Assumption

This briefing assumes you appreciate the value of training for your staff.  You are in good company a few years ago a Rutgers University study reported that nine billion dollars was spent annually on management training.  The research also reported that CEOs only felt that about 5% of their training dollars delivered real value to the business.  This briefing explains why training fails and how you can improve the value of the training to your business. The Costs Of Training

Training has extraordinary costs to your organization.  Many of these costs can be increased or decreased by the design of the training.  The hard dollar costs may include:

1.      The cost of the trainer.

2.      The cost of materials.

3.      The cost of the training facility.

4.      The cost of participant’s travel/hotel/meals.

One of the obvious indirect costs is the participants’ time.  In addition, there is a large number of less obvious indirect costs.  These include:

1.      The lost opportunities which occurred while the participants were in training.

2.      The frustration of participants who have heavy workloads.

3.      The frustration of participants who see the training as irrelevant.

4.      The frustration of participants who experience the training as good, but do not believe those back home will use it.

This last series of less obvious and indirect costs are probably significantly greater than the more obvious, up-front direct costs. 

 The Cutting Edge Of Training

Organizations that have discovered how to make training matter significantly are investing 1-2 weeks of training for every employee every year, and reaping a ten-fold return on training costs.

Here are some guidelines to make your training as successful:

 Guidelines For Successful Training

1.      Training should be done in Capi[1] GROUPS.  Real work teams should come to training as training units.  These can be permanent teams of people who work together; or they can be temporary, cross-functional teams. Most training, for purposes of efficiency, pulls people out of a number of units who do not work together and who may even be from separate organizations.  This decreases the impact of their absence and it also dramatically decreases the benefit of the training.  When they return home no one else understands the training and within a few weeks most of the enthusiasm, energy,
knowledge, and skills gained in the training has disappeared.  Because the participants are not in real work groups, the examples, exercises and materials used in the training are fictitious.  There has been an abundance of research that points out the superiority of training when people work on real life tasks as opposed to working on play exercises in order to develop skills.

2.      Line managers are the best trainers.  When line managers actually teach their workers they will deliver an accurate picture of the current practices in the organization.  If you wish to make changes in these current practices it is best to concentrate on getting support, skill and buy-in from your line managers on these changes.  You should then have the line managers train their subordinates. 

         Too often the so called “expert” trainer is an expert only in presentation skills, entertainment, and the design of a good training session.  They may have no practical experience managing work.  In some organizations people are trained about computers by computer experts; they are trained about operations by operations experts.  However, when it comes to management training, managers do not deliver the training; the trainers do.  This has the potential for creating a large gap between what the trainer is training, and what the real managers are doing.  This is often the trainer’s attempt to bring change to the organization.  Change must occur from the top down if it is to be effective without creating a revolution.  (See “Why Training Is the Boss’s Job”, Fortune, January 23, 1984.)

         All training, which is the attempt to introduce new skills, processes or behavior into the organization, will benefit dramatically by having a cadre of the key line leaders present at the end of the training.  They should be there to answer questions from participants about specifics on the changes to be made.

3.      Effective training is just in time and just enough.  Giving people extensive training which they will not be applying in the near future harkens back to our early education.  Adults learn best when they can take what they have learned and apply it fairly quickly.  Thus, most of the training seminars and classes where people are given training, which may not be relevant to their immediate work, may be too much for them to retain and apply.  It is largely presented in this format for efficiency and the convenience of the trainers; not for the convenience of the learner.  Thus, both the timing and the content of the training must be responsive to the actual needs of on-the-job workers.  Having a strong cadre of internal coaches and facilitators enables you to take full advantage of the effectiveness and efficiency of the teachable moment, when it occurs.

4.      The CEO must be involved.  The CEO should be the first participant in all of the training programs so that he/she may fine tune, update, or change whatever is appropriate.  It is also relevant for the CEO to be involved in the delivery of the training or at least involved in some part of all management training.  A few minutes of introduction at the beginning and some time at the end of the training for questions and answers can do wonders in terms of implementation.

5.      TEACH TO HEAD, HEART, HANDS.  Learning can occur in your head on the left side of your brain.  This is the site of conceptual knowledge.  Most management training occurs here.  Concepts and principles are very powerful because they can be applied to a variety of specific situations.  This is where the “A” styled manager, in the PAEI model, learns best.  Learning can also occur in your head on the right side of the brain.  This is the site of intuitive and creative learning.  This is where the “E” styled manager learns best.

         Learning can occur in your hands or body.  This kinesthetic learning is the learning of muscles and nerves and is based on the skills of doing specific things.  Some management training occurs here.  This is where the “P’ styled manager learns best.

         Learning can occur in your heart.  This is the site of value and belief learning.  This type of learning is slowest and most difficult.  It is also the longest lasting and most powerful.  This is where the “I” styled manager learns best.

 Some Radical Ideas For Training 

Here are some ideas that are not as traditional as the normal approaches to training which can have very high value and often very low cost.

1.      Job rotation.  As soon as someone becomes competent (of course, you now need to know how to measure and assess competency in each job), they move on to another job so that each person is continually learning a new job. This cross training allows your work force to not only make more intelligent decisions because they understand the impact of their work on other jobs; it also allows you to be extraordinarily more flexible in the work loading and distribution in your organization.  In addition, you increase the challenge and opportunities for each individual person.  For good workers, job rotation in itself is a reward. 

2.      READING RELEVANT BOOKS AND ARTICLES. Each work unit of 5-10 people can meet on a regular basis–let’s say 1-2 hours a month–to read and discuss a current book or article about their industry or management. Each employee on that team would be challenged to go to their local bookstore, pick an appropriate book on management for their area, and purchase sufficient copies for all.  Everyone reads a chapter before each meeting, and then meet and discuss what in the reading is relevant to their business.  One client saved money by buying only one book and taking turns reading aloud in the meeting.

3.      ADVENTURE TRAINING.  A great deal of management training is very intellectual and mental.  There is usually great benefit in considering somatic learning where the learning experience occurs more in the body than the brain.  Typical of such approaches are outdoor challenge programs which can be designed to stretch individuals or to build teams. Most communities now have adventure training companies using such things as initiative training, team problem solving and ropes courses. 

4.      Mission linked training.  All the training done in your organization should be assessed to see which parts of the mission and strategies it supports.  You can actually grade or rate on how well each part is supported by the training.  Training which does not strongly support your mission and strategies should be changed or eliminated.

5.      Assessing real needs.  An in-depth assessment of training needs should be done and updated every 2-3 years for each job type in the organization.  This is more than simply asking the boss what the employee needs to know or simply asking the employee on a survey which course would you like to take.  It means analyzing the job needs and the employee’s knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

6.      CROSS FUNCTIONAL TRAINING.  One of the most practical ways of combining training with real work is to charge each work unit with identifying its customers, clarifying their needs, getting feedback on how well they are meeting those needs, and actually putting together a brochure which markets their department’s services to other parts of the organization.  As this progresses, each department can design the training it would like to offer to other departments.

7.      MANAGEMENT ROUNDTABLES.  Peer managers meet monthly to help one another solve problems and share successes.  See the Management Briefing on Master Mind Groups for guidelines.

8.      Use the twelve question assessment in the book First Break The Rules. Use the results to design training to address shortfalls.  The focus is on increasing productivity and morale.

Tags:   · Effective Management Training · Intact Groups · Training1 Comment