Competency and Performance Solutions

The causes, costs and consequences of the cultural gaps between healthcare and information technology.

Tampa Bay Medical and Technology Expo: 2:15 pm – 3:15 pm: 15th July 2010.

This workshop reviews the challenges that arise at the interface of healthcare and information technology, and points the way towards realistic and cost-effective solutions.

• Glynis and Greg Ross-Munro will offer research and insights into the cultural gap between the healthcare clinical world, and IT world, and the position of Medical Informatics, caught between two different occupational cultures. Continue reading »

Organizations want training.  Research shows that training does much more than grow skills. Those who receive good training feel that their company has invested in them. Interactive training sparks innovation, engages people and makes it significantly more likely that they will stay with the company and bring their heads, as well as their bodies, to work.

The problem is how to invest in people, but achieve this with  short, affordable, effective training designs, that deliver a considerable amount of customized, sustainable learning and attitude change. Businesses need training interventions that provide

• powerfully interactive experiences: they need these to cost as little as possible,
• real lasting learning: they need these to take people off the job for the shortest time possible, and
• engaging training experiences that spark innovation and collaboration: they need these to be custom targeted on the specific needs of their organization so that people feel  “invested in”

It’s hard to blame them.  Organizations are “doing more with less,” and their alternatives are often minimal canned training, on-line non-collaborative training, or no training at all.

CPS began addressing this need by using accelerated learning techniques, such as jigsaw training designs, often mixed with plays and/or multiple intelligence work.  These most powerful, interactive learning methods work well for all generations. The collaborative nature of the work is ideal for innovation and cross-functional problem solving. Continue reading »

Third Prize: A self-sustaining system for monitoring your corporate information security and privacy on the Internet.

Second Prize: Engaged staff, increased retention, teamwork and trust.

First Prize: A long-term, company-wide culture of awareness of the importance of respecting and protecting corporate information. Employee-driven emphasis on its role in trust-based business relationships, legal obligations to business partners, competitive advantage etc.

In CPS’s Managing Millennials workshop, we suggest many ways to give your Generation Ys some variety in their work, to engage their interest and loyalty, and to offer some outlet for their creative minds, as they focus on routine tasks. Most of these suggestions leverage their technological and generational-specific skills, for the well-being of the organization.

Continue reading »

The following article, by Glynis Ross-Munro, was published in the Summer 2009 edition of The Woman Advocate, Vol. 14, No. 4,by the American Bar Association. Copyright is shared with the author.

Glynis is President of Competency and Performance Solutions, a Tampa-based consultancy that assists firms with generational differences, collaborative thinking skills, culture and inclusiveness. She has been married to a lawyer for 33 years.

The success of a legal team depends on collaboration and teamwork. In the current workplace, that means solid communication between four generations of professional and support staff, clients, business partners, witnesses and others. This is no easy task. Continue reading »

Culture (I tell participants) is like an iceberg. You see the part that sticks up about the water, but below the surface is the real bulk. The thing you are most likely to crash into is that unseen, unsuspected mass.

The aquatic metaphor is also apt. We swim in our culture, so like fish we do not notice it. It is the water that surrounds us, and we cease to analyze it. It is simply the environment in which we live.

The other common image of culture is the onion. Our daily lives are framed by layers upon layers of  unseen assumptions and mind-sets. Because we have no other way of conceptualizing our world, we see it through our ‘normal’ perspective, seldom imagining different interpretations, until some rather dramatic event gives us new eyes. Or until we choose to study a subject like Anthropology, to help us see that many things are hiding, in plain sight, right in front of us.
Continue reading »