilitated more than 100 open and in-house Big Ticket (Design and Facilitation skills) workshops with participants from corporates like AMEX, SRF, Hero Honda, Baxter, Frito-Lay, Daksh, Max New York Life, Aviva, MetLife, Quippo, HCL E-Serve, Moser Baer, Cadence, Convergys, Bharti, Apollo, Vertex, Sapient, Genpact, ITC, Pravah and many more.

In this workshop participants will:

1 Create intervention processes rather than events

2 Develop learning modules of your choice with us as your partner

3 Receive follow up feedback and coaching

4 Practice instructional design principles and models

5 Experience personal growth and learning.

For further information please contact

Mayank Verma – +91 93500 27803 | +91-129-4043675

mayank@vyaktitva.net

When you are in a leadership role everyone will be not only listening to your words, they will be watching your face. If you even appear to be bored, disinterested or “checked-out,” you may inadvertently de-motivate everyone in the room. The content of presentation you are observing may not be that important to you, but your reaction to this content may be very important to them. You need to be fully engaged, not for your needs – but for their needs.

Many books have been written about the “glamourous” aspects of being a leader. Little is written about having to sit in long meetings, watch PowerPoint presentations and hear what you already know – while wishing you could either go to sleep or go to the bathroom.

Like great Broadway actors, great leaders stay in role. This discipline is not part of being a phony, it is part of being a professional. If Broadway actors can go out night after night and work their hearts out, executives (who make a lot more money than actors) can certainly do the same thing.

What do you think? Is it important for a leader to always “be on stage” all the time ?

And yet low cost.

Interesting article about a case study in the T+D magazine about how an organization did this:

Guided by a strategic initiative to improve performance and individual and leader accountability, a representative from our learning department visits each of our facilities annually to engage in individual coaching with each of our leaders. This also serves as a way to improve compliance with HR and organizational development practices and procedures.

These visits do not take the place of valuable classroom instruction, but along with webinars and online training, they reinforce important learning principles and put Silliker’s leadership development concepts into action. For three hours, the learning professional and local leader work on issues important to leaders, their employees, and Silliker. These include identifying goals and expectations for direct reports; creating learning objectives and development plans for high-potential employees; and reviewing prior performance appraisals, with a focus on developing effective criteria.

These annual development visits have proven to be a very effective way of making sure leaders value, understand, and use the tools and processes available to them. Silliker enjoys strong support for this program from individual leaders and executives. Leaders value the individualized attention to their personal leadership development and effectiveness, and executives value the cost-effective solution that creates sustainable leadership within the company.

Here’s the article and the quote that Gagan has given:

“Its quite heartening to see that capability and competence are becoming more important than gender for succession planning in the business houses. With most companies now playing in the global arena, capabilities are becoming more vital for success, which is a welcome shift,” says HR consulting firm Vyaktitva partner Gagan Adlakha.

Mr Adlakha has worked with the Reddy daughters (of Apollo Hospitals) in the past in areas such as organizational development, HR and building performance culture. More recently, he worked with the Khaitan sisters, Araddhana Khaitan Mahana and Nidhi Khaitan Modi, founders of Manya Education.

We’re listed in the Company Blogs section along with the following firms:

• learnability matters - Kern Communication Company blog
• Upside Learning – Upside Learning Company blog
• C2 Workshop – C2 Workshop Company blog
• G-Cube – G-Cube Company blog
• Tata Interactive Systems – TIS Company blog

Do check out the list to get to know other learning and training related blogs

Training recruiters and hiring managers on Competency Based Interviewing

Situation

The organization is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services.

In India they are based out of four major cities from which business processes and IT processes are delivered to the US organization.

Over the last five years the client has grown in size and complexity – hiring a large number of employees to meet its business needs.

The Complexity

The organization was facing an issue where recruiters and hiring managers were not in the same page and the quality of hiring was quite patchy.

The organization  realized that it needed to standardize the process as well as get the recruiters and hiring managers to do better quality of interviewing.

The Engagement

The organization chose to partner with Vyaktitva to help them think through the solution. Vyaktitva consultants as part of the ADDIE model – conducted Analysis, interviewing hiring managers, recruiters, business leaders and HR leaders to find the true learning and performance gap.

After conducting the Analysis, Vyaktitva came to the conclusion that the hiring managers and recruiters needed to be on the same page as far as the process of staffing was concerned, and also to clarify their specific roles in the process and which areas they would interview candidates on.

Vyaktitva designed and developed the intervention.  The focus was making people skilled in using Competency Based Interviewing and also to clarify issues around the process and give feedback to the organization on the process.

The Intervention

It involved the people going through a learning and doing program, clearing a test, and then conducting  a real life interview using the concepts learned in the intervention, using  real world feedback. They also brainstormed on how the organization could improve the process.

Impact

Recruiters and Hiring Managers shared that the process was helpful in interviewing people for high impact roles.

Eventually around 75 people who cleared the program were awarded certificates in being able to use Competency Based Interviewing.

The organization also listened to the feedback and inculcated the feedback of the employees from the training program as a process improvement in the Staffing process.

“Leapfrogging the Organization Training Capability”

The Situation

The organization is a diversified global financial services company that is headquartered in New York.
The company is best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses and is one of the top 30 Most Admired Companies in the World.

The organization is based out of four major cities in India, where back office operations are taken care of.  The client had recently grown significantly in both grown in size and complexity. A large number of new hires had come into the system and many people had moved into higher roles to manage the ramp up.

The complexity

The steep ramp up meant that more people had to be trained for doing the operations and many others were required to be trained on doing their new roles. All this had to be done consistently over a period of time with great efficiency and effectiveness.  To do this the internal training team needed to do training on both process and other behavioral skills.

Most of the trainers in the training team were internal hires. They had good communication/ presentation skills and keen on becoming trainers, but were not from the training/ HR domain nor trained on the science and art of training and development. The organization wanted to ensure that the investment being made on training and developing these employees were giving the desired results in the best possible manner.

One of the biggest pivots for this was to ensure that the trainers were adequately skilled to deliver the training in an effective manner to ensure learning among the participants. The other was to re look at the design of some of the key programs and make them more efficient in terms of ensuring learning and the program duration.

The solution

The organization invited Vyaktitva to partner with them to help meet these objectives. Vyaktitva used the ADDIE* model for the intervention and begun by conducting a detailed Analysis – talking to hiring managers, participants, training team, business and HR leaders to excavate the true learning and performance gap and opportunities. Based on the Analysis, Vyaktitva recommended and designed a ‘Learn + Do’ intervention.

It involved the trainers to attend the customized intensive ‘Big Ticket’ program of Vyaktitva on Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. This program was spread across 5 weeks and conducted 1 day a week. Teams of trainers were created and each team was given one of the key programs to re-design. Each session focused on an aspect of Instructional Design which the trainers learned about during the session and during the week used on their real life project/program. This was presented and discussed in the next session and feedback was given by the instructor and the other participants. The instructor was also available to each team during the week for more focused coaching on the project.

The final presentations/mock sessions were made to an internal Learning and Development team who along with the instructor evaluated the participants on the detailed competency indicators of Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. Participants who qualified were certified and felicitated at an organization ceremony.

The Organizational Impact

1)      Better Designs = more learning + less training duration: The intervention ensured that all the key programs were revamped to become better instructionally designed and thus ensuring better learning. Better designs also enabled the organization to cut down the duration of some of the programs leading to huge savings.

2)      Better Delivery of Training = more learning + less attrition during training : The organizational competence on training delivery leapfrogged with all the trainers getting certified leading to more impactful training, better management of participants’ learning needs.

3)      Common framework of training design = better future interventions: A shared understanding of the principles of people development, common framework, templates and vocabulary was established in the organizations which help ensure that all future interventions were of a certain standard and quality. This would ensure the sustainability and long term impact.

*Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation & Evaluation

The McKinsey quarterly has an interesting article which says that frontline managers should shift their focus from adminstrative tasks to coaching their employees.

As the article says:

Found in almost any company, such managers are particularly important in industries with distributed networks of sites and employees. These industries—for instance, infrastructure, travel and logistics, manufacturing, health care, and retailing (including food service and retail banking)—make up more than half of the global economy.

Vyaktitva has done path breaking work in this area using an intervention that focuses on building a front line manager’s ability to understand the aspirations of his/her team member and to develop the ability to coach them.

Here’s a case study on how Vyaktitva did this for a client in business process outsourcing industry.

Developing the First Line Leader – A Force Multiplier

The Situation

A BPO client of Vyaktitva was a pioneer in the industry. The BPO industry was young and dynamic. It grew at a rapid rate in its initial years; this resulted in a lot of learning, standardization of systems but also brought with it a set of challenges.

The complexity

Rapid growth and attrition had resulted in a lot of young associates / agents getting promoted to the team leader role very quickly. Their teams typically consisted of 12-15 associates in the age group of 20-27 yrs; at times some of the team leaders had team members who were more experienced and older than them. The client was facing a lot of attrition within these teams which was also impacting business. Vyaktitva was invited to come in and design an intervention that addressed attrition.

The Engagement

As a part of the ADDIE process Vyaktitva met a cross section of stakeholders to identify the real cause of attrition.

The analysis clearly indicated that the team leaders were young and did not possess either the experience or the skills to handle the people related issues of their teams. Detailed analysis around some key indicators further revealed that the team leader was specifically unable to understand the aspirations of his team members.

The team members expected their team leader to understand their aspirations and help them achieve their potential. This was a key skill required in team leaders that was leading to attrition.

Vyaktitva realized that building skills that helped team leaders identify team member aspirations and address them needed to be a process; looking at it as a one off training program would not give the desired results. Vyaktitva designed an intervention that built these skills as a process.

The Intervention

The intervention started with pre-work that the participants were required to complete over 2 weeks. The team leaders had to follow a pre-defined process and work along with their team members to complete this pre-work. The pre-work formed a part of the workshop; during the 3 days of the workshop participants applied learnings from each session through a customised tool called the “Real World Connect Document”

Each participant could therefore apply learning on the floor.

The workshop also required participants to take targets on controlling attrition. They were required to share the “Real World Connect Document” with their supervisors; the attrition control targets and action plans were discussed before being signed off by the team leader and supervisor.

The post training process also had two check points that assessed progress against interim milestones. The first check point was assessed after fifteen days and the second after forty five days. Team leaders were certified only if they had managed to achieve their attrition control targets.

Impact

The teams and processes that went through the intervention showed dramatic drop in attrition.

The ability to understand team member aspirations and address them actually helped the organization manage attrition.

The next Big Ticket Instructional Design program is in October 2009.

Check the details and nominate people

“It’s our view that the single most important capacity in people, particularly in the times in which we are living, is the capacity to adapt to new realities,” said Marty Linsky, co-founder and principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates and co-author of the new book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

Those leaders who will be successful will exhibit the following characteristics and behaviors, according to Linsky:

1. A blend of optimism and realism

2. Empathy

3. An experimental mindset

4. Trade autonomy for interdependence.

Read the whole article here.