Learning & Development – Time to adjust the tune

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality and so companies attach a strong priority for identifying and developing leadership and management skills. In spite of the substantial amount of time, money and resources are invested in developing them there is a disappointment with the state of leadership and management at the middle and front-line manager level. Even where the colleague possesses the capability to lead, organisational factors affect their ability to respond. Some of the common issues are flatter organisational structures and pressure to deliver targets.  

 1.     Flatter organisational structure: Cutting down the manning is a knee-jerk reaction to reduce cost but this short term bottom line focus overshadows priorities of delivering quality. Flatter structure also means that sometimes individuals need to influence others without having formal (managerial) authority over those colleagues. At least one thing is good with the flatter organizational structure - the need for leadership throughout the organisation has been acknowledged. Mostly front-line and middle managers are asked to support continuous organisational change and apply simple leadership techniques to influence colleagues who do not report to them directly.

 2.     Pressure to deliver targets: Supervisors are aware that developing people is their responsibility. However, their ability to manage the task, or to do their job are under regular inspection from their top managers, and they are often micromanaged on the operational targets. This drives supervisors to adopt a hands-on approach, although many leadership programme which they would have attended, shared - that they should achieve results through empowering and developing their teams. But, these are the occasions when, because of pressures they just don’t have the opportunity to empower their team. They land up doing themselves because it needs doing now.

 As Learning & Development (L&D) professionals, we can’t adjust the wind, but we can adjust the sails. Tough times brings the spark that fosters innovation; therefore adjusting our sails and fine tuning our practices may help us to cruise through this period.

 1.     Business and commercial awareness: L&D needs to have much closer alignment with the business strategy, and we need to give more emphasis on monitoring and evaluating L&D activities. We all know, demonstrating the direct correlation between L&D and financial success is always a difficult choice. Conceptual models can seem somewhat flaky too. We need to go beyond the narrow focus on ROI and put a more strategic case for investing in the future capability. CIPD L&D Trends 2015 & 2016 , states “Lack of clarity regarding the business strategy is one of the most common barriers hindering business alignment. Some propose the lack of clarity is due to poor leadership, for others it is hindered by ‘changing priorities and focus’ or ‘organisational instability’.” Agreed these are the challenges; nevertheless, If we want to be taken seriously in this volatile conditions, we must think and talk strategy and economics at every level. 

 2.     Providing tailor-made programme for the role/position: We should develop content from scratch and align role/position needs. The focus should be what skills supervisors want to master rather than what they want to be. So, It’s not about completing those certifications and having high attendance % in your monthly L&D reports; it is about mastering the skills learned and are the attendees implementing those skills at the work place? In future, there can be a generation shift in organizations that will need to focus on the definition of development and advancement.

 3.     Developing Inhouse Mentoring & Coaching skills programme: CIPD L&D Trends 2015 & 2016, states “Most organisations offer coaching and/or mentoring. In similar findings to last year, just over three-quarters of organisations offer coaching or mentoring to employees, although this rose to 89% of the public sector and is also more common in larger organisations.” One of the main advantages is of using internal coaches/mentors is that they do not have the direct costs that hiring an external coach or a mentor may bring. In addition, because managers are constantly interacting with their team/colleague they will have many more opportunities to influence them than an external consultant would have.

 So, plenty to do, plenty to explore and plenty of achieve for Learning & Development experts - exciting days ahead!