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Co-ordinate to i manufacture report, U.S. companies spent over $90 billion dollars on grooming and development activities in 2017, a year-over-year increment of 32.5 %. While many experts emphasize the importance and benefits of employee development — a more competitive workforce, increased employee retention, and higher employee engagement — critics point to a painful lack of results from these investments. Ultimately, there is truth in both perspectives. Training is useful at times merely often fails, peculiarly  when information technology is used to address issues that information technology can't actually solve.

Many well-intended leaders view training as a panacea to obvious learning opportunities or behavioral bug. For example, several months agone, a global financial services company asked me to blueprint a workshop to assistance their employees be less bureaucratic and more than entrepreneurial. Their goal was to train people to stop waiting effectually for their bosses' blessing, and instead, feel empowered to make decisions on their own. They hoped, every bit an outcome, decisions would be made faster. Though the company seemed eager to invest, a training program was non the right way to introduce the new behavior they wanted their employees to acquire.

You and Your Team Series

Learning

  • Learning to Learn

Grooming can be a powerful medium when there is proof that the root cause of the learning demand is an undeveloped skill or a knowledge arrears. For those situations, a well-designed program with customized content, relevant example cloth, skill edifice practise, and a final measurement of skill acquisition, works neat. But, in the case of this organisation, a lack of skills had very little to do with their problem. After asking leaders in the organization why they felt the need for training, we discovered the root causes of their problem had more than to do with:

  • Ineffective decision-making processes that failed to clarify which leaders and groups owned which decisions
  • Narrowly distributed authorisation, full-bodied at the top of the organization
  • No measurable expectations that employees make decisions
  • No technologies to quickly move information to those who needed it to brand decisions

Given these systemic issues, it'due south unlikely a training programme would have had a productive, or sustainable outcome. Worse, information technology could take backfired, making management look out of touch.

Learning is a consequence of thinking, non education. It happens when people reflect on and choose a new behavior. Only if the work environment doesn't support that behavior, a well-trained employee won't make a difference. Hither are three atmospheric condition needed to ensure a training solution sticks.

1. Internal systems support the newly desired beliefs. Spotting unwanted beliefs is certainly a clue that something needs to modify. But the origins of that unwanted behavior may non be a lack of skill. Private behaviors in an organization are influenced past many factors, like: how clearly managers found, communicate, and stick to priorities, what the civilization values and reinforces, how performance is measured and rewarded, or how many levels of hierarchy there are. These all play a role in shaping employee behaviors. In the example higher up, people weren't behaving in a disempowered way because they didn't know better. The company's decision-making processes forbid them from behaving whatsoever other way. Multiple levels of blessing were required for even tactical decisions. Access to basic data was limited to loftier-ranking managers. The culture reinforced asking permission for everything. Unless those problems were addressed, a workshop would evidence useless.

2. At that place is delivery to alter. Any thorough organizational assessment will non only define the skills employees need to develop, it will also reveal the conditions required to reinforce and sustain those skills once a training solution is implemented. Just because an organisation recognizes the factors driving unwanted behavior, doesn't mean they're open to changing them. When I raised the obvious concerns with the organization above, I got the classic response, "Yes, yes, of course we know those issues aren't helping, but we think if nosotros can become the workshop going, we'll build momentum and then get to those later on." This is usually code for, "It's never going to happen." If an organization isn't willing to accost the causes of a problem, a training volition not yield its intended benefit.

three. The training solution directly serves strategic priorities. When an organization deploys a new strategy — like launching a new marketplace or product — training can play a disquisitional function in equipping people with the skills and knowledge they need to assist that strategy succeed. Only when a training initiative has no discernible purpose or cease goal, the hazard of failure is raised. For case, i of my clients rolled out a visitor-wide mindfulness workshop. When I asked a few employees what they thought, they said, "It was interesting. At to the lowest degree information technology got me 2 hours away from my cubicle." When I asked the sponsoring executive to explain her thought process behind the grooming, she said, "Our employee engagement data indicated our people are feeling stressed and overworked, so I thought it would be a overnice perk to help them focus and reduce tension." But when I asked her what was causing the stress, her answer was less definitive: "I don't really know, but most of the negative data came from Millennials and they complain about being overworked. Plus, they similar this kind of stuff." She believed her training solution had strategic relevance because it linked to a vital employee metric. But evaluations indicated that, though employees found the training "interesting," it didn't actually reduce their stress. There are a myriad of reasons why the workload could take been causing employees stress. Therefore, this manager's free energy would accept been better directed at trying to determine those reasons in her specific section, and addressing them appropriately — despite her good intentions.

If you are going to invest millions of dollars into company training, be confident it is addressing a strategic learning demand. Further, be sure your organization tin and will sustain new skills and knowledge by addressing the broader factors that may threaten their success. If you aren't confident in these conditions, don't spend the money.