No one is an island
By Andrew Mayo (April 2004 Issue)
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Now I want readers to be very honest. What percentage of the training for which you have been responsible – be it either inside an organisation or as a consultant – can you demonstrate had a measurable change in behaviour back in the workplace? Do I hear: ‘Please don’t ask me that; believe me, I’ve tried but it is so difficult …’ And this is only Level 3 in Kirkpatrick terms. Relax, I am not going to beat the evaluation drum again. But I do want to examine one of the key causes of so much wasted spending, and why good learning does not have the effect that it could have.
One of the well-known formulae for effective learning is that it is the product of motivation, the availability of learning resources and the opportunity to put the learning into practice. The first and third of these are often missing. Regarding motivation, I have even known people turn up for a training course and say: ‘My manager needed to use up his/her training budget, so I was told to come.’ The desire to learn may be in negative territory in such a case, although the good learning facilitator may be able to turn that round. What is so often missing is the environment that encourages and supports the learning in action. The best action plans, made in good faith at the end of a programme, drift into the mists of good intentions – sometimes very quickly – as they meet resistance.
We can see the reasons for this, as in many areas of life, as a balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. The ‘push’ is the internal motivation to make something different happen. The ‘pull’ is the encouragement of the organisation, and those who are close to the learner, to see change of behaviour or the application of new thinking. Naturally these feed on each other. A weak ‘push’ can be strengthened by the encouragement of those around us. So in the ideal world beloved of HR theorists, the learner’s manager eagerly awaits his/her return from an event to see what he/she has learnt and to work together on putting it into practice. The manager allows new behaviours and ideas to flourish, provides feedback and counselling, arranges sharing sessions with other colleagues and generally consolidates the learning cycle for the learner.
Do you recognise managers like that? I hope so! But how many? Maybe 15–20 per cent if you are lucky. What happens to the rest? A cursory conversation as to whether the learner enjoyed the course, quickly moving into the problems that have arisen while s/he was away? Active discouragement of new ideas? The lack of support – zero or ‘negative pull’ – can quickly suck dry the new enthusiasm of the learner.
Why does this happen? It happens because the investment in individual learning – perhaps fuelled by a well-designed performance and development review process – runs ahead of the willingness of the organisation to change and adapt. In other words, there is no synchronisation between any organisational development strategy and the development of individuals. Event participants can certainly master new knowledge and skills offline, but to be able to apply them may require changes in others – above and below them – and in the structure, systems and processes of the organisation.
This leads us to the need to identify and understand the stakeholders in any learning intervention, which may go much wider than just learners and their managers. One of those stakeholders is that nebulous being the organisation itself – its norms, ways of working, expectations, rituals and processes. These are powerful and difficult to resist, because one cannot have a dialogue with the organisation as one can with a person. As soon as we try to do something contrary to the norms our ‘push’ has to be very strong. If we are the CEO, authority reinforces it; if we are somewhat lower down, it becomes a challenge. The question is, does the organisation – despite paying for our learning – really want us to learn and change?
The fundamental problem is the frequent mismatch between what the organisation wants to be – its OD strategy, which may not be clearly written down – and what individuals learn. If the latter is derived from the former we will find the necessary synergy. The trouble is that many organisations have their vision and values and aspirations, and say all the good words about innovation and customer focus and so on, but actually have no coherent and measurable plan to really change. It requires a clear articulation of ‘what we will be like when we have changed’ – in terms of specific behaviours of people and experiences of those who deal with us – and regularly monitoring against it. This then provides a framework for individual change that can be coherently integrated.
Of course, a good learning programme builds in the on-the-job application with the co-operation of other stakeholders in the success of the learning – or so the theory goes – and it makes sense. But the truth is that this is not so often done; to do it for every individual requires a level of co-ordinating resource generally unavailable anyway. What we can do is take more care about the alignment of our ‘investment in people’ with its real chance of realising behavioural change, by top management defining clearly the blueprint of the organisation that we want to become.
Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, with specialisms in people and organisation development. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew@mliltd.com or www.mliltd.com
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