Well, as an organization, we are anticipating a number of exciting happenings at JOIN , all kicking off. . .you guessed it, this summer. Here is a little preview:

Labor Market Report: A while back, JOIN and the CEO Council for Growth commissioned a report from Drexel’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy. This Labor Market report contains the kind of region-specific data that is highly relevant to area businesses and to folks working on economic and workforce development. We are looking forward to the report release this summer.

Update on JOIN Investments: As you know, JOIN has invested in 6 innovative workforce development projects. Starting in the late summer or early fall, we are going to offer formal updates on 4 of these projects—best practices, outcomes, lessons learned, and all of that good stuff. It’s all part of our effort to innovate and then spread the ideas that work.

Innovations Forum: JOIN would like to make a habit of convening a meeting with organizations that are, in some way or other, addressing the human capital challenge in the Greater Philadelphia region. Our inaugural meeting is happening this fall! In the meantime, we are busy drafting up invitations and agendas and thinking about how to facilitate a meaningful, productive discussion.

So, stay tuned. We have lots to share.

The GreenLight Fund’s mission is to “address the critical needs of our cities’ low-income children, youth and families by identifying high-performing, innovative nonprofits in other communities and supporting them to expand to the city when they show the results needed to have a significant impact on local needs.” As you can probably infer from that statement, the GreenLight Fund and JOIN have some things in common. We both work hard to be responsive to regional needs. We are both determined to make small, but strategic investments in social innovations that work. And we are both interested in scaling up or spreading those innovations.

In JOIN’s case, we want to identify what works on a small scale and then expand that model within our region. For the GreenLight Fund, however, they work to import successful social innovations from elsewhere to Philadelphia in a way that is sensitive to the unique local context. JOIN, of course, is focused pretty exclusively on workforce development, while the GreenLight Fund’s portfolio is a bit broader.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, the GreenLight Fund announced its first two investments in Philadelphia: Year Up and Single Stop USA. With these new funds, the two non-profits are going to set up shop in Philadelphia to help educate and equip young people for careers with good wages and good prospects. We are excited that both programs are focused on tackling Philadelphia’s human capital challenges. (Full disclosure: the Director of JOIN serves on the GreenLight Fund’s Selection Advisory Council.)

We encourage you to check out two recent blog posts from the GreenLight Fund. They offer smart, pithy descriptions of Year Up and Single Stop USA, and include some of the thinking behind the selections. We are grateful for the work of organizations like GreenLight Philadelphia and are looking forward to see what happens next.

If you think about it, in our interpersonal exchanges, we are always building capacity of some kind or another. Perhaps it is the capacity to intelligently purchase a used car or navigate public transportation at a certain hour of the day. Maybe it is the capacity to have a sensitive conversation with your boss or to influence your co-workers. In new or ambiguous situations, you want to talk with someone who has been there before and has some low-cost strategies to consider. Not only that, these kinds of conversations build social capital, which can offer benefits to us as individuals.

This morning at the JOIN office we led a conversation that, yes, can safely be described as capacity-building. (There were muffins! There was coffee!) Around the table and on the phone, we hosted leaders from a number of industry partnerships that are doing great work in the southeastern Pennsylvania region. The group was wildly diverse. There were folks working with mushroom farmers, advanced manufacturers, the storm water management industry, and hospitals, among others. A few attendees have been active in workforce development for some time, while others are very new to the work. For all of that diversity, however, it was remarkable how many similar concerns and interests the group shared.

Without wading into all of the gory details, we will tell you that attendees shared insights about data collection, software systems, advocacy and relationship-building strategies, and funding. Having the conversation felt a little like creating an economy of scale out of economies of scale: individual businesses work together in the industry partnership to share resources and best practicesà the industry partnerships, representing hundreds of businesses collectively, have a conversation about mutual needs and interests.

Anyway, it all made for an exciting and encouraging morning for us. Convening conversations like the Industry Partnerships meeting is the kind of space where JOIN can bring real value and leadership. We are looking forward to next steps and optimistic about the new capacities that collaborative conversations of this kind can bring about.

How do you build capacity in your organization or within informal/formal collaborations? Have any thoughts about industry partnerships? We’d love to hear from you. Comment on our blog or tweet us at @joincollab

Every body says that practice and just plain ol’ tenacity will help you go the distance if you want to learn a new skill or continue improving one that you already possess. They are right. You run through your jazz scales on the piano. You shoot 50 lay-ups. You dribble a soccer ball around orange traffic cones. If you don’t perform well, your coach or teacher will give you a few pointers. But how often do we break down work-related tasks into more discrete skills at our day jobs? Moreover, how often do we get good feedback from people observing our performance?

In thinking about using feedback to develop new skills in yourself or others, here are two tips:

1. First, feedback should be regular and soon after the attempt. At an old job, I used to get calls on occasion from my manager 2-3 minutes after I had sent an important e-mail. He would say, “I really liked how you captured the issue in this sentence.” Or, “I would have made the ask in a different way.” Or, “I’m curious about why you did not copy these two people [insert names here.]” Believe me, whether the comments were good or bad, I was careful to apply them next time I put together a sensitive missive.

Unlike athletes and musicians, students, trainees, and employees do not receive regular feedback, and when they do, usually the opportunity to learn has been long gone. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, has written extensively about the benefits of deliberate practice. Continuous feedback is one of its cornerstones.

2. Secondly, do not play the “balance the positive with the negative” game. How many of us have ever been in one of those awkward meetings in which your boss throws in a couple of compliments to make up for the meaningful critique he or she really cares about? According to a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, the “Sandwich Approach” to feedback is not good practice. It increases anxiety for both parties, and makes the receiver feel that the positive feedback may be dishonest.

Instead of using positive feedback as some kind of buffer, it is a better idea to be honest and then work together on strategies to improve the next time around. Roger Schwarz, the HBR blogger, writes, “Giving negative feedback transparently means respecting your direct reports, not controlling or alienating them; makes both your negative and positive feedback more genuine to your direct reports; and lowers your discomfort and their anxiety.”

That is not all there is to say about feedback, of course. But hopefully it generates some thought as you reflect on your own work life or business. For our part, the need for career coaching is one of the things that the JOIN is seeking to mediate through its investment in The Career Support Network. And we just like thinking about best practices like this anyway.

Ever gotten feedback that was spectacularly helpful? Are there feedback strategies you use as a manager to reinforce or develop new skills in your employees? Comment here or tweet us @joincollab

What Working Scared (Or Not At All) uncovers about the state of affairs for workers of all socioeconomic levels and ages is disheartening and grim, to say the least. After the wave of globalization, the steady march towards a knowledge economy, the recent recession, and convergence of other factors, workers are struggling to pick up the pieces. The title of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s article about this book?: “Told in many voices, American workers’ story is bleak.”

But Dr. Van Horn does not leave it there, fortunately. He offers a way up and out: strategic effort and investment in retraining and educating jobless or underemployed workers. Dr. Van Horn argues that workers already understand just how critical ongoing training and education are. (Though, as we discussed in our blog post the other week, workers also know that not all training programs are created equal.) He writes,

“Over eight in ten low-income workers said more education is essential for improving their job prospects, according to Heldrich Center Work Trends research. . .Workers at the lower end of the income scale are especially eager to acquire the skills necessary to improve their opportunities and earnings in the workplace, but they are the last likely group to receive them.”

Investments and education infrastructure have to catch up to worker’s lived reality. That is what we are working hard on here at JOIN along with many of you—our partners and investors. We strive to be frank about the pressing employment needs in our region, but equally determined to find and replicate workforce development efforts that work. We look forward to hearing the response to Dr. Van Horn’s recommendations . . . and here is to better stories from workers in our region.

Reference: Van Horn, C. (2013). Working Scared (or Not at All): The Lost Decade, Great Recession, and Restoring the Shattered American Dream. (1 ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

OK. Here is the more precise version: if the 51 largest U.S. metro areas each improved their adult four-year college attainment rate by 1 percentage point, we could predict an $856 increase in per capita income. That means everyone in the U.S. makes $856 more every year. Talk about ROI!

CEOs for Cities, the organization behind that statistic, is calling the relationship between college attainment and income, “The Talent Dividend.” I happen to like that label. It is a hopeful one.

Last week, the Flying Kite published a great article about “The Talent Dividend” report and how it applies here in Philadelphia. They even profiled one of JOIN’s partners, the University City District, and investments, the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative! I’d encourage you to check out the article if you haven’t already.

The author of this article, Lee Stabert, contends that conversation about economic development is often tipped in one direction. She writes, “There is a lot of talk in Philly these days about talent attraction and attainment — how do we lure the San Francisco start-up maven, the brilliant Chicago college student or the European scientist? And how to we get them to stay?”

It seems like somebody somewhere has been answering those questions, because there are a lot of cool things happening in Philadelphia right now. There are creative communities like Indy Hall. . .spaces like The Loom. . .and start-up geniuses and entrepreneurs extraordinaire who hang with Technically Philly or Good Company Group. We need that in our city. It is part of the equation. But, as Ms. Stabert writes, “There is another story to tell.” We also need substantial investments in education and talent development for Philadelphians who are not yet earning a family-sustaining wage. We’ll all be the better for it.

While it’s good to see issue of low-wage and entry level work covered nationally, the truth is there’s a lot more to the story than what’s presented here. A couple of considerations for you:
Training is one thing – training that leads to career advancement opportunities may be another. Here’s what I mean by that; the article states that of the workers aware of employer-provided training, only 64% report participating in those trainings. The reason – “workers who have used these programs say they are no more likely to feel confident about their prospects for advancement than those who have not received extra training.”

This statement points to an issue that many of us working in this space grapple with – how to connect training, clearly and honestly, to career advancement. The most effective workforce partnerships do this well, they actively engage employers to understand what specific types of training and curricula develop the skills necessary for workers to advance. As a result, worker training efforts are focused on the development of skills and the attainment of credentials that are valued, and lead to a payoff for workers and employers.

Our colleagues at the Hitachi Foundation told us that another one of the survey findings that didn’t make it to print is the valuable role that public private training partnerships play in this space. JOIN agrees- which is why our funding has taken the form of investment in these kinds of partnerships. But how valuable are they? We wanted to find out, which is what led to our JOIN ROI study. If you need a refresher, that information is available here.

As Stephanie Luce, professor of labor studies at CUNY School of Professional Studies said in the article, “It seems to me if the training programs at the work sites really were leading to successful upward mobility, workers would be taking them.” Yep! And employers, if they are wise, will figure out how to incentivize these kinds of training to mutual benefit.

Each summer, WorkReady Philadelphia, the city’s youth employment and career preparation system, offers internship experiences for thousands of young people in our city.

These 6-week, paid positions bring value to employers, foster new skills and opportunities for youth ages 14—21, generate economic activity, and promise dividends in the long-term, workforce development equation.

Early employment experience makes a difference. According to Paul Harrington, EdD, head of Drexel’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy, “Early work experience has powerful influence on long-term employment earnings. There are all these behavioral traits that you learn on the job, and if you don’t develop them through early work experience, you’re disadvantaged later.”

This year, Mayor Michael Nutter issued an ambitious 10,000 Job Challenge for WorkReady Philadelphia. Meeting that goal in summer 2013 would mean nearly 3,200 more internships than last year—3,200 more young people building skills and preparing for the workforce. Last year’s internship locations included: Bank of America, CVS Caremark, St. Joseph’s University, Aramark, Susquehanna Bank, and PECO, among dozens of others.

Right now, WorkReady needs 5,000 more jobs to meet the Challenge. If you are an employer, there are tons of ways for you to participate, even if you aren’t able to host an intern. Check out the links above and consider how you could help to reach the 10,000 job threshold.

And finally, as a coda to this little post, we like innovation here at JOIN. Chalk it up to youthful energy and idealism. So this post’s author was intrigued by the folks at Tiny WPA (the name is a nod to FDR’s New Deal-era Work Progress Administration). It is no formal summer internship, but these hip public works projects are creating opportunities to engage youth, recognize their talents, and throw wide open the doors for them to contribute to their neighborhoods and cities. Young people designed and built this adventure playground and these benches here in the city of Brotherly Love last year. Cool stuff!

Interested in participating in the Mayor’s Challenge? Have thoughts about your own summer employment experience as a young person? Dying for some Italian ice? Comment on our blog or tweet us at @joincollab.

 
A series of really inspiring meetings I attended last Friday got me thinking about what true collaboration looks like. The teamwork we’ll see on the basketball court over the next few weeks is one illustration of successful (or unsuccessful) collaboration), but what does this look like when done well in the work of JOIN and organizations like ours?

 
None of us like to meet just for the sake of meeting. But it is pretty exciting when you can get the right people in the room to not only strategize and plan around a particular program or initiative, but take ownership over the implementation phases. The right combination of partners recognizes they all have a part to play in the outcome of the program/initiative in question, and are on board to see it to completion and make mid-course corrections where necessary to ensure success.

 
Some purely anecdotal takeaways from my own experience with collaboration follow below. Good collaborators:

 
1.    Value the input of colleagues, partners, and stakeholders. And I mean actually value it—they use it in the initial discussion, planning, and implementation phases of their work where appropriate. Not everything you do will require stakeholder input, of course, but giving people genuine opportunities to give feedback—that you can use before a new program starts or a new practice is adopted—shows your partners that you find their contributions critical to their work and not just a public relations effort.

 
2.    Work from the assumption that they don’t have all the answers, Piggybacking off of number 1, true collaborators NEED to collaborate. In other words, they recognize that diverse perspectives are a necessary part of the planning process for new and/or innovative work. Not to mention, you get an organic communications and branding arm when your partners are bought in and can spread the word to their networks.

 
3.    Are visionary, and empower their partners to see themselves in the work. After one meeting in particular, I left feeling encouraged not only because everyone around the table had good ideas to contribute, but everyone was visionary. Everyone could talk about concrete things they envisioned that our work could contribute to and the steps needed to achieve them. And those are the types of meetings I don’t mind being in!

 
What does successful collaboration look like in your work? Feel free to add your thoughts on this and/or March Madness by tweeting @joincollab or commenting on this post.

Kenyatta  was trained through our partnership with the Federation of Neighborhood Centers – the Green Jobs Readiness Partnership – and found employment in this emerging industry.