8D1/2-09 - Communicating and Using CBPR Data / Dealing With Community Change in CBPR...See details below and follow all instructions. Answer all.

PRACTICALITIES OF ACTION RESEARCH

APPROACHING AN ORGANIZATION I think it is important to strategically plan how you approach an organization. In my situation I had various situations. In some cases I was contracted to go into an organization, they sought me out, so I had entrée into the management level, and it was very simple to just arrange a meeting and begin to work. In other cases, I was tasked with recruiting organizations for particular programs, could be grant initiatives, other initiatives that, in many cases, the Federal Government was promoting, and I was tasked with being the performance consultant for those initiatives. So in those cases, where these were more or less cold calls, I had the greatest success with focusing on a Return On Investment sort of approach. Really approaching organizations with a, what is in it for them presentation. So that took some groundwork, really had to do some researching on the organization, take a look at what is important to them, set up an initial meeting with folks to find out what is their bottom-line, what matters most to that organization. And then we of course had to make a presentation as to how we felt we could impact that bottom-line. So in many cases, to deal with anything from improving customer service and customer satisfaction. It could deal with retention issues, for students or for employees that were costing the organization money for folks who were not retaining. They could do with improving test scores, reducing waste rates, for manufacturing type of organizations. But my job was to figure out what was really important to management and the folks that were approving the work, and then make it very clear to them how we could impact those particular elements for them, and how we would present that to them. So it was a very involved -- there was a lot of homework involved in approaching an organization. We did not just walk in there cold. That would have been a death nail to us. We really had to have our homework done and be able to show them the kind of impact we could have. We would generally try to approach initially by phone to set up a face-to-face interview, face-to-face appointment. We prefer to do things face-to-face. We had a strong record of performance improvement with these types of initiatives that we could display, and we felt that was based done face-to-face. That did not mean that we always got first entrée with the highest management level, sometimes it would be mid-management or supervisory level, but somewhere we wanted to get in that first level, and then we could often work our way up. So oftentimes that would result in two or three meetings, and we were amenable to however they wanted to do that. Some organizations, it was easier to get to top management than others, just depends how stratified. But again, we made it very clear from the onset that we wanted to impact their bottom-line. We felt we could do that. We had a history we wanted to show, and we felt that we could best do that with a face-to-face meeting, and that made them much more receptive to freeing up a little time for us.

REACHING DECISION MAKERS In many organizations when you are trying to figure out, who is the individual who will make this final decision, you really do have to go through some layers. The bigger the organization, the larger the onion, you have to peel back the layers. Probably the best way to demonstrate that, I will share a little story with you. At one point I was mentoring new performance consultants in the field of Federal Government as

one of six individuals in the state to go around and mentor folks, to train them to do what I did, because they wanted a bigger cadre of folks that were working effectively in the field. So I had a mentee who had been contacted by a huge banking organization, just the most grand banking organizations that we have, very well-known name here in city, and was asked if they wanted to competitively bid for a project, to come in and do some customer service kind of performance improvement. So she was extremely nervous, and she called me and she said, can you help me, this is huge for my first time out of the box, can you come along with me to this meeting? So since I knew there would be a number of folks going, I suspected that it might not be top management, we would be going through a filtering kind of system. So when we got there, we were fingerprinted, lenses of our eyes were read for identification. We had to nearly be frisked. I mean, it was incredible security. They whisked us up in the private elevator to the top floor. The Director of Training, Seth, met with us, asked us to make a presentation and talk about what we could do. We started the conversation with, we want to know what is important to you, and we want to impact your bottom-line. This is all about Return On Investment for you. Immediately he said he had to stop the meeting, which I was a little concerned about, because typically that is a pretty positive approach with folks. He ran and got a phone, with the speaker phone attached, and he put the speaker phone in the middle of the table, he said, I need to call our VP of Operations who is working in the Boston office today, and get her on the phone. He called her up. We heard this voice from the phone. He explained what had just transpired. And she said, I just want to let you know, not only do you have the contract, but I want to know why the other dozen folks that we interviewed had no interest in our bottom-line, we are a bank, we are about money, why was not anybody interested in impacting our bottom-line, that is what this is about? So she congratulated us. We got a very nice contract out of that. But we definitely had to go through that filtering process and work through the training director to get to that VP, who was in an entirely different city. She told the training director she did not want to be bothered until somebody started talking Return On Investment, and then he could call her, and she would get involved with the interview. They will set the playing field, and you really need to work your way along until you get to that individual at management that can make the final decision.

PITFALLS OF ACTION RESEARCHM I think it is very important to approach action research projects without preconceptions. We have a hunch that something is going on, or something needs addressed, but oftentimes there is a tremendous back story in that organization, even if it is your own organization, you might not be fully aware of it impacting that performance, or impacting those results. Many times I would go into an organization being told that I would be conducting one type of training and then discover that something else entirely was needed to impact the bottom-line. I think it is important for those trainees and those participants to trust you. If there is not a level of trust, they are not going to divulge what that back story is. I will share one quick story with you, I think illustrates that pretty clearly. I was contracted to come in and work with a number of master carpenters to do remedial mathematics, which sounds extremely odd, it sounded odd to me at the time that master carpenters would not know how to do mathematics since that is what they do for a living. But there was such a tremendous waste rate at this organization, which was a custom cabinetry business, that the VP was extremely concerned, they were just wasting too much product. They took too much wood to build the products that they did on, and they were breaking even, they were not making any money. So the assumption was, these folks do not know how to read a rule, they cannot read a blueprint, and they are making mistakes. When I got into that organization and those workers began to trust me, I found out that they really did know how to do mathematics, they were exceptionally skilled at it, but they were treated extremely poorly by the management. So their method of retaliation was, we will figure out exactly where this business breaks even on a contract, so we get paid, and then we will start to waste product after that, so that the organization does not see any profit, because they are not going to make a profit off our backs when they treat us so poorly. When they treat us better, they will make more

money. So what I was contracted to do and what I ended up doing were two completely different things. It really needed to be some coaching of management versus some remediation for mathematics, for some carpenters. So you really have to be open and have that sixth sense of, something is not right here, I need to dig deeper and find out what the root cause is of this performance issue, and sometimes it is quite surprising. In a situation where what management perceives to be the problem versus what actually is the problem, I think you need to be very, very careful in how you approach management about that. And again, I always kept my focus on what is profitable to this business, what is important to this business. That is our focus and everybody is focused on that. In this particular case that I just shared, I brought in an outside consultant to work with management, who specialized in those kind of very sensitive situations, but always couched around, your job is extremely difficult, you are under tremendous amount of stress, we have coaching and strategic training that can help you deal with the situation for being a manager at this level. Let us help you make this business profitable and make this work climate more amenable to everybody that works here. So that was generally well received.

COMMUNICATING RESULTS I think that communicating of the result is one of the most critical pieces of the work that you will do, because that is the take away that everyone has from the project that is done. My favorite quote is from Jack Phillips of the ROI Institute, who says, if you do not plan to communicate your data effectively, do not bother spending the time to collect it. People really need to understand what happened, and you need to be able to present that in a way that is well received by them. So very early in the conversations with management or whoever the individual was that I was working with, I would spend time talking about, what do you expect to see as results, and how do you expect those results to be portrayed? What kind of platform can you give me to talk about the impact that we had? And that would include, not only the impact at the very end of the intervention, but I would come back, in some cases several months, several weeks later to make sure there really was a transfer of learning, that people really did implement what we had been training them to do. So I would negotiate all that upfront. I would make sure that I had time, and I had the resources available, I had access to the people to come back and collect that post- intervention data. Otherwise I could not prove that I had an impact. And as a person who made their living as performance and consulting, that was critical to my survival. So we often had to negotiate that upfront, because if things went well, oftentimes it was, well, the production line is going well now or test scores are increasing now, and we are very busy, so we cannot have you come back in here, and if that was not negotiated in my contract, it could be a problem. So needs to be talked about upfront. Need to talk with management about what kind of data they like to see. Are they numbers people or are they stories people? Do they want to see hard data from production, from waste rates, from test scores, what are they looking for? That way I could be very clear about what kind of baseline I collected, so I knew what the picture was in that organization before I started, and then my post-intervention data, and those two would correlate so that I could show a change, because it would not make any sense not to have that baseline if I could not show that I increased or improved anything. I learned a very difficult lesson as a performance improvement specialist and that was, I always negotiated to have a face-to-face meeting about the results. I learned early on that just writing up a narrative report and handing it off to a supervisor often was the end of the interaction with all that work that I had done, no one had read it, the supervisor, at that particular level, knew things had gone well, and we would be done. So I would arrange very early on in those discussions to have a time to get back and present the results, maybe it was at a board meeting, or maybe it was at a management meeting, or some type of event that they already had scheduled, but I would want 15, 20 minutes of time to get out there and display what we had done. I used a lot of graphic representation of data, so it could be quick. I could show a quick slide with a graph and show, here is where we were, here is how we improved. I used a lot of stories from the participants and trainees, in their own voices. I would put their picture up. I would record their voice, talking about how

wonderful this particular intervention had been. So they really could connect with their own people, and the impact that we had, and I had hard data to back it up, that was displayed in a way that was very easy to read, very easy to communicate, and something that they would take with them. And then I always left them with the hard copy as well, along with my business card of course, so they could contact me for future work. But my greatest advice is, do not just hand off a report, get some face time with people, and give them something powerful to look at during that face time, that will really help them connect with the results that you had. I think in the presentation of your data, it is important to remember that academicians will be very interested in the letter of your dissertation, every element of your dissertation, every paragraph, and that you have followed all five chapters, and that you have met all the criteria of academicians. Management will most likely not have time to sit down and read your dissertation. They tend to like business oriented type of reports, bulleted statements, graphs, very quick and dirty. I typically had about 15 minutes to present my data at meetings. 15, 20 minutes would be the average. So I could not stand there and recite my dissertation. But definitely that work I had done for my dissertation provided me with the background and the confidence and the experience to do an effective executive summary in 15 minutes. The key was, I just really had to focus on the results with management, that is what they were interested in, that would get me back in the door the next time. And I would certainly have all that background available for anyone that needed it. But you really need to communicate effectively for your particular audience, so that can mean a variety of things, whether you are writing an article on the study, whether you are writing the dissertation, whether you are doing an executive summary for management, you really need to be able to massage that data in a way that is effective for that particular audience.

CREDITS Subject Matter Expert: Interactive Design:

Instructional Design:

Project Management:

Dr. Jamie Barron

Patrick Lapinski, Marc Ashmore

Liz Anderson

Julie Greunke

L i c e n s e d u n d e r a C r e a t i v e C o m m o n s A t t r i b u t i o n 3 . 0 L i c e n s e .