Examining Success in People and Programs

Workforce Development is like an industry of smoking doctors with high fat diets. We are busy preaching to job seekers and businesses about how to perform at maximum strength, but never actually take the lessons of high-performance coaching and apply it to our own industry.  I think that it is time to look at what success really looks like and bring it home. This means that workforce development “must drink the Kool-Aid.”

It is time to examine success and its people to see how it fits into our workforce development world every day.

§  Successful people are not “jack of all trades.”  If you examine Olympic athletes that won gold medals, you will find that they spent hours, days, and years perfecting their skill- and that is for one sport! You can be Michael Phelps in swimming, but cannot throw a javelin at all.  In another example, look at healthcare. If you go to your general practitioner and have any specific issue, you will be referred to a specialist for a bump, itch, pain, etc. Jonas Salk, the doctor that invented the vaccination for polio, studied polio for 8 years before the vaccination was announced. He was not spending his time learning how to solve all the world’s diseases. He devoted his time and attention to one thing and as a result became a great success!

 §  Success is intense. It is high-impact exercise. Heart-pumping exercise is aerobically, high impact. It takes a toll on the body and as a result it can radically change the body.  Intense can be of the mind.  Experts in any field have spent countless hours in study. As I write this, someone who has engaged in intense, in-depth study of disease and the body could be developing a cure for cancer. Looking back at Jonas Salk, notice that not only did he study one thing, he studied it intensely, learning everything known about polio.

 §  Practice Makes Perfect! It doesn’t matter if you are in training to be an Olympic athlete, a heart surgeon, or a professional dancer, the more practice you get, the better you are. In order to become a Prima Ballerina or a professional musician, you must practice daily. Being a casual participator in any craft will not make you successful in that field. It takes practice!

Now let’s examine the current state of workforce development to see if the rules of success are being followed. 

 §  Now trending… Generalists! Everyone is supposed to know everything, but do they really? It’s not reasonable to be an expert on everything. If you have only “general” knowledge of something, you are master of nothing!  This is the workforce development gone retail department store. If you walk in the mega store and ask someone that works there if they sell batteries, they know that they exist in the store and will send you to the department. If you ask someone in the mega-store which batteries fit your need, you may get a blank stare or maybe someone will read the back of the package if you are lucky!  Maybe we should re-think this trend?  The solution is to send the generalists where the bad trends go and think “Guru.” Everyone who works in your workforce development program should be a guru of something, a go-to on site expert for thing/industry/topic. If you can’t eliminate the generalist- enhance them with on-site “gurus.”    

§  More, More, More… with Less, Less, Less!   Every program that exists loves to brag that they have beaten the bureaucracy thing and has “done more with less.” Congratulations! You have thrown all your marbles on the floor. Although they look pretty from the view from above, try to walk and you will slip and fall. Once you have scattered staff into hundreds of small tasks, you have lost the intensity of a bigger subject. If each marble represents a piece of expertise of a subject, by throwing them all over the floor you have diminished the power of a full bag of marbles. When scattering marbles, you decrease intensity and it is very easy to lose a marble somewhere. Why is this important? In an industry where the compliance is in the details, a missing marble can be a disallowable cost.
 
§  Another problem with losing intensity, is losing the practice makes perfect in a particular task.  This does not happen on purpose, but goes along with the “more, more, more” mindset. The more people the average workforce development professional has to meet with per day, the less the impact of the meeting between the job seeker and the professional.  In order to give quality work, you may not give quantity. High quality work comes from practice, practice, practice of correctly completing a task. Completing tasks thoroughly and accurately takes practice, repetition, and time. It is harder to unlearn something incorrect, than to learn something correctly the first time.  This does not just apply to administrative tasks, but also to coaching and counseling. Practice makes perfect in any task!

Unfortunately for me, I am a workforce development blogger and not a policy maker, so my ideas are just that ideas.  Hopefully, I planted some thoughts in your head about the life in the average busy program. At the end of the day, programs are going to work to meet numbers to obtain and retain contracts, but keeping numbers steady requires a strong foundation where we think quality first and quantity second. As each of us becomes a master of a task, we are able to do it faster and the quantity will increase.

I welcome questions, comments, insights, rants. Please post below. Until then- Happy Summer to all my readers in the Northern Hemisphere! I can be reached at kcirincione@gmail.com ~Karen Cirincione