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In This
Issue...
 With A Little Bit
Of Luck
Using Both
Eyes
In The Face Of
Change
Answering A Big "What If?"
In Chicago
Features...
Peter Block
Column
Views for a
Change
Pageturners
Heard on
the Street
Return to NFC
Index
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 With A Little Bit Of Luck
How Managers Can Improve Continual
Learning and Mentoring
Ellen Wallach’s
resume is impressive. Her work spans from teaching
psychology, making films, writing and speaking to
consulting. For nearly 30 years she has worked with
public and private organizations to help them find ways
to keep employees happy and productive. She designs
mentoring programs, coaches individuals and consults on
crisis management, team development and management
training. She even finds time to give back to her
community—20 percent of her time to be exact.
Wallach loves what she
does and tries to help others find the same satisfaction
in their jobs. She co-authored “The Job Search
Companion,” an organizer and motivator for job
seekers, now in its fifth printing. Wallach also worked
with Richard N. Bolles, author of the popular,
“What Color is Your Parachute?” training
career development professionals throughout the United
States.
And she likes
dancing too. Over the course of a three-year sabbatical,
Wallach explored the lives, careers and transitions of
former ballet and modern dancers. Her project,
“Life After Performing,” received national
attention and appeared in most of the major newspapers in
the United States including a front-page article in the
Wall Street Journal. She has been on NPR’s
“Morning Edition” and spoken to groups such
as American Electronics Association, U.S. Bank, Seattle
Chamber of Commerce and many others.
Like all of
us, Wallach has faced her fair share of challenges to get
where she is today. She is lucky and she knows it.
Wallach appreciates luck so much that she intensively
studied the subject and identified ways for others to
take advantage of the many opportunities luck sends their
way.
Most recently
she has been helping managers. In response to the demand
for individual coaching, Wallach thought of a more
cost-effective way for companies to help coach managers:
Management Learning Groups.
In a
recent interview with News for a Change, Wallach tells us
about Management Learning Groups and discusses the
bottom-line benefits of Management Learning Groups and
offers some tips on how to make luck work to the best of
our advantage.
NFC: How do you begin to help people
recognize what they want to learn and then help them
learn that in the Management Learning Groups?
Wallach: The first sessions are about the career
management process and that begins with an assessment
of management skills using feedback, performance
appraisal and self-analysis—meaning what skills
do you have, where do you want to use them and
what’s important to you?
NFC: Is it hard to get managers to recognize
that they need to continually increase their skill
level and knowledge?
Wallach: For some it is. For some it
isn’t. And of course the people that are the most
anxious to participate are usually the ones who need it
the least. The ones who are involved in their own
continuous learning and are aware and appreciative of
feedback are usually the ones who have been working on
themselves so long and would love to participate. The
people who are not as open, who don’t pay as much
attention, who don’t reflect on the feedback they
get and perhaps don’t use their own experiences
and opportunities to grow are the ones who usually
don’t participate.
NFC: How do you convince them that they need
to?
Wallach: It depends on whether you have a carrot
or a stick. My belief is that for those people, at some
point, there is enough pain that they’ll pay
attention. I do a lot of corporate crisis management,
where a manager is not succeeding or a team is not
working well together. It’s usually well beyond
awful and I’m called in to fix it. Typically what
I find is that people ask me for a solution. The first
thing I need to do is figure out what the problem is.
One of the challenges I have as a consultant, and
probably the most important thing I do for my clients,
is to help them identify the problem. Once I do that,
they can buy into the solution. The big challenge for
an internal or external consultant is to figure out
what they want and what they need. You give them what
they want or you won’t have a job anymore. If
you’re a good consultant you’ll convince
them that they want what they need.
NFC: What’s the best way to design
Management Learning Groups? Who ideally makes up these
groups?
Wallach: Homogeneous by level and heterogeneous
by function. A lot of the depth in the group, a lot of
the wonderful sharing and information, and the richness
in the group, comes from the diversity. People begin to
see from other people’s perspectives what the
organization and the challenges look like. There was
some research done years ago that asked,
“What’s the biggest problem between people
that causes the most arguments?” Sixty-four
percent of the people said, “Not seeing each
other’s point of view.” There’s a
wonderful quote, “We are not victims of the world
we see, but how we see the world.” Usually our
world-view is very narrow and based on our own
perceptions.
NFC: Do the agendas for Management Learning
Group meetings include time to discuss what’s on
their minds?
Wallach: Yes. And more and more that’s
where most of the energy goes. I always have something
to talk about. In the beginning one of the managers, an
engineer, wanted an agenda. He wanted to know what I
was presenting. He wanted structure. And now he
doesn’t care. Everything that comes up in the
group is food for, “How does this relate to what
I do everyday?”
NFC: Does the conversation get off track when
people start discussing what’s on their
minds?
Wallach: No, that never really happens. Part of
my job is to keep the group focused and to make sure
that it’s a valuable and worthwhile experience.
This is not a group for gossip. This is not a group for
complaining. This is really an opportunity to get some
help. When people come they have something specific in
mind that they need help with and then we talk about
it. The last time we met we had someone who was
promoting a person. There was a peer group and she
promoted one of them. The problem was, “How does
this person now supervise the people who used to be
their peers?” So it was very focused and very
real. And the first question is, “Who’s
ever had this experience?” “What’s
happened?”
NFC: Do you feel that each individual makes
valuable contributions?
Wallach: Everyone contributes. Everyone is there
and present 100 percent. I pay enough attention that if
they weren’t, I would ask them to participate, I
would encourage them, ask them a question or invite
their comment. But I don’t have to do that very
often. Everyone really participates and answers.
NFC: Are there any formal ways you encourage
them to evaluate their own performance in the
group?
Wallach: I haven’t asked that. The main
thing I see is that everyone contributes and feels a
sense of responsibility to everyone that is at the
table. My main concern is perceived value: Is this
worthwhile? And if one person tends to talk a little
more than another, that’s OK.
NFC: Do conflicts ever arise?
Wallach: People’s experiences may be
different so they might disagree, but we’ve never
had anything that I would call a conflict. We try very
hard to be respectful, to be open and supportive and
not to be critical. People have really done a good job
with that.
NFC: What are some of the tangible, bottom line
benefits of the Management Learning Groups?
Wallach: Everyone feels that it’s a
worthwhile use of his or her very busy time. The
organization is raising the quality of management. The
best way to become a good manager early in your career
is to hire a good manager. We learn by example. When I
was taking psychology and learning about child abuse, I
thought to myself that children of abusive parents
would never abuse their own children. What I found out
was the total opposite: The people who abuse their
children were themselves abused as
children—that’s how they learned to parent.
The same is true with managers. The best way to learn
how to be a good manager is to have a good role model.
The better managers we have at the senior levels in the
organization the more it filters down to other
people.
Also, the organization benefits from having
a more cross-functional openness. People understand the
organization better and they understand different
perspectives. When they’re asked to be on
cross-functional teams they get out of the “us
vs. them” defensive or territorial stance and
become more collaborative. Management Learning Groups
are a place for managers who have felt isolated when
talking about management. These groups are a way to
focus and think about being a good manager every month.
They’re a place to get help. Most managers
don’t want to call human resources or ask their
bosses. For example, if they have to fire someone and
they’ve never done it before, this is a place
where they can talk about it, where everyone knows what
one another’s strengths are. They know two or
three people that they can contact during the course of
the month and say, “I’ve got to fire
someone, what do I do?”
NFC: Our managers are our mentors. Do you think
there is a need for formalized mentoring
programs—isn’t it something managers should
do by virtue of being a manager?
Wallach: Formal mentoring programs help expand
your knowledge of the organization. When I design
mentoring programs, I first ask, “What kind of
mentoring do you need?” Otherwise everybody would
choose the top three people in the organization to be
their mentor. So you look at what they want out of
mentoring. Is it technical skills you want to develop?
Is it management skills you want to develop? Is there
some knowledge of how to do business with clients? Do
you want to meet someone who has had family career
issues and has made a good balance? Do you want someone
who has decided to be an individual contributor instead
of becoming a manager? Maybe that person would be a
good mentor for you. So the beginning is to think about
all the different ways you can be mentored and then to
do an assessment. The assessment can be informal or
formal. It may be as informal as, “What kinds of
skills do you think you need to develop?”
“What kind of mentoring do you feel you need at
this point in your career given where you think
you’re going in the next 3-5 years?” Or it
may be a little more formal: “What kind of
performance appraisal have you gotten?”
“What kind of feedback have you gotten?”
That will help you ascertain what kind of mentoring you
should get.
NFC: What if there are no formal mentoring
programs in place but the employees want something? How
can they talk to their managers and get them to
recognize the need for it and get that support?
Wallach: I see that all the time. Generally,
when organizations spend money it’s because they
believe it will impact the bottom line. So that means
looking at what would be the benefit to the
organizations—everything gets sold on
benefits—if there is concern about turnover or if
there is concern about retention. Oftentimes
organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
recruiting women and people of color, and then when
they do an audit three years out, those people are not
there anymore. So the organization is spending a lot of
money to recruit but not develop and retain. The more
you can do to assess what the problems are and what the
benefits would be to the organization, the better job
you can do of selling it.
NFC: What types of changes have you seen in the
ways training is delivered with the improvements in
technology?
Wallach: Well, certainly more online
training.
NFC: Is that an improvement? Do you think online
training takes away from the real learning
experience—the face-to-face interaction and the
human contact?
Wallach: I think it’s a compromise. An
assumption that is not fully developed with the
research is that some people learn in a particular way.
There are many people who don’t learn best
sitting and listening. I think computer-based learning
is terrific. You get it when you need it. One of the
most important things is to get the information when
you need it. What I need is just-in-time learning and
that’s what these Management Learning Groups are
about. “I have to take care of it or do it
today.” “It’s a real problem right
now and this is what I need help with.” Maybe, I
took my management class four years ago, I won’t
remember any of it. All of the research that’s
been done shows that the way people retain the most
information is through experience, discussion,
discovery and mostly teaching. You never learn anything
as well as when you have to teach it to someone else
and that’s why the Management Learning Groups
were designed that way.
NFC: Technology takes away from some of those
elements: experience, discussion.
Wallach: I think particularly skill learning can
be done online. You don’t need to be in a
classroom to learn how to type or do many other
things.
NFC: OK, technology helps us, but so does a
little luck. You have studied the impact of luck on
success. What are the four different types of luck and
how do they impact us?
Wallach: Luck by accident is the first kind of
luck. Something happens and you don’t have any
control of it. You have blue eyes. You were born in
Bosnia—good luck, bad luck. The second kind is
luck in retrospect. One woman told me that she was late
to her freshman year English class, there was one seat
left, she took it and it turned out she married the guy
sitting next to her. You didn’t know it was lucky
and suddenly it turns out to be lucky and you
didn’t know until you looked back. Now, no luck
can be controlled, but some luck can be influenced. The
two kinds of luck I just discussed cannot be
influenced.
The third kind of luck is luck by
opportunity. Something happens and you have to take
advantage of it. Someone once told me that she was
selling computers and she met someone on a flight who
said he was interested. She didn’t think he was
sincere. Two weeks later she sent the information and
gave a follow-up call. The man said, “I was
really interested but I’ve already bought
them.” You have to keep your eye open for the
opportunity. Luck by opportunity can be
influenced.
So can luck by design. For example, you have a car you
want to sell. You tell everyone you know, you put the
word out, put an ad in the newspaper and you do
everything possible to sell it. You know what your goal
is—to sell the car—you just don’t
know how you’re going to do it. The big skill
there of course is networking.
NFC: What are some of the other core skills that
go along with these different types of luck?
Wallach: Questioning assumptions is one of them.
How do you really see the world in a different way? How
do you not become victim of how you see the world? When
you think about arguments or disagreements, how many of
them have to do with misunderstandings, misassumptions
and not seeing the world from the other person’s
point of view?
The second is risk taking. Third,
networking—in its fullest extent. People will
often say to me, “I need to find a job; I need to
get a network.” They’re only about four
years too late. Networks are not for when you need
them. Networks are exactly that—supportive
relationships with people where you continue to help
each other.
Another is taking advantage of chance. It happens in
everyone’s life, you just have to be looking for
it. If all you do is have a goal and you keep your eyes
on the goal, then you’ll just watch your feet
walk and you’ll miss out on all the opportunities
that were there. You need to have a goal but you also
need to make your own luck. So it’s like juggling
where both pieces work together.
NFC: Can you use these skills to influence or
control your luck?
Wallach: You cannot control it, but you can
influence it. People can make their own luck. When you
look at the people who are the most successful, in
whatever way they want to measure success in the world,
they’re the people who have taken advantage of
opportunity, people who have broad networks of people
and connections. They are the people who are willing to
take some risks. You look at those skills and
you’ll see that’s true.
NFC: You state that your work is to keep your
employees happy and productive—that’s a
tough job.
Wallach: It really is. But you know companies
pay for 100 percent of someone’s time and often
they don’t get 100 percent of their energy, even
when they’re at work. My job is to help people
focus on what they’re being paid to do, and if
they’re happy they will. Sometimes they’re
not in the right job, then I can help them find the
right job—in or out of the organization. Happy
employees make happy customers.
NFC: How do you stay motivated?
Wallach: I think a lot of how we replenish
ourselves has to do with our attitude about life, how
we see the world and how we see ourselves in it. I
always look at my career and I ask, “Am I
learning?” “Am I making a positive
difference in the world?” “Am I having
fun?” And ultimately, “Am I living with
integrity and intent?” And that’s really
how I judge what I’m doing.
The very best jobs are the ones that you make, that fit
your skills, interests and motivations. And
that’s what mine is, and it keeps changing. There
is always something new and exciting.
NFC: From talking to you, I can tell that you
love what you do.
Wallach: I do, and everyday is different. I feel
like everyday is my birthday. I never know what’s
going to happen. I get to meet new people and have new
challenges. I get to be creative and I feel very
blessed.
March 2001 News for a
Change Homepage
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Issue Highlight —
Someone To Watch Over Me
