Inside our minds we all have a door to personal growth and development. The door is locked and the key is on the inside so what can we do to turn that key and open up our lives and our business to greater achievements?
Most organizations invest in learning and development for their people. I'm sure yours does too. But what value do you get from that investment?
What lasting benefits do you see? What impact does training have on your people and your business? The chances are that you don't know. Or, you may be thinking “absolutely none!”
Ask anyone who has ever attended a training event what they can remember. Many of them will tell you that, within an hour of leaving the training room and heading for home, they have already forgotten at least 50% of what they learned. A month after a training event around 80% of learning has been lost.
Even if you're not very good at numbers, it's easy to see how the cost of training, compared to the percentage of real learning that takes place and the impact this has on the business, is money down the drain.
How much has your organization spent on training in the past 2 years? How many in-house courses have you run? How many people have you packed off to external, open courses with great expectations? How disappointed have you been with the outcomes? What have you got to show for all that time and money?
Here is an example of how training alone leaves that door to learning firmly locked! Paul has just returned from a Team Building course. For 3 days he has been saturated with information about what makes an effective team and how to transform his mediocre bunch of staff into a high performing task force.
He has joined in with the group exercises, taken part in role plays, wrestled with case studies, contributed to discussion, (spent far too much time at the bar!) and got to know some of the other managers on the course.
They had a bit of fun, had a few laughs and came away with mountains of material to refer to in the coming days and weeks, guaranteed to have them building magnificent teams.
It is now the morning after the course. Paul arrives at the office to find hundreds of attention seeking e-mails sitting forlornly in his in box. His diary is packed with meetings, conference calls, important deadlines and urgent matters that he couldn't deal with while he was out of the office attending the course and which are now imperative.
One by one, his staff come knocking on the door, needing to see him, wanting a word, wondering if he has a few minutes to help them with a problem. His line manager drops in for a quick chat, stays for half an hour offloading her troubles and business woes and departs with a brief “Oh, by the way, hope the course went well and don't forget that I need the quarterly report on my desk by 4-00pm tomorrow.” And so the week goes on. And the next week. And the week after that.
By the end of the month Paul has forgotten that he ever went on a Team Building training course! It has been a waste of the organization's money. but, even worse, he is still recovering from his 3 day absence from the office at one of the busiest times of the year.
Paul is very busy catching up, juggling priorities, fire fighting and keeping up the endless struggle with people and performance. The very thing that he went on the course to achieve - building a high performing, effective team, is now even further away than ever!
So what should have happened? What would have been a smart and simple way to ensure that Paul really learned from his expensive training course?
Let's put the clock back to about 3 weeks before Paul attended his course and see how things could have been done differently. Paul and his line manager, Sarah, have a conversation about teamwork. They talk about how the team that Paul has recently inherited is under performing and lacking in energy and motivation. He feels powerless to do anything about the situation and doesn't know where to start.
They explore his learning and development needs as a manager and team leader and identify the Team Building course as a learning opportunity. They discuss the key areas of Paul's management skills that the course will address and agree on 4 key learning points:
- Understanding what he can do to work with his team to improve their individual and collective performance
- Discovering the key ingredients of effective team work
- Communicating with his team on what needs to change and how they can make those changes
- Setting goals with the team and developing an action plan
Sarah makes an appointment to meet Paul 2 days after he returns from the course. At this meeting, they talk about what was covered on the course, what knowledge he has gained, what thoughts and ideas he has for how he can develop his team and whether the course has addressed the key learning points.
Sarah arranges for Paul to follow a coaching programme, working one to one with an executive coach who will help him to bring clarity and purpose to the way that he can apply what he has learned about Team Building.
With the support and encouragement of his coach, Paul begins to focus clearly on what he wants his team to be and do in the future, what goals they will work towards and where the team will be 6 months from now.
Over the next few weeks he spend an hour each week with his coach, sometimes meeting face to face, sometimes talking over the phone and with e-mail contact in between coaching sessions, exploring ways of re-building Paul's team.
Through the positive, non-judgmental commitment that Paul received from his coach he has made excellent progress. He has opened up a dialogue within the team, he is involving team members in re-shaping the team's purpose, helping them to contribute to the process of change and moving steadily towards creating a high performing, effective team.
Paul has found ways to use and apply the information that he gained on his training course, learning from his experiences, putting theory into practice and seeing his team grow and develop as individuals and as a cohesive working group. Coaching, in partnership with training, has resulted in Paul unlocking the door to his development and actively translating learning into building his team.
