Smart leaders do not pay for training

If you ask a roomful of managers to raise their hands on whether they have ever attended a training course, you can expect almost all hands to go up.  Ask that same group to keep their hand up if the training made a significant, long-term difference in their work and you will be challenged to find one or two hands remain up.

I have been involved in training and developing people for over 25 years and I have to be honest: most of the training I have delivered has been time wasted. In fact, statistics show that training, as a standalone event, is generally a bad investment.

After reading this article, if you are a smart leader, you will not send anyone for training any more.  You may not even have a training budget.  Sounds crazy?  Read on.

What is your Development Investment Quotient?

Simply put, Development Investment Quotient (DQ) is how wisely a leader or company invests time, money and resources in effectively developing people to deliver on the company's vision, mission and strategy.

Training itself should only be a very small part of your people-development plan. For many companies, unfortunately, it is the only thing. What is worse, once they attend a course, success is measured by whether someone "liked" the course or had fun. This is typically how companies, both receivers and deliverers of training, tend to measure success.

Because of this, someone reading this article is wasting time, money and resources this week. Let us fix that and raise your DQ starting today.

We will list eight key success factors to increasing your DQ and driving business results through your people.

To simplify the message, we will use this format:

Typical approach: Things companies typically do to waste time, money and resources while trying to make their people more effective.

Our thinking: Ideas and thoughts on how to transform the typical training mistakes into remarkable and productive development and learning initiatives.

Steal this idea: Examples and case studies that are actual ideas in action. Hint: Steal these ideas!

Development directly linked to direction

Typical approach: Training and development driven by symptoms (turnover, customer complaints and production errors) and planned by the HR department at the direction of the top management. Top leaders lack understanding of their workforce and their link to the business direction.

Our thinking: Start with a clearly defined vision, mission, values and strategy. Everything your company and people do should be driven by that. If you do not have it; if it is not clear, or if your people do not know it … fix this NOW. Without it your company and your people will drift and never achieve their full potential.

Steal this idea: Leadership must create a human-capital strategy right alongside the business strategy. It is integrated into the fabric of the strategic plan and cascaded through the organisation with the rest of the plan.

Case study: American Standard

"For the past four years, American Standard has been creating a much more strategic process for investing in the development and management of our people. The missing piece for us was a way to link our investments to bottom-line results. We created that link, helping us to develop a clear road map for improving business results. Equally important is our improved capacity to persuade managers to make the necessary investments by providing them compelling evidence on the bottom-line impact that results from improved development and management of their people," American Standard human resources senior vice president Lawrence Costello said.

Relentless support from the top

Typical approach: Training and development driven by HR with lip service to the effort demonstrated by leadership and supervisors. In reality, "we don't have the time" is a common phrase. People being sent to programmes are regularly pulled out at the last minute because of work obligations.

Our thinking: What is important to the big boss(es) is important to everyone else. Top leaders must constantly check the progress of their managers and key people in developing skills and competencies that drive the business forward. If a manager cannot plan well enough to allow for a two-to-three day development event, something is wrong with their business.

Steal this idea: A consumer products manufacturing operation business unit head's first two leadership team meeting agenda items: 1. Safety report, 2. People report. These are not "show up and throw up" reports but specific people safety and development actions that move the business toward its goals. If they do not have the data, they are asked to leave and get it. If they have not done anything, they must explain why. The unit head said, "I figured if these two happen, there will be less to talk about after that. It worked."

Everyone is involved before, during and after

Typical approach: The boss sends their employee to training because a) employee has a "problem", b) they were told to by HR c) got to use the budget d) insert YOUR favourite bad reason. AND, the boss does not go through the training because, "I already know it …"

Our thinking: The more people that are involved in the development of your people the greater the return on investment. It starts with the boss leading by example and that, by the way, spreads the learning and knowledge at a much faster rate. Add peers and subordinates to the learning mix and you have a whole team pulling for one person's development. If the whole company is doing that you have what organisational guru Peter Senge calls a "Learning Organisation".

Steal this idea: The boss and employee sit down BEFORE the development and identify specific, work-related areas of focus during and after the session. The person attending actually (GASP!) tells their direct reportees about the programme, what to expect after AND how they can help him/her make sure it sticks. PS: by involving "The Boss", he/she ends up learning too … it is a two-for-one deal.

Case study: Omni Hotels

"Formerly, our people went to training as an event, then came back with no support to that training," Omni Hotels sales vice president Judith Lages said.

"With our new programme, we made sure our most senior executives were not only exposed to the training but also attended training on developmental coaching skills," she said. Lages believes this coaching is the thread that has to be woven through every piece of the cultural fabric.

James R Engel is executive director at the APMGroup.

This is the first part of a series on getting the best returns from development initiatives.