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What_To_Do_When_Successful_Training_Fails
| What To Do When Successful Training Fails
Why Successful Training Failed
Elizabeth M., Human Resources Director for a mid-sized furniture
manufacturer, earnestly shared with me her hopes for developing
a skilled cadre of supervisory personnel who would effectively
lead their work groups by positive example and, thereby,
maximize the contributions to company profitability. She wanted
the front-line Supervisors to be able, through training, to
develop, motivate, and inspire their subordinates to be more
effective and productive contributors to Company growth and
profitability.
She explained that her front-line leadership needed to learn
basic leadership skills, and wanted training to address these. I
asked her what had been the companys prior experiences with
formal training, and she explained that, in 2000, she had
contracted a trainer to deliver a series of supervisory
development workshops, and that these were successful; that is,
they were highly evaluated by workshop participants, and
everyone thoroughly enjoyed them. Training was considered a
success!
I inquired, “If these workshops were successful, why was she
interested in contracting for more of the same training?” Elena
replied that, because the company failed to reinforce training,
and that follow-up training was needed to reinforce the 2000
training intervention.
On Day 1 of class, I asked participants to briefly review and
summarize what they had learned from this prior training, and of
those skills learned, which were they using, on-the-job, As an
aid to developing participant responses, I briefly summarized
the content of previous training, together with an abbreviated
review of the skill points covered in all the previous lessons.
I then verbally polled their responses. Typical answers were, “
I learned a lot of useful things;” “ I learned how to treat
people better;” “Training helped me understand how to get along
with others better,” etc. Not one of the twenty-one people
present could name one skill learned much less presently used as
a result of training.
This is an example of training dollars that were apparently
poorly spent; after all, if you cannot point to specific
performance improvements as a result of training, why bother
doing it at all? In this case, at least, it wasnt enough that
people thoroughly enjoyed themselves and that training was
entertaining and upbeat.
What to Do?
1. It is axiomatic that successful training must be tied to
expectations for specific improvements in group or individual
behaviors: competent training can demonstrate measurable
results. 2. Specific improvements must be tied to identified
needs; therefore, do a needs assessment before you even entering
the classroom. If the company doesnt want to invest the time and
money in an assessment effort, walk away. Needs assessment is
critical to any classroom training effort. 3. The needs
assessment process should identify the specific improvements
that are needed improvements that are measurable and specific.
This may seem an elementary point, but it is often missed, or
undervalued. 4. Educate the internal person who is “driving” the
training effort as to why needs assessments are necessary, what
can be expected from them, how they can inform and guide a
successful training effort, why performance criteria are
necessary, etc. Get the internal person and other key
stakeholders in the organization - involved and committed to the
entire training process. 5. Hold trainees accountable for
learning. This can be done in a number of ways, including
pre-and post testing of training content, simple verbal quizzes
during class, using a paper-and-pencil evaluation exercise as
part of class, etc. Some resources for evaluation activities
include: Games Teams Play (McGraw-Hill), More Team Games for
Trainers (McGraw-Hill), “101 Ways to Make Training Active ”
(Jossey-Bass), and “101 Good Ideas: How to Improve Just About
Any Process (ASQ Quality Press). 6. Develop mechanisms, with
trainees that they can use to continually evaluate their own
learning and application of newly-acquired skills.
About the author:
Anthony Griffin is owner of Teamworks, a bilingual/bicultural
performance improvement and human resource development practice
reaching out to Hispanic workers. http://www.teamworks1.com
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