The Culture - Training Connection
When you want to change or improve skills, it is important to consider how those attempts will be impacted by your corporate culture. You need to be clear on whether your intention is to work within the existing culture or to change it. As such, you must be aware of the limits that your culture creates when it comes to implementing training.
If you have a command-and-control culture where management is unwilling to relinquish decision making power, attempts to increase the decision making skills of your employees will fall flat. A similar fate awaits those who invest in training employees to be good team players if the reward and recognition systems focus on individual contributions. Unless behaviors are encouraged by management and supported by internal systems (i.e., performance management, compensation), they will not be sustainable. Without this required infrastructure, the company will revert to the status quo.
Once the employees realize that the company's infrastructure doesn’t support the “new” way of doing business, they get scared. Suddenly, their success and reputations are threatened. They feel as if they’re flying without a net. As a result, they revert back to old behaviors where the consequences are well-known and comfortable.
At this point, the corporate culture has effectively defeated your attempt to improve performance despite the time and effort invested in a state-of-the-art training program. The bottom line is: all of these human resources systems must be integrated in order to produce meaningful, sustainable changes in performance. It’s critical that you are prepared to address these types of obstacles when you create your strategic plan and design your training programs. When the culture and systems are aligned, your desired training outcomes will be realized.
If you’d like to learn more about effective training and change management please contact Kammy Haynes.
The Beginning or the End?
A relatively common comment after an assessment center (AC) is, “That was great. Can we do this again in a year to see if we got better?” While the acceptance of the assessment results is welcomed, the clients have underestimated the value and purpose of the data. The idea behind assessment and feedback isn’t to improve how well someone performs in an AC. Rather, the AC results should be used as a catalyst to improve job performance. So, the better approach is, “Let’s check back in a year after we’ve used this data to train and coach our employees to see if our performance is better.” Any type of developmental assessment should the beginning of the improvement process, not the measure of it.
For more information on developmental assessments and improving job performance, please contact Warren Bobrow.
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