A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a networking happy hour with professionals from a very successful healthcare company (billions in revenue per year). We were making small talk and discussing all manner of business topics when we got around to training. 3-4 of the professionals from this company told me, “It’s so crucial, but typically if there’s any type of revenue downturn, that’s the first thing we slice.”
I was surprised by this -- after all, typically the No. 1 trait differentiating Fortune’s 100 Best Places To Work is, in fact, a commitment to training and development. But I also sadly wasn’t surprised, because training tends to be housed within HR -- and many executives today came up in a business world where HR isn’t empowered to do anything beyond compliance-type issues. As a result, HR is still earning that ‘seat at the table,’ and elements housed within its walls tend to get a bit less attention from the most senior of decision-makers.
Josh Bersin of Deloitte has noted this too: when companies hit economic rough spots, they tend to shift down their training budgets. When the money is flowing, training tends to majorly ramp back up.
If you take all this together, though, you come to a less-than-stellar place: while training is clearly important, and companies are willing to spend money on it relative to the overall company performing well, there can be a disconnect on priorities around training.
The first disconnect: Managerial training gaps
Typically, there’s a 12-year gap between a first managerial position (usually age 30) and a first managerial training (usually age 42). There’s also these numbers, from the same research:
- 42% say that their companies’ growth plan are slowed by lack of access to the right leadership
- 47% are prepared to lead a global workforce
- 34% of executives believe they are prepared to lead a diverse workforce
- 37% create succession plans for key roles in leadership
If only 1 in 2 people are prepared to lead a global workforce, it seems we need more work in the training area -- or at least, we should be training new managers earlier than 12 years after they first receive a managerial role.
The old adage is truer today than ever -- people leave managers, not jobs. Maybe part of the reason for this is that people are becoming managers and not being effectively trained on managerial skills. There’s been some research in recent years indicating that 82 percent of managerial hires end up being the wrong one in the eyes of those who promoted them. That’s 8 in 10. Talk to a CEO and tell him/her they have an 82 percent failure rate in some aspect of their business. It probably won’t be a pleasant meeting.
The second disconnect: What’s the ROI?
Almost everything in business needs to be tied to some ROI, and especially in modern business. Executives and decision-makers are still cautious because of the 2008 crash and the potential for another one, so they don’t want to spend money willy-nilly (as we saw in some of the stats above). You need to make a compelling case for ROI on training modules and courses, etc. -- but many companies fail to do this, which can create unnecessary politics and drama within an organization as people gripe about HR/training getting money despite not being a profit center. Now, there are many effective ways to prove ROI for training -- many detailed here -- but I’d say everything comes down to speaking the language of the decision-makers. People who control purse strings in an organization typically use one set of vocabulary when making decisions; if you come into a meeting with an HR language set, that won’t resonate with them. Learn the terms they use and the metrics they track in terms of ROI and success, then apply those terms and metrics to your presentation on the need for increased training. Senior management has a lot of in-group/out-group associated with it, so if you want a proposal to get through, get as close to in-group as possible.
The third disconnect: Who owns and enforces training?
This topic is a major one for me. I’ve worked in dozens of different training contexts in my career, and all have pros and cons. The one thing, above all, that needs to happen is that HR needs clear guidelines on the training process -- all the way through a year or two after trainings occur. Stakeholders need the same clear guidelines. Oftentimes, though, this doesn’t happen.
I worked with a client who had a centralized training hub in place. Training managers evaluated each student, gave feedback and areas for improvement. At the same time, department managers were supposed to be giving continuous feedback to the training managers. (You can see where this is going.) Communication became an issue, and ultimately HR dumped all the failures onto the training managers -- essentially not holding the department managers accountable, largely because they had more revenue-facing roles. Eventually the training program shuttered.
The fourth disconnect: What’s the evaluation point?
In almost every case I’ve seen, there might be some proven business ROI on training -- but the training ostensibly occurs in a vacuum, because it never comes up on performance evaluations. Front-line managers often don’t even mention employees taking training when they do the reviews, which is absurd: shouldn’t some aspect of an evaluation be around an employee’s efforts to grow and develop themselves? If employees are trying to get better and learn more and ultimately benefit the company -- and then their manager just launches into an exhaustive series of checkpoints around other topics -- then how did the training truly benefit all involved?
Admittedly, I realize that priorities are often unclear in organizations -- and around way more than just training. Based on recent research from MIT’s Sloan School of Management on 11,000+ managers at 4,000+ companies globally, it found that 67 percent of senior leaders can’t name the priorities of their company. (Oftentimes, these people reported directly to the CEO and still couldn’t name the priorities.) In that way, training is just another aspect of sped-up modern business with a priority disconnect problem -- and these four examples above are some of the biggest flaws I’ve seen in my career to date. What else would you add?