A New Way of Identifying Top Talent
Using Simulations to Reach Beyond Training

Managing Virtual Teams
Three Tips for Teaching Managers to Lead Virtual Teams

A New Way of Identifying Top Talent
Using Simulations to Reach Beyond Training
By Mike Vaughan

As budgets are trimmed and business challenges mount, companies are looking for executive leaders who can thrive in a business environment in which they will be called upon to do more with less while maintaining their poise in the face of unprecedented economic upheaval.

Enter Simulations

But what if there were a way of decreasing the uncertainty surrounding candidate viability? What if there were a surefire method of separating the truly top-shelf talent from the merely mediocre?

That’s where simulations enter the picture. While most of us are accustomed to thinking of simulations as training tools that immerse participants in complex, realistic environments and develop and hone critical skill sets across a wide range of cognitive dimensions, a new trend is emerging in which simulations are being applied to other critical workforce development issues that extend beyond pure training applications, per se—including top talent identification.

In Practice

Recently, a client firm approached us with a question. In addition to helping develop executive-level skills, the firm wanted to know whether simulations could also help it to more accurately determine whether its “high potential” candidates were truly equipped to lead.

TARGET: TOP TALENT Quick Tips When building, buying or customizing a simulation that enables you to spot top talent, here are three design elements you’ll want to incorporate:   Use multiple rounds. A simulation should assess participants’ ability to not only make decisions, but to be self-reflective enough to evaluate the quality of those decisions and modify them accordingly over time. Incorporating multiple rounds into a simulation allows you to do this. During the initial few rounds, participants will make plenty of mistakes as they strive to understand the simulation. As the simulation unfolds over the course of subsequent rounds, however, you’ll be able to gauge which candidates are able to learn from their earlier mistakes by making stronger decisions during later rounds. Throttle-up/throttle-down. By designing your simulation in such a way that the stakes are raised at certain points, you’ll be able to determine how participants deal with stressful situations. And by easing back on the emotional throttle at other times, you’ll allow learners the time they need to regroup, without pushing them too far and risking burnout. Capture the data. Your simulation should come equipped with a customizable analytics and reporting package that allows you to track trends and identify individual performance relative to the key traits you seek in executive candidates. This simulation “dashboard” should be capable of capturing and reporting an array of data types, including: Individual and team decisions. How decisions change over time, and whether decision outcomes are better or worse as a result of any changes. Which participants learn from their mistakes over time by thinking strategically about all aspects of the business, and which candidates are merely guessing. At-a-glance comparisons of individual results, team results, and entire training group performance on a round-by-round and overall basis. The ways in which stressful situations taking place within the simulation impact the quality of each candidate’s performance in key areas.

The firm’s executive team was looking for particular kinds of leaders: problem-solvers capable of making smart decisions when confronted with knotted complexities; critical thinkers able to sift through disparate data points to identify the most important factors while discarding irrelevant information; and systems thinkers capable of viewing the entire business holistically and understanding how individual, departmental and business unit-level decisions impact other areas of the enterprise. Ideally, candidates would possess all three of these key attributes.

Yet, assessing and developing these skills alone, the company knew, would provide it with insufficient indication as to whether candidates also possessed the equanimity necessary to listen to their better angels during crunch time. When under duress, the company wanted to know, would candidates keep their wits about them? Would they maintain their ability to delegate and lead? Would they look toward the long-term stability and well-being of the organization and take informed risks, or would they make short-sighted decisions elicited by their own stress in order to gain short-term relief from stultifying ephemera?

Rather than hypothetically extrapolating from a personality profile how a candidate might perform under pressure, we designed an immersive simulation that grew extremely difficult and stress-inducing at key inflexion points during the learning experience. Then, using an electronic “dashboard” reporting mechanism, we generated results that depicted whether candidates who performed well under normal circumstances continued to do so when confronted with stressful business situations, based on factors such as the quality of their decision-making, their teamwork and delegation skills, and the success (or lack thereof) of their overall performance.

The answers were telling. During the first few rounds, it became readily apparent which managers were most apt to founder under pressure. It was also evident which candidates could take stress in stride because these candidates were generally able to remain focused on producing sound business results, regardless of the various obstacles with which the simulation cluttered their path.

By the end of the simulation experience, the company had not only decreased the level of uncertainty surrounding each candidate’s executive potential, it had all but eliminated the hypothetical guesswork so common to conventional types of talent assessment techniques. Most important, the firm’s leaders felt that they were now far better equipped to make informed decisions about executive promotions and hiring.

Michael Vaughan is president of Regis Learning Solutions. Contact Mike

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Managing Virtual Teams
Three Tips for Teaching Managers to Lead Virtual Teams
By Beth Zadik

From scheduling online meetings across international time zones to communicating effectively online, virtual operations come with their own set of management challenges.

1. Model your organization’s typical project cycle. To make your simulation as realistic and translatable to the real-world as possible, the project lifecycle that you incorporate into the simulation should mirror the same project phases that your virtual managers follow in their real jobs.

In a virtual management simulation that we designed for a global accounting firm, for example, participants are assigned a realistic project and then spend each of three simulation “rounds” tackling a variety of tasks as they push their project toward completion.

Round one of the simulation entails communicating with their team, creating a project plan, and the establishment of team norms and expectations. During round two, managers are tasked with establishing development objectives, handling cross-cultural communication differences, and encouraging effective team dynamics. The simulation concludes with the third round, during which managers identify ways to support a team member’s career development, manage change, resolve team conflict, and build team synergy. Upon completion of the simulation, each manager identifies action items to implement on the job.

2. Identify the real-world challenges your virtual managers face. Then, build obstacles into your simulation that force your managers to confront them. Whenever we design a customized virtual management simulation, we first conduct a needs analysis to uncover the challenges that a client organization’s virtual managers face. With one client, for example, this analysis revealed four key obstacles the firm’s virtual managers regularly encountered. These included:

• Engaging in clear communication.

• Establishing team norms and guidelines.

• Supervising and mentoring virtual staff.

• Effectively managing projects and team deliverables.

We then built a series of obstacles into the simulation that forced the firm’s managers to confront each of these challenges head on.

To enhance their supervisory and mentoring skills, for example, participants were asked to deliver difficult feedback virtually. At one point during the simulation, each participant learns that one of her subordinates isn’t keeping up with his deadlines. The manager must then have a virtual conversation with the employee and take steps to resolve the matter. Based on the path she takes and the choices she makes at each point during the conversation, feedback that underscores key learning objectives is automatically generated by the simulation.

In addition, the participant is able to see how her decisions during the conversation (and within the simulation overall) impact the success of her team in several key areas, such as team communications, team morale, and project performance. That’s because at the end of each task, a built-in dashboard reporting tool appears on-screen that depicts “at a glance” results showing the manager how each and every move she makes affects both team and project outcomes.

3. Use the power of story. A wealth of adult learning research points to the fact that adults learn more effectively and remember things more clearly when they are emotionally engaged in a learning experience and when their learning is tied to memorable stories.

It follows, then, that by creating an environment in which stories are shared, you will enhance the likelihood that simulation learnings will be committed to memory—and, ultimately, put into practice on the job.

One way to incorporate memorable stories into a virtual management simulation is to make stories a focal point of facilitator-led “touch point” discussions that take place at the end of each simulation round. For example, we typically arm our facilitators with memorable anecdotes to underpin the content of each task performed within a simulation. During each touch point discussion, the facilitator prompts the participants to share insights from the simulation and relate key learnings back to the job. The facilitator also takes this opportunity to share one or more of the stories in her back pocket at opportune times during each touch point discussion. And because stories are best retained when they are told by participants themselves, she also makes a point of eliciting and capturing personal stories tied to each task from the participants themselves.

Another way of incorporating narrative power is to establish a storyline at the beginning of each task you assign. For example, if you want to teach your virtual managers how to team-build effectively, you might begin a team-building task by upping the ante with a story. (E.g., “Team morale is low. Team members feel disconnected and there is no team ethic present.”)

Once you’ve set up the narrative's dramatic tension, follow it with a task, such as having the manager find a way to build a sense of esprit de corps. Then, give the manager choices as to how he’ll tackle the challenge—be it coaching; assigning a task to two or more people who have never worked together before; establishing a virtual water cooler; allotting five to 10 minutes for social interaction before every teleconference begins; or creating a social networking space so that team members can get to know one another better.

Finally, use your dashboard to show the manager how each decision he makes relative to a given task impacts the performance of his team. By offering your managers the means to see the impact of their decisions in real time, you’ll ensure that they quickly learn what works (and what doesn’t) when leading a high-performing virtual team.

Beth Zadik is a program director at Regis Learning Solutions. Contact Beth

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