Have you ever heard anyone say that the training and development function is critical to the success of their business? That it would increase profits? Improve efficiency? Was indispensable?
Even though most large corporations have a training and development function they are always somewhere on the periphery. For employees, managers and executives alike, training and development is looked on as a nice to have luxury and not as an essential tool of business strategy execution. The general belief is that it helps individuals get better, not the organization as a whole.
In the American and many other Western cultural contexts, individuals are supposed to develop themselves and take responsibility for their own career advancement. The firm has little responsibility to develop employees, relying on the competitive nature of employment and learned self-sufficiency to provide any needed skills. Individual employees as well as managers operate under the belief system that those who take the initiative to learn will and should get promoted. However, reality is often very different with personal prejudices and organizational politics dictating more promotions than merit.
But there is good news: the perceptions about learning are changing and many firms are taking responsibility for developing their employees. Moreover, they can point to specific profits, new products or improved processes that are attributable to the strategic development of people. This change has been driven by three converging factors.
1. The first is awareness that firms that decide to take an aggressive stance toward employee development can more effectively execute the business.
This awareness was led to a large degree by the success of Jack Welch at General Electric. He realized that the employee development function offered a vehicle for driving change and for introducing new ideas to his leadership team.
With that insight, he reshaped the leadership institute at GE and made it a powerful force for providing executives with the information, research, and practice to move GE into new business areas and to reshape the old ones. He used it as his bully pulpit and as a way to introduce radical new ideas to an old culture. He immersed GE’s leaders in multi-day sessions led by senior executives and leading academics. They dug into strategic issues and examined them from different perspectives, giving them a far better ability to reshape their businesses than they had ever had before. He gave academics credibility and a testing ground for new ideas about manufacturing, project management, and globalization.
2. The second factor is that every business is challenged with rapid change, quick product obsolescence, a global marketplace and talent shortages.
Keeping a skilled workforce that is aware of changing social and market trends is essential to profitability. Employees need to be aware, skilled and focused on customer and market needs to keep the business successful. IBM and HP are large and public examples of organizations that have been forced by the market to overhaul old systems, leave certain business segments for others, re-educate their entire workforce and actually morph into entirely new organizations. They could not have done this without help from a strategically aware learning and development function.
3. And the third factor is the shortage of talented people seeking employment and the difficulty of attracting those that do exist.
There are fewer people entering the workplace and an increasing number eligible to leave it. Younger folks are more inclined to work for themselves and are reluctant to seek employment in big organizations. The number of technical graduates is down and visa restrictions and public opinion limit the number of foreign workers. This has forced businesses to re-look at development as a less costly and more effective way to get the skills they need. It is no longer cheaper to hire people. It may actually be cheaper to develop them internally and retain every one they can.
The New Development Function
Three features distinguish the emerging development function from the more traditional training function.
1. First of all, the emerging learning function aims to have an impact on the strategic thinking and decision making of the organization.
The best learning functions aim at macro change at the senior level – at helping leaders and key employees make and sustain decisions that may mean radical change for the organization. This requires the learning function to incorporate elements of change management, team effectiveness, and leadership into its programs and activities so that overall organizational capabilities are improved and strengthened. This is huge shift from usual training and development functions that were tactically focused and had little effect at senior levels.
2. The second big difference is that focus is on supporting senior leaders by providing the information and skills they need before or at the exact time they are needed, and by implementing rigorous development of new leaders.
A modern learning function aims to improve a broad set of skills that will have a measurable impact on corporate goals, or business results or on customer satisfaction. An example might be developing a leadership curriculum devoted to providing the organization with skilled managers who have project management capabilities and who deeply understand the market. The emphasis is on just-in-time curriculum development. Rather than spend hours in planning and instructional design, these functions are able to execute serious learning in a very short time using tools, experts and processes that are assembled as needed. The focus is on broad competency development, coaching, leveraging experts, and in assisting in redesigning work to meet new needs.
3. And finally, the learning function makes an active effort to identify emerging trends, opportunities and threats and helps the organization understand and develop appropriate responses to them.
Instead of being reactionary, the best strategic learning functions anticipate competition and change and help senior management understand and craft ways to take advantage of opportunities or defect challenges.
It is unfortunate that many organizations fail to grasp what power they could unleash if they created and gave appropriate resources to a learning function instead of a traditional training and development function. The two functions are no more similar than bookkeeping is to financial management. Both essential, but not the same.
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All your points are well taken and long overdue to be heard. At least you are no longer a voice in the wilderness (as you were for so many years). Finally companies are understanding “serious learning” and what it means to the bottom line.
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