Saturday, August 29, 2015

Enabling Change that Lasts, That Should be the Focus in Training

There is a saying .... "Put a Changed Man Into an Unchanged Context and he eventually goes back to the old ways of doing things".  
Very relevant for trainers and training fraternity.  General quest for trainers is to see change come about based on the inputs during a training intervention.  Thus they see their role as that of driving change.  However the lasting change does not come by because of the above.   Which means... The trainers should understand the context from which the trainee (who you expected to change) came from and eventually went back to.  

Understanding the context and seeing that in light of the training is very important.  Therefore the role of the trainer is also to collaborate with the owner of the context (here it is the line manager)  to understand stumbling blocks as well as enablers for the desired change.  
For e.g. you wanted to make people more proactive through a training program.  However the situation on the ground once the trainee went back (here it is say one of the operations floor for customer X) was one where any hint at addressing something which was not raised as an issue by the client or any other stakeholder is not welcome and looked at with suspicion is a sure shot recipe for the trainee going back to old ways.   Why rake up issues, why search for embers to burn your feet... these are the kind of manifestations of feedback.

So what do you do?  Trainers can pass the baton to designers and say the context should be taken care of during design.  Yes, but the product you create is what gets back to action in the context... (in example above it is the operations for Customer X) and it is in the trainers interest to work with the managers or leaders in the floor of operations for Customer X to see how people are encourage for being proactive.   The managers need to be sensitized that one has to encourage, reward, cajole people to be proactive just in case they have been so used to not being proactive and waiting for fires to be doused.

Operationally using Kurt Lewins - Force Field Analysis helps in identifying barriers to change and resisting forces and as a group the Trainers can work with leaders to eliminate the opposing forces.   Thereby it becomes a much easier task for trainers to achieve their goals of bringing about lasting change once the context issues have been addressed to facilitate changed behaviors. 

Training is not an event. It is a process. It does not end at the exit of the classroom session.  The designers, managers and trainers should work together to ensure that there is sufficient focus on right context for individual to perform in changed context.



Friday, August 28, 2015

Don't Miss the Woods for the Trees: Performance Management can drive right Behaviors

One objective of a good performance management framework is to drive the right kind of behaviors within various organizational entities.   How does this happen? By Setting Targets and Goals with qualifiers. Yes, the word qualifiers is to circumvent the proverbial  "fallen between the cracks"

It is important to emphasize both "how" and "why" aspects when setting goals and not just the focus on "what"
Take for example the highest achiever of sales in Pharma Co (name is irrelevant).  Here was Monty the highest grosser on sales.  For eight quarters he clocked over 40% growth each quarter and was the star salesman two years in a row.  About 9 months later when a new drug was launched by the competition the skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.    Mohan used his smooth talking skills and network with stockists to off take and store more than they needed and the inventory went piling up finally leading to zero off take in two quarters when things got tough.

We don’t need to mention the fake invoice generation by “unscrupulous” employees to show higher sales.  This happens in various industries and google your way to “Billing Scams”

So if you are looking for good behaviors aligned to your organizations value system then you need to ensure the “desired behaviors” are brought into focus.  

This can be done through combination of the Performance Management and the Competency System.   The PMS should focus on the goals the “how” and “why” along with the “what”.   The managers should ensure that they anticipate how things can “Go Wrong” and discuss these with their teams in the process of setting goals.   

The competency framework should ensure that the behaviors of the competencies (managerial and leadership) do cover behavioral aspects of “how” apart from defining the core job related behaviors of the given role.

Focusing on just numbers,  targets and deliverables you might end up like the proverbial  missing the woods for the trees.


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