TRAINING DOES NOT WORK!

I'm convinced training does not work! Now before all my training friends get angry at me let me first say my title is a little misleading. If anything, this blog post is 100% in support of training. Let me explain. I am a firm believer that our industry is misunderstood,  unappreciated, and underutilized. The two components we don't talk enough about in terms of the grand scheme of things are the responsibilities of the  managers and employees. Managers must reinforce training with targeted coaching and reinforcement. Employees must be willing participants who actively engage in the learning process. If any of these three components training, management coaching, and employee participation are lacking only fractional success will be achieved if that.

So what do we need to do?

1. Training has to extend its branches to not only training employees, but also training & coaching upper management and middle-management on how to engage in the coaching process successfully. This includes measuring the success in value parameters that management can appreciate such as employee retention, reduction of recruiting dollars needed, specific skill / performance ratings, etc.

2. Managers can no longer say they are too busy or they wear too many hats. I always share with people when I do public speaking there is no buy-in because only one person is doing the end-of-the-year review and it's not the training department or the outside consultant. Managers are coaching every single day in terms of their messaging and that message tells an employee to either stay at the company or leave the company.

3. Employees must be active and willing to engage in the learning process as a true learner. For far too long employees have evaluated training departments on their abilities; whereas, I believe training departments should have the right to evaluate employees participation in the learning process. Let me expand further, we have parents evaluate youth sports coaches for their ability but what if we evaluated parents and their behaviors by the coaches wouldn't we change some behaviors that require significant changing?

Here are some additional thoughts & suggestions:

1. Train employees on the professionalism of receiving feedback (this helps training and managers coaching).

2. Assess employees on their approach-ability and coach-ability (this helps training and manager's coaching to better understand the best way to train and coach each employee).

3. Make employees accountable for teaching back what they learned after every training initiative (their attentiveness will dramatically go up).

4. Measure manager's coaching commitment by the number of "scheduled" sessions they conduct weekly, employee perceived value of the sessions, manager's perceived value of the sessions, etc.

5. Training departments design and co-facilitate best practice sessions with managers for their employees. For example, if a manager has employees who need training and coaching on handling angry customers the training staff and manager can design a session where there is lecture (trainer) accompanied by practice sessions using post practice coaching feedback (trainer & manager), and followed by scheduled practice sessions by the manager (designed by trainer and facilitated by the manager back at the department).

The goal is to build employee's understanding of their role in learning and NOT just receiving training (big difference in mentality in my estimation), manager's understanding the HUGE opportunity in coaching their employees, and the incredible value training can bring both employees & managers from so many perspectives!

I hope I have not offended by training friends?

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