Gaining from Training…

Disclaimer: This website occasionally uses affiliate links, meaning: at no additional cost to you, I earn a small commission if you click-through and make a purchase. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I only feature products that I believe in and use myself. Your support means the world to me and allows me to host this website. Thank you!

___________________________________________

Imagine for a moment that your employees are balloons. And also imagine that each balloon has a weight hanging from it by a piece of string. When a balloon fills with helium, it naturally rises upwards. Think of the helium in this context as being the positive aspects of the people in your business – their knowledge, skills, motivation, commitment and overall performance: the more helium the better, right? The weight on the other hand represents the negative, the things that hold us back, drag us down, and prevent us from rising higher; some of this might be skills or knowledge gaps, or it could be down to personality-driven issues.

This was an analogy used by a facilitator on a programme I once attended. It was a good mental image that has stayed with me, and I would expand it slightly to say that there are broadly three types of people in any business:

• Those full of helium, your top performers.

• Those with more helium than weight holding them down so they rise, however slightly (this is where most employees are).

• Those with more weight than helium.

While this is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek generalisation, in any business there will be people of varying motivation levels and abilities. It’s your job as a manager to try to get the most from each of your employees, which in turn requires you to develop them, in various ways, and appropriate to their level of contribution to the business. In that sense, developing people is a significant part of your role and especially so at times like these when you are trying to maximise the contribution that each individual team member makes. While there are any number of activities that can be classified under ‘development’, the emphasis here will be on three important areas: training, coaching and mentoring. What you do in relation to training, coaching and/or mentoring shouldn’t be viewed in isolation, although that is often precisely what happens in a lot of companies. Broader issues such as the overall culture within your organisation and prevailing attitudes towards staff are important when it comes to getting the most from any development activity, so it’s worth highlighting a few general points that impact on the potential for success of your efforts:

• ‘Culture’ is the collection of values, beliefs, norms and customs that make any company what it is – you could even say that culture is the personality of an organisation and differentiates it from similar entities. Culture impacts heavily on day-to-day business life, and, therefore on employee development. For example, if a wider people-oriented culture, in which employees feel valued and respected, is lacking in your business then any expenditure on training, coaching and/or mentoring is pointless or at least diluted. You don’t need a

  degree in psychology to understand just how irrelevant development becomes for employees who are badly managed on a daily basis, or who feel undervalued. If the wider culture in a business is essentially broken, then anything spent on developing people is potentially wasted.

• How decision-makers within the organisation view development is also important. When I sit and talk with senior managers about growing their businesses, they generally think in terms of return on investment: What’s the return on this particular investment going to be? is how they think as a rule. Yet I always find it slightly amusing that when many of the same managers look at the development of their people, something suddenly changes, and the focus frequently turns to the cost side alone: What’s this going to cost me? In my experience, if the investment mindset is applied to all development activities, it is surprising just how quickly outcomes improve when What’s this going to deliver for me? serves as the mantra.

• Equally, we have all heard operational managers and supervisors use the excuse that they “don’t have time” to develop their people. Again, with an investment focus, they will come to recognise that failing to train, coach and mentor their employees, amongst other things, makes them less efficient and ultimately less productive and, as a result, significant management time is lost fixing the problems that arise. By front-loading the time in terms of developing their staff , the return is improved quality and productivity, as well as time freed up for the more important management activities.

With these general points in mind, the following three sections offer guidance specifically in relation to getting the most from training, coaching and mentoring.

1. Gaining from Training

If you want to maximise the returns generated from any employee training you provide, you need to think about two important factors, content and contribution:

The Content of Training

While it may appear obvious to say that the content of training offered to employees must be tailored to their needs, while at the same time remaining focused on what is best for the business, this is still a common failing in how training is delivered in many organisations. For example, sending a group of employees on a generic service excellence course, or a number of managers on a standard development programme is of questionable value to either the business or the people involved. Yet, this kind of thing happens all the time, mainly because it’s easier to organise; employees are frequently lumped together and shunted off to training programmes which have little direct relevance to them, or to courses pitched at levels that are entirely inappropriate for their needs. Sure, generic training in areas such as customer care is applicable to all employees but there is really no such thing as a ‘standard’ training programme, and this is even more applicable when it comes to personal development at a management level. A golden rule should therefore apply: training programmes should always be tailored by employee segment, and any employee or manager attending a course must clearly understand its objectives and how that particular event fits into their wider development plan. When they see its purpose, they naturally strive to learn as much as possible from it and are more likely to later apply that learning for the benefit of the business.

Linked to the content issue is the quality of delivery, whether the training is provided in-house or by external consultants. Again, it’s fairly basic to say that the delivery of training must be stimulating and engaging if it’s going to have a positive impact, but how many times have you seen employees trudge out of a training course at the end of a session, or day, looking as if they had been forced to dig coal for a few hours? Badly delivered training is a waste of time, no matter how good the content.

The Contribution of Training

A second point to consider when seeking to maximise the returns from training is the ability to measure its outcomes; quantifying the impact of training delivered not only supports cost–benefit analysis, but also helps to better target future expenditures. Unfortunately, when it comes to measuring training outcomes in concrete terms, the approaches managers use are frequently quite ad hoc. For example, in many companies the only real evaluation of training comes from the assessment sheets filled out by attendees at the end of a course; this is useful information in terms of validating content and delivery, but it doesn’t give any insight at all into whether the training provided later translates into positive outcomes back at work. Th is perhaps goes some way to explaining why owners and managers are often so quick to cut the training budget when hard times hit; it’s difficult to justify expenditure for an activity where the returns are all too frequently described in vague terms. Making the case to senior management that training leads to increased morale, improved quality, reduced staff turnover, etc. is hardly a winning argument from a hard-nosed business perspective, valid as those claims may be.

In his seminal book, Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels, [1] Don Kirkpatrick has defined a four-level evaluation model which covers:

Level 1 - Reaction: To what degree participants react favourably to the training.

Level 2 - Learning: To what degree participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitudes, confidence and commitment based on their participation in a training event.

Level 3 - Behaviour: To what degree participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.

Level 4 - Results: To what degree targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training event and subsequent reinforcement. [2]

This is a very useful model for addressing how to better evaluate the training you offer, and there is no pretence that doing so is easy. It is not. The key is to try to link the outcomes from all training activities to specific business measures such as customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, sales, cost reductions and individual performance results.

2. The Power of Coaching

Of course, formal training is not the only route to developing your employees. Coaching and effective management also go hand-in-hand, in the sense that much of what you do is concerned with helping employees to raise their performance on a day-to-day basis. For this, you need to be a good coach, and in that regard there are two types of coaching to consider: corrective coaching and performance coaching.

• Corrective coaching relates directly to situations where an employee is struggling with a particular task, or skill, in their job; the willingness and motivation are there but they are having some problems getting it right. They don’t need formal training as such, but might require corrective coaching just to help them get that final piece of the puzzle into place. This is relatively easy to address because the focus is on task, and once you approach the coaching in the right way, there are rarely too many problems other than the employee who simply cannot master a particular skill to the level required.

• Performance coaching, on the other hand, is broader in scope and seeks to resolve short-term or periodic attitudinal and behavioural issues that are affecting an individual’s results. For that reason alone, the performance coaching of others is the greater challenge for any manager and will be the primary focus here.

  Performance coaching can take place in a variety of scenarios, ranging from a directive approach by you to one of facilitation:

Depending upon the issue at hand, and indeed the employee involved, there may be times when you are forced to be directive in terms of how you coach others; on occasion they refuse to respond to your efforts, so you end up mapping out the problem for them and also determining the solution. Clearly, this has limitations, as the employee is not taking ownership of the situation. At the other end of the scale, you use your talents to facilitate the employee to both define the problem and the solution. This is a far preferable approach as the person involved is essentially directing their own development; that said, it takes a lot of skill for you to be able to draw out the problem and then guide the employee to find the solution. In between these two approaches are situations where the employee might raise a problem with you and you offer guidance on the solution, or where you raise the issue but lead them towards defining the best way forward. Regardless of which performance coaching scenario is involved, you should keep the following points in mind:

• Simply telling a difficult or under-performing employee to change their attitude or behaviour is likely to have limited impact because in most instances they probably don’t even think there is an issue in the first place – more likely, they believe it is you who has the problem.

• For that reason, the first goal of performance coaching is to get the employee to accept that there is a difficulty to be addressed and also that you are not willing to allow it to continue. As in the above scenarios, they might do so readily on their own but, more often than not, you will have to coach them towards that acceptance.

• When operating in coach mode, your ability to remain calm and in control is of course vital. Some troublesome employees may know exactly which buttons to press and, if you react, then not only will the coaching fail, but you will have given them the pleasure of winding you up.

• The ability to use all your communication skills to good effect – question technique, listening skills, managing tone and body language – lies at the heart of being an effective coach.

• When faced with a significant attitudinal or behavioural problem, be realistic about your goals in terms of outcomes. It is unlikely you will see a radical turnaround from one coaching session, but if you see progress in the right direction, then that is an achievement in itself. It usually takes a number of attempts to get to your ultimate goal.

Performance coaching is a really valuable skill for managers because every employee has at times attitudinal or behavioural issues that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, some managers regularly by-pass the coaching route altogether and, when faced with performance-related problems, even relatively minor issues, rush too quickly into disciplining people, even though coaching might have resolved the matter. In most cases, it’s better to try coaching initially because once you head down the disciplinary route you change the dynamic of the relationship with that employee and it rarely fully recovers, in my experience. Clearly, if someone fails to respond to genuine coaching attempts, it may be necessary to then shift into disciplinary mode but that will always be the exception not the rule. Coaching, when done well, works.

Finally, on the issue of coaching, its use is primarily intended when dealing with periodic negativity or infrequent problem behaviour from a person in your team. When faced with an overtly negative employee who is serving as a continuous disruptive influence, it is unlikely to have any great impact so you need to consider how you deal with such individuals.

Training and coaching a fundamental to the success of any organisation, and more so today when companies are looking for greater productivity and employees want to continuously develop in their jobs. I like Henry Ford’s view on this subject when he said “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

If you found the content of this article interesting, I have expanded on the topic in my book, 'The Essential Manager'. Click on the image to the left to purchase the book on Amazon, or if you'd like a signed copy you can purchase one directly on this site via our products page.

References

[1] Kirkpatrick, Evaluating Training Programs: Th e Four Levels (Berrett-Koehler 2006).

[2] Source: www.kirkpatrickpartners.com.

___________________________________________