Harvard Business Review Leadership Training – Summary. U.S. corporations spent a lot of money – about $ 356 billion worldwide in 2015 alone – on staff training and education, but they did not get a good return on their investment. Soon people go back to the old way of doing things and the company process did not improve. To address these issues, senior executives and their human resources departments should change the way they think about learning and development: Because context is important, necessary adjustments in institutional design and management processes must come first. The authors identify six common barriers to change: (1) ambiguous directions on strategies and values, which often lead to conflicting priorities. (2) Senior executives who do not work as a team and are not committed to new directions or recognize the necessary changes in their own behavior. (3) Top-down style or laissez-faire by the leader that prevents honest conversation about the issue. (4) Lack of coordination across businesses, functions or regions due to poor institutional design. (5) Insufficient leadership time and attention to talent issues. And (6) staff fear of informing senior teams about barriers to organizational effectiveness. They advocate six basic steps to overcome these obstacles and achieve greater success in developing talent.
Six common obstacles for managers and organizations prevent people from applying what they have learned, no matter how smart and motivated they are.
Harvard Business Review Leadership Training
To create a conducive environment for learning and growth, senior executives must first be involved in institutional design – both at the top and organizationally.
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Corporations are victims of great training robberies. American companies spend a lot of money on staff training and education — $ 160 billion in the United States and nearly $ 356 billion worldwide in 2015 alone – but they do not get a good return on their investment. They are not. For the most part, learning does not lead to better organizational performance because people soon return to their old ways of doing things.
Consider a microelectronics product (MEPD) at a company we will call SMA, which one of us studied. SMA has invested in a training program to enhance the organization’s leadership and effectiveness. MEPD was the first business entity to implement it, and almost every salaried employee in the division participated.
Participants described the program as very influential. Throughout the week, they were involved in a variety of tasks that required teamwork, and they received real-time feedback on both individual and team attitudes. The program concludes with a plan for re-learning within the organization. Pre- and post-training surveys showed that participants’ attitudes changed.
A few years later, when a new general manager took over, he asked for an evaluation of an expensive program. As it turned out, the manager thought there was little change as a result of the training, although it was inspiring at the time. They find it impossible to apply what they have learned about teamwork and collaboration due to some management and organizational constraints: lack of clarity of top-down style strategies. GM used to be an environment of political accusations and conflicts across functions. “[GM before] had a significant impact on our unit, as we all reflected on him in our managerial style,” a member of the senior team of the division explained during an interview. “We are all more dictatorial.”
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As a change strategy, training clearly does not work. It rarely works, as we have found in our research and teaching, and in the consulting work we do at dozens of companies. One manufacturer, for example, suffered several deaths at its operating plant despite a $ 20 million investment in state-of-the-art safety training centers. Participants in corporate education programs often tell us that the context in which they work makes it difficult for them to put what they teach into practice.
However, senior executives and their HR team continue to spend money year after year in training efforts to drive institutional change. But what they really need is a new way of thinking about learning and development. Context determines the stages of success or failure, so it is important to be involved in institutional design and management processes first.
An education that aims at the growth of an individual is worthy in its own right, and people aspire to acquire knowledge and skills that will help them grow in their careers. However, the main reason senior executives and human resources invest in management training is to make their leaders and organizations more effective, and the results up front are disappointing. Three-quarters of the nearly 1,500 senior executives at 50 organizations interviewed in 2011 by CEB were dissatisfied with their company’s academic and development functions. Only one in four reports that it is important to achieve business results. Decades of worthwhile studies show why it does not work, but unfortunately that understanding does not go into most companies.
Researchers noted problems with the training program in the early 1950s during the Ohio State Leadership Study. They found that one program succeeded in changing the attitude of front-line managers about how they should manage, but follow-up studies showed that most managers shifted to their pre-training perspective. . The only exceptions are those in which the boss has practiced and believed in the new leadership profile that the program is designed to teach.
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Then in the 1980s, one of us helped conduct a study that showed that training programs do not facilitate organizational change: companies trying to start big changes by training hundreds or thousands of employees across the board. Many entities to act differently from a single company (in the model of six) that has not started its transformation this way. The problem is that even well-trained and motivated employees are not able to apply their new knowledge and skills when they return to their unit, which is incorporated into Do the work set up. In short, individuals have less power to change the system around them than to organize them.
The idea that organizational systems – which define roles, responsibilities and relationships – have a profound effect on an individual’s mindset and behavior is supported by a number of studies. For example, research by Seymour Lieberman of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found that frontline union workers promoted to managerial attitudes and managers were forced by the crisis to return. Go back to frontline work, back to support. Unions and anti-management attitudes. Adding to the idea, Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg found that Wall Street “star” analysts, rated by an independent agency, did not perform well or maintained their star status after the move. Another company. In fact, most of them never regained that status during their five years of study. Those who did take their team – the system that helped them succeed – with them when they changed companies.
Those findings are relevant to the research – by Amy Edmondson of HBS and Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon – that organizations need “fertile soil” in place before the “seeds” of training interventions can grow. When researchers looked at corporate training programs aimed at improving problem-solving and communication between managers and subordinates, they found that success differs within a company. Improvements are more prevalent in organizations that have already created an “psychological safety” environment in which subordinates feel free to speak.
From all these research streams, we know that education and training are most attractive in high-visibility institutional transformation and development efforts led by senior leaders. That is because such efforts motivate people to learn and change. Create conditions for them to apply what they have learned; Promote immediate improvement in the effectiveness of individuals and organizations. And put in place systems that support learning.
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Poor return on investment is not the only bad outcome of a failed training initiative. Top-down employees become crazy. Corporate leaders can deceive themselves into believing they are implementing real change through corporate education, but others in the organization know better, as we see in the MEPD example. Why do leaders not get it? For two reasons.
Logically, people must be recruited and developed with the “right” knowledge, skills, and attitudes to maximize the efficiency and performance of the institution. Therefore, HR identifies the required individual competencies in line with the company’s strategy and then sells the top managers on training programs designed to develop those competencies, believing that organizational changes will follow.
Roles, responsibilities and relationships are defined by organizational structure, processes, leadership style, professional and cultural background of people and human resource policies and practices. And it does not recognize that all of these elements together drive the behavior and performance of the institution. If the system does not change, it will not support and sustain the change in individual behavior, in fact it will make people fail.
Second, HR managers and others find it difficult or impossible to confront senior leaders and their teams with an uncomfortable fact: failure to implement strategies and change organizational attitudes is not. Not from individual shortcomings, but rather in established policies and practices. By the top manager.
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What needs to be addressed before training can be successful in the long run. It is easier for human resources to identify the capabilities of employees as a problem and training as a clear solution. That is the message that senior leaders have.
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