How Do You Approach People Development/Training In Your Organisation?

It’s critical to get the right approach to how you develop your people. We have developed our own taxonomy for helping understand how mature an organisation’s Learning and Development approach really is.

One of the most common situations we find is how an organisation will promote the rhetoric of the right hand side but in reality have a mind-set more focused to the left.

To achieve the high impact people development of the Organisation Focused column requires a critical process to be followed.

Line management have to take ownership for, and be capable of, articulating the development gap for their people.

The required solution has to be validated and integrated with the organisations’ strategic imperatives.

The delivery phase meets the highest quality standards

Line management stay engaged with the process taking responsibility for making sure the new learning is embedded in the workplace and the success metrics are robustly pursued.

There is a clear learning loop applied where legacy practice is tested against new, current practice and emerging best practice is captured and codified.

Predaptive, in conjunction with its sister organisation Structured Training can design the most effective, high impact learning environments, including facilitating the transition your Learning and Development culture across to the right hand side of our model.

The Top 10 Reasons Why Training Your People In Tough Economic Times Is A Bad Idea

We thought it was time to stop all this political correctness around valuing your people in a downturn and tell it like it really is, with the top ten reasons not to train people - the real deal.

1. It gives people new skills and new ideas which they have to try out back in the workplace. This is dangerous because they are finding the job difficult enough as it is.

2. It can send out the wrong signal – like you value them. What you really want is for people to feel like you might fire them at any minute, it keeps them sharp.

3. It’s a great way to save some money. A few hundred pounds not spent on a training course for someone responsible for thousands, perhaps millions of pounds of customer/product/process/organisational value is better than increasing their ability to unlock new opportunities or reduce our business risk.

4. It confuses them. We need the gloom and doom message to be consistent, so giving them a positive, enjoyable experience shows us as being inconsistent.

5. It implies we have a plan of which training is only a part. This will raise expectations that we know what we are doing, when in reality we don’t.

6. It introduces them to people from other organisations (if an open training course) which might give them thoughts about comparing pay, conditions or work practices. People are better off kept ignorant.

7. It forces a dialogue with their line-manager, around business objectives, coaching points and development goals. Managers haven’t got time for this; they’ve got too much other pressure to cope with.

8. It takes people way from the job, and they’re off enough already through low morale.

9. It improves people’s CVs, and they might leave if they think they’re too smart.

10. It’s a waste of time and money. We never implement new stuff when they come back because we’ve been too busy covering for them whilst they’ve been away. Anyway, after the brief positivity we see for the first few days, they seem to become even more miserable than before they went on the course.

Training people at this time, you’ve got to be having a laugh!