Make 2017 the year you invest in up-skilling your team whilst ensuring a return on your investment.
Training and development is my business. It’s a business that I love. I get to watch organisations go through transformational change; I observe individuals growing into future leaders; I see those “light bulb” moments in the eyes of my delegates.
Making a difference
Ultimately, training is about ‘making a difference’ to the people undertaking it and the organisation paying for it. However, investing in people, like any investment, needs to deliver a return. While it may be hard to measure, it’s essential that your investment in training delivers tangible results.
When you manage a team, how well it performs often depends on how well you’ve trained and developed your people.
If you’re among those organisations who want to cut back on their staff development, you might want to listen to the words of the philosopher, Aristotle:
In other words, it may cost you some time and money to develop and learn, but the results are always worth it. Those words are 2000 years old, but they are still true today; which perhaps tells us something fundamental about the human condition.
So, let’s consider the question: can you afford not to upskill your team?
What is the cost of not training your staff? Well, they are unlikely to develop the skills required to help your business to grow, resulting in low productivity, lack of motivation or engagement and potential mistakes that can lead to customer complaints and damage to your business reputation.
In fact there a number of things I’d urge you to consider:
- Training doesn’t have to be expensive
It can be done in-house and for a group of 10 can cost as little as £250 a head. Action Learning Sets, e-learning, coaching and mentoring are all low cost, high impact ways of increasing staff knowledge and productivity.
- Training is not a cost, it is an investment
Delegates should arrive at a training session with a clear idea of why they are there or what their objectives are for the session. More importantly, the leadership team should know why they are running it and what outcomes they are looking for. It should be as measurable, and those outcomes represent the return on that investment.
- One of the main reasons for training failure lies in poor leadership
This is something I’ve seen time and again during my experience of delivering training to thousands of delegates. Now, don’t beat yourselves up if you’re in a senior management role. Your job is to hit business targets, to deliver on strategy objectives. Nobody ever told you how to successfully implement a training programme. So it stands to reason you may fail to appreciate the importance of your leadership role in its success.
- You must follow-up on training sessions with on-the job coaching and support from managers. Are your managers skilled to do this?
It is unlikely that a one day training course alone will create behaviour change and development unless your managers are 100% on side with the programme and fully understand the content their people are being trained in. Ensure your managers have the skills to coach and mentor their team in the new techniques they have learned.
I find that there is often a complete disconnect between managers and the staff undergoing the training. Managers must be fully engaged in effort, commitment and follow-up, as well as understanding how to implement training effectively.
Convinced?
Individuals need ongoing training and development to help them become more effective, and to take on bigger and more significant challenges. It gives them a feeling of personal development, which motivates them and helps them to do their job better. Training can increase productivity and employee engagement, reducing employee turnover and delivering measurable returns for your bottom line. It shows your staff members that you care about them.
More than this, your team needs help in learning new skills as the nature of their work – and of your organisation – changes. So, maybe it’s something to consider in 2017?
Just a thought.