Bad training programs not only waste learners’ time, butalso chew up organizational resources with little to show for it. Last month we looked at four project levelwaste factors: jumping to solutions without identifying problems, poorly andinefficiently designed programs, testing knowledge rather than performance, andfailure to support job performance directly. Now we will focus on three more strategic level factors that the largerorganization must deal with to truly root out learning waste.
Waste Factor #5: Ignoring the ecosystem
With formal training accounting for about five to 10 percentof an individual’s learning time in a year, learning becomes informal duringthe other 90 to 95 percent of the time. This means employees are much morelikely to be learning in the context of their job rather than as captiveaudiences of instructional presentations, including eLearning.
An approach that considers any and all learning andperformance problems to be solvable only by training is wasteful because nosingle approach—including training—is adequate alone to foster, let alonesustain, a learning and performance culture. It is an ecosystemof solutions—a combination of a variety of approaches, and the synchronizationof the tools and technologies they use—that matters more. The key, of course,is making the right choices about what interventions to use, and when and howto use them to full effectiveness.
Waste Factor #6: Failure to align learning with talent strategy
Ultimately, the success of any learning initiative will alsodepend on who is the target of that initiative. Training programs riskineffectiveness when they are not matched to the needs of the people who takethe training, i.e., when the wrong content is delivered to the wrong people. Perhapsemployees already have the skills, making some of their learning time boringand wasteful. Or maybe the training is too advanced for some of theparticipants, again making their time in a learning mode wasteful as they arebeing exposed to content for which they do not have the prerequisites. What employersneed are precision training solutionsthat accurately match specific learning and performance needs.
Any learning strategy must walk hand-in-hand with acorresponding talent strategy, including recruitment, development, staffing,and promotion. Is the firm hiring novice workers who need lots of trainingbefore they can be valuable contributors to the business? Is the companybringing in experienced hires who may not need to learn as much in order toperform? Are the best technical specialists being moved into supervisorypositions, without considering their people skills? Should everyone in a targetgroup be trained, or should specific individuals—your “seed corn”—be identifiedfor training, and then sent back to teach others?
When training or any learning or performance strategy is inconflict with a firm’s talent strategy, the results are ineffectiveness andwaste. Some people get more training than they need, others get less, and stillothers may get the wrong training that targets capabilities they already haveor don’t need. On the other hand, when this is done well, the success of trainingsolutions is more assured because they are precisely matched to performancerequirements (which brings this list full circle—back to waste factor #1:performance assessment, discussed last month).
Waste Factor #7: Disregarding an anti-learning culture
No training program can work if there is no organizational leadershipto support it. Leaders, from executives to front-line managers and from subjectmatter experts to program managers, must be role models for learning. They mustparticipate themselves, support others when they need to learn, serve asexamples of the expected behaviors that come from learning, and help to removeany barriers that might get in the way. Without leadership, a learning cultureis impossible. And without a learning culture, there will assuredly be lessvalue and lots of waste.
No learning strategy can be successful if it is implementedin a vacuum, without sponsorship, focused on the wrong people, devoid ofmotivation, or deployed into a hostile organizational culture. When greatlearning comes up against a lousy learning culture, the culture will win everytime. Developing training programs or other learning and performanceinterventions will be fruitless unless the environment is such that people wantto support them, are prepared for using them, are rewarded for using them, andfeel that using them benefits both themselves and the organization.
As important as a learning culture may be, a performanceculture is even more important. As should be clear by now, the true measure ofsuccess is how individuals and organizations perform relative to businessgoals. Evidence that the firm values learning and that people willingly sharewhat they know is great, but it isn’t enough. It must also reward successfullearning, not just on its own merits, but also because it contributes toimproved, valued performance. In other words, even great training that doesn’tcontribute value may be a candidate for elimination.
“The most dangerouskind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”—Shigeo Shingo (1909 – 1990) was a Japanese industrial engineer who wasconsidered the world’s leading expert on manufacturing practices andthe Toyota Production System.
Creating greater value in your organization’s learning andperformance programs will depend on your willingness to recognize and deal withwaste. The four project level and three strategic level waste factors,presented in this column and last month’s column, are keys to this effort. Theactions that address these waste factors should not be taken as absolute, hard-and-fastrules. There are heuristics and nuances that cannot be so easily codified, thatcome from experience and experimentation, and are certainly a big part of theequation. These actions are, more properly, a starting place. They are bestseen as guidelines and should be followed with the thoughtful consideration ofcontext—adapting to fit your organization and modified as you gain experience.
Therewill be detractors and resistance. What you see as waste, others may see as adesirable practice. Education, examples, case studies, and above all, soliddata will help a lot. In the end, picking the right moment and situation todeal with waste and set a new direction, and finding people who are willing togive it a try, is critical.
