|
|
SAVE MONEY, STOP TRAINING
Delivering superior business results through strategic development
In this article we try to give you some clear and innovative ideas about how to provide development that will deliver a payback many times greater than the initial investment. For us, strategic development is about:
o Building a cadre of key individuals capable of being the engine of future growth
o Equipping these individuals with the knowledge, skills and experience they require to enable the organisation to achieve its stated strategy and vision
o Developing a culture of learning and innovation.
In most situations, what strategic development is definitely not about is putting people on training courses. Let us be as provocative as we can: In the current economic climate, you must stop training your best people. Most of us by now must surely have realised that training is an expensive and ineffective tool for the development of key populations. What this article is fundamentally about then is how to stop training and start developing. Trust us, it makes real business and financial sense.
The story to date
The first two articles in this series on strategic development explained in detail the processes and mechanisms that must be put in place to ensure that your best people have the edge that they need to steer you successfully and profitably through these troubled times.
Strategic development presupposes that the organisation has the basic learning and development processes in place and builds from there. We are assuming, therefore, that most forward looking organisations will already have a training needs analysis process, usually linked in some way to a performance management process and resulting in a costed and prioritised training plan. We would also expect to find processes in place to support continued professional development (CPD) for all technical experts and professionals, along with rite of passage programmes for managers and specialists. If you do not have some of these foundation elements in place, talk to us: They are not optional items for mature successful business, at least those that wish to continue to be so.
The purpose of this and the previous articles is to provide a structured set of ideas on how your business, when it is confident of those foundations, can cost effectively take its learning and development investment to the next level. It does this by aligning development specifically and systematically with the strategic aspirations of the organisation. It is this that we call strategic development.
Just do it!
Strategic development is about analysis in the support of decisive and committed action. Most organisations that take strategic development seriously find the next critical step the hardest. That is, the tailoring of specific development actions to identified needs in order to deliver real and lasting business and individual benefit.
Keep it simple
However, long experience has taught us that, in implementing such a process, outputs are much more important that inputs. In other words, it is much better to have a basic process that drives robust action than it is to have an elaborate process that delivers little in the way of action.
Indeed, we would go one step further and say that a robust review process is the last part of the jigsaw that an organisation should put in place. Frequently organisations get wrapped up in an elaborate planning process whilst having little or nothing in place to deliver the required and promised follow up. As such, the process is quickly devalued, being seen as nothing more than an activity that fills folders that then sit unopened upon shelves.
It is much better then to start with strategic development activities for key populations and then maximise the strategic benefits of these activities through the implementation of a simple, formal review process.
Core principles
Our preferred approach to the delivery of strategic development is based on the following principles:
o Development must be customised to the needs, experience and potential of each individual by each individual
o People learn most effectively from practical, work-based activities that are directly related to their development needs
o Individuals learn best when working in collaboration with each other
“Me plc”
Our approach to strategic learning and development starts with what we call the “Me plc” metaphor. By this we mean, posing the same questions and taking the same steps when looking at individual and team development that a new managing director would when taking over responsibility for a given business. These steps should include:
o Assessing the current situation: resources and capabilities; competitive environment; SWOT.
o Identifying key issues
o Developing strategic and tactical plans
o Sharing plans with key stakeholders and making ROI commitments
o Implementing the plan
o Working with interested peers on a support and challenge basis: regular board meetings
o Tracking metrics and deliverables
o Using a support network
o At end of agreed trading period, reporting on value added and plans for the future
o Providing payback to the organisation.
A case study
Perhaps the best way of explaining how such an approach works would be use an organisation we have recently worked with as an example.
Paul invited us to work with him and his team shortly after he took over as MD. He explained to us that he first needed to be sure that he had a senior management team capable of working with him to craft a convincing strategy and vision that delivered long term secure growth, before then collaborating with them to energise and to engage all employees in the ongoing future success of the business.
Looking at the current team, he was posing himself the following questions: Who in the current team is able to rise to the challenge of building a shared vision of the future and taking the business there? Who, besides Paul, was going to provide the energy, engine and direction for growth? What would be the consequences of the management team continuing to behave as the currently did? What did they need to do differently, as a team and as individuals, with regard to behaviours, capabilities and beliefs?
The brief
He required a team capable of providing strategic leadership. This meant a team that can:
o Create a sense of urgency – generating a passion for growth based upon business need and hard evidence to create a compelling sense of urgency.
o Connect with people – building effective relationships.
o Enabling others to act – promoting collaboration by supporting shared goals and building trust, coaching and developing skills, providing challenging tasks and effective support.
The solution
We met the requirements of his brief initially by implementing a robust assessment and development process for the management team, before using this reformulated team to sponsor a broader organisational development initiative.
In doing so, our approach was to design and run the initial stages of the process and then hand over expertise and materials so that the organisation could increasingly run the process with its own internal resources. This had the combined advantages of substantially reducing costs, embedding the necessary expertise within the business and ensuring that benefits continued to accrue long after we have left.
The key elements of this programme were:
o Assessment and feedback against an agreed model of what good looks like – holding up a mirror.
o Systematic individual and team coaching / mentoring to ensure delivery of required individual and team development.
o Ongoing short inputs – challenge to make a difference in day to day work – evidence based
o Active involvement of Paul – acting as mentor, providing a business challenge and participating in opening and closing events.
The process:
o Encouraged dialogue with regard to the inspiring leadership and future vision the team and each individual member gave to the business.
o Provided substantial, robust feedback on leadership behaviours relative to an agreed model of what good looks like. This data was reviewed with Paul to help him make important decisions about the future structure of the team.
o Required team members and Paul to both give and receive honest, open and direct feedback.
o Presented models and frameworks for looking at strategic leadership, vision and values.
o Incorporated a 360 degree feedback tool, a leadership competency model and a range of other psychometric tools including: Belbin’s Team Types, Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles, the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and Schein’s Career Anchors.
o Introduced participants to the principles of tailored personal development and provided the required support and challenge to get them started on that journey.
Treating managers as adults: making learning self managing
What matters most is what works for a given individual and the organisation. In our view, this means taking the time to discover that and to tailor solutions accordingly.
In doing so we would normally recommend the flexible application of a self managed learning approach. This means providing a development structure where key people and populations can make decisions about:
o What they learn
o How they learn
o When they learn
o Where they learn
o Why they learn
They do this:
o In the context and framework of the organisations needs
o In the context of their own personal development so far, and bearing in mind where they want to get to
o With others who are working through the same process themselves and who offer mutual support and challenge in a Facilitated Learning Group
o Assessing their own achievement and that of others in the group
Putting your brain to work
In our view, being a self managed learner is about being fully engaged in what you are doing, but in a mindful way, not just taking things for granted. It involves:
o Questioning how and why you and others are approaching a task or problem
o Identifying new ways of doing things
o Identifying new needs that fall out of that process
o Looking creatively at new ways of fulfilling those needs
o Evaluating progress against pre set targets
A support process
Where possible, this means pulling together groups with common development needs and providing them with skilled facilitation to ensure the delivery of both personal and organisational benefits. A skilled facilitator would typically take participants through the following stages:
o Diagnosis / assessment / feedback
o Drafting a Personal Development Plan
o Contracting with key stakeholders
o Implementation of development activities in the context of group support and challenge
o Collective business challenges
o Delivery of payback to stakeholders
o Re-contracting
This approach is strongly based on Kolb’s learning cycle. It assumes that in order to learn people must first take action. Subsequently, they need to reflect on what they have done, come to clear conclusions about what works and what doesn’t within a specific context and then be prepared to do something different in order to apply and test this learning.
The focus then is on active, business related learning. This means taking advantage of learning opportunities that already exist within the business, but learning from them in a mindful way. We tend to use a range of tools in order to achieve this. The most common of these include:
o 360 degree appraisal
o Assessment / development centres
o Psychometrics
o Ongoing feedback
o Personal development contracts - personal Strategic Business Plan
o Action learning
o Facilitated Learning Groups
o Coaching
o Group coaching
o Mentoring
o Facilitation
o Strategic projects and challenges
o Appreciative Inquiry
o Open Space
The benefits
The benefits to any organisation of adopting such an approach are that:
o It is designed to encourage autonomous learners who take responsibility for their own development.
o Learning is grounded in the workplace and real business challenges.
o The approach encourages an active dialogue and mutual understanding between the MD, the management team and key populations. This dialogue should expand to the broader business.
o The focus is on delivering sustained organisational learning and change.
|
|
