By Shawn P. Quigley Office Politics is defined as: “(business) (functioning as singular or plural) the ways that power is shared in an organization or workplace, and the ways that it is affected by the personal relationships between the people who work there” (Collins English Dictionary, 2014) Let us first state that Office politics is […]

By Shawn P. Quigley Previously on Leadership In our last post (Leadership Equation), we discussed an equation for leadership. Using that equation to further our discussion on leadership, we will delve into the two major drivers: Experience and Attitude. Experiences of a Team Member Let us first look into experience. As we can all attest […]

By Shawn Quigley This blog is inspired by The Fifth Discipline Field Book, published by Double Day – New York, Peter M. Senge copyright 1994 The Learn Organization The five disciplines of a Learning Organization are Team Learning, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, System Thinking, and Shared Vision. With that, let’s look at the items that […]

Survival of the fittest is not just a biological concern.  Our business must constantly adapt to external stimuli and find better, quicker ways of performing our work.  One way to accomplish this growth is through actions sometimes referred to as project post mortem, or an after action report.  We have a plethora of tools of […]

After we have identified the objective and the preferred delivery mechanisms we will set about building the training.  We will consult subject matter experts, and put material together.  That material will include: Develop Training Material Course Objective and Description Rubric Lesson plan (including formative assessment questions) Presentation, application exercises and practice material Student material (perhaps […]

In our previous post we discussed training needs tied to the organization’s objectives. In that work, we uncovered the scope of the needed training to address specific areas for improvement with very specific metrics identified.  The discussion and subsequent research of the objectives also provided us with input to help ascertain the best delivery mechanism.  […]

Training development follows similar set of processes or activities as product development. First and foremost we must know what we are trying to achieve.  What is our scope? What is our ultimate objective? Those same steps we use to evoke the requirements or our product targets for our training requirements.  The objectives of our training […]

We see well-meaning people adopt an attitude “if it needs done, then I will do it” even if their job or position in the company does not define them as the person to solve the problem. I call this absorption and it is part of the much ballyhooed “can-do attitude” upon which many companies thrive.  […]

“Scaffolding” is a term often used in education, but in our experience, rarely followed to a significant extent. Scaffolding allows us to grow a student in capability by starting easily and providing progressively more intricate and involved exercises. This approach actualizes Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development. When training clients, we must […]

The Seven Circles approach (De la Maza, Michael. Rapid Chess Improvement, 2002) uses a repetitive approach to developing automaticity in chess strategy. For those in the automotive world, it resembles a layered process audit somewhat. It requires different levels, different speeds, exercises, and more. We suggest this approach is a good way to intensively educate […]