The BizLibrary Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

In this month’s episode of The BizLibrary Podcast, we sat down with Matthew Burr, an HR consultant with over 13 years of experience working in HR. Matthew shared some of his insights around interviewing, a topic that many organizations find themselves surrounded by in the midst of the current job market.

Matthew gave a few of his key insights – first, he discussed the importance of honesty in the interview process.

Using K-mart as an example, Matthew talked about the absolute need for interviewers to paint an accurate picture of the challenges and obstacles in a job, and discover first if a given candidate is up to the task of working through those challenges. 

This may turn away some candidates, but Matthew demonstrates how many of those candidates aren’t great fits, if the challenges they’re presented seem insurmountable or unappealing.

Matthew tells us “I’ve taken jobs with companies where they tell me it’s 25% travel – I was in a position where I was on the road 95% of the time.. You’re not going to retain anyone. The more open, the more transparent you are, the better you are in recruiting and retaining people – you’re also building that trust up front.” The honesty and transparency doesn’t just help you find the right candidate, it also helps you 

Next, Matthew discusses the importance of a great process – fair, warm, welcome, and efficient. Hiring processes that take too long will result in candidates finding other positions, potentially with competitors! When in doubt, get a second opinion. Matthew tells us “It’s never a bad thing to bring them back in and have another sit down and have another decision.”

Moreso, when faced with two great candidates, never burn bridges! Matthew points to a common issue employers run into: Candidate A and B are both great candidates, but you choose candidate A. Candidate A rejects your offer, and unless you’ve maintained your relationship with candidate B, you may be back to square one in your recruiting efforts!

Matthew tells us “Even a generic thanks, but no thanks, but your resume was reviewed. Those are things that any company can do very quickly, and there’s no real reason not to do those things.”

Finally, Matthew expresses the importance of asking difficult questions. His favorite tough question – “tell me about a time you failed.”
 
 He asks this to discover how employees come back from failure by learning and improving. He tells us “Everyone has made mistakes – it’s a self-reflection question, but also an emotional intelligence question.”

Hiring the right candidate is a fundamental cornerstone of a successful business. Refining your process, being open, honest and transparent, and asking the right questions will go a long way in helping you find the right talent for your organization.

Thanks for listening to this month’s episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! Want to learn more about creating a great interview process? Check out our free resource, 

Welcome back to another episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! We know it has been a while since our last episode, but that's because we have some exciting changes to come! This week, we are so excited to welcome back Thomas Shayon Harrell, a successful L&D professional, whose thought leadership has helped further the knowledge of not only his own workplace but of several other L&D professionals.

Thomas is here this week to discuss personal branding, and if you're like us, you may be wondering why L&D professionals should care about personal branding - Thomas quickly answers that with a compelling argument - he tells us that his company's initiative to produce and create social content through LinkedIn has helped them secure new partnerships with potential clients, and has attracted new employees who are excited by what they see on LinkedIn.

Naturally, we were hoping to understand Thomas' secrets - as we noted in this week's episodes, Thomas is often able to create trending posts, and so we wanted to learn his methods.

Thomas outlined six strategies, among them relevancy, and working with the algorithms. To hear more about Thomas' strategies, you'll have to listen to the whole episode!

Moving forward, we have some exciting things planned for The BizLibrary Podcast, and among them is a reworking of our release schedule. For now, we'll be releasing episodes on a monthly basis. 

Don't worry, because with 67 episodes, there's plenty of relevant and important L&D content for you to catch up on!

Thanks to all of our listeners who tune in each week. We appreciate you, and we're glad we're making something you find useful and valuable. 

Stay posted for more updates, and we'll see you in March!

The BizLibrary Podcast is back with another episode. This time, we’re discussing how L&D and HR departments can use training to make the merger and acquisition process proceed smoothly. Brand consolidation is a growing trend, and companies will continue to need to grow larger to stay relevant in a globalized marketplace.

That said, mergers and acquisitions can be a source of stress on organizations – there may be stress due to fear of layoffs, redundancies in departments, and clashing cultures. However, when managed well, a merger or acquisition can dramatically improve your market standing as companies consolidate clients, products, and markets.

It may be tempting for training programs to take a “wait and see” approach to mergers and acquisition, but this approach ignores the fact that leaders, managers, and individual contributors all need to learn specific skills to successfully navigate a merger or acquisition.

Managers need to know how to communicate information effectively, without leaking confidential information. Account managers must know how to anticipate and answer client questions, so that client retention remains high. 

All of these necessities all fall on the shoulders of L&D, and begs the question: if mergers aren’t the perfect time for learning and development programs to establish their value and be agents of change, when is?

Unfortunately, data suggests that many organizations fail to allow training programs to become true catalysts of change.

Research from the Project Management Institute shows that only 18% of organizations are effective change enablers. Using training to build a more agile company is one of the many roles that training program managers must take on to optimize the ROI of their programs.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! When you’re done listening, be sure to download the Crisis Management ebook! It’s full of strategies and has a workbook section so you can better prepare your managers and leaders to navigate the seas of change! 

This week on The BizLibrary Podcast, Hannah and Derek discuss defining and developing job competencies.

Competency based training is an effective way to set L&D goals and define behaviors that you’d like to see changed through training. The first step of that, however, is to define these job competencies.

Hannah notes that most companies have already begun this process, by creating skill requirements on job postings. 

Analyzing these job postings and defining a ‘why’ behind each skill is vital: take a skill like communicating on the phone.

“Phone skills” is a generic term, and could mean several things. For example, an account manager who helps clients strategize how to market a new product needs distinct skills: they need to know how to anticipate and answer questions, how to apologize at times, and identify and solve the unique needs of their clients.

That’s a distinctly different set of skills than what’s required for a sales cold call, who needs to be able to communicate a value quickly, gain the trust and attention of a potential buyer, and gain a commitment to set up a later meeting.

Going beyond a generic term like “phone skills” requires you to get very specific in order to accurately define the skills that will make your employees successful.

Hannah also stresses that having something in place to measure the results of your training is key to successfully accomplishing strong competency based training. The Kirkpatrick model is a great way to measure the results of your training, but having metrics that are tied to success is important as well. 

For instance, for a sales rep who is in training to improve  measuring how many meetings booked will help you identify whether or not your training is effective.

Thanks for listening to The BizLibrary Podcast! When you’re finished listening to this week’s episode, be sure to download the free related resource!

This week on The BizLibrary Podcast, we talked to Susan Daniel about how her organization, Exeter Finance, was able to create an onboarding process that immersed new hires into Exeter’s intentional culture.

Company culture can be intentional or accidental. Every company has a culture, but companies with strong cultures intentionally build a culture by using vision, values, and missions to build processes and behaviors into the workplace.

Exeter Finance has a “culture of excellence.” To test the strength of this value, Susan conducted surveys and focus groups and identified that the main values at Exeter were people, performance, and service.

By working with people across the organization, Susan and the leadership team at Exeter were able to shape their workplace and introduce new skill and behaviors into their training.

Susan not only has values in place, but she also has ways she measures how well she trains these values. To measure how well new hires work with others, she can measure how well they manage projects, collaborate, and communicate.

With a blended approach, all new hires at Exeter are given strong people management training. This lasts for 90 days, which shifts the onboarding program to leadership excellence, where each employee discovers their leadership strengths, and how they can use those skills to create excellence.

Finally, employees learn about service excellence, where they learn how to better serve clients and the community at large.

By framing onboarding around the values of a company, Exeter’s culture has become a baseline for how things get accomplished. 

Susan tells us that she recently had a conversation with the CEO, who has mentioned that this effort has helped him buy-in to the importance and value of developing employees.

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! Be sure to download our free resources, and we’ll see you next week!

This week on The BizLibrary Podcast, we welcome Hallie Tucker. Hallie is a safety supervisor and program manager at Superior Energy Services, who has developed a great program using data-driven approaches.

We talked to Hallie about how she uses data to build a stronger training program. She starts with a framework that most learning and development specialists are familiar with: the Kirkpatrick model.

The Kirkpatrick model is a framework that can be used to measure learning - it starts with measuring satisfaction - a simple question can measure this: did the learner enjoy the training? 

Next, the Kirkpatrick asks us to understand whether or not the learner actually learned from the training - we can do this by measuring how learners performed on assessments. 

Next, we want to identify whether an employee actually changed their behavior - this is the goal of our training, so identifying whether this happened is important.

Finally, we need to look at the outcome - if our training is properly aligned to business goals, then we should know whether we achieved a goal.

For instance, if our goal is to increase phone calls made by a sales rep, we can measure it by comparing the number of calls made before and after training.

This framework is ideal for measuring training because we have a full picture of the learner's journey.

Hallie began with this framework as a way to bring statistics into her program. With leadership bought in, Hallie began looking for data to apply to her training.

One of the best, and easiest ways to collect data is to simply survey employees. Hallie reminds us to look for nonverbal cues when we collect data, but that simply having conversations with employees and managers about what skills are important for success is a great way to get started.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! When you're finished listening, be sure to download the related resource!

This week, we are excited to bring leadership expert and author Kevin Eikenberry to The BizLibrary Podcast. Kevin brings two decades of experience to the forefront as we explore the differences between the theory and application of true leadership development.

Apart from remote leadership, which makes methods like "manage by walking around" obsolete, Kevin notes that not much has changed in leadership over his time as a consultant. At this point, Kevin says, the basics are well known.

What's missing from leadership training that makes it really work in the real world, is the buy-in. Leaders know the fundamentals of leadership, but don't apply them. Until they see in real terms why they need to apply those fundamentals, they may never adopt them.

Once we've created strategies to build buy-in from our leaders, there are further challenges to be solved. One of the biggest challenges facing today's leaders is the rise of dispersed and virtual workforces. In 2019, it's not uncommon for entire departments to have never met face to face. Uniting and leading these employees to success can't always be accomplished with traditional management strategies.

This presents quite a challenge to leaders because traditional leadership strategies don't always work. To overcome this challenge, Kevin recommends training employees to use communication technology to its full potential. Webcams, chat technologies, and even email can all be used to lead effectively, but face-to-face time in the form of webcam or skype meetings is crucial. 

You can listen to Kevin's podcast, "The Remarkable Leadership Podcast," where he goes in depth with other leadership experts. He also regularly presents free, HRCI and SHRM approved webinars for BizLibrary. 

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! When you're finished listening, be sure to download this week's related resource.

We'll see you next week!  

Welcome to another episode of The BizLibrary Podcast! Today, we welcome DeeAnna Deane, from Teel Plastics, to discuss how she’s managed to build high-functioning teams in her organization.

DeeAnna is very clear that relationships are a key part of building high functioning teams. She started her initiative with the goal of making each team member seem more human to each other.

To do this, she held a training session where she highlighted negative personal aspects, then asking employees to identify these traits in themselves. 

Each employee confessed that at times, they exhibited some of these negatives traits, be it gossip, or focusing on bad news. Next, DeeAnna highlighted important leadership qualities. Employees also quickly identified with these qualities.

The point that this training session drove home is that we all have the ability to impact our teams: negative emotions are contagious, but so are the positive ones, and because we all carry leadership qualities, we can use our positive traits to help one another out.

Management has an important role in this process: by facilitating team building exercises, managers can create a self-sustaining, high-functioning team ecosystem that is agile and can solve many problems without intervention.

This frees up valuable management time to focus on bigger problems, while individual contributors develop their leadership skills and overcome day-to-day challenges.

Finally, DeeAnna talks about positive psychology, and the scientific effects of positive thinking. She references a study that suggests that emotions are contagious, and they affect our work. More expressive people can transfer their mood, bringing energy and focus to a team.

The same is true for negative emotions, however, so a manager of a high-functioning team should be able to recognize and overcome negative energy.

When you’re done listening to this week’s episode, be sure to download our free related resource! 

And as always, thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The BizLibrary Podcast!

Succession planning can never be started too soon. When there is turnover in your leadership ranks, if you do not have someone prepared to take over important leadership duties, your organization could be headed for trouble.

Hiring from the outside is expensive. Hiring executive level leaders is expensive – a study by The Centre for American Progress demonstrates that replacing highly skills executive costs about 213% of their annual salary!

This week, we welcome back Daniel Binkholder to discuss the real strategies behind succession planning. Getting high potential employees ready for leadership roles is difficult, but one of the most important services your training program can provide.

Daniel first recommends identifying high potential employees: these are employees who not only exhibit great leadership qualities but who are willing and want to be in leadership positions.

The next step is to develop a leadership program for these individuals. One concern many training program managers share during this process is that high potential employees may decide to leave before they take on more responsibility reducing the ROI of your leadership development program.

This will happen, even in organizations with phenomenal turnover rates; if you don’t have enough high potential employees to keep a leadership development class stocked, read this free ebook!

Eventually, when the time comes, you will have employees who are prepared to take on leadership positions!

One important reason to start succession planning today is that you cannot control the future! In reality, executives may leave at any moment – for any reason. Succession planning can’t wait!

If you’d like to learn more about the importance of succession planning, be sure to download this week’s free related resource. It’s a great look into identifying core competencies and setting realistic goals.

Thanks for listening to The BizLibrary Podcast!

This week, we welcome another Havens brother - the legendary Matt Havens.

Matt's here to talk about customer service, and how customer service is a serious competitive advantage and a key to client and customer retention.

We live in a digital age, where exceptional customer service can go viral - and bad customer service can too!

To remain in favor with your customers, it's important to do a few things - be authentic, honest, and human. 

Being authentic in customer interactions is about acting with integrity. There will be times where your customer service misses the mark - perhaps a delivery will be late, or perhaps your software was down for an extended period of time.

When these moments occur, an authentic, honest conversation needs to occur. Most companies and people you do business with will be understanding. 

However, part of delivering exceptional customer service is doing everything you can to make sure that mistakes are avoided as much as possible.

By working to deliver on your promises, and hosting honest, authentic conversations when you cannot, you're doing a lot to deliver great customer service. 

We asked Matt about some of the challenges that B2B companies face when trying to win loyalty and brand love.

Matt admits that this is certainly more challenging, but business is about relationships - be personal, and understand that even when you speak to a representative of a company, they're still a person - so be human!

Customer service is crucial to your business success - if you nail customer service, you'll get repeat business, and we know that it's easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find new ones!

Customer service is about teaching respect and acting with integrity - with the right approach, and commitment, your organization can gain a serious competitive advantage!