No business plan should be complete without an assessment of the training needed to support it, says Andrew Mayo, and doing so really would benefit business.
How many times does one hear the statement 'we only train for the benefit of the business'? It slides off the tongue neatly, but is of course suitably vague to minimise contradiction. If people said "for the benefit of the bottom line", we would be impressed but left wondering how they managed to prove this in every case. But the 'benefit of the business' can mean anything as distant from the bottom line as making an individual feel better.
My observation is that many organisations engage in an enormous amount of training that does not benefit the business in any measurable or lasting way, and training departments are deluded by 'happy sheets' that report that people had a good experience. (Even this is not always the case!). This is due to the woolly approach that is adopted to learning objectives, most of which do not specify the outcomes, and which are impossible to assess later.
Andrew Mayo, Mayo Learning International
I am not of the school that says that all training must have a financial bottom line benefit. I don’t believe this works in the public sector, and even for commercial companies we may choose to spend on training for the direct benefit of other stakeholders than the shareholders alone. We may justifiably believe that what benefits the others benefits the shareholders in the long run, but even using sophisticated cause and effect techniques this often becomes very difficult to credibly prove. However, this does not excuse us from having measurable outcomes, since at the end of the day it is our duty to know whether what we spent was justifiable and why.
We would get over this problem very simply if we started in a different place. Instead of starting with the training course and trying to prove it is worthwhile, if we started much more rigorously with the need, we would have a head start. What are the outcomes that we are looking for? This is where many leadership development programmes fall down spectacularly. Always conscious of the need for better leaders, and the fact that everyone else has a programme, very little thought is typically given to the outcomes desired. At best it is often some hoped for improvement in 360 results.
If the training function wants to be sure it is meeting business needs it must start in one of two places. One set of drivers will be the business objectives – the overall strategies, yes, but also the specific goals that managers have. The second set of drivers will be problem areas – and I mean operational issues (not the obviously HR ones), all of which will have a people issue of some kind behind them. This means sitting down with managers and going through a systematic set of questions.
The first question is not “what training needs do you have?” We must start with exploring their goals and problems, and understanding what lies behind them. For a business objective, what is working for it and what against it? Then, who are the people and teams behind these forces? If the business goal is “to grow market share”, is it the marketing people, the sales people, the product development people – or all of these? Are current quality problems from manufacturing working against us? Once we have the critical players, then we can ask about their capability to deliver, and this may lead us to some learning goals. We have not even mentioned training yet, and we may well decide that the goal can be met by a different learning method. But this approach ensures that we start and stay business driven, and the success or otherwise of the eventual contribution will be clear.
It also makes sure we don’t jump to solutions without fully understanding the need. I remember the case of a senior FMCG team that was missing all its budgets and losing market share. L&D was called in, and, without any analysis, ploughed into a leadership development solution. This team were very experienced; their problem was changing market conditions that required a different product strategy and some cost cutting. Better soft skills and teamwork was not what the business needed at that time.
In another case, increasing customer dissatisfaction in an IT company led the management to call for a programme in customer focus for service engineers. Intelligent business analysis showed that if it were not for these engineers customers would have totally deserted. The problem was a combination of management decisions to save money by centralising spare parts and engineer scheduling, and by salespeople failing to keep proper records of equipment held.
Some organisations build their training portfolio from appraisal information. This is certainly an input, but if it is the only source of deciding the training portfolio it is immensely dangerous. The motivations behind training course suggestions on the development plans which follow appraisals are many and varied. To assume that every training recommendation is about improving performance, and this therefore must be a business benefit, is naïve in the extreme.
Achieving business success is completely dependant on the capabilities of the people involved, including of course those of management. The mission of the L&D, or training, department is to offer the learning required to provide the level of capabilities needed. No business plan should be complete without an assessment of the training needed to support it. As a training manager, is that a critical part of your role?
Andrew Mayo can be contacted at Andrew.mayo@mayolearning.com. His consultancy, specialising in organisational and individual effectiveness can be found at www.mayolearning.com, and for training needs at www.mayotraining.com
