It’s 2012.  Everyone typically has great intentions this time of the year in putting foot to pavement and nailing down some concrete resolutions; things they really want to get done over the next year. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of my current role at ReadyTalk and the roles of those who surround me. One of my resolutions is for personal improvement.

Professional growth, and getting better at “your craft” is one thing that is constantly on my mind.  With my team, I’m always stressing that failure is a learning opportunity, but how do you learn and advance without waiting for failure? Simply put, you practice.

Ok, that sounds easy, you say. But, when you sit down to think about it, how exactly do you practice things like project management or people management or even software engineering? My day is filled with  productive meetings, but does going to meetings allow me to practice my people skills? Does making a spreadsheet or facilitating a story-pointing session give me ample opportunity to practice the craft of agile coaching? And more important to me directly, how does one practice effective leadership?

Dan King, our CEO, is an amazing leader and his thoughts and ideas inspire me. So I took a step back and examined what I see Dan doing almost constantly. The answer was reading, and asking questions. Dan is a voracious reader, and he uses the management and leadership books he reads to help formulate questions about how lessons learned by others could have been applied to his own experiences or how they could be applied to challenges that ReadyTalk may face as the organization grows. So, my goal is really about practice. Practicing leadership by way of reading and thinking more about leadership in different industries and domains. Also on my agenda is helping our engineers practice their craft of software engineering, but that is a blog post for another time!

I’d be curious to hear how you may have tackled this problem. How do you practice something that isn’t quite tangible, such as leadership or people management? Drop me a line and let me know!

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

I visited ReadyTalk back in July and had the opportunity to meet and learn about this flourishing organization.  You can read about my experience here.  Suffice it to say, I was impressed.

As I travel the country studying the happiest companies and how their employees benefit, I’m learning a few things.  Intuitively, I knew what I meant by a “thriving organization,” but I never really had to operationalize that definition into something concrete.  Although my definition isn’t entirely concrete now, I have managed to come up with a few principles that thriving organizations seem to share.

First, thriving organizations have a clearly defined vision and everything they do spirals around that vision. A vision is “a statement of what is possible, the picture of the future you want to create.”  It isn’t a strategic plan.  It isn’t your goals or methodology.  Companies that I study collectively know who they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.  If employees in a company don’t share this vision, or, in the case of some companies, even have this vision, then they will likely experience an internal entropy.  Further, vision statements are inculcated into policies, procedures, strategies, and recruitment.  It touches everything in the organization in an authentic and animated way.

Second, these companies are fortunate to have humble, democratic, and demanding leadership. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some stellar CEOs, Dan King right here at ReadyTalk being one.  Thriving companies share a common principle in the type of leaders they enlist and in the way that they are lead.  Jim Collins explored Level 5 Leadership in his seminal book Good to Great and I have found his assessment to be true, with an addition. Great leaders are both humble and a bit ruthless, as Collins suggests, but the leaders I’m meeting along the way also ignite curiosity.  They promote curiosity, and subsequent innovation, by getting out of the way of their team’s strengths.  They position themselves at the helm of the moving ship, not to steer or enact change, but to set the vision and preempt disaster.  Anything but laissez-faire, these leaders put exceptional people around them, judiciously mobilize moving parts, empower their people to dig deep creatively and inspirationally, and then get the hell out of the way!

Third, thriving organizations embrace PERMA.  I’m cheating a bit here.  This helpful mnemonic actually stands for five principles (and I would argue that all of them are necessary for a company to thrive).  They are Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaningfulness, and Achievement.  PERMA is a concept originated by Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, and serves to push our rather myopic understanding of happiness into something that is less about feeling good, i.e. pleasure à la cupcakes and rainbows, and more about living a purposeful life, i.e. meaning à la engagement and flow.  The attributes of PERMA provide the empirical building blocks for happiness studies and can single-handedly change how an entire organization functions.  The framework for how this can happen is the idea for Glad Lab (www.gladlab.com).  Through our research, we’re learning what PERMA looks like in companies.  We want to help every company we encounter to reach the status of a “Thriving Workplace” simply because they are attuned to the nuances of PERMA in their organization.

The assembly of these principles is the wellspring from which a thriving company emerges, but my hunch is that it still takes something more to make it flourish.  The intangible “X factor” (as it’s often called) is not easily identified or measured.

But maybe the sweet spot isn’t that nebulous after all.

Maybe it simply comes down to achieving results and treating each other with dignity along the way.

Either way, I’ll keep you posted.

Dr. Shelley Prevost is the Director of Happiness and resident cultural engineer at the Lamp Post Group.  With 15 years of experience in the field of psychology, she provides a necessary counter-balance to the more logic-based business practices.  At Lamp Post, she mentors others to attend to interpersonal relationships at work, to communicate openly and directly, to identify guiding values, and to mediate conflict efficiently.  When she’s not directing happiness at Lamp Post, she can be found researching and writing for Glad Lab, a blog committed to proliferating the principles of thriving organizations.

Last week, a few people from our marketing team attended the Eloqua Success Tour. The basic function of these events is to interact with like-minded peers who are utilizing the Eloqua platform and share best practices, unique use cases, and helpful tips to avoid pitfalls. Eloqua’s regional success managers also share new functionality and present the upcoming product roadmap for discussion. It’s a great way to network and simply learn how others are utilizing marketing automation within their organization.

There were some great presentations this year including one particular SaaS company that has created progressive profiling with the Eloqua platform to continually capture and aggregate information from prospects that are visiting their site and filling out forms, hitting key pages, etc. The speaker made a great point: personalization is really the future of marketing. The idea can be attributed to all of the social networks that are embedded in nearly everything we do. Work related or not – this is how to catch someone’s attention. Call them by name, offer them what they’ve been looking for on the right day at the right time, and you  just landed yourself a deal.

When someone feels a sense of individuality, not just like another fish that’s going to get hooked, they’re more likely to foster a relationship with your brand. Today, consumers have almost come to expect a one-on-one dialogue with marketers.  The challenge to us as the marketers is to use the important data we’re capturing to strike that personal chord with our prospects.  Knowledge of past behavior is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases and crafting relevant messages that will increase sales. The key takeaway is to build plan to follow the customer – not making them follow you.

Is personalization part of your strategy and marketing automation program? Is it working?

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.

Corporate Training: Now, More than Ever
By Melanie Turek, Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan

When I ask C-level executives about their biggest concerns when it comes to deploying new technology, one topic always tops the list: training. That’s a bit of a head scratcher, really. Training is, after all, something completely under a manager’s control. But in fact, with the increasingly virtual nature of the workplace, it’s harder than ever to make sure employees get the training they need—whether it’s related to technology itself, or broader business processes and corporate policies and regulations.

Organizations today are managing a growing number of remote workers, partners, suppliers and customers—all in the face of increased competition, pressure to keep costs down, and rapidly changing markets. These companies know they must continually train their employees and constituents, as quickly as possible, to ensure that they are up to speed on the latest company and product information; in-house technology; and business processes. But even as corporate training is becoming more important, it’s also more difficult, with trainers and their students spread out across vast geographic regions and time zones, and even across cultures.

Good corporate training must address several key issues:

Corporate training should be available to employees on-demand.

• On-demand, rather than scheduled, training. It’s no longer enough to plan a series of training sessions and expect employees to “show up” at the given time. With people working in different time zones, from various locations, and juggling multiple job roles, they can’t be expected to prioritize training ahead of business-critical projects or their own work schedules.
• Insightful, relevant content that engages attendees while ensuring their training needs are met. It’s critical to be able to cut through the multi-media clutter, while making sure that the information imparted is understood and retained. And as with all learning, corporate training greatly benefits from participant collaboration. Video, too, can add value to the experience and make it more interactive.
• Ongoing learning as needed. It’s important that corporate trainers be able to offer refresher courses and follow-up classes on an as-need basis, to ensure employees remain up to date on the latest information, and that they can refresh their memories on certain elements of a program or process days, weeks or even months after the initial training took place.
• Keeping costs and travel in check, while reaching more people more often. This is the age of innovation, in which employees must work with colleagues, partners and customers to develop content and ideas quickly and decisively. Training is critical to prepare all employees for this new way of working. But as more of those employees are located in remote locations and home-based offices, reaching them with training becomes more difficult and costly. Managers need solutions that can extend across the boundaries in the most cost-effective manner.

The good news is, web conferencing can help corporate trainers meet all these needs—easily, and cost effectively—and sometimes better than real-world events. For information on how companies are delivering effective online training through web conferencing, join Melanie for “Effective Online Training: Tips from the Experts,” a free webinar on Wednesday, February 23 at 2 p.m. EST.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

Social Venture Partners (SVP) named Kim Morse, an account manager at ReadyTalk, as Denver’s Volunteer of the Year. SVP strengthens local non-profit organizations through targeted investments of time, expertise and money and helps partners to become better, more informed philanthropists.

Kim’s work with SVP is a great example of the importance ReadyTalk places in supporting Colorado’s communities.

ReadyTalk asks all employees to volunteer 20 hours a year and gives them the flexibility to do it during work hours. There’s also a Charitable Contributions Committee, which is a group of employees who identify and evaluate donation and volunteer opportunities with non-profit organizations. Some organizations receive an in-kind donation web and audio conferencing services, financial donations, volunteer support or other services based on need.

In 2009, ReadyTalk supported:
• Denver Rescue Mission
• Food Bank of the Rockies
• Meals on Wheels
• Community Shares
• Common Tables
• The International Alliance for Women
• KIVA
• Volunteers of America
• Project Homeless Connect
• Boulder Cycling Club/ Tour de Cure
• Connections Therapeutic Riding Center
• Young Philanthropists Foundation
• Freedom Service Dogs
• National Sports Center for the Disabled
• Love, Light & Melody Foundation

Congratulations to Kim and the entire ReadyTalk team for their contributions of time and money during 2009.