A Quantum Voyage

Don't Waste Your Money on Training!

So said the MD of a 100 plus company in the south east.

His view was that he employed people with relevant supporting skills and with the exception of meeting the legal niceties the rest was down to the line manager and learning on the job. He had previously spent money on training, but had not noticed any real difference in the performance of his staff, with or without off the job training.

The company survived, but not without an injection of new blood and a root and branch review of the way the company operated. There was not just a lack of people development, all the company’s initiatives were top down, change was always prescriptive and employees were expected to cope come what may. Not only were employees unhappy but they were a vastly underused resource, they never volunteered and their potential for creativity was lost.
 
Of course training and development is never an optional extra, well directed, they serve both, the on-going effectiveness and wellbeing of organisations; and they help future managers to arrive in post oven ready.

The key phrase is well directed, sadly a lot of training is not well directed, the expected results are not clearly specified and post training impact is not objectively measured.

The Benefit of Training is to make a gain or, to avoid a loss and the company and the employee should both benefit.

A few sad facts:

• 22% of skills are below standard.
• Typically, this costs a business of 50 employees, £165,000 per year
• UK productivity is 13% below that of other major economies
• In Britain £4.5b is spent on training each year by employers, but this may not be used effectively
• In 2001 50% of the $56.8b training budget in the USA had not been used one year later and was unlikely to ever be used!

To make training pay, there are a few questions that it is well worth having the answers to.

• What is the need?
• When will the need arise?
• If the need is met will it serve the strategic needs of the organisation?
• Will there be an adequate return on investment?

How can you be sure that you have genuine and timely answers to these questions? All too often training and development requirements are generated as a reaction to perceived bad performance and locking the door after the horse has bolted is bad news. Training requirements are also often generated as a response to a trend or a fad; there have been more reincarnations of fundamental training ideas than there are grains of sand. Some training is sold like clothes, fashions are created each year to generate products that superficially look different, but serve the same basic needs.

Some things stay the same; organisations still need a vision, a mission and a strategy to generate the strategic objectives from which managers derive their goals.

A lot of organisations don’t have a goal setting culture and even in those organisations that do have one; goals are not systematically tracked so that feedback is regular, and not ad-hoc.

On average:

• People who have written goals are 25% more effective that those who don’t.
• People who track goals are 25% more effective that those who don’t.
• People who have written goals and track them are 65% more effective.

Collaborative goal setting, in which goals through the organisation are aligned to its strategic goals and tracked, does not just deliver great results, it systematically identifies any resource shortcomings and needs. It objectively determines training and development needs and provides the basis on which the return on investment can be calculated.                                                        -DKL

David Knowles-Leak runs a performance management company. He works with www.goaltrak.co.uk who provide an organisation wide strategic goals and management system for generating and managing results. He can be contacted on 01628 400 665 and at davidkl@linkmanagementgroup.com

Performance Management - Why Bother?

There is much talk in both the Human Resources (HR) and Technology (IT) press about Performance Management. These two seemingly disparate domains have found at least one commonality: the need to provide feedback to people at all levels in an organization.

Until recently, HR referred to this process as Performance Review or Performance Appraisal. Performance to IT was about computer and network functioning. HR made the switch to indicate more clearly that people needed to be managed and they wanted to know how they where doing at their job. What a concept! IT got on the bandwagon when automation of just about everything was becoming the vogue.

Now, there is a push from the HR side of the equation that is being met by web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that promise fast, easy, "professional" reviews. Some of these IT organizations even provide the wording for a manager to use in writing review documents. Yuck! I'll say it my way, thank you very much!

Think about this: the two primary reasons to conduct goal driven, objective performance appraisals are 1, to be sure that the people are doing what they need to do to support the organization's vision, strategy and goals; and 2, to provide objective and subjective feedback to people about their performance on the job and support their professional and personal growth. A mutually beneficial process.

The sad fact is that even today, in our "enlightened" society, most small to mid-size organizations don't conduct appraisals of any kind. On the rare occassions that they do, it is usually a one-sided lecture by the manager without consideration of the employee's viewpoint, frequenty ending unhappily for both parties. It doesn't have to be this way. It only takes a system of clearly defined goals and performance expectations, agreed to up front by both the manager and the employee. When appraisal time comes around(we suggest at least twice a year, quarterly is better) there are no surprises.

More on how to get this done in our next issue.

Human Kindness

In their book, “Leading with Kindness”, William F. Baker, Michael O'Malley assert,. . . ”that being kind is a crucial attribute of some of the world's most successful business leaders, leaders whose success is anchored in their integrity, credibility, vision, insight, inclusion, and fairness. And kindness is not some intangible quality that one either "has" or doesn't, it is a combination of quantifiable, learnable, and refinable traits and skills.”

We submit that providing objective feedback on your people's performance in a timely, accurate manner, is kindness. What could be more fair than establishing upfront agreements on expectations and then letting people know how they are doing? How much fairer or kind could one be than clearly articulating the organization's vision and strategy so that people know toward what they are contributing their efforts? How much more credibility and integrity can we have than sharing the profits of the organization with the people whose labor produced it?

Spending 20 years in the textile/apparel industry exposed us to the antithesis of kindness. For the most part, the leaders of apparel companies in the 1950's and 1960's were tyrannical in their approach to management and leadership. Certainly, not all behaved this way, however, we worked with enough of them to get an overall experience that demonstrated kindness was the exception.

Now, consider this: every season these manufacturers had to design new styles of apparel to offer to the retailers. That essentially meant going out of business and going back into business four times a year.  The textile makers had to have new fabrics, new colors, new textures available to support this never ending cycle. The pressure and anxiety this process produced was, (and is), enormous. Who had time for “kindness?”

The above may be an explanation, however, it is not a reason, to be unkind. The shouting, cursing, blustering boss was frustrated by all pervasive “lateness” in the delivery of resources; fabrics, people, truckers, payments, etc. The fear of failure was rampant. He only had a limited window of opportunity to get his apparel into the stores. If missed, the season was lost and so was his investment. The people received the brunt of this frustration and fear. Still only an excuse, not a reason.

Raised in this environment, the lessons stuck, sort of. When we left that industry 30 years ago and built a sizable organization development consultancy, we behaved in a similar manner. Old habits are hard to break. We eventually did break them and our clients and our people were the beneficiaries. . . as were we and our children. Today, the generations of “X, Y and perhaps Z” will not tolerate that type of behavior.

The success of an enterprise is dependent on those who show up every day, whether in person or via telecommuting. Treating people with respect and allowing them to always retain their human dignity is the only way to ensure long term organizational viability. Kindness is a fair price to pay.

-RSL

Changing of the Guard

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about a new CEO taking over the leadership of an organization? Job cuts? Restructuring? Move around the furniture?

Perhaps. Just in the past two months this event occurred with one of our client organizations. The first thing the new CEO did was to gather his leadership group for a day to clearly define the top level corporate goals for 2008. We were fortunate to be asked to facilitate the process. Rather than do the job twice, the CEO decided that as the goals were defined, they would be entered directly into GoalTrakEV, eliminating the error prone process of transferring them from paper or word processor to GoalTrak.

It was a sobering experience for all concerned. While the CEO was familiar with our goal setting process from many years of exposure, his predecessor had shortcut the system. He had to start from square one. We even had to formulate strategy on the fly; no mean feat! At the same time, the CEO and his people were learning how to use GoalTrakEV, as the previous CEO eschewed GoaltrakEV in favor of a home grown spread sheet system which, by the way, no one understood or used.

We still have two more groups of leaders with whom we must work, cascading the corporate level goals to the divisions and departments. They too, will be learning GoalTrakEV, along with the technology of goal setting, as many of them have not been exposed to the process. Our new CEO is paying the price for the short-sighted view of his predecessor.

The salient points here are, the new CEOs understanding of the value of real world goal setting; the advantages of using GoalTrakEV for creation and easy tracking of their system of goals; and the benefits of having each leader set up their Performance Appraisal criteria directly in the system. The CEO actually negotiated expectations with his people in this same session. Senior Leaders are off and running!

-RSL