Courageous Training: Bold Actions for Business Results (Bk Business) - Softcover

Mooney, Tim; Brinkerhoff, Robert O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576755649 ISBN 13: 9781576755648

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

All too often—maybe even most of the time—training doesn’t stick. But Tim Mooney and Robert Brinkerhoff have discovered that some iconoclastic trainers achieve breakthrough results by having the courage to break away from the usual approaches and identify what really works. In simple and engaging language they lay out the Four Pillars of Courageous Training, illustrating each with real-life examples that highlight specific concepts, methods, and tools, and include four case studies that demonstrate the mind-set needed to truly transform training and produce dramatic—and measurable—business results.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TIM MOONEY is a Vice President with Advantage Performance Group (APG), a wholly owned subsidiary of BTS Group AB. A seasoned performance consulting expert who specializes in assessment, organizational change, and sales effectiveness, Tim has delivered projects in Germany, France, Great Britain, North America, and South Africa. In his role as the Practice Leader for the Advantage Way, Tim is responsible for developing the practice capabilities, growing the business, and working closely with APG and BTS clients globally to ensure measurable results on all projects.
ROBERT O. BRINKERHOFF, Ed.D., an internationally recognized expert in evaluation and training effectiveness, has provided consultation to dozens of major companies and organizations in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singa- pore, South Africa, and the United States.
Brinkerhoff is an author of numerous books on evaluation and training and has been a keynote speaker and presenter at hundreds of conferences and institutes worldwide. Scores of leading corporations and agencies, from Dell Computer and Ford Motor Company to the World Bank and Central Intelligence Agency, have adopted his methods and tools for training effectiveness and evaluation.

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Introduction: The Hole We’re In and How We Can Stop Digging

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The first rule for being in a hole that you can’t climb out of: Stop digging!

DENIS HEALEY, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer

What if training really had to work? What if your organization was “betting the business” on a new strategic venture, the success of which depended largely on training? Could you guarantee that the training would absolutely, positively work to drive performance and to create business impact? The odds would be against you. The reality is that training fails to work far more often than it works. If you put a hundred 2employees through the typical corporate training program, chances are that less than 20% will end up using what they learned in ways that will lead to improved job performance. The vast majority of trainees will fail to improve their performance, even if they tried to utilize the training. They will encounter a combination of obstacles, including indifferent bosses, crushing time pressures, lack of incentives to change, peer pressure, or some other problem that will extinguish their motivation.

Why is this so?

We know what some of the causes of poor training outcomes are not. We know that training leaders, managers, and employees are not trying to make training fail. (Throughout this book the term “training leader” denotes the role that provides leadership to the learning and development function in an organization, such as training manager, chief learning officer, consultants, and other human resources development professionals whose job it is to provide direction to the workplace learning operation. The term “training” includes all workplace learning, whether in the classroom or on-line, such as employee development, leadership and executive education, technical skills training, soft skills training, job rotations, and so forth.) Training leaders do not get up each morning with a pledge to try to make things worse and to see what new disasters they can bring about. Most training leaders, moreover, are not content to see training yield sub-optimal results. In fact, they work hard at trying to make sure that the training is the best it can possibly be and that trainees get as much as possible from the workshops and other learning services.

Further, we know that training leaders are not ignorant. Increasingly, they have advanced degrees in human resources development or a related field. Most of them are well educated, attend professional conferences, and read multiple books and 3articles each year about improving learning and performance. But several insidious forces prevent training operations from producing more than only the most marginal of business results. These are very strong, deeply rooted forces that block improvement and derail efforts to make things better, seeming to paint training leaders into a corner where failure is inevitable. This chapter is about those forces and sets the stage for the Courageous Training approach: a proven model and set of principles for action that bold leaders have used to overcome the negative forces and thereby to achieve remarkable impact and value from training investments.

One of the first things these courageous leaders did was to recognize the negative forces for what they were. The leaders also decided that they were not satisfied with business as usual. Good enough, for them, was not good enough. They began to work with their clients in ways that would effect change, using innovative methods and tools that would help ensure increased impact and value. But we also know from our work with these highly effective training leaders that the tools and methods alone were not sufficient to achieve outstanding results. The leaders also had the courage—the leadership backbone—to stand up time and again to the forces that would try to paint them back into a corner from which their efforts would fail.

Courageous Training has two complementary and interdependent parts:


The Four Pillars, which comprise the concepts, methods, and tools that successful training leaders have employed, and
The Courageous Training Code, which incorporates the seven principles for conduct that guide the leaders in their personal behavior and interactions with other people.

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Chapter Two describes the Four Pillars; the subsequent four chapters explain each pillar in depth, including examples and illustrations of the methods and tools characteristic of each pillar. But as emphasized throughout this book, without a courageous and bold training leader, the tools and methods of the Four Pillars, as helpful as they are, are not enough. Chapter Seven examines the other half of the formula for success: the Courageous Training Code. This code articulates the rules of conduct that put into operation the intangible but vital qualities of will, tenacity, and vision that Courageous Training leaders must embody to implement the Four Pillars. Chapter Eight introduces four bold training leaders who have achieved remarkable results—the results that first inspired us to write this book. Each of these leaders wrote a case study, and the case studies comprise the subsequent four chapters. In the final chapter (Chapter Thirteen), we outline a path that other training leaders may take to begin their own courageous journey: where to start, what steps to take, and what to watch out for along the way.


WHY ISN’T TRAINING WORKING NOW?

The courageous training leaders with whom we have had the privilege to work knew things could be better, and they were determined to make them better. They saw that training efforts often were stuck in a hole, a hole that was getting deeper and, worse yet, a hole that they themselves were sometimes a party to digging!

It is useful for us to review some of the negative forces that we, our Courageous Training colleagues, other authors, and probably many training practitioners have seen that make the training hole ever deeper. These are the forces that we must recognize 5and understand if we are to put down our shovels and climb out of the hole into a space of Courageous Training.


The Mr. Goodwrench Syndrome

Mr. Goodwrench is the name used by an American automobile company to market its garage and repair services. It is a label that also reflects an attitude common among managers in many organizations—the notion that the training department is some sort of “employee repair” facility. According to this ingrained, habitual belief, if your employees are not performing well, then you can send them to get some training, where they will be “fixed.” When the training is over, they will return as fully functioning and effective performers.

Of course it does not work this way. Almost always, the causes of poor performance that drive a frustrated manager to request training for an employee are complex and rooted in myriad organizational, cultural, and systemic issues. Lack of training is seldom the exclusive or primary problem, and a training class alone will not make the poor performance go away. The training function, despite well-intended efforts to get at real causes, is often pressured to deliver some sort of training. Very often, training leaders cave in and, against their better instincts, go ahead and fill the order for training.

And so some training is delivered, and the net results are predictable: frustration all the way around. The employees who are having difficulties do not get the real causes of their problems addressed. They sit through training that they feel they do not need, and as a result leave even more frustrated in their jobs. The manager blames the training department for being nonresponsive and unrealistic, for wanting to take too much precious manager...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1576755649
• ISBN 13: 9781576755648
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland