What really makes for a great classroom experience though, is great delegates, and I’ve had plenty of those over the last three days. Working with great people makes everything that much easier and enjoyable - there’s always something to spark off.

Note to self - don’t mispell ‘technical’ on the flipchart.

I enjoyed seeing the new Connect newsletter come out, my first as Editor. We’ve had some good feedback already and I’m looking forward to getting on with the next one.

Today has been very rewarding and stimulating, two coaching sessions - two very different organisations and a different focus required for each. More of this please!

A supplement in today’s paper on great places to work has got me thinking once again on workplace volunteering and closing the gap between the private and third sectors. Wrapped up in this are some ideas around leadership skills and reaching out to Generation Y.

I’m getting increasingly busy and this means my time management and prioritisation skills are going to need to slip up a notch. Some work to be done here.

I’m keen to find some practical examples of where charities have used social media tools to capture and propogate learning within their organisation. I’m looking for all kinds of examples, no matter who big or small, but with the emphasis on learning and improving staff skills and knowledge, rather than engaging with stakeholders, clients or service users.

It would be great if I could get a range of third sector people to write a blog, tweet, shoot a short video or record an audioboo about their own examples, which I could then collate and refer to in the newsletter. Please feel free to leave a comment here or send me a link to your own blog, boo or tweet.

Thanks very much for your help!

Sir Alex Ferguson has been the manager of Manchester United for 23 years, an unprecedented and unmatched tenure in modern football. Great football teams do not burn brightly for too long, as players find title-winning form difficult to sustain against the pressures of fame, fortune, expectation and the deterioration of their physical gifts. Even the greatest sides the sport has seen have had a limited lifepsan of around say, two to four seasons. The vagaries are just too formidable. And once a great team begins to lose its way, to splinter and disintegrate, how does the manager summon the energy to start over, nurturing a fresh wave of talent and staying competitive? Very few of the all-time greats have managed that, but Ferguson has done it three times.

1992-1997: four league titles, two FA Cups
1999-2001: three league titles, one FA Cup & the European Cup
2006-2009: three league titles & the European Cup

Along the way, the way the team is structured has changed from 4-4-2 to 4-4-1-1 to 4-2-3-1 to 4-3-3 and then back to 4-4-2. There’s also been a shift in outlook, with the all-out attacking nature of the early nineties vintage replaced by the more patient, but no less easy on the eye style you will now encounter at Old Trafford.

Everything changes then. Great players move on, tactics evolve, new owners arrive and leave, but Ferguson keeps on building great teams.

Every organisation could learn something from three principles  which I would argue form the bedrock of this man’s ability to build great teams. These are they:

1. Let the team evolve.
After tearing opposition defences apart for two seasons, Andrei Kanchelskis’s form dipped and Ferguson wasted no time in selling him to Everton in 1995. Kanchelskis was a classic winger: fast, direct and tricky. He was a fan favourite and seen as an integral part of that first great Ferguson side. His replacement in the team could not have been more different in style. No tricks, no pace, but in possession of incredible stamina and one of the most accurate right feet the game has seen - David Beckham.

Ferguson has never recruited like for like. He identifies great players, brings them to the club, makes them better and then adapts the shape and style of the team to suit their particular strengths. When Beckham left for Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo took his place in the team and once again this saw a consequent shift in the shape and style of the team. Constant evolution.

Too many organisations think about the role first and the individual second. There’s obviously a balance to be struck, but I would always come down on the side of recruiting the best talent and adapting their role and the shape of the team to fit their strengths.

2. Develop talent from within.
Alan Hansen said that you’d never win anything with kids, but Neville (Gary), Butt, Neville (Phil), Scholes, Giggs and Beckham certainly proved him wrong on that. Ferguson believes passionately in giving young players a chance to deliver and continues to have his faith in youth repaid. Not enough organisations are brave enough to follow his lead, despite the fact that talent management initiatives and succession polices are all the rage.

This isn’t about keeping recruiting costs down, it’s about keeping alive what it is that makes your organisation special. Seeing Eric Cantona put himself through extra training sessions had a profound effect on the likes of Scholes and Beckham, helping them understand what it took to be a great player. Individuals who have through the ranks of your organisation will understand its values and what makes it special - they deserve to be given the chance to deliver.

3. Recruit people with hunger
Ferguson very very rarely buys players from clubs similar in shape and stature to Manchester United and when he does (Laurent Blanc, Seba Veron), it hasn’t worked. He has however, had a great deal of success in bringing in players from smaller clubs who have something still to prove, who want to get better and who he will work with (and be patient with) to help them get to the desired level.

Why recruit people to your organisation who have nothing left to prove? Where will the motivation come from? Experience will help you maintain the status quo, but you need hunger and determination to get you to the next level. And I would stress that this is nothing to do with age, this is about giving people a new stage in their career and making sure they have the tools, resources and learning opportunities they will need to develop and perform.

Obviously there is a lot more to Ferguson’s ongoing success than these three principles, but they certainly stood out for me when I was thinking about how he has succeeded in continually building outstanding teams. We have a lot to learn from the great man. Your comments are welcome.

Capturing is the process by which learners, be they in a group or as individuals, use methods such as note-taking, action-plans, whiteboards, flipcharts and snow-carding to help capture thoughts, ideas, key methods and approaches.

The learning facilitator can turn a sterile environment into a focused and creative learning environment by surrounding the learners with the results of their capturing, as well as using relevant displays, posters, materials and visual aids.

These approaches are most commonly used in syndicate work and brainstorming sessions, where appropriate tools and methods are needed to map the rapid generation and exchange of ideas and approaches. This way of working is not new to us by any means, anyone stepping in to a primary school classroom in the last 100 years would have seen some fine examples of capturing and surrounding, but in terms of workplace learning, facilitators and trainers have tended to capture the thought processes of their learners in a very linear way, encouraging learners to stick with the sentence and paragraph structures that have been drilled into them at schools and universities.

Over the last ten years, we have seen much more creative approaches to capturing and surrounding become prevalent, spearheaded by design agencies such as IDEO, who use the clustering, sorting and voting of ideas on post-its as one of the key stages in their ‘design thinking ‘ process, which they have used to produce a range of award-winning products. It is worth noting that that these more creative approaches have been made easier by the advent of more flexible tools. Products such as ‘magic whiteboard’, sticky flipchart paper and more durable post-its are much more adaptable than blu-tac and drawing pins and give the facilitator a much wider range of options.

Using capturing and surrounding techniques will not lead to the creation of perfectly crafted ideas and solutions by themselves of course, but there is no doubt that they enhance the learning process. The most simple way that they do this is through aiding retention. By writing out your thoughts, ideas and learning points and then displaying them, you have a much better chance of remembering them, as (to put it crudely) they are not allowed to disappear back into the ether. When you start to build on these ideas and combine them with those of other learners in a group and again, display them, you can quickly build a matrix of ideas where the connections and links can be traced and new solutions built in a very visual and stimulating way. Working in this way can help learners to immerse themselves in their thoughts and choose where they place their focus. It is a fun, creative and vibrant form of self-expression.

However, capturing and surrounding may not always be suitable in a learning situation and it is the facilitator’s role to provide an element of control. They must ensure that the techniques retain their usefulness, giving learners the right tools, guidance and structure and be able to make the right judgements on what should be displayed and retained, and what can be jettisoned. Post-classroom, they need to exercise discipline, using their editing and translation skills to ensure that important information can be logged and distributed.

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, facilitators and learners now have an expanded range of tools to use when capturing and surrounding. Hand-held video recorders, audio devices and digital cameras enable us to record our thoughts, words and ideas and swiftly upload them to classroom laptops and then transfer them to a video screen where they can be replayed and dissected. We might then choose to send them to platforms such as Evernote and Slideshare, so that they can be accessed and commented on by peer networks, or convert the best ideas into captivating visuals using Wordle or even comment on them in a podcast.

This dizzying range of options that is now available to facilitators and trainers has come at a good time, because if we are indeed seeing a decrease in time spent in the workplace ‘classroom’, then we are going to need to find new ways of capturing and surrounding for the benefit of our learners

This post is very much about my own experiences of using 360° feedback as a coaching tool and I don’t profess to be an expert. I would be very interested to read views on alternative approaches, so if you do read this, please don’t refrain from adding a comment and enhancing the post with the benefit of your own experience. It would be appreciated.

I think that feedback gathered using a 360° process is a wonderful thing. If you get the process right then you will receive feedback that is fast, confidential, targeted and benchmarked, creating a powerful picture for the individual on how they are perceived by a range of their colleagues.

This feedback picture can be vivid, nuanced and full of insight, but it can never be the truth. The feedback that colleagues give to the individual will always be subjective, it will always be open to bias and some respondents will never have the time and inclination to give feedback that is honest and specific. No matter how much attention you give to the design of your questionnaire, if you are running the process for more than one individual then you will not be able to completely bespoke it for each of those individuals, tailoring each question to the specific demands of their job roles. The point I am trying to make is that the 360° process gives the individual this fantastic feedback picture, but it should not be presented to them as the truth.

This is the first point in my mind when I use 360° feedback as the basis for a coaching session, however that doesn’t mean that I feel wary about how the session is going to unfold. Instead, I feel excited, as I believe that this kind of feedback represents a powerful opportunity for the coach and coachee.to generate insight and self-awareness.

Self-awareness is very rarely easily achieved, especially in relation to how we are perceived by those around us and it is not surprising that we shy away from examining how our behaviour impacts on others. Even if we are prepared to put aside our fears of being judged, then collecting meaningful feedback from our colleagues can be an awkward process, for instance, walking around the office asking each person in turn ‘so then, what do you really think about me?’ is just going to make you feel more odd, rather than enlightened.

The 360° feedback will provide a powerful, if imperfect, picture of how an individual is perceived by their colleagues, focusing not just on their areas for development but also their qualities and their particular talents. This gives the coachee a rare opportunity to generate powerful insights into their behaviour and raise their levels of self-awareness. It is worth reminding them however, that this all within the context of their working environment. They are not being given feedback on their worth as a human being, rather they are being granted insights into say, what the people they manage think about their ability to set meaningful objectives, or what their own manager thinks about their strategic skills.

Here lies the rub. For many of us, the tendency when we’re presented with this vivid picture of feedback will be to pick out the negative points, the stark scores or statements that stand out and prick at our pride. Sure we’re happy that our colleagues value our open and positive communication style, but we CANNOT BELIEVE that they don’t think we’re quite so hot on delivering projects on time. How DARE they! It’s natural to indulge in some self-flagellation, but it isn’t going to get us any further down the road. So this is where I think the coach needs to work really hard to ensure that the 360° process remains a useful process for the coachee.

I feel that if I’m coaching someone through a 360° feedback session, I need to ensure that we have a really strong and robust structure to our conversation. At the beginning, when we set our ‘contract’ together, I’ll be sure to let them shape their outcomes for the session and the areas that they want to explore, but I’ll also be a little bit directive and establish that as well as taking a look at the areas where they feel they want to develop, we’ll be exploring what the feedback tells us about their key strengths, their qualities and the talents that their colleagues feel they bring to the workplace. I will propose that we take a forensic approach to all the feedback that has being generated, establishing which is strong, honest, accurate and focused – the stuff that we can work with and which can be of use to the individual. That’s the good stuff we want to pick out the key themes from, getting us closer to the truth. The rest will be of no use to the coachee and they can take the decision to discard it.

I will be clear that some of the feedback will be of no surprise to the coachee and that it may be more beneficial to focus on the themes that contain fresh insights and new understanding, rather than treading on old ground. And I will also offer the idea that you cannot please everyone all of the time, that there maybe aspects of the coachee’s behaviour or work-style that don’t go down well with some individuals, but that those choices are made for the sake of the organisation and shouldn’t lead to knee-jerk reactions.

Finally, I will emphasise the context within which the feedback has been created, reminding them that the 360° process is powerful yet imperfect and does not represent the truth, rather it represents an opportunity for the coachee to find their own truth.

These are the kind of parameters that I want to build into this kind of session. They underpin the conversation and help provide a supportive and positive space within which the coachee can explore all the marvellous feedback that has been collected for them. With any luck, they will gain new understanding, recognising where they might build on their existing strengths and where they might try new ideas and strategies in their drive for self-management. As the coach in this kind of session, I would be seeking to understand what learning needs the coachee had identified for themselves and the opportunities they would grasp in order to meet those needs.

My final thought around using 360° as a coaching tool is that I would be surprised if you can tie up all the themes that emerge in just one session. After such a powerful barrage of feedback, the coachee is going to need some time for reflection and let these new insights and ideas settle into the mind and it may take one or two follow-up sessions before they’ve really absorbed everything that has been handed to them by their colleagues.

To conclude then, I believe that the 360° process is a powerful coaching tool that if handled carefully, can enable the recipient to reap some rich rewards in terms of self-awareness and new insights.

Over to you. What do you think?

This article makes some good points, but the ‘training is dead’ headline feels a little bit like unnecessary hyperbole. I added my tuppence worth.

I wrote the following for Londonist in 2006, just after Sol Campbell had walked out of Highbury during half-time in his club’s game against West Ham. It was described as a meltdown at the time and there were all sorts of theories flying around as to Campbell’s state of mind, but no explanation was given by the man himself and I doubt that he will ever feel the need to explain himself to the media now that he’s left Notts County in a hurry. Sol keeps his own counsel and I admire the way he’s maintained a level of privacy. He’s a maverick of sorts, but he deserves our respect.

Still waters run deep is how the proverb goes. And there are few athletes as still, as impenetrable as Sulzeer Jeremiah Campbell. Here is a man who has spent the last thirteen years defying lazy footballer stereotypes whilst going about his business of de-constructing attacking moves with a level of stealth that is almost perverse in its ability to go unnoticed. All the while his sphinx-like visage and ice-cold demeanour have combined to keep us all at bay and denied us the opportunity to proclaim ‘this is what Sol Campbell is about, this is who he is, this why he was good and this is why he is now bad’.

He has let the mask slip though. But only twice. Both times playing for England in international tournaments, when he thought that he’d won the contest for his country, only to have the glory snatched away. In the anguish writ large over his face, we saw just how important it was to this man to win and to set the standard on the global stage. Setting the standard is exactly what he did, as Campbell was voted into the ‘team of the tournament’ on both occasions by the real experts, the technical study groups of FIFA and UEFA respectively. Rated as the best of the best, but not able to take his team all the way, and in those fleeting moments, the pain really showed. The only clues that we have been given then, is that Campbell cares very deeply about playing for his country and after the trauma of Wednesday night, the received opinion is that he is going to be denied the opportunity to make any kind of impression in Germany this summer.

What is wrong with Sol then? Has he lost control? Too old? Too rich? Some Arsenal fans might have it that he is no longer committed, that he is no longer making an effort. But how can you say that of a player whose gift has always been to appear as if he does not need to make any effort at all? Certainly, Campbell appears to have lost focus, but we have no idea why, and perhaps the fact that he has never revealed his life to us, might remind us that players do have a life away from the arena and that like anyone, their focus can be disrupted by the ups and downs of the everyday.

Don’t write him off too quickly though. Towards the end of the 2002/03 Premiership season, Campbell was red-carded for apparently elbowing Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. He missed the last four games of the season and could only watch as the title was conceded to Manchester United and his teammates lifted the FA Cup without him. Sol came back from that, and we’ll back him to come back from this.

He can’t pass though.

To be honest though, the business world has been looking across to sport for inspiration for decades, be it in the hope of finding new ways of influencing, motivating, developing or inspiring their employees or perhaps just to have a reliable way of providing hospitality events for their clients. The traditional, male-dominated workplace saw itself reflected in macho sporting environments and felt comfortable leaning across and plucking out endless inspirational quotes and team building exercises.

But this isn’t a diatribe against the macho workplace, this is an attempt to pick out the most positive aspects of the sport/workplace interface, which I think are plentiful. In my own experience, what I’ve learnt as a football coach has had a fundamental effect on my abilities as a learning facilitator and a workplace coach. Designing and running training drills with a collection of unruly footballers has taught me so much about group dynamics, learning structures, delivery styles and self-confidence, and I savour the opportunities I have to take new ideas from one field to another. Football has heavily shaped my thinking in the workplace and I strongly believe that looking to another environment, any environment, is critical for anyone who wants to be better at what they do.

As a football coach, I’ve been very aware how attitudes to the ‘matchday warm-up’ have changed over the years. Back in the day, before a game the coach or team manager would send the players out for a few laps round the pitch and a bit of shooting practice and that would pretty much be their lot. Ideas around this area quickly began to develop, as the thinking was driven by the visionaries constantly looking for new ways to seek an advantage over their opposition. It soon became apparent that players would benefit from a warm-up that included a range of exercises, some designed to stretch the muscles and some to get their heart-rates up to the level they would be experiencing in the match. Coaches had begun to recognise that if their players were to be truly ‘match-ready’ and able to make an impact from the first whistle, then they would need a warm-up that involved exercises which replicated the kind of movements they would be making in the game itself.

If this weekend you were to go and watch a Sunday league game of football at your local path, you may well see a team warming up in the more traditional way, running few some half-hearted stretches before standing in line and taking turns to take an unopposed shot against their own goalkeeper, despite the fact that it is highly unlikely that they will face a similar situation in the game. If however, you go and see the Arsenal, you will see a warm-up which incorporates a succession of high-intensity drills where every player is able to replicate the movements and situations they will soon be finding themselves in. One team is warming up in a thoroughly amateur way and the other is pushing boundaries and finding new ways to continuously improve.

I think that the classic ‘icebreaker’ exercise should be viewed the same way. These kind of exercises are classically used at the beginning of a group learning session, they can have a variety of purposes, but usually it is to engage the group, bring them together and get them ‘warmed up’ for the activities that will follow. Unfortunately, it is precisely this kind of activity which we have often seen being parodied in programmes like ‘The Office’, trite and embarrassing games which the trainer has picked out of a ‘1001 Icebreakers’ book. Learners often dread them and see them only as an opportunity for unwanted exposure or a necessary evil that need s to be endured before the proper stuff can get underway. For my own part I now feel compelled to start every warm-up exercise that I deliver with a ‘I promise that this won’t be too painful or cheesy’ line, in an attempt to limit the pre-conceptions and anxiety that I know exists.

These kind of exercises are used for a good reason, it is important to get the learning group engaged, relaxed and focused on the work ahead, and a short sharp and effective drill is often the best way to do that. My contention is that to get the most out of this kind of activity, you should design a warm-up exercise in which you give the learners the opportunity to replicate the skills they are going to be using in the work ahead. If for example, you are delivering an away-day for a team of directors, in which they plan to be analysing the external environment and identifying possible risks, then create a warm-up exercise that includes those skills. You can (and should) keep it simple, you can keep it light, but whatever you do, make sure that it’s relevant. Even if your warm-up exercise consists of nothing more than the same question directed at each learner, then tie that question in to the aims and objectives of the entire session.

The reason that the icebreaker has become so poorly thought of is that too often trainers and facilitators have used exercises that have no connection to the rest of the learning event. Delegates aren’t dummies, if they can see that (for instance) your carefully constructed bingo exercise has no link to the networking skills course you’re delivering then of course they’ll view it as nothing more than a frivolous bit of fun. And that’s at best, at worst they’ll feel condescended to and may start to disengage.

I prefer the aim high approach. Challenge your learners and get them focused and sparking off each other from the moment they enter the classroom. If you can get them match-ready, then they will produce the results you are looking for.

Creating a compelling picture of perfection.

This is a technique that I encountered throughout the time I was studying for my coaching diploma, that the individual is much more likely to achieve their goal if they take the time to transform that goal from a simple statement into a fully-formed and fleshed out vision for success. That may sound a bit corny, but it’s something I’ve seen work in practice, both in myself and when working with people I’ve coached. It’s not a complex process, it requires nothing more than exercising your imagination in a way that is fun and rewarding. I’m tempted here to launch into a detailed definition of this process, as I see it, but instead I’ll hold back from that and let my thoughts develop, allowing myself be influenced by others as I build a much fuller understanding of what the phrase above means to me.

I do however, have a clearer idea of how I’m going to go about building that understanding. To begin with, I’ll shoot a short video, where I will attempt to explain why I find this conecept so interesting. Then, I will attempt to use social media to collect some input from others. Rather than opening it too wide, I’m going to see if I can target a few people whose thoughts I’m really interested in and see if I can co-erce them into making a short video for me. I’ll ask them three core questions:

1. What tools do you use to create a compelling picture of perfection?
2. What process do you follow?
3. How have you used the pictures that you’ve created?

Next step would be to see if I can take what I’ve learned from these people and see if I can improve the way I create my own pictures of prefection. I’m also toying with the idea of drawing some of these pictures and asking a wider selection of people for their own examples, but I’ll see about that when I get to it.

I feel quite excited about this one, as I’m hoping that I will get a lot out of it. We. Shall. See.