Training? Boring. Not! Listen up...

I went over my past assignments over the past 30 years, classified them as successes and failures based on performance against expectations of shareholder, customer and employees (more on that later) and looked for key factors. One aspect I found to be remarkably consistent was how invested the business was in training. What was the understanding of training? Who set the curriculum? Who did the teaching? Was its effect measured? Were leaders graded on their administration of training? For launches, how far ahead was training conceived and administered? How well was the training tied to start of production? How much was training a fundamental part of doing business? And the failures and successes sort of naturally separated into two different outlooks on training. Where we failed we saw training as soft. Where we succeeded we saw training as hard. And here are the two different views on training:

Training is soft. It’s an HR driven activity, so we can be seen as investing in our people. It’s something we do after we take care of business delivering product on time in full at quality. It’s value is hard to measure. Impossible to get a clear ROI. So much harder to make investment decisions here compared to say, investment for capital equipment. We train them, they get credentials, and then they use it to negotiate a raise or market themselves out to another job at a higher pay. 

Training is hard. Direct influence on the top line. Direct influence on bottom line. But hard to administer, hard to quantify. It has to be driven and led by operational leadership. The top leaders can take responsibility to drive business results. Or they can create an environment where every employee takes the responsibility to drive results. Which approach has a more reliable outcome? The key to creating this environment is training. Hard training.

Perhaps the best example of training is hard was what I experienced at the launch of GM/Cadillac’s new plant at Lansing Grand River in 2000. It is only after the passage of a decade, and having the opportunity to compare other approaches do I begin to see the sheer beauty of the approach that was planned for that plant. A gang of around 10 “shift leaders” were picked from GM around the world to help set this place up. 

Rather quickly, the mantra was, if you wanted to earn your place as a true leader in this place, you needed to be able to “Make Rule, Teach Rule, Live Rule.” For example, Find and rigorously apply the standard for pedestrian markings across the plant, checking for clear and efficient paths of movement. Then incorporate this rule of it ( including the personal consequences for non compliance, with a clear way of reporting it) in a variety of contexts to train new employees, visitors, contractors - anyone who entered our plant. And finally, abide by the rule to a fault. Set the example. Thereby earning the moral authority to make it a real standard in the plant. 

The first year or so, as the facility got built, both leaders and team members were locked in intense training activities. There was the seminal “simulated work environment” that we cobbled together with used conveyors and carpenter hewed wooden cars that we set up to run on the conveyor as prospective team members assembled them while simulating a day in the life of work at LGR. Think of the wisdom. We invested in a day of training (often administered by us shift leaders) of prospective team members so they could self select to join us. One could argue that the investment was ridiculous. If the take rate was only 50% and it tied up the shift leaders for days. But we got employees who joined, “Eyes Wide Open.” 

The mother ship of lean at GM there was in the Opel plant in Eisenach. We went in planeloads of team leaders to practice, observe and learn. Free Bailey’s Irish Cream on the Lufthansa flights, then gave reason in later years to nominate it as the official celebratory potion for all successes! Imagine the investment of time and money in travel and payroll at both ends where Eisenach was still a full fledged assembly plant with their leaders doing our training part time! Hard core UAW team members who cared, but had scepticism on the intention and application of lean, cam back converted, sort of saying, “This is what we have been asking for all along.” 

Upon their return, we built a Pilot center where we setup mini conveyors to present jobs at designed heights, brought early vehicle prototypes and simulated jobs repeatedly to find the right sequence, right technique and balanced the line for even flow. Not by engineers, but by the same team leaders that had come back from Eisenach. They hand wrote the work instructions, training and teaching themselves on how best to do the job. They were the authors. 

And then, as the team members started flowing in, they were the teachers. Team members got to recite, observe, train and certify themselves for each job ( ROTC). Leaders were both firm and soft in driving the key elements of the jobs, but easy to modify the job instructions in the face of improvements suggested by the team members (team meeting, agreement, revision of work instructions, recertification). 

Later as we began to scale at a steep rate, and the jobs were already defined, team members had to attend a week long orientation to the plant they were about to enter. The teachers, you guessed it, was the plant leadership. Leaders taught. Again and again and again. The benefit of leaders as teachers is fresh in my mind to this day. First, you actually have to grasp and learn the material (you can't fake it for long, or will simply be overcome with disgust at your schlepping stuff you didn’t understand or believed in.) Next, since you would inherit these students on your floor and depend on their performance, you had to teach well, with passion, and strong feedback to ensure that they got it. And finally, you were painfully accountable for what you taught, as your students then observed you through the day on the floor whether you in fact, followed what you preached. That this is so compelling, yet practiced so rarely (never saw it again in my later assignments and was only marginally successful in putting it in place in a variety of industries,) still baffles me. 

The pinnacle of all this training was when I got to invent the class for training and certifying team leaders. Oh my! We trained them to be better than industrial engineers. There was nothing “engineering” is what we taught, and they grasped it without balking. We taught them: how to train, how to certify, how to change instructions, how to do engineering tryouts, how to problem solve, and mostly how to lead! To watch these students (zero formal engineering education)  blossom and take on and conquer really hairy problems of equipment failure or product design was a matter of joy. 

So look around your organisation and develop a sense for what training means around here?Does it look like this:

1. Do you balk at the requirement of 40 hours of training for your team members per year? Or find it hard to fulfil with good classes rather than the usual computer skills or soft skills classes?
2. The curriculum is developed in isolation by HR?
3. Do you steal from your training budget to make up for a gap somewhere else?
4. Do you freak out in October looking at how far you are from meeting your goal for the year on training and schedule a three day seminar with an expert coming to the office to get all your direct reports?
5. 50% of your end of line defects are routinely palmed off to Operator Training? And your leaders accept that explanation!
6. Classes get scheduled, trainer shows up but very few of scheduled people get released from the floor citing poor attendance for the day
7. HR has responsibility for training getting completed. They keep showing the lack of attendance, and everyone keeps accepting why  it did not happen.
8. Plant manager is scheduled to do the first hour of the orientation class, but mostly the training manager does his slides
9. Training in an off site location is offered as a reward for a job well done
10. Training topics are at the end of a meeting’s agenda, and often get missed as we run out of time covering other operational topics.

If so, you may have found a central reason for why your business struggles to meet shareholder, customer and employee expectations. Time to sit and have a heart to heart conversation with the folks that matter on how to fundamentally change your approach to training.