Don’t waste your money on training!

Like most L&D practitioners, I regard learning as A Good Thing, something to be encouraged at all times, and a good habit to get into.  Learning, in its broadest sense, helps people get better at everything they do, and it helps organisations succeed.

But that doesn’t mean all learning is always good for organisations.  This is basic economics.  Organisations have scarce resources, and need to make difficult decisions about what to spend their money on – what activities will add most value?

Ignoring this basic economic principle is the reason why expenditure on training is often wasted.  I’m reminded of the marketing manager who knows half of his advertising budget is wasted – he just doesn’t know which half.  Organisations often undertake training as little more than a matter of faith – they know it ought to be good for them, but they’re not sure exactly why, or to what extent.  This means the organisation can’t tell whether they’re best spending money on training, or better spending it on something else that might impact more on performance and results.

This is one of the reasons why Dr Alasdair Rutherford and I set up Airthrey, the learning evaluation solutions business, two years ago.  We wanted to help organisations work out whether training is working for them, and what parts of their training budget might be wasted.  Thus the message not to waste money on training, but to find ways to measure (or otherwise accurately judge) the contribution training makes, and so target scarce resources for training more effectively.

Airthrey’s flagship programme, Learning Evaluation Action Development (LEAD), is a means for organisations to work this out, using the best techniques available, with support from their peers, with the best resources on the subject, and with tuition from Alasdair and me.  It’s not another training course, but a form of supported consultancy, by the participating HR/L&D professionals themselves.  It works really well, and I commend it to you.

The Seven Pillars of the Corporate University

Thanks to Business Annual for re-publishing my 2009 article, The Seven Pillars of the Corporate University, in July 2013, as part of a feature on corporate universities.

You can read the article here: http://businessannual.net/

CIPD Centenary

The other day, I received my new membership card celebrating 100 years of CIPD, and then the latest issue of People Management popped through the letterbox with its inbuilt, if slightly repetitive, supplement telling the story of the 100 year history.  I usually enjoy historical perspectives, so why is it I feel marginalised by it?  And not for the first time.

 

People Management traces the history of CIPD back to the formation of the Welfare Workers Association, forerunner of the Institute of Personnel Management, but has nothing to say about the origins of the Institute of Training and Development (ITD) as the British Institute of Training Officers in 1964.  The picture of the institute’s magazines over the years follows the same line, through IPM publications, with no mention of any ITD journal.

 

This is part of a paradigm that regards learning and development (L&D) as a sub-set of human resources, ignoring the many thousands of L&D practitioners (and CIPD members) who do not work within an HR function – writers, consultants, coaches, independent trainers, vendors of L&D services, e-learning developers, learning technologists, staff of colleges and universities, community learning practitioners, and more.

 

When I blogged about this before, I attracted retorts from CIPD, but clearly the mindset hasn’t changed.

 

Some of my best friends are HR professionals; many of my clients work in HR; but I’m not one of them.  I am happy to be part of the CIPD community, as I have been for nearly three decades, but does that mean my professional identity has to be subsumed? Surely CIP isn’t trying to drop the D?

Networking

I attended the Hr Network Scotland annual conference for the first time last week, and it's fair to say I was blown away.

I don't know what I had expected, exactly. I knew it would be a decent conference, but I was unprepared for just how good. Ten years ago, Iain McMillan, the Director of CBI Scotland, told me that anyone who could bring together 100 people for a one-day event in Scotland was doing very well indeed. A decade on, times can't have improved, and yet Hr Network Scotland must have had about three times that number, and of a strong calibre too, featuring many heads of HR, OD and L&D, along with senior representatives from the supply side of the market. All of which made for great networking opportunities.

Hitherto, I had assumed the CIPD Scottish Partnership annual conference was the only game in town. How wrong I was.

The conference contributions were of an excellent quality too, from Jane Sparrow's keynote on culture and performance, through case studies of good practice in fostering employee engagement - and I say that in all due modesty having chaired the e-learning session, featuring the case study of Midlothian Council.

In passing on my congratulations to Lee Turner of Hr Network Scotland, I may have erred on the side of emphasising my former misconception - I hope he wasn't insulted! Perhaps I can make amends by recommending next year's conference to anyone interested in HR in Scotland. I certainly plan on being there.

A book a year

I’ve been doing a lot more writing in the six years since I launched this blog.  After an eight year gap from my first book to my second, I’ve had three books published in the last four years (see sidebar links), and I’m planning to step up that rate.  Not that this is the season for resolutions, but I’ve decided to aim to write and publish one new book every year.
 

Later this year - within six months - I’ll be publishing my next work-in-progress, and I’ll be blogging further information in the coming weeks.  Next year, Alasdair Rutherford and I plan to publish our first print book on learning evaluation and impact (last year’s Total Value Add: a new approach to learning evaluation was an e-book only) – we’re collecting content, and we have a title, although that’s under wraps at the moment.  After that, my next solo effort will be in 2015 (I have a couple of ideas for new books on learning and development), and so on from then.

One area I’d like to move into is writing/publishing for the academic market.  I’ve just completed an undergraduate course for the University of Sunderland on Contemporary Developments in Business and Management (book length – about 80,000 words – but not counted towards my book-a-year target), and I’m about to start a postgraduate course on Managing and Leading People (similar length).  I’ve also co-written a postgraduate course on Strategic Action and the Environment for the University of Bedfordshire, and edited some Scottish Qualifications Authority management courses for Opus Learning. I’m open to offers!

I'm Spartacus!

In the current issue of Management Today, Nigel Nicholson offers “A New View of Leadership”.

Some of what he describes is not new – he offers a triangular model of seeing (vision), being (identity), and doing (action), which may be considered an attempt to bring together visionary, authentic, and action-based approaches to leadership.  Nicholson calls his contrivance “The Leadership Formula”, but it seems to me to contradict the much more interesting opening to his article.

Describing the collective behaviour of animals and birds, in herds and in flight, Nicholson asks “who is leading?” and characterises this as a “very human question and presumption”.  We can all, no doubt, recall instances where managers (aspiring leaders) see the key to teamwork as effective leadership (their leadership). Instead, Nicholson argues, teams that lack leaders do not lack leadership, because “leadership is not a thing (nor is it necessarily embodied in a charismatic individual) but a process”.

I’ve written before that anyone who has served in the forces, or has played a team sport, knows that leadership is often exercised by individuals other than the designated leaders, and sometimes by a collective. There is an increasing understanding that leadership is not the exclusive preserve of senior managers, something exercised from the top down – rather it is something anyone can do, in the right place and the right time.  We are all (potential) leaders, we are all Spartacus.

Nicholson seems to me to have carried this argument a step forward, emphasising that leadership is more than an individual quality, it is a condition to be cultivated in a work team or organisation, a pre-condition for success.  I am grateful for his insight and analysis, even if I feel he does spoil it a little by decrying “recipe books”, then going on to offer his own individual-centric “formula”.

Reason overcome by emotions

If you’re not interested in football, you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about recently-appointed Sunderland coach Paolo di Canio, and revelationsof his fascist sympathies.  In a nutshell, many people involved with Sunderland Football Club would prefer they did not employ someone of such an extreme political persuasion. Less well known was the recent attempt by some supporters of Hamilton Academical Football Club to remove a stadium director who was once a member of the British National Party (BNP).  I suspect there are many other examples.

This is not confined to football, of course.  The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that a Bradford bus driver sacked (nine years ago) for membership of the BNP had his human rights breached (and by implication was unfairly dismissed).  Since the leaking of a BNP membership list in 2008, there have been calls for BNP members in many occupations to be sacked.

One correspondent to People Management argues that BNP members should not be admitted to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Fascism (like its bedfellow racism, with which it is often confused), is understandably repugnant to most people, but does that mean its adherents should be driven from employment and society? Of course, it may be very upsetting for employees to find a colleague holds such views, but the emotional public reaction to fascism does not help judgements as to whether this is acceptable on a case-by-case basis.

The very word “fascist” is akin to “paedophile” in its capacity to evoke outrage, and provoke ill-considered responses – the modern equivalent of a medieval burning at the stake.  Surely in an enlightened society, a modern civilization, we should have better ways to combat people with these attitudes, using reason, and a measure of understanding and compassion?

Human resources professionals have to advise on, and manage these instances, in pragmatic terms.  The solution to many problems among people in a workplace lies in learning and development, but how much time and resource can we legitimately spend guiding emotional fascists from their intolerant views towards a more co-operative working relationship with colleagues? This is the real business issue, obscured by political campaigning against fascists, confusion of fascism with racism (highlighted by the Di Canio case), and reason overcome by emotions.