Push and Pull for Employee Training

Somebody from the Training group of a Indian firm posted this interesting question on Linkedin:

Normally it is noticed that employees are pushed to attend the training sessions aimed at a specific skill enhancement.Also it is noticeable that there is (on an average)2% - 5% absenteeism in training programmes .So what is it ,that managemnent should do to bring about a LEARNING CULTURE and from PUSH switch to the PULL factor.

This was my answer:

The answer would be is the need agreed to by the employee themselves? Is it seen as 'punishment' for lacking in a skill?

If there are negative connotations associated then the employee will never be 'in' the sessions - forget learning

The organization needs to assess the kind of culture and process by which training needs are analysed. Normally such needs are identified by managers during the performance appraisal process and euphemistically called "Areas for Improvement" which everyone knows is organizational gobbledygook for "weaknesses"

Training needs have to be assessed using a different methodology and without the negative atmosphere associated with them. Take a look at Human Performance Technology

Where have I been?

In case you have been wondering whether this blog has been kept in cold storage, don't worry. Am around and very much kickin' it. Only this time, it's offline.
Am currently in the beautiful city of Pune in western India, delivering two back to back workshops for a client. One of the workshops was for veteran managers on Influencing and Networking Skills.
Today and tomorrow I am delivering a program for their management trainees on making the transition to a full time management role and facilitating understanding that the choice in their hands to make a vibrant and positive workplace.

Here are some interesting blogs I came across recently. HRM Today is a community blog authored by some of my fave bloggers. ResumeGrabber is a company I tweeted about sometime back, and now they have started blogging too. On a related note CodeMunch claims it's a social resume builder application. Cool. Note to self: Must check it out to see what that means.
The Human Capital Institute is starting blogs related to talent acquisition, leadership, the talent economy, talent development and strategy. Only the talent economy blogs seems to have any worthwhile content on it, so far.

HR certifications not any great help says reader

apeksha left a comment on "Talent shortage in HR in India?":

We have a whole lot of graduates being churned out each year..unfortunately most of them though talented, are not from a "recognized" college, or lack the right 'attitude'.

as for having a body like CIPD, i dont know. I just became a graduate member of CIPD, will get my degree from the university of Edinburgh..and i still cant find anyone who wants to hire me becuz i do not have "adequate" experience

Last Friday I attended a meet of SHRM India at the Satyam School of Leadership in Hyderabad. Nina Woodard head of SHRM in India, was talking about the PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications that SHRM's HRCI body offers. While PHR and SPHR are very US specific certifications, GPHR certification seems to be the only one for non-US professionals to take. However the eligibility for that seems limited to HR leaders who are already delivering global HR processes.

Of course, there exists the other route to develop HR professionals, which is by building their skills like CII, National NHRD Network and XLRI are trying to do together. However, in my view that is a much slower model and might not take newer competencies that are becoming essential to HR professionals into account.

Setting Up a Competency Center

An email a reader sent me:

Let me introduce myself. I head the competency management center at xyz, inc.

I request you to share your knowledge on, setting up a Competency Center. I would want to work on the following this year

1. Setting up the state of art infrastructure.
2. Come out with a robust model for training of all employees in soft skills.

Pl do guide me on coming out with a good working plan.


for point 1. Setting up the state of art infrastructure: I would ask you to take the following into account:

Growth of the business
Kind of Competency Development needed
Budgets

For point 2. [Come out with a robust model for training of all employees in soft skills.] I would suggest you to:

1. have a discussion with the heads of the business
2. come up with gaps between current competency and future needs of business
3. Analyse if it makes sense to build the competency or acquire it. For example if the organization is going for a strategic change in direction it might need to hire different kinds of people than trying to make the current people develop different skills/mindsets. Skills are easier to build. Mindsets are not
4. Decide on your delivery plan - classroom, e-learning, blended learning depending on how your people are distributed.
5. Link these development initiatives to actual work, by way of projects and give people's managers accountability for the success.

Hope that helps!

The role of trainer

On a training e-group there was a discussion whether it is correct or proper for trainers to use the group as a resource bank to ask for presentations on various soft-skill topics.

This got me to think about the role of a trainer and I posted this email to the group:

This dependence on "slides" still means that we trainers are on a "Teaching" mode.... the sage on the stage

To really achieve learning amongst adult learners I would suggest using the different aspects of adult learning like active experimentation, reflective observation, concrete experience and abstract conceptualisation (ref: Kolb's learning theory)

Only then can we move from a "teaching mode" to a "facilitator of learning", being the "guide by the side"

People in a training room have collectively more wisdom and learning than the trainer, and the true role of a trainer is to get them to express it and share it with each other and crystallise it. A trainer is a catalyst.

When you try to teach adults, they will never learn

Featured in the Hindustan Times today

On an article on how blogging has changed people's lives!

When Riddhi Shah of Hindustan Times called me and said that she was doing a feature on how blogging has changed some blogger's lives, I was flattered. Gaurav Mishra is the one who referred her to me. Thanks, Gaurav.

Others featured in the article are Kiruba, Akshay Mahajan and Suman Kumar.

Another thing, the article makes me a couple of years older than I actually am! I hope that helps to get some consulting clients ;-) !

Image on top is how it appears in the HT Mumbai edition and the one on the right is how it appears in the HT edition in New Delhi

Leadership and Multiplayer Online Games

Paul Hemp posts on the HBSP site (via steve rubel on Twitter):

An article I’m editing for an upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review provides a glimmer of hope for all of you med-pots out there – and offers some disturbing food for thought if you’re in the business of leadership development.

The piece – by Byron Reeves, Tom Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll – argues that multiplayer online games, such as Everquest and World of Warcraft, give us a sneak preview of what leadership will look like in tomorrow’s business world. A study of these games found that people who’d never be identified – or identify themselves – as candidates for a real-world leadership training program are able to effectively lead teams of dozens of players on strategically challenging missions. That’s because certain games’ characteristics – non-monetary performance incentives, data transparency, temporary leadership roles that give people the chance to practice their leadership skills – make it easier to be an effective leader. One implication for real-world organizations: There may be large and untapped reservoirs of leadership talent that you don’t know you have.

This echoes a theme in the interview in the interview I did with HBS professor Linda Hill that appeared in the January issue, entitled “Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Leaders.” One of Linda’s key points is that organizations risk overlooking potential leaders because they are “invisible” – that is, lack the high-profile personal characteristics such as compelling communications skills that we associate with leadership. Ironically, these invisible leadership candidates may in fact possess characteristics – for example, modest egos that don’t get in the way of collaborative work – that are ideally suited to tomorrow’s business environment.

One reason I think most organizations do a bad job of identifying leaders is that they confuse the outer expressions with the underlying behaviors of people.

Most organizations really don't do a good job of articulating behaviors that a leader needs to build and showcase. Top management and board's tend to focus too much on financial success in the past than behavioral aspects of a leader, not taking into account that past successes are also contextual to processes and teams that might not be the same in the current organization.

Related article: Developing People for Leadership

Coaching growing in the UK

From the Times

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than three-quarters of organisations now invest in coaching, including performance and personal coaching, for their employees.

At Lloyds TSB, the corporate-banking division in Scotland was one of the first of the bank’s departments to embrace performance coaching. “Many people wrongly assume coaching is about addressing underperformance,” said Manus Fullerton at Lloyds TSB Scotland. “In fact it is of greatest benefit when coaching your best performers. All the top sportsmen and women have coaches to help them improve.

“We are taking the same approach in our business, not just coaching individuals, but training our teams to coach one another. We have witnessed growth in business levels, staff engagement and a real appetite for further coaching.”

Despite the touchy-feely image, Cartwright, a former sports coach and psychologist, agrees that coaching is not for failures – quite the reverse. “Tiger Woods has five different coaches and nobody would say he is a failure,” he said. “But we have this macho British idea that chief executives ought to be able to just get on and do the job. In most businesses, once you reach partnership level your training and development stops.”

With a few more executive coaches there would, he said, “be fewer people quitting, getting the sack or jumping out of windows. It’s lonely at the top – who else can these people talk to?” Cartwright points out that senior executives can’t talk to their peers – because they will be after their job – they can’t talk to their board because that would be seen as a sign of weakness and they certainly can’t confide in their subordinates.

Coaching poor performers may or may not get you results. However coaching a high performer could send out a signal that you are interested in developing them and that he/she has never really 'arrived'.

Becoming Global managers

We have started the phase where Indian companies are globalising. To succeed, they need to be led by global leaders and managers, people who are comfortable with viewpoints and cultures not their own. What are the characteristics of a global manager? Abhijit Bhaduri, head of HR at Frito Lay, himself a global manager, having worked with Colgate Palmolive in Malaysia and the US, has some thoughts:

Being a global manager means being comfortable holding almost two opposing thoughts and not allowing either one to overwhelm. Being able to flex one's style to address different business and people needs means that such individuals are a rare breed. They learn to manage change. Not in others or in other corporations but starting first of all within themselves.

If one has to succeed in the future, this is a skill one has to learn and build at the outset. Right now one can be leading global teams, because the going is good. However, when business goes through a cycle down, the ones that will be left standing will be the people who fit the definition of a global manager.

Self Learning and Generative Learning

A friend sent me a mail asking me if I could point him to any material on self-learning.

When I hear about self-learning I mostly think about how Dr. U. Balaji used to talk about "collaborative and generative learning" or as he named it, Sahaveda.

So I searched for generative learning, and found this.

Generative learning is the active process of saying, "Oh. That's like ..." It's the process of constructing links between new and old knowledge, or a personal understanding how new ideas fit into an individual's web of known concepts. "The essence of the generative learning model is that the mind, or the brain, is not a passive consumer of information. Instead, it actively constructs its own interpretations of information and draws inferences from them" (Wittrock, p348). Learning involves mental activity - thinking. For example, with respect to reading a textbook or paper, without active construction of relations between parts of a text, or between the text and personal knowledge, the student will pass over the words and wonder what has been read. How many times have we each finished reading a paper, page or paragraph and wondered what it was that we had read?

Yes, I think it is what self-learning actually is.

So there is a difference between knowledge which I believe along with Denham to be a social process and learning, which is more personal?

Yesterday I was watching a DVD of a talk by Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1982, in which he talks about holistic observation. There are various points he makes about observing and the nature of consciousness. Now I am fascinated enough to find out what his thoughts were on learning and knowledge. As his core message was:

'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man's thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.

posts to start the week

Some blog posts worth reading on a Monday to reflect throughout the week:

Why Sensemaking is vital - Anecdote Blog

Savor obscurity while it lasts and Beware of turning Hobbies into Jobs by Hugh.

Why do young people have more imagination in Blogspotting

and an article from Knowledge@Wharton - How investing in Intangibles like Employee Satisfaction translates into financial returns:

a correlation between employee satisfaction and stock returns need not imply causation. Although he controls for many observable variables, it is impossible to rule out the story that an unobservable variable, such as superior management practices, may cause both higher returns and satisfied employees. However, even under this interpretation, "it still remains that the market does not incorporate intangibles (whether they are satisfaction levels or good management) even when made publicly available, and that an investor could have earned significant risk-adjusted returns by trading on the Fortune list."

Strategy and the Fat Smoker - Book Review

There are only two words I have to describe this book - "Amazingly Insightful"

David Maister blogger and author of such masterpieces like Managing the Professional Services Firm, The Trusted Advisor and First Among Equals, takes a look at why individuals and organizations cannot do what they know should be done.

I was kicked when David's people contacted me to review the book, and when the book arrived in the mail last week, I was engrossed and read it from cover to cover taking small breaks to ruminate and think about it over the weekend.

The metaphor of the "Fat Smoker" is the organization, that needs to change, knows what should be done to change and yet does not change. In a simple, conversational style David Maister brings his key insights to tell us why change in professional services firm is so hard and what needs to be done to make it happen.

That's because, David tells us, that the objective of strategic planning should not be analysis, but resolve. Too many times, in too many organizations - and this holds true not just in professional services firms but in others too - strategy is about saying "this is what we will do" and "these are things we will not do"

The "we will not do" things are tough to imagine and organizations keep losing their focus on it. As an independent consultant I was myself a victim to this thinking. I wondered if I could do blogging consulting, as well as training in traditional HR and Leadership areas and I guess that's where I failed.

Building distinction and differentiation needs to be translated into both the statements. And as David reminds us, it is the leaders of the firms that need to be setting directions by their actions. Any ambiguity is perceived as a negative mark.

He also reminds us that people are of two types, those whose goals are short term and those who prefer a long term view. Then there are people who like to work alone and there are others who prefer to collaborate. Implementing a strategy through a diverse group of such individuals and their different needs can be a huge challenge.

Apart from Strategy, David also covers Client Relationships and Managing and how to tie them up all together.

There are so many gems in this book, that I can't recommend it enough. The part that really resonates with me is chapter 10, why (most) training is useless. I found myself nodding throughout as I read it :-)

If you are a manager, HR and Change leader or corporate Executive who is leading change and wondering why change is so difficult, then read this book. It will tell you what to do - and it can be painful truth. As one of the chapters says: It's not how good you are, it's how much you want it!

Now you can even get the book as a printable ebook. More reviews about the book here and there's a podcast too.

UK training firm has my posts on their site

Phoenix, a training firm based in London, UK has some 48 posts from this blog listed on their site.

While the posts are all attributed to me, and links are given to this blog, still I was a little staggered to find them there.

I would value it more if they added a line or two of their own opinion on my ideas and rants, whether they agreed with me or disagreed with me. That would give me something to converse and engage with. That would be a first step to making meaning from an interaction.

When someone takes your content and does not add a word of agreement or dissent, they lose an opportunity.

Looking forward to the folks at Phoenix entering into a conversation.

Of the outliers

One Japanese saying goes "The nail that sticks out, will be hammered in". Was reminded of that saying when I saw the new Aamir Khan movie Taare Zameen Par (detailed review on my personal blog)

However in this post, I won't be talking about the movie except for the thought that Aamir's character articulates that the world has always been changed by people who have been different and thought against the grain, because they have seen the obvious through other perspectives.

So as this year draws to a close, here's my wish for all of us. May we never forget the ability that we all had as children- of viewing this world with different views, different eyes, every single day.

That is what will help us be more innovative.

Remember, innovation consists of two steps, divergence (idea generation) and convergence (analysis and coming to a conclusion). Education and everyday living teach and reiterate the second step all the time. It is up to us to keep renewing the ability to generate different ideas.

The movie is about a boy suffering from dyslexia and here's an interesting research that says more dyslexics become entrepreneurs in the US compared to the UK (Hat tip: Businesspundit)

many of the coping skills dyslexics learn in their formative years become best practices for the successful entrepreneur. A child who chronically fails standardized tests must become comfortable with failure. Being a slow reader forces you to extract only vital information, so that you're constantly getting right to the point. Dyslexics are also forced to trust and rely on others to get things done-an essential skill for anyone working to build a business.

Sometimes our so-called weaknesses really are our strengths.

It's all a matter of perspective, you see (or you don't ;-) !

Developmental Needs Analysis

Training Needs Assessment would be the start point for any intervention, and one TNA exercise might give you inputs for many training and non-training interventions.

You can do the needs assessment at various levels: 

1. Individual Level – You would get data about the developmental needs of an individual by feedback from the reporting manager and other stakeholders who interact with that person. The developmental needs might be classified as different, either skill-based, attitude based or knowledge based
2. Team Level – A team might have a specific need that is due to a business or organizational need
3. Role Level – For organizations that have a specific competency level defined for each level of the organizations, there would be role based needs depending on how managers in that level are currently.
4. Organizational Level – Organizations might come up with certain needs that need to be driven across levels and locations and these need to be built for each person

 

Some more thoughts on this topic on my blog Training & Organizational Development: Needs Assessments

Conducting needs assessment

I’ve been ruminating on the approach that organizations take to taking out pieces of the training process and looking at consulting support for the same. The typical approach to training support that organizations look for is during the delivery process.

Related posts:
Making Learning Strategic
The problem with Leadership Development
Needs Assessments
OD and Peformance Consulting
Transfer of Learning

Some organizations (including a former client of mine) also involve training consultants in the content design process. However, I haven’t really heard of any consultant doing the needs analysis piece before getting into learning design and intervention. By needs identification, I mean a comprehensive assessment of capability development, including which needs are actually related to skill building and learning and which needs might be addressed by either changing organizational structure or moving people around.

The problem is when external consultants/trainers are brought in without real assessment of needs being done. The root of the issue is that Organizational Effectiveness/Developmental work is often divorced from training design and delivery. Had written more on this topic here

What I would like to know is why organizations do not involve external help in actually conducting the needs assessment which is as important, if not more, than training design and delivery.

Any answers?

Who are you subjecting to training?

Prasad raises a very pertinent point in his post "Training the Victim":

The real problem in these contexts might not be related to the capability level of the individual employees at all. Often, the problem is mainly at the structure, process, policy or leadership level. However, it is relatively difficult/inconvenient for the organization/unit head to address the issues/make changes at these levels. So there is a temptation to jump to the conclusion that it is an employee capability issue and to attempt a training solution. Since the real issue remains unaddressed (despite the 'training solution'), there can't much improvement in the situation. I am not saying that there won't be issues at the individual capability level. Of course this possibility should also be explored and if there is evidence for the existence of such a need, an appropriate learning solution could be attempted. My point is just that a proper diagnosis needs to be carried out before a solution is attempted (instead of jumping into the most convenient solution) and that when it comes to taking the responsibility for the deterioration in the performance of the unit in such situations, sometimes, the individual employees are 'more sinned against than sinned'.

The sad part is that the inability to view a system holistically is a rare skill. Often such "training managers" who are called want to contribute but themselves lack capability to diagnose. In such a case the saying "To someone with a hammer, all the problems look like nails" holds true.

When I attended Peter Block's program on "Internal Consulting Skills" the ability to question and to equate with the business leader and manager is a key skill for all support staff. However few HR and Training managers can actually do so. In fact, one of the exercises the program had was for participants to start their statements with "I want..." when talking to a business leader. One of my friends, the Recruitment Manager for a unit said, "How can I possibly say 'I want'? My clients would detest me!"

Internal HR units I think start becoming very servile rather than stay service oriented. In fact my suggestion for HR people is to start being a lot more assertive, question every data given and come to your own conclusions. When I was a person delivering internal service I often wondered what Tom Peters meant when he said that HR folks have to change to Professional Services Firms internally. Now I know.

You'd think that when someone runs a monopoly on a service they would become haughty and when someone is operating in a competitive market they become servile. However my experience with internal HR groups ("the monopoly") and as an external consultant ("competitive market") has been quite the opposite !

Blogging and Learning

Have been quoted in Education Times' Executive Education section:

“Learning is essentially a social activity, by engaging with others and
understanding different realities and contexts. Blogging magnifies the scope to
engage with others who are spread throughout the world.”Blogging as a tool helps
you learn from various people from your field of work and express to them
better. It leaves more scope for learning as it leaves you more exposed to
different ideas and comments and opinions.
One’s understanding of a topic is raised by having such open and unrestricted access to peers, superiors and opponents. How? Blogging as a tool aids you to connect to others in asynchronous time and therefore has periods of incubation. Another key advantage of the tool would be the fact that anyone on the internet can challenge or support your point of view or idea and might provide you with valid points and research to support their views. This is almost like an auto-check for your literature where the world literally is continuously churning out corrections and add-ons for
your ideas.

Blogging as a means of communication can be used as towards branding,
market research, innovation, consumer insight, hiring, customer service,
marketing and public relations besides giving consumers a platform for voicing
opinions and building an online community. However, the current use of corporate
blogging in India is at a very nascent stage. Expected because corporates in
India are not used to a two-way communication with their stakeholders. Ghosh
adds,“Indian firms have to understand that blogging is also about giving the
organisation a human face.”

Associating with a Consulting firm t Hyderabad

For people who follow my career, here's an update...

After more than a year of an independent consulting venture, I've bowed to the fact that maybe I can't do it all alone.

Hence, I've decided to join forces with some people who are doing some great and innovative work in HR consulting and outsourcing . Remember the new take on HR outsourcing I talked about? Well, it offers that service.

My role would be two fold. I would be working with them to look after HR service delivery for some ongoing projects and also look at building and delivering new business in HR consulting areas.

Then there's the question of Blogging and Social Media Consulting that Imagence was offering. While the services do not tie into its service offerings, we would evaluate any request for blogging related services by a client and then evaluate if we could deliver it.

In hindsight, working independently is a great learning experience and I loved the flexibility that I got through it. The downside was that if a couple of inquiries for work came in I could not build a longer pipeline of work unless clients had responded to earlier proposals.

Insightory.com for knowledge sharing

A friend, Sanjay Lakhotia asked me to check out Insightory.com, which wants to be the knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking platform between management industry and academia.

The site is still in "alpha" (now is that a sign of web 3.0 ? ;-)

Currently there are a lot of management papers kind of stuff uploaded by current business school students in India. Avneet Jolly (an ex-Hewitt Associates consultant) who is the brain behind the site wants to roll it to B schools in the US and Europe soon. As they say:

Our goal is to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge i.e. put it out on the "open" web, so that those who have expertise can add to it, and those who need the expertise can tap into it. In doing so, we will create powerful networks, with rich opportunities for "providers" as well as "seekers" of management knowledge.

However the site it is not a wiki. If you have seen Scribd.com it seems more like a version of Scribd.com focussed on management subjects.

I'm not sure how much management practitioners will use the site, but seems like management students will discover a lot of creative ways to complete their assignments now.

Oh there's a contest on now too...Anyone in the management community is welcome to participate. See details, rules and award information here. Documents submitted up to Dec. 31, 2007 will be eligible for Daily Best Document awards of US$ 100 or 200 each or local currency equivalents. The Overall Best Document submitted during the Contest will receive US$ 3,000 or local currency equivalents.

Wow ! That'll ensure participation, I guess !