D Foster Associates

I was at a great ISPI meeting last Thursday.  The speaker was Tina Teodorescu of Competence Systems.  She led a great discussion on how to partner with the Business Unit rather than just acting like their “client” or sometimes even their “boss”.

She referenced a great article in FastCompany called, “Why We Hate HR”, which really in many cases could be relabeled “Why we hate Training and Development”.  You should give it a read, and try replacing HR with Training every time they mention it.  It hurts, but if you are honest with yourself, you can see the truth in it.  One of the best quotes is about training.

The training person said that 80% of employees have done at least 40 hours in classes. The chairman said, ‘Congratulations.’ I said, ‘You’re talking about the activities you’re doing. The question is, What are you delivering?’

I’ve had direct experience with this as I mentioned before in my post “When Training Goals are a Bad Thing”, and I can attest to the fact that it is hard for a training department to give up on it’s activity based goals (especially when they are compensated on them) and focus on results based goals.

The only way to do it properly is to get out from behind the desk and work directly with the business unit.  When you know exactly what their issue is, what their goals are, and how they are being compensated, then you can design a solution that will solve their problems and improve performance.  If that work is done properly you should be able to develop a solid business case for the training and get the support of the business unit.  If you can’t do that, then you should really reconsider if the training is necessary, or if you are missing something in the analysis.