You only need to have five things in place for your leadership or management development project to be successful. As we’ve seen in previous posts, the first of them is that the senior people are fully involved in the project – you can read more about that here and here.
The second is that the initiative is focused on creating results. In recent years, “results” has become a slippery word. Quite understandably, every training outfit promises that they create great results, ROI and business benefit from their product, and because of this it can be hard to understand what they really mean by “results”. As one of our clients once said, “everyone tells you they can do everything, so how do you choose?”
Here’s the best meaning of “creating results” in a training context:
• People get some input – from a seminar or similar
• They apply this at work on whatever needs doing (nothing theoretical or staged)
• In applying this material, they create business results (more on these later)
• People report those results back to their group at the next training event, and hear everybody else’s results and recommendations
• They get more input… apply this at work… create results… report these back to their group… etc
Why do it like this? The sequence above is the simplest reading of what management and leadership really are: the manager gets information, takes decisions, and gets results.
At senior level the information could be a shift in market conditions, leading to the decision to make a new strategy, leading to the execution of that strategy and the results that come from that – including profitability, market share, staff retention and everything else.
At a more junior level the information could be that half the evening shift have called in sick, leading to the decision to make a frantic series of phone calls in the short term, and to reorganise the way the evening rota is constructed in the long term. The results of these decisions – a fully staffed evening shift in the short term, and fewer occasions when lots of people call in sick in the long term.
So we might say that anybody who wants to get better at management really wants to get better at creating results – and you only get better at creating results by… creating some! Even if the stated goal of a training programme is “learning” rather than creating results, all managers have “learned” how to manage through their experiences up to this moment – and they manage by repeating whatever has created results for them in the past. They will only “learn” to do something different if they apply an idea in the workplace and it creates a better result than whatever they’d been doing before.
What sort of results do managers create in programmes that are run in this way? It depends entirely on their position and their business. Here are some examples.
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In the training world “results” doesn’t always mean that people applied something in the workplace and something advantageous happened. “Results” now has a great variety of meanings. Here are just a few of them:
• The “result” was that people attended the course
• The “result” was that people scored higher on a questionnaire they took after the course than they did on a similar questionnaire they completed before the course
• The “result” was that people arrived back at work with an action plan
• The “result” was that people had a good time – 85% of respondents rated the day as “very good”…
• … or that “17% of people felt more confident” after the course
• The “result” was that three years later 70% of the people who attended the programme were promoted
• The “result” was that everyone learned something – eg. what personality type they are
You can see that most of these “results” are halfway houses. They’ve taken the first step towards creating a result at work – whether that’s learning about personality types, or attending a course, or arriving back at work with an action plan. The next step – actually creating the result – is absent.
Why does this happen?
The first reason is outlined in this blog post about The Decapitated Organization. This is a company where, among other things, senior managers aren’t interested in the training given to those further down the hierarchy, and may even be hostile to it. In an environment like this it’s a great risk for HR or L&D to ask people to do anything back in the workplace – after all, the workplace is the senior managers’ domain, and they may not like what their people are being asked to do.
It is also a risk for HR or L&D to ask the delegates themselves to do anything back in the workplace – after all, if these people decide they don’t want to do it, they can complain to their senior managers and turn the full force of the management group on the unfortunate HR / L&D departments. And why should HR or L&D take this risk? If the senior team aren’t really behind the development of their people, why sink a chunk of your personal capital into an unwelcome aspect of the development project, even if it’s that aspect that will make the initiative successful? I wouldn’t.
For this reason, and others, in the training world there is a strong focus on input rather than output: on what is done on the training day rather than what is done in the workplace afterwards to create a result. We’re interested in learning not doing, rather than learning by doing. And if the focus is primarily on input, there is unlikely to be any output – which means no results, no ROI, and no business benefit.
An easy way to test where the focus lies in any training initiative is to ask this question: what will the participants do the day after the training session / seminar / online learning module / etc? Because, as you’ve no doubt guessed, the day after is the time when the results are created…
This post originally appeared at www.mitchellphoenix.com in 2013