Maximizing Value Contribution
We help people achieve higher levels of productivity, maximize their value contribution and reach their full potential.
Among all of the talented people that surround you, some stand out because they contribute substantially more value than others. They deliver consistently outstanding results in the areas that matter most. They are recognized by people of influence for their achievement. And they seem so satisfied in their work and passionate about what they’re doing. How do these star performers achieve such a high level of personal productivity?
Many people think that being a star performer at work has a lot to do with intelligence, logic, creativity, sociability, and ambition. In fact, research has proven that being a top performer has little to do with these traits. Of course, you’ve got to have the minimum levels of these and other qualities in order to be hired, but beyond that, there’s no correlation between how smart or self-confident or extroverted you are and how effective you are at work.
What actually sets stars apart from the rest of the pack are the strategies they use to do their own work and to work effectively with others—strategies that have been proven to dramatically improve individual performance.
At Avid Learner, we’ve built on the groundbreaking productivity research originally conducted for Bell Laboratories by Carnegie-Mellon University professor Dr. Robert E. Kelley. Our consultants study the high-productivity techniques used by star performing engineers, scientists, technologists and other professionals around the world—and in a variety of organizations—to increase the value they bring to the business. We draw on these insights to design and deliver unique training experiences that accelerate your personal productivity and value contribution.
Solutions you might find helpful:
Strengthening Employee Engagement
We help strengthen employee engagement.
There are two primary factors that distinguish a highly engaged follower from an average one: independent, critical thinking and active participation in the destiny of the enterprise. The star performers we work with bring enthusiasm, intelligence and self-reliance into implementing organizational goals. They’re actively engaged in making the organization a success, rather than holding back their best ideas and effort out of a sense of futility.
When delivering sessions for managers, we help them identify leadership practices that support or undermine exemplary followership, and develop action plans to encourage higher levels of engagement.
Through our continued research, we’ve learned how star followers are often purposefully committed to something—a cause, a product, an idea or principle—in addition to their own lives and careers. For many, it’s a passion that engages their hearts as well as focusing their minds, emotionally fueling their everyday work activities. Many participants in our training programs come to realize—or sometimes rediscover—what that is.
Solutions you might find helpful:
Leveraging Diversity
We help organizations leverage the unique talents of their diverse workforce.
Chances are your organization has made a significant investment in diversity and inclusion. Perhaps you’ve helped to arrange diversity training or establish a mentoring program. Maybe you’ve been involved in stepped-up minority recruitment efforts. Your workforce, your customers, your world—it’s much more diverse than ever before.
And while the feedback you receive from various identity groups is appreciative, the recurring message is:
- What else can be done to help make outsiders feel more like insiders?
- What else can be done to develop the talent and unleash the true potential of everyone in the organization?
We know that diversity is much broader than ethnicity, race and gender. But for those who are not yet integrated into the dominant culture and may have less access to the informal sources of knowledge in organizations, figuring out how to unleash your own productivity to make game-changing contributions can take longer than it should.
We’ve come up with a way to accelerate everyone’s productivity by leveraging the know-how of your top performers. Women, people of color and newer workers who participated in our training programs increased their overall rate of productivity improvement by 400% when matched with a comparison group of non-participants.
Solutions you might find helpful:
Developing Future Leaders
We prepare people for positions of leadership.
Organizations today are facing a critical shortage of leadership talent at all levels. In response, most have instituted “talent pools”—systems to identify and accelerate the development of their high-potential employees. Over a period of years, talent pool members take on stretch assignments, participate in appropriate development opportunities, and receive the coaching and support needed to prepare them to meet future challenges.
Identifying talent pool members is, of course, only a first step. The key is to develop promising individual contributors into high-performing leaders. That’s where we can help.
Our unique development process helps strengthen individual productivity and dramatically improve the performance of your emerging leaders during their early years in the talent pool. Our program helps talent pool members learn how to take meaningful initiatives, drive business results by supporting senior management, build dependable pathways to knowledge, broaden their perspective, thoughtfully manage their time, resources and careers—and much more.
Solutions you might find helpful:
Calibrating Performance Ratings
We help managers differentiate between average and star performers.
Organizations today are valuing and compensating jobs in different ways. They’re searching for new ways to provide tangible rewards to their top performers. If these variable or “pay-for-performance” programs are to succeed, managers must be willing and able to differentiate between middling performance and star performance. These objective assessments should measure a person’s performance against a set of competencies known to have a proven impact on business results.
Judging value is especially challenging in engineering, technical and scientific environments, where customers seldom know what they really want, problems are ill-defined, each task or problem is unlike the one before it, team members work virtually and individual contributions are harder to isolate. Variable pay programs will only motivate employees and achieve the desired result if managers properly apply consistent criteria that reliably predict success.
Solutions you might find helpful:
Planning Productive Company Meetings
We help you develop an agenda for your company meeting and prepare your speakers to present effectively.
In two months, 60 managers and professional staff from your business will be meeting for a week at your corporate offices. It’s your meeting. It’s got to be a very good use of everyone’s time. You need to craft an agenda and make sure each invited speaker has clearly defined objectives. Too often, the agenda and key messages get pulled together in the final few days before everyone arrives. The lack of planning shows when participants begin to multi-task. Their attention fades. They step out of the main meeting or hold side meetings to get “real work” done.
In consultation (and before we train your presenters), we’ll work with you, your conference planning committee or your staff to clarify your overall meeting objectives, develop your program, ensure relevance, heighten engagement and create a plan for managing the meeting as it unfolds. Our aim is simple. When the meeting is over, those who attended will tell you “this was a very good use of my time.”
Solutions you might find helpful: