Matthew Richter posts daily comments in LinkedIn—well, almost daily.
You can follow him and join the conversation by going to http://linkedin.com/in/matthew-richter-0738b84.
For the benefit of our readers, we decide to compile and reprint some of his provocative pieces from the past. Let us know what you think.
Test Yourself
If you are designing a training program, test yourself:
What is the overarching goal of the program? What do you want participants to do differently as a result of the course? As a result of being trained, what business issues do the participants help resolve?
How will you test the participants have developed those skills? In the live classroom or virtual classroom? How will you test they are applying these new skills on the job? Evidence is key; not just self-reporting or anecdotes.
Are you sure? Do you know? How do you know? that implementing this course will indeed resolve your business issues? If you don’t know, why do it? If you do know, how will you prove it?
If you have good, affirmative answers for 1-3, are you letting logistics, politics, and money contribute to the design? If so, then perhaps the business issue getting resolved isn’t so important to your stakeholders. Or, they don’t believe the evidence you can provide them proves the course will do what it professes will do. Or, similarly, you haven’t demonstrated a clear value for your program. If so, go back to the first question.
What Are the Attributes of a Great Leader?
Did you think of someone who reflects those traits? I did. If asked to construct a formal set of leadership competencies, they would likely reflect what you just thought of during this highly unreliable and statistically invalid thought experiment. Me, I think of Obama and FDR. The problem is no matter how exhaustive that list may be, you are likely to miss key attributes that were essential variables to their successes. Also, their successes probably reflected different traits and skills at different points in different contexts. In other words, no one set of trait, skills, and competencies fit— even one leader, let alone all leaders. More, my prime examples are not even close to representing all great leaders in history. Highly successful leaders like Simone Veil, Steve Jobs, Gandhi, MLK, RBG, all exhibited unique, or minimally very different, skills and traits that facilitated their successes. Finally, it is easy to retroactively assign competencies to a leader’s successes. It is dangerous to assume those that worked yesterday will work in today’s or tomorrow’s context. Explaining what made a leader great is easy. Predicting what will make a leader effective is impossible.
Can You Justify Your Existence to Your CFO?
How do your trainings contribute to solving business issues? How does an increase in a specific skill yield results in the organization? If I am your CFO, can you show me the outcomes of your work against my investment? Legal, Finance, IT, and all the other support functions can easily prove their worth. How does L&D demonstrate its value? Retention? Maybe. But retention only indicates people like feeling as if they are getting developed. Not that they actually learned anything. But I’ll accept it as one metric. How many companies spend money on efficacy studies? How many do more than measure smiles? L&D is politically correct. But, in its current state, as an industry, do we actually add value to the business? In my heart I believe we can. The challenge to all of us is to prove it. Stop teaching models and competencies that have no correlation to performance. Let alone any research validity. Focus on teaching employees how to solve performance problems. That might mean your training cannot be one size fits all. It may require variance. Focus on end-goals and drive to that point.