FAQ
- What’s the catch?
- What does the Creative Commons license mean?
- If I put 6 – 10 people through this program, I’m losing between 384 and 640 hours of their time on the job. How do I know it’s worth it?
- Can I republish A Leader’s Manifesto?
- It’s crazy to give all this content away! How do you expect to make money?
There is no catch. There is no charge to you to use the materials. But there are conditions, as explained in the terms of the Creative Commons license. If you use the Humans At WorkSM materials, you are automatically agreeing to the terms of this license.
What does the Creative Commons license mean?
In a nutshell, it means that any material here that carries the license image and text is available to use free of charge. You are allowed to adapt it for your own use, but you are absolutely positively not allowed to use it (in original or adapted form) for commercial purposes. If you want to develop your own version of the program on a Do It Yourself basis, and deliver it in-house to your own employees for the next forty years, be my guest. If you want to develop your own version, slap your name on it and start selling it to people, you are in violation of the license and if I find you, I will take action against you. You are allowed to learn from my work. You are not allowed to make money from it.
Here’s the plain English version of the license as well as the full legal text. Make sure you understand the terms of the license completely before you use the program material. Contact me if you have any questions.
If I put 6 – 10 people through this program, I’m losing between 384 and 640 hours of their time on the job. How do I know it’s worth it?
One of the challenges of any learning experience is measuring whether it’s been a success. I recommend that you consider carefully what success looks like to you so that you can design a meaningful way of measuring it.
Research, and our own experience, tells us that productivity is directly related to employee engagement. In about 85 percent of US companies, employee engagement plummets after the first six months on the job, and “the fault lies squarely at the feet of management — both the policies and procedures… and in the relationships that individual managers establish with their direct reports.”(Sirota Survey Intelligence, 2006). We know that in 2007 alone, disengaged employees cost American businesses $382 million in lost productivity.
So you should measure the success of this program by how the manager’s team performs. This should be both a numbers game — lower error rates, higher productivity, year-over-year revenues, whatever is appropriate — and a report from the team itself about job satisfaction, expectation of staying with the company, etc.
Do a gut check. Look at each team whose manager you are considering for this program. Depending on how directly that team contributes to the bottom line, how long will it take to get a return on a 64-hour investment in good management skills? My guess is that in almost every case it won’t take long.
Can I republish A Leader’s Manifesto? Can I adapt it along with the rest of the program or take parts of it for a book I’m writing?
No. A Leader’s Manifesto is covered by a slightly different Creative Commons license. You’re welcome to print it and give copies to people, share it with the world — but you must credit me for it, you may not charge for it or use it for commercial purposes, and you may not change the text in any way (unlike the program curriculum, which you are free to adapt if you wish).
It’s crazy to give all this content away! How do you expect to make money?
I don’t. How crazy is that?