Lead Differences with the Brain in Mind (MITA Brain Based Mentoring Interventions)
To motivate all employees to out-perform themselves, is to provide tools to lead across differences with impact.
Lead Differences with the Brain in Mind
In October 2010, McKinsey Quarterly, Aaron DeSmet, Monica McGurk, and Elizabeth Schwartz, wrote:
Companies around the world spend up to $100 billion a year to train employees in the skills they need to improve corporate performance…. But training typically doesn’t have much impact. Indeed, only one-quarter of the respondents to a recent McKinsey survey said their training programs measurably improved business performance, and most companies don’t even bother to track the returns they get on their investments in training. They keep at it because a highly skilled workforce is clearly more productive and because employees often need new skills to deal with changes in an organization’s strategy or performance.
Check out the audio here on Linkedin McKinsey Quarterly.
No wonder so many people dislike , or find few useful applications in diversity training. Unless participants are facilitated to rev their brainpower and gear up for the change, they cannot expect new skills to address conflicts across differences at work. Unless they motivates their minds to learn skills that will bring about new behaviors, diversity programs are a wasted effort.
Brain based skills (or smart skills) in the MITA Mentoring Interventions —get people personally involved—so that improvement can come more rapidly. The program first helps participants to rethink mental approaches they bring to training and shows how brain based mentoring interventions differ. Training is too often seen as something that is done to dolphins or dogs, while mentoring interventions are skills that require personal thought, based on each one’s unique mix of intelligences, and preferred applications.
Traits of the MITA Brain Based Method:
Organizations develop brain based approaches to capitalize more on differences, when they develop, use, and tweak new skills, and then measure their growth in communicating diversity:
- MITA begins each session with a window word related to diversity – and then allows that word to inform the entire session. There are usually several sessions in the program, depending on how many window words are addressed. These include words that address differences as strengths, such as: culture, silos, management-worker, gender, practices, beliefs, intelligences, reviews.
- Smart skills are introduced – so that traditional hard and soft skills integrate into smart skill tools for building caring and curious work cultures, across differences, in ways that individuals and the entire organization benefit.
- Participants engage in active learning as they begin to develop and practice brain based skills to address real-life situations where performances can noticeably improve an organization’s results of applying their newly discovered skills to advance differences.
- In order to access the diversity of backgrounds, experience, and knowledge, 2-footed questions are facilitated in all sessions. These questions shape the overall discussion, and also enable individuals and teams to choose different levels and topics of focus to apply the most significant skills to drive successful business performance across differences with the brain in mind.
- The MITA Diversity program targets skill gaps that hold back organizations but rarely get spoken out in ways that allow new skills to create transformations that offer dividends to individuals, teams, and organizations. Together participants identify areas where wheels are spinning because diversity is overlooked.
- Expectations align with skills developed in the MITA Brain Based program, and reviews begin with each individual who reflects against a standards set of guidelines. Interaction with management occurs only after individuals suggest evidence for use of their newly designed smart skills to address each of the review issues related to diversity.
- Because multiple intelligences are engaged throughout the diversity program, sessions will affect employees across entire organizations. For instance, consider one person, or department that targets performance to improve its team communication skills with another department. After refining the specific target, and after developing skills to counter resistance from colleagues or from another department affected by brain based diversity approaches, colleagues may be expected to accommodate newly adopted intelligences that alter routine practices.
- Reviews are developed in MITA brain based diversity programs, after reflection from all participants. Reviews align with smart skills developed and targets sought – so that evidence can be recorded and measured for these skills – and they improve communications across differences.
Changes in MITA Diversity programs, results in dynamic new behaviors, when people become a vibrant part of the solutions and practices they help to develop. Have you seen it happen?
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Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset