Is your organization wasting its money?
Our reader poll today asks: How strongly do your organization’s leaders support training for their teams?
– We mandate training, attend it ourselves and support it afterward: 39%
– We send people and sometimes expect them to use what they learn: 27%
– People have to fight to get trained and they get little support: 20%
– We don’t send people to any sort of training: 7%
– We send people but model the exact opposite behaviors we expect: 6%
Sending someone to training but not attending yourself or expecting your people to use the tools they’re trained on is a waste of time. It sends the wrong message. If you truly believe “people are our most important resource,” then when you invest in them you need to demonstrate that you’re serious about the investment. If you’re going to invest in your people, cultivate that investment with the support of your time, attention, and encouragement.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.
My strong advice to enterprises is to use a “Leaders teaching Leaders” approach as much as possible. Sponsorship is really clear, relevance is more assured and follow up is natural.
Thanks for the thought Huw. I think it sounds great and makes sense in theory. My experience over a decade in training and working with all sorts of companies is the LTL approach completely breaks down for two reasons:
1. The leaders aren’t experts in the topics they’re asked to teach so the training is not effective. When it’s not effective, people don’t go or they don’t use it and the organization has wasted its money.
2. Leaders have “day jobs” and many times the training is not an objective on their goals. When that happens, they *always* make the tradeoff of running the business/hitting the goals instead of delivering training.
My suggestion: use training experts for delivery and have the leaders show up at the beginning and end of sessions to emphasize the training’s importance at the beginning and discuss how people will apply it at the end of the course. That approach ends up being a great balance.
In the company I work for, most of our training has only partial relevance to our work. Requesting further resources seldom gets results, so my approach is to invest in myself.
I belong to the lucky group whose organisation actually fosters training and gets out of the way of its application (I don’t ask for much – not even support – just for management to get out of my way). But my client’s consultant’s organisation gives hardly anything at all for training, and it shows. It’s unfortunately pretty much across the board in environmental consulting in Asia (I would expect the 7% to be higher hereabouts). So we end up coaching the consultant staff ourselves, as a ‘coalition of the willing’ with some of their more senior staff who do it on their own time.