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Is Training the Missing Link in Strategic Plans? by Dan Bobinski
Dan is a syndicated columnist and is the director of the Center for Workplace Excellence. He has a new website (see his bio below) which I hope you will visit. You will find this article to be both provocative and compelling.
Overview:
Despite almost universal agreement that good training is part of every success recipe, it often remains a missing ingredient. And, when organizations don’t align their training with their strategies, it’s darn hard to achieve enduring success.
Have you noticed how management gurus and business experts often contradict each other? In his book The Dip, marketing expert and best-selling author Seth Godin advises companies to focus all their efforts on being the best in the world at one thing, and quit doing everything else. But in their book A Stake in the Outcome, business experts Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham tell us that “no company can last unless it protects itself against the surprises of the market, and diversification is still the best form of protection anyone has come up with.”
Then we have Max McKeown, who is touted as Europe’s unorthodox answer to management guru Tom Peters (as if Peters wasn’t unorthodox enough). McKeown says bad behavior among leaders is good, pointing to Apple’s Steve Jobs, who has a reputation for temper tantrums—leading people to avoid him in the halls, yet driving those who subscribe to his vision to meet near impossible deadlines. Nevertheless, an opposing view is preferred by many, including consultants and authors Bette Price and George Ritcheske. In their book True Leaders, they say effective listening and relationship building are imperative to a leader’s success.
Disagreements abound on many levels, except for ongoing training and development. Everyone seems to agree it’s necessary. In fact, mention “the learning organization,” a term made popular by Peter Senge, and people say, “Oh, yes—of course.”
Perhaps the most compelling reason for a consistent, solid training program comes from Arie De Geus, author of The Living Company: Growth, Learning, and Longevity in Businesses. De Geus says "An organization's ability to learn faster than its competitors may be its only sustainable advantage."
Unfortunately, it’s practically a business maxim to say that training is the first to go when budgets cuts have to be made.
With strategically-aligned training necessary for a company’s enduring success, it would seem that executives would be all over it like white on rice. Instead, a disconnect appears to exist between the knowing and the doing.
We cannot say that executives lack motivation to implement training programs. By definition, the word motivation means “a reason to move,” and executives have very good reasons for implementing training programs. Name one? Sure. Strategically-aligned training will accelerate a company toward achieving its stated goals. That’s a darn good reason all by itself. With that nugget, decision-makers have very good motivation.
The problem appears to be elsewhere. Some form of resistance or obstacles are in the way of doing what needs to be done for success. Companies struggling to move forward need to discover and remove these obstacles. And really, it’s up to the leaders to make this happen.
Here are some thoughts that might move this process along:
Many training functions have been re-branded as “Learning and Development.” Personally, I like the change because it’s a better description of what’s supposed to be happening. Unfortunately, the schema of many decision-makers is that Learning and Development is simply a re-branded subset of Human Resources (HR), which is merely a re-branded version of the Personnel Department from the 1980’s.
Evidence to back this up comes from a survey of 555 executives in 68 countries funded by the Corporate Leadership Council, a membership of senior executives with a shared commitment to involve HR more thoroughly within organizations. Their research found that only 25 percent of CEO’s view HR’s performance favorably, and only 16 percent think HR has any strategic importance.
Those numbers are appalling! Worse yet, training as a topic was overlooked altogether as it failed to garner enough attention to be mentioned on any of the aggregate lists.
Further evidence that training remains low on executive priority lists is the fact that direct expenditure for training as a percentage of payroll has remained quite constant in recent years. The American Society for Training and Development’s (ASTD) State of the Industry Report for 2007 states that “the consolidated average expenditure as a percentage of payroll has only moved from 2.31 percent in 2003 to 2.33 percent in 2006.”
To put that in perspective, imagine a football field with the ball placed two yards and one foot away from the end zone. That little bit of turf represents the average training budget as a percentage of payroll in 2003. Yet after three years the ball has hardly moved – in fact it’s moved less than ¾ of an inch!
Clearly, the average company is not investing any more to create exceptional training programs. If I may be so bold, I will recite the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.
Where is the ball for companies providing exceptional training programs? Bump the ball up to one inch shy of the three yard line: 2.97 percent of payroll, according to ASTD. In other words, it doesn’t take but a mere 2/3 of one percentage point to go from average to being exceptional.
Following the advice of virtually every business guru is not an insurmountable task. Considering that exceptional training programs make it much easier for companies to achieve their strategic goals, it would seem that key decision-makers need to re-evaluate what they’re doing to reach those goals.
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Dan Bobinski is the director of the Center for Workplace Excellence, which has just launched a new website offering a 100% online Train the Trainer course. Amazingly enough, the website is www.OnlineTrainTheTrainer.com. (image that!) Go take a free lesson and see what it’s all about. Dan can be reached at (208) 375-7606 or dan@workplace-excellence.com.
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