How can I make people care?

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I received an email today from a CEO the other day asking me, “Do you have any good references / literature on ‘how to make people care’? I’m having some employee challenges.”

I thought I would share my response with you:

“Three ways:

1) hire people who care (it’s an attitudinal thing, not a training thing)
2) show a direct connection between success for them and why they should care
3) lobotomy – expensive and illegal but can dramatically shift innate personality traits. For examples of when this doesn’t work I suggest renting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and yes, I know, that was a potion, not a lobotomy – you get the idea).

Motivation is not something people need to receive. It’s finding ways to remove the things that demotivate people that keeps them motivated (if you hire self-starters).”

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit

An interview with Bill Taylor, Game Changer blogger for HarvardBusiness.org. Zappos knows that they can’t deliver great customer service unless their employees are committed to the values of the company.They attempt to bride new employees to quit during the initial training.

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Andragogy versus Pedagogy.

  

 

 

Pedagogy

The distinction between the old style of university lecture learning (pedagogy – child learning) where the professor has the answer or it’s in a book, and our job is to write down as fast as possible the “nuggets” of information for the purpose of memorizing it for a test of recollection versus application filtered it’s way into business and leadership training within organizations a long time ago and even though it’s time has passed (while actually, it never really work all that well), there are still many organizations who are using an academic approach to attempting to develop leaders within their organization.  It’s usually referred to as “training” and it’s the mind-numbingly boring “fill my glass” approach to learning that causes most adults to slip into a waking coma for extended periods of time.

A few years ago (1833) a psychologist named Alexander Kapp developed a much better approach: Andragogy (adult learning).  This model supposes that the learner is involved in the design and evaluation of their learning, that mistakes are part of the process of refinement, that the subject being learned has relevance to their current situation, and that the learning is focused on problem solving versus memorizing content.

In my experience the andragogy approach leads to the key thing that’s required in leadership development: actual changes in behaviour over the long term.  Without an actual change in behaviour the result is “academics” who can preach about leadership but who demonstrate a complete lack of application.  We have a model that we use at ViRTUS called the Video Test: turn off the volume and watch what people do.  It’s a much better determinant of a person’s abilities.

When adragogy is blended with immersion and spaced repetition it’s amazing the difference in the ability of adults to take concepts and turn them into behaviours and habits.