subject: The trouble with training [print this page] The trouble with training The trouble with training
Trouble with training
In these target-conscious, skills-hungry days, more money than ever goes into training. Tony Scott wonders how wisely it's being spent.
Over the past 20 years, I've worked with organisations and businesses in all three economic sectors: private; public; and not-for-profit. I've seen training and development initiatives that have delivered results and continue to do so. I've also seen initiatives soak up time, money and effort to no purpose.
This article looks at four principles that seem to make the difference. Observing the principles alone won't guarantee effective training. But ignoring them will guarantee ineffective training.
Inject reality
Much of what bedevils organisations including consultancies in a time of great change and unrelenting cost pressure can be summed up in two linked habits: a reluctance or inability to focus; and short-termism.
Both are entirely understandable. Neither is helpful.
FOCUS Many Boards, especially in the public sector, have agendas of high-priority issues that run to several pages. Trying to deal with all the issues simply diffuses management effort to the point where none gets cleared. As a result, the agenda gets only longer over time and managers feel increasingly frustrated.
Choosing the top one, two or three priorities, and sticking with them, takes courage from directors. But it transmits clarity to all so that it becomes possible to make visible progress. Staff who see the movement develop confidence in their leaders and, in time, themselves which generates commitment to sort out other issues and excitement about the possibilities of change.
SHORT-TERMISM Short-termism commonly takes the form of a helpless shrug and a belief that, no matter how hard we work, it'll be for nothing because the goalposts will be moved again soon.
But it is possible to discern and address longer-term issues in any organisation: the need to develop faster, cheaper ways of doing things; the importance of sorting out relationships between departments; and the need to sell change to staff at all levels so that new ideas move smoothly from awaydays and Board papers to daily reality.
Leaders who concentrate on these larger issues and on using their training budget to persuade people to tackle them find that they can take advantage of moving goalposts instead of being threatened by them.
The fire-fighting mind-set that tends to go with short-term thinking can lead to curious blind spots:
In one large hospital, nurses and junior doctors spend hours on the phone every day, ringing wards to find out where beds are available for new admissions. The salary cost alone of using highly qualified staff in this way adds up to tens of thousands of pounds a year. But the Trust has yet to find the couple of thousand it would take to put a single PC on the admissions desk with a simple log of vacancies.
Or take the Board secretariat where a roomful of word-processing staff put sticky labels on window envelopes and type every name and address twice on the envelope as well as the document because, they say, they can't spare the time to learn how to position a name and address so that it shows through the window.
Issues like these abound in organisations. All are known to staff, and all can be readily fixed once people believe that sensible ideas will be listened to and acted on. The trick is to inject such realities into training courses and awaydays, so that every event becomes a forum where issues can be openly discussed and addressed. In that way, confidence grows alongside a willingness to change.
The same principle applies even more acutely to Boards themselves. On one occasion, a Board wanted training for itself on internal communication skills. It turned out that the real problems had to do with the division of operational responsibilities between directors and the fact that the tensions thus created were being swept under the carpet. Surfacing the problems in the course allowed the Board as a whole to face them, fix them, and, as a result, communicate better on other issues as well.
Use the 80:20 principle
The 18th-century Italian mathematician Wilfredo Pareto came up with the analytical weapon now known most widely as the 80:20 principle. It suggests that in any situation, 80 per cent of the results come from 20 per cent of the causes.
So in a service business, 80 per cent of the revenue comes from 20 per cent of the clients (and departments), and 80 per cent of the problems come from 20 per cent of the staff.
The same principle can be applied to training decisions. A London personnel director, concerned about the quality of recruits and the time taken over their selection, decided to run a series of courses in interviewing skills.
The course was aimed at personnel staff and other junior managers, and it coached them... to avoid hypothetical questions (because the answers tell you only whether the candidate has read the textbooks)... to listen instead of talk... and to dig for evidence of skills and aptitude instead of relying on snap personal judgments.
The course made a little difference. But not much. The real causes of the trouble lay elsewhere. The organisation had a staff turnover of around 25 per cent a year more in some departments and a clumsy selection process.
The turnover was largely a function of a management culture that ran on fear. Fixing that would have been a long and delicate process. But the time and money spent on selection could have been cut much more simply. Selection took so long because so little thought had gone into it. Consider:
Every vacancy was advertised in all the local papers, which guaranteed as many as 1000 replies (a single ad or merely an internal one would have been cheaper and faster).
Each reply was logged and responded to with a hefty pack of information and an application form (almost all the information could have been distributed at a later stage or via a website, saving a sizeable sum in postage alone).
The forms were sifted by juniors who were nervous of making a wrong decision, so upwards of 50 candidates would be brought in for interviews (a tougher paper selection could have cut that number in half, saving several man-days of time).
Finally, when a candidate was chosen, all the other applications were thrown away and the whole process was repeated for the next vacancy (since most of the available jobs were clerical or domestic posts, and since those were being filled at the rate of 10-15 a week, it would have been easy to keep a file of the most promising runners-up and thus cut the selection workload by more than 90 per cent).
By demanding a training solution which addressed only a fraction of the problems rather than contemplating a rethink of departmental procedures which would have addressed the bulk of them the personnel director ensured that the investment would yield only a marginal payback.
Insist on senior backing
One of the commonest reactions to any training message is: I'd love to try it, but they would never let me.' They usually means the person's manager.
The only way to counter the reaction is to insist that one or more key authority figures get involved the more senior the better. The most far-reaching events usually require a director or two, including the chief executive. The sponsors' role can take any or all of three main forms:
Clear barriers ahead of the event, so that staff don't find excuses to duck out.
Join some or all of the event and make clear their unequivocal support for it. Use some of the time to convey, informally, the Board's thinking on a relevant current issue.
Monitor changes in performance afterwards and reward noisily and publicly those who experiment with the new ideas.
Post-event support is most powerful when it applauds courageous failure as well as success. If only successes win recognition, participants will assume that failure attracts blame and they'll learn to keep their heads down for safety. That can only diminish and slow down the course's payback.
Perhaps the best way to win senior backing is to measure the training's commercial value in some appropriate fashion. That doesn't necessarily require complexity or time. For a course on letter-writing in a tax practice, for instance, I persuaded the client's senior managers to record for a day how much time they spent reviewing each letter, and what proportion they returned for rewriting.
They collected the figures twice: once before the course; once three weeks afterwards. Average reviewing time went from 4 to 11/2 minutes, saving each manager a total of more than 11/2 hours a day. Rejection rates went from 50 per cent to zero.
There was a bonus. The confidence and morale of staff members continued to improve as they saw their work leave the office in recognisable form, which meant that they put more effort into doing even better next time. More to the point from a training perspective, the senior managers and their partners lined up solidly behind the course's messages.
Tie in to long-term strategy
Any training course worth the name is a change programme in miniature. If not, it can have only a questionable value. But if it is to help to change behaviour, it must be linked with three things: the organisation's core purposes; what's important to the jobs people do; and what's important to the individuals in those jobs.
Looked at from this perspective, it is curious how many courses on assertiveness, equal opportunities and other sorts of awareness, and loosely defined personal development have sprouted across the private and public sectors. Even training in such apparently useful areas as consultancy and communication skills can fall into this semi-detached trap.
The courses can be well-meaning attempts to respond to staff requests or to placate the disaffected. But they rarely change behaviour, for three main reasons:
They are used as a sort of gift a magic dust' that will somehow on their own lift morale and performance, and show management's good faith. But because the courses have no hard-edged relevance to work, they can serve inadvertently to increase frustration and cynicism.
They are targeted only at junior and middle-level staff, instead of the movers and shakers without whose backing nothing will change in the organisation. Customer-care programmes often fail to deliver change for this reason.
The courses take place in isolation. Their effect, if any, is social; their value, if any, is public relations. Cut off in this way from the purposes of the organisation that funds them, they make no material difference to it.
By contrast, courses which are tied explicitly to long-term strategy can make a big difference with appropriate reinforcement via such mechanisms as promotion and pay rises. Two examples may make the point:
A two-day conference aimed at building the confidence of managers to take commercial decisions became the launchpad in one public-sector agency for a staff-backed change process that cut the number of senior managers from 20-plus to six and has pushed its management costs down to 5 per cent a third less than the national average.
A series of three-day courses persuaded an inwardly focused specialist service to take more care of its external customers and stakeholders. The courses transformed the mood of the staff, which in turn is now helping the service to grow its revenue through referrals from outside its nominal catchment area.
Conclusion
Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the six honest serving-men' who'd guided him in his early career as a journalist. Their names, he said, were Who and What and When, and Where and Why and How.
The biggest single trap in planning a development initiative is to consider only what it should cover and how, who it should be aimed at, and where and when it should be held. The biggest and hardest single factor in designing events which add real value is to work out why.
