All organizations, whether business, government, or nonprofit, should be doing more to measure their impact. Many hospitals know that they have a high infection rate post-surgery, but that hasn’t changed the behavior of their doctors and nurses. Measuring something doesn’t guarantee that behavior will change. Many managers in organizations care only about delivering programs, not achieving important results (e.g., Evaluation Management Organization Culture Organizational Learning evaluation impact measure TEDxThis is not necessarily true. MORE >>

Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. For example, an American Management Association survey of coaching found that respondents from organizations that use coaching more than in the past are also more likely to report two kinds of advantages: 1. They’re more likely to report that their organizations have higher levels of success in the area of coaching. It is highly likely that high performing organizations choose to use coaching more than low performing organizations. MORE >>

Sean Murray and I present a similar argument in our book, “The 5As Framework,” except we go further to say that training, as well as any learning intervention in an organization, should contribute to achieving the strategic goals of that organization. You must make sure that you are maximizing the impact from every performance intervention…This means that rather than a culture of events, you need a culture of learning, one that supports ongoing learning throughout your organization. Why Learn? How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations. MORE >>

We learn more from studying successes than we do from studying failure. have become convinced of this from my experience evaluating many change interventions in many different types of organizations. They show how a focus on success, what they call “bright spots”, resulted in improving the nutrition of rural villagers in Vietnam, improving the behavior of a troubled ninth-grader, and improving sales of an effective drug for treating asthma. However, there is a time to learn from failure. She argues that most managers don’t know how to learn from failure. MORE >>

Should your organization have a CCO and CLO? Paul Hebert argues against organizations appointing a Chief Culture Officer. Hebert writes: …as soon as you codify, quantify and assign responsibility to something it ceases to be everyone’s responsibility…Culture is a defined as a set of shared values, behaviors, norms.  agree with Hebert and I have similar concerns with having a CLO (Chief Learning Officer). Learning is what employees in high performance organizations must do continuously as part of their jobs. Companies Shared.  Operative word.  MORE >>