Many businesses set aside budgets for training. But what happens after the certificates are issued? In the second of a two-part series, Anderson Studios Head of Marketing Alex van Eeden chats with organisational transformation expert Charles Moyo about how people-focused learning solutions can produce measurable results.
Alex: Last time you spoke about how true organisational transformation must focus on the people, and be not imposed from above. You have unique insights about how that applies to training and development.
Charles: Turning a business around from stagnation to growth can only happen when people’s mindsets are changed..
You need to shift them from old ways of thinking to a growth mindset. This can only happen if you respect your employees’ knowledge and experience.
Training fails if it ignores what people need to grow personally and professionally.
You have had direct experience of this. Tell me about it.
A major South African company hired a London-based transformation consultancy to run what they called a “capacity building intervention”, training staff to reformulate business sales processes.
During the training we could see there was minimal staff engagement in the sessions. I asked one of the consultants what he thought was going on.
He said he was surprised. The company’s senior executive management had given the consultancy carte blanche for their intervention.
I pointed out that their mistake was only consulting senior leadership. They had not verified with the staff what the business actually needed.
“You’re making the training about the company,” I said. “You need to take it away from the company and make it about the people.” Anyone who had been in that industry for two to three years would have done courses exactly like their intervention. That’s why people were rolling their eyes in the sessions.
In training, once you make the organisation the focus, you lose the people.
The rooted problem of tick-box training
It seems the problem was training for the sake of training, and nothing more.
Yes, in most organisations training is a tick-box exercise. It needs to be much more than that.
Training for organisational transformation must show tangible results.
Over the past few years I’ve spoken to many executives in learning, development, training and so on.
I ask them a simple question: “You are the Learning and Development Department, and you have a range of capacity-building interventions. Can you draw a solid straight line between your intervention and the organisation’s performance?
“How has your intervention changed the performance trajectory of the organisation?”
They can’t give me an answer.
Most admit that they do not measure the link between their intervention and organisational performance.
Organisations have a budget for training, so it is done, but often without any examination of the results. That’s a common attitude. Then there’s the South African context, where there’s a skills development levy, where there may be kickbacks, where training scores BEE points, and so on.
There’s enough incentive for us to do training, so we’ll do it. But how does it then loop back into the business? It’s often fruitless because, with rigid top-down leadership and no focus on the people, staff receive training on how to transform a business but can’t actually do anything.
Fixing the education mindset
With that style of hierarchical leadership, staff have no influence over decisions.
They have no influence. And this applies to education in general.
People will chase education because they believe it opens doors – and it does. But you will find a lot of highly educated but ineffective people in organisations. This is disastrous for business. The average South African business is not doing as well as it should, because of that.
Education, too, is a tick-box exercise. People go to university because they must get that piece of paper. But there’s no behavioural change thereafter because there’s no mindset change.
A business unit manager who reported to me had two master’s degrees. But his strategy for the unit was primitive and transactional; it showed no understanding of how the business worked. He eventually resigned. When I asked him what he thought the business would lose with him leaving, he had nothing to say.
I advised him to stop living in the world of the certificates that you hang on the wall, and start living in the business, where he could leverage the headspace education afforded him and bring it into the business.
One’s success in business should be what validates the education one has.
Putting wheels on training interventions
I’ve got nothing against education. I love education. But we need to fix the mindset around it. And that also applies to on-the-job training.
Training consultancies must go beyond developing and handing over a learning solution, and leaving the rest to the client. They need to be implementers of change, ensuring the efficacy and impact of their interventions lead to real transformation and, ultimately, return on investment.
It must go beyond completion rates. Trainers need to put wheels on their intervention and make sure it has a life within the business, in a way that can actually be measured. They must be able to say, before the intervention you were there, and now you are at a higher performance level.
Looking for transformative learning solutions that go beyond completion rates? The Anderson Studios approach shifts mindsets, drives performance and inspires continuous improvement in the people that power your business. Get in touch today!
