D Foster Associates

After posting yesterday about Partnering with the Business Unit, I received an e-mail from Kevin Oakes, President of SumTotal, Chair elect of ASTD, my former boss, and all around good guy.  He sent me his recent article, The Enterprise from the 2005 T&D magazine.  As it turns out, I am one of the few in the industry that didn’t read the original Fast Company article.

Kevin does a great job reviewing both the article and even some of the many comments posted on the Fast Company website.  He also quotes an interesting Accenture study titled “The High Performance Learning Organization” that says

Only 2 percent of learning executives in our study are measured or evaluated according to how successfully they align the learning function to strategic goals of their company or agency.

Kevin then goes on to talk about the lack of business strategy in the L & D groups.

Understanding the business, and measuring the right things has been cited many times as critical to the success of the workplace learning professional.

Finally, when discussing the current trend to outsource HR and with it the training and development group he references a list from a 2004 SHRM human resources survey report that lists the top seven reasons for outsourcing this function

If the HR and training and development functions were seen as strategic to the organization in the first place, much of what’s on this list wouldn’t be considered.

And he is right.  If the training and development group can’t show solid business cases for their initiatives and prove to the business units and the executive team that they are a strategic part of the business, their future with the company is limited.

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.

As I promised, I wanted to continue to talk about Training goals. I was working on a current project talking to an associate about her experience with a large law firm. The firm actively promoted their professional development goals within the firm, and used those goals as tools on their website as both a marketing point as well as a recruiting tool. When my associate was onsite for a meeting, she walked by a large room, that had a number of computers as well as shelves of books and videos. She asked about the room, and was told, “It’s the training library.” She was impressed by the investment in the equipment, but when she asked for a bit more information about it she was told, “Oh, nobody goes in there.”

The reason? If an associate or attorney was seen in the room by a partner, it would be assumed that they were not busy enough, and would be given more work, or even be publicly berated for “wasting their time” and be told to get back to work.

While the firm, and the professional development group, made a big deal about how important training and development was, the culture of the partners completely undermined any goals that the firm could set.

When creating training goals it is important to also review the corporate culture and other influences that have the ability to undermine those goals.

As the year comes to an end, I always start thinking about where I am with my current goals, and what goals I will set for the upcoming year. This is always a good time for you and your company to look at their training and performance goals and make sure they are properly aligned. So, in that spirit, over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some customer examples of training and performance goals.

When I was working on an assessment project for a large aerospace company, I started off with what seemed like a simple question to the Director of Training, “What is your group’s primary mission?” To which I got a quick and definitive answer, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.” After digging some more, I was relieved to find out that there were secondary goals that defined the quality of training and satisfaction of the learners, which was good. When interviewing other people in the Training department, they were all able to immediately repeat their mission exactly, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.”

So, what’s wrong with that you say? Well, none of them could provide me with specific information on how deliverying 834,000 hours of training would improve the performance of the company. To make things even better, when I suggested that by using a combination of blended learning, competency development, and targeted performance goals and measurement, they could deliver the same effective amount training in less than 600,000 hours, they were very concerned. “But we won’t deliver 834,000 hours of training, we won’t get our bonuses!” was the loud response. The core problem was that the training department was measured and compensated soley on their ability to deliver hours of “butts-in-seats,” with no measurement or tracking of the impact that had on the company.

So, before you get all excited that your department has solid, well-defined training goals for the next year, make sure you can also explain how those goals will drive the performance of the company. If you can’t explain it, and have no process to measure that impact, your goal setting is not done.