Charles Plant spent most of his working life helping companies implement strategy.With early roots in finance, Charles caught a significant wave during the software/dotcom boom where he saw huge success helping companies grow through technology. One thing became clear however, that no matter how great the processes, if company culture wasn’t right all good intentions went to the way side.
His journey through software companies like Synamics and the green fielding of the now flourishing MaRS discovery district began his quest to end the misery of overwhelmed employees, the tyranny of bad leadership, and the torment of toxic cultures.
Over a 30 year career Charles has coached, trained, or consulted to over 1,000 managers. Trained as a Chartered Accountant and a banker with an MBA in marketing, He’s been an officer, director or investor in a dozen technology companies.
Charles’ work at MaRS involved heading up a group of former entrepreneurs and specialists who provided education, mentorship, market intelligence and capital to over 2,000 technology start-ups in Ontario. Prior to this Charles’ 15 years as co-founder and CEO of Synamics, placed him in the crux of a booming telecommunications software market providing mass calling platforms to telcos.
It was an intermittent seven years on the faculty of York’s Schulich School of Business where Charles got interested in the subject of education and saw the potential for innovation in the field.
Years of research, prevailing themes and success as an entrepreneur got Charles got to where he is now, founder and Creative Director of Material Minds
i Before we get into the nitty gritty, how did you come up with the name Material Minds?
CP It’s hard to find a free URL these days and Material Minds was actually a name that was created by a friend’s daughter. It was trying to refer to the concept of materiality and minds that focus on things that matter,.
i Things like twitter and texting and mobile emailing have indisputably created executive ADD, how has that affected the way leaders learn and listen?
CP Listen? Are you sure that people are still listening? I think that there’s a lot more bloviating going on than listening. With so much opportunity to talk, it’s hard to get your message heard out there so people are spending most of their time talking and little of it listening. This might be one of the great challenges of leadership today, no time to listen.
i What is the biggest difference between how you’ve discovered that leaders learn as compared to how everyone else thinks they do
CP There’s this $30 billion leadership training market out there and for some reason, people think that you can put people in a classroom for three days and they’ll emerge as better leaders. But when you ask people 90 days after a course what they changed, you get dumbfounded looks. Huh? I was supposed to change? People can’t learn to lead from a blog, a book, or a classroom. They learn by watching what others do, trying things out for themselves and talking about it with their peers.
i How does the way a leader learns compare to come one who is an individual contributor ( not a leader)?
CP Hmmm, well you can’t teach leadership to someone who isn’t managing people but I don’t think this is what you’re getting at. Perhaps we can look at acquiring knowledge versus acquiring behavior. You can acquire knowledge by reading, watching, listening and your only task is to remember it. Acquiring new behaviors is much harder and leadership is a behavior. To learn new behaviors you must try the behavior out and repeat it umpteen times before it becomes fixed in place.
i You wrote an excellent white paper about ROP, return on people and part of that had to do with employee engagement? How much more of a return does a company get on an engaged employee compared to one that isn’t?
CP Gallup has done a lot of work on this issue and numerous study show a correlation between employee engagement and business results. Depending on what you read, there is a 240% boost in performance related business outcomes with highly engaged employees. But I think we should take studies like this (even mine) with a grain of salt. This is a very complex area and I’m not sure whether engagement leads to results or results lead to engagement or whither the two are correlated by virtue of good hiring practices that hires engaged people who are results oriented.
i The whole employee engagement thing plays a huge part in new HCM technology, what do and don’t you like about solutions like Ryyple, SABA and Success Factors?
It is also important for you to levitra samples http://respitecaresa.org/levitra-7363 understand that the problem occurs in normal men and there is nothing to worry as medical science has advanced way too much and there is solution to fight counter to ED. The corrective approach, effectiveness, significant treatment procedure and the positive effects keep increasing as time goes on. uk viagra prices Extenze is more affordable than many similar purchasing viagra in canada products. It was online viagra prescription found that risk to impotence reduced greatly with two to three coffee cups in a day. CP There isn’t a magic pill. Each of these solutions adds something to the mix but doesn’t replace what is most important, that is a boss who cares. It all comes down to the fact that you wouldn’t hesitate to go all out if you thought your boss cared about you as a person. You wouldn’t want to let her down. If you know your boss doesn’t care though, would you go the extra mile? Probably not. You can’t make an app out of this. You can’t make an app that replaces someone who cares about you. (Actually this may be a brilliant idea. Create a reverse Tamagotchi.)
i Tell me a story about employee engagement, you’ve done so much research , it’s there a sentence or two you can share as a key take away that will help drive home the importance?
CP A friend’s son, who had struggled in grade 1 came home with his first report card in grade 2 and his results were stupendous. On being asked why he was doing so much better this year he responded that it’s because his teacher likes him.
A great blog I read once summarized it this way. “They won’t care what you know until they know that you care about them.”
i I remember asking you if emerging tech would be your research hotspot, you corrected me by saying that the Knowledge economy was in fact where it’s at for you. What’s your take on how the Knowledge economy is impacting us as people?
CP Wow, that’s a big question. In fact the socioeconomic effects of the knowledge economy are so vast and pervasive that I don’t even know where to start.
Perhaps I can start with how it is affecting us at work. What it has done for those whose business is to create knowledge is to make everything ambiguous. When you are creating knowledge, how do you know how much knowledge is enough? How can you define quality? Is there an increasing or decreasing return for marginal time spent? These are difficult questions for an employee to answer.
At the end of the day, you don’t really know whether you’ve done your job or not. Being a leader of knowledge workers is even more complex as you are faced with making decisions in a very ambiguous environment all the time. Not only that, you must be much more sensitive to the ambiguity faced by your direct reports and managing them well is much more critical to the success of the organization.
i Almost every recruiting assignment I get asks for candidates that can deal with ambiguity, in fact the assessments they are given before hire, often probe for this. What does this mean for learning, education and setting up workforces for success?
CP Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to teach a tolerance for ambiguity. Some people need everything to be well defined and others don’t actually like colouring within the lines.
This reaction to ambiguity starts in grade school as the farther along the path you go for an education, the less ambiguous the nature of school becomes. It becomes ingrained to flee from ambiguity. So the first thing is to actually hire people who can tolerate or thrive in ambiguous circumstances.
The best thing that you can do to foster a love of ambiguity is to change the penalties for failure. Teach people to fail successfully. The Six Sigma environment of the industrial economy doesn’t tolerate failure and that ethos has also been ingrained in the work environment. You need to beat that out of an ambiguous environment and encourage people to try things and fail.
Reward successful failure as a pattern of experimentation and failure that ultimately results in success. People will over a long time, become appreciative of such a culture and thus thrive with ambiguity.
i What’s the biggest thing that human capital professionals need to start changing as they face the new workplace of today?
CP Another huge question that I’ll take one step at a time.
They first need to learn how to hire better. Hiring for attitude and training for skills as a replacement for the resume centric approach to hiring will bring great rewards.
The deliberate creation of a caring, sensitive culture is the next step. Get rid of people who don’t care about others.
Next, forget about trying to train leaders in the old way. Coaching works better and must be repeated and reinforced over a long period of time to stick. And finally, you have to measure behaviors with 360 surveys etc. and make the results part of the appraisal and compensation system if you want real change. Never forget the person in each class who asked the question: “Will this be on the test.” That person attended your last management training session and realizing that he wasn’t going to be tested on anything, promptly stopped paying attention.
i Any last words?
CP A and B students work for C students. In the knowledge economy, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are much more important than they ever were and more important in the long run than technical skills.
This is hard for left brained individuals like me to get. We were trained to make everything about logic, not emotions but that doesn’t work. We want our customers to have a positive emotional reaction to what we’re doing so we need to ensure that those around us react in a positive fashion to how we work.
If we can learn to be better in tune with our emotions and make decisions based on those emotions, then we’ll be much better leaders. (I think my old friends will fall over reading that from someone like me who as you say spent a life in software, finance and accounting, all highly logic driven fields but then maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.)
