The recent past has been a difficult time for human resource development professionals. A down economy is cause for concern in any field, but why is training always one of the first areas to be cut? Take a step back and look at your position, your department, and the industry. If you were on the outside looking in, what would you see?
More important, if the chief executive officer or another senior officer in your organization took a walk through your training or human resources development department, what would he or she see? How would management officials describe what you do day to day? If the answer is, “I see them in the training room, but I'm not sure what else they do,” or even worse, “I don't know,” then you are not a business partner, which is a cause for concern. If you don't think your CEO, division managers, and vice presidents understand what you and your department bring to your organization, then it's time to find ways to make your value known. Companies are reluctant to cut where they perceive value.
Now more than ever, as workplace learning and performance practitioners, you need to increase your sphere of influence and show how training and learning are fundamental to the success of any organization. To do this you need to reposition your department to take on the role of a business partner within the organization.
Practitioners appreciate such a bottom-line approach, but often are resistant to change or unsure how to reposition the training function as a business partner. Risk is another reason to hesitate before taking on the role of business partner. Once you make yourself known in the highest levels of your organization, you are likely to be tied directly to both successes and failures. Staying in the comfort zone of instructional design, delivery, and evaluation is much less risky. Or is it?
The key to increasing your influence is to create a perception of your department as a credible business partner. Credibility is critical for changing your role from reactive to active. Without it, you will always be handed solutions instead of having opportunities to apply your skill and experience to come up with better ones.
To become a business partner, however, you have to develop credibility at the right level. That is what this Info-line will help you do by enabling you to evaluate the degree to which your department is a business partner and by providing practical, applicable advice for expanding your sphere of influence. You will learn to build credibility:
at the classroom level
at the departmental level
at the inter-departmental level
at the executive level.
Note the importance of moving sequentially up through these levels. If you try to move straight to the highest level, bypassing the work you need to do and the relationships you need to build along the way, you run the risk of doing more harm than good. To move on to the next level, you need to be firmly grounded on the level below.
“The path from the training room to the boardroom is not a straight line. It runs through every department”—Eric Davis
To help you move up through the levels, each stage provides a self-assessment tool, two sets of concrete steps to expand and grow your credibility within your organization, and key metrics. To get the most out of this Info-line, take the selfassessment at each level. This will give you a good indication of where you are currently.
Steps to help you move forward are broken into two categories: critical transition steps and reinforcing actions. The critical transition step is like a bridge. When you begin it, you are at one stage of credibility; when you complete it, you are at the next highest level. Reinforcing actions further strengthen your credibility at each level. As you engage in these actions, your influence in the organization will grow. And your influence will grow for all the right reasons: You are creating and demonstrating value to the organization while building a broad base of support.
The key metrics of each stage focus on the type of reporting you should be doing at each level and the numbers that are important to the people with whom you are seeking to increase your credibility. As you progress through the stages, your reporting metrics should expand to cover your new capacity. This is not to say that you should abandon metrics from preceding stages. Instead, you should continually add new metrics to your expanding foundation.
At this stage, you are credible only within the four walls of your classroom. In the rest of the organization, you are regarded as a necessary evil. The general perception of the work done in the classroom is that it does not really tie into what transpires in the boardroom.
The only people who directly interact with your department while you are engaged in your primary function are class participants. Most managers cannot speak authoritatively about the details of classroom training, so they trust you to run the classes they assign. Once you step outside of the classroom, however, they don't know what you do. To determine if you are in this stage, carry out the self-assessment in the sidebar Stage 1 Self-Assessment at left.
Remaining in this reactive state is draining. If you remain in this stage, you risk burnout from too many days in the classroom and the stress of having no control over your workload. The following critical and supplemental steps are designed to help you prepare the groundwork for advancing beyond this stage. Your focus is on expanding your credibility with the managers who request training.
The critical transition step in this stage is to align your activities with the strategic goals of your organization. Connect everything you do, every purchase you make, and every class you design and facilitate to your company's strategic goals.
This can be as simple as including on the purchase order the reason for the purchase and what goal it will help the company achieve. What is important is written documentation. This also can be in the form of an email when making the request. When faced with having to create a class, you should ask the requestor, “How does this further the company goals?” The idea of justifying your costs is more about maintaining what you have than increasing your influence. If you cannot cost-justify each activity and each purchase, then you will be understandably nervous when cost cuts are discussed. Be prepared to defend each line item in your budget.
Even if all your training decisions are based on business fundamentals, however, the real world does not go away. You will still have mandated training requests to “fix” a performance problem that you know will not be “fixed” with training, which is why you need to continue to expand your credibility and influence.
To maintain your classroom credibility and make your department known beyond the classroom, you need to increase your department's visibility. Most employees and even upper-level management do not understand what a training department does throughout the day. Building name recognition within the organization is one of the first positive steps you can take to market your training department and its value to the organization. Here are some ways to do that.
Ensure that the training department's name conveys the right message. For example, “Widget Learning Center” and “Widget Performance Center” convey very different meanings to your potential customers. Spend some time thinking about what your department does and create a name that reflects that.
Ensure that your department's acronym helps your marketing potential. For example, the TYZKQ Center does not sound as good as the PEAK Center. If you have inherited an illfitting brand, don't be afraid to change it. You might want to make the change in conjunction with an open house or at the start of a new year. The change is a signal of the great things to come. It's a break with the status quo.
Create a logo for your department. Once created, put the logo on the cover of every document you create. Train in logo shirts. Hand out pens with the logo. Do whatever it takes.
Create a mission statement that reflects how you support the company's mission. The statement should not be delivered as a mandate.
Instead, get your entire department involved in writing it. Begin by gathering together the company mission statement, values, and strategic goals. Go through your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and then use that information as a basis for determining how your department can best support the company's overall mission. Take some time to do this; it does not have to be finished in one day. The process will be more effective if you give these directions to your group in preparation for your meeting.
Once you have determined your mission, follow the same process with the department goals. In many cases, you will have goals set for you, but don't be limited by that. Look at what the company hopes to accomplish and see where your department has the best opportunity to support company goals.
The last step is to tie it together. Create a plaque or sign that lists your mission statement and the goals you hope to accomplish for the coming year. Post the new mission statement in your classrooms.
Metrics play a part at every stage of the process of increasing departmental credibility. In Stage 1, the metrics of building classroom credibility focus on productivity, the most important of which are:
number of students trained
number of days spent in the classroom
number of classes taught
reactions as measured in surveys
occupancy rate of classrooms.
Take the assessment in the sidebar Stage 2 Self-Assessment to determine what stage you are in. At the beginning of Stage 2, you are still credible only within the classroom. You are unable to deny a training request, even when you feel that the intervention will not be effective. For example, you may receive requests for training that have poor objectives, such as the following:
“I want them to proactively anticipate our customers' needs.”
“I want them to be more productive.”
“They aren't following the new process; train them again.”
These are requests that you may not be able to fulfill. However, an outright refusal to train could be fatal. You are not a stop sign. You are not there to say no. Continually saying no to training requests is as counterproductive and damaging to building credibility as continually saying yes. You want to be a speed bump. The key is to alter the perception and expectations of training.
To expand your credibility, you must take steps to educate your customers about training and what it can and cannot do. In Stage 2, you will draw your managers/training requestors into the classroom to share responsibility for classroom outcomes. The critical transition step is to engage your managers in writing training objectives. You are educating the people who request training as to what is achievable and what is specific, measurable, and realistic. They now begin to have a context for requesting training.
Educate your managers as to what a well-written training objective contains. Ensure that each objective ties back to a departmental goal. Agree to how you will measure achievement of the objectives and have the manager sign the agreement. This will help you to eliminate the fluff and focus on measured outcomes.
Training objectives are stated in measurable and observable terminology. Good objectives should always include the performance you expect the learner to achieve, under what conditions, and the level at which the learner should be able to perform. Saying that the learner will be able to “understand how to write a letter” is vague and not measurable. A better way to say this would be: “Given a template, the learner will be able to write a business letter three paragraphs in length with no grammatical errors.”
You also should discriminate between performance objectives and training objectives. A performance objective is the change in behavior that you want the learner to exhibit on the job. Because a classroom environment cannot be an exact copy of “real life,” a training objective should state what is reasonably expected of the learner after completing the training. For instance, a performance objective might be: “Learners will be able to recall the definitions of medical terms most frequently used in their jobs.” On the other hand, a training objective might be: “Given a list of medical terms, the learners will be able to identify the correct definition from a list with 90 percent accuracy.” There is a subtle but significant difference between the two objectives. Refer to the references and resources at the end of this Info-line for help in learning to write good objectives.
After applying this process to a training intervention, one of two outcomes will occur: The performance issue will be resolved, or it will not. If the intervention is successful, you get to claim some of the credit because you were involved in developing the objectives, which can set a precedent for future classes. However, if the participants don't exhibit the desired behaviors after the training intervention, new possibilities open up. This is where the second piece of education comes in. Get back together with the manager. Explain that skills and knowledge are just two components of performance. Step through the other factors, such as tools, processes, motivation, capability, standards, and measurement. You can now quantify that skills and knowledge are not the issue and can propose an alternative solution by performing a needs analysis. Up to this point, you had no data to support your assertions. Now you do.
To embed and expand your newfound credibility, try some of the following activities:
Most training departments track the numbers of students they train, how many passed, and data from reaction surveys, but little else. None of these measures will elevate you to the level of business partner. It's up to you to put into place additional metrics that show value. Utilize preand post-test outcomes to show knowledge gain. Quantify your time spent in and out of the classroom. How many classes did you develop? Process documents? Job aids? Performance checklists?
Often, a manager's perception of how the work gets done is significantly different from the reality. Capturing work-arounds and tacit knowledge will help managers develop a better idea of their territory and increase understanding of the true work function.
What does it take to become a trainer? The paths are as varied as the subjects taught. (See the sidebar Professional Development: The Road to Success.) Whether you are a former subject matter expert who has learned the profession or someone coming in with a degree in training and development, let everyone know. If you are a subject matter expert, make the number of years of experience with the subject you have known around the organization. Indicate your degree, certification, and experience if you are an old pro.
The important thing is to make sure that the rest of the company recognizes that you have a significant amount of intellectual capital within your department. An effective way to highlight this information is to post staff bios on your company intranet and in the classroom. If your staff has any certifications, you could put them on display as well. Let people around the organization know about your department's extensive skill set—a meeting, hallway conversations, any time is a good time to promote your people.
The outstanding work of training and development leaders often goes unnoticed by the larger organization. It is necessary to raise the level of consciousness within your organization. Co-workers might understand that you exist and at a high level what you do, but unless they attend a class, they don't know what to expect from you. As a knowledge broker, you need to sell your product. You have already begun to market your department by creating a name and logo.
If no one knows you trained, did it really happen? Celebrate classes in session by taking a group photo and let each participant create a short bio. This is especially effective for new hire training. It's a chance to get to know the newest team members. Celebrate graduations. Invite other managers. Give out certificates and serve cake. It's a nice reward for the attendees and helps to induct them into the company culture while raising the awareness of your activities. Management meetings are another good opportunity to celebrate your successes. Talk about progress toward goals, courses created, analysis, and staff achievements—anything that will give insight to what you do when you are out of the classroom.
The company intranet can be a great marketing tool, as it helps raise awareness of your department. Create a separate Webpage for training. Instead of placing learning documents in various places on the intranet (such as on another department's Webpage), make sure that any and all content that you provide to the company is directed through your branded Webpage. As owners of the content and the center of learning for the company, your intranet Webpage becomes the knowledge portal for the entire company.
Possible content for your intranet includes:
course listings
staff bios
research links
library
job aids
training request form
department policies and procedures
department news
success stories
online courses
classroom schedules.
To discover what at what stage you are, take the assessment presented in the sidebar Stage 3 Self-Assessment at right. In this stage, you have shifted from being reactive to having some control over training content and outcomes. Managers who request training should view you as a credible department head. These co-workers now understand that you have performance and productivity goals to meet, just as they do. Before, they may not have known how (or if) you were measured. Now they realize that you have finite resources and must prioritize your workload.
By focusing on the knowledge and skill that support department goals, you have altered the perception of your value and utility. You have brought training requestors into the classroom and made them your partners in creating successful outcomes. Your managers have learned something new, and they know how to request training. This stage ends with the opportunity to look into performance issues that traditionally fall outside of training. In Stage 3, you will bring other managers into contact with you through needs analyses and process mapping.
By getting the training requestor involved in writing training objectives, you have increased your credibility with the requestor, who is often a line manager or department head. Because the training requestor has agreed on outcomes for the training, and how they are to be measured, he or she cannot place the blame for ongoing performance issues on the training. However, as a performance specialist, you should be prepared to further assist the manager by conducting a needs analysis to identify the other performance factors.
By looking at the process chain under the auspices of process re-engineering, you come into contact with other departments or organizations that either supply the department in question or are recipients of the department in question's work. Use your existing relationship with the training requestor as an entry point into the other departments in the process chain. Let them understand that your focus is to help everyone involved perform better, enabling them to achieve the goals they are being measured against. This procedure widens your sphere of influence, but it does not elevate it on the organization chart. For help in getting started with needs analysis, refer to the sidebar Needs Analysis Planning at left.
Trainers can be change catalysts and are often best positioned to ensure that there is no distortion between the vision and the execution of organizational vision, goals, and strategies. Here are some ways to help you extend both the influence and power of the training function in your organization:
hold an open house
focus on performance
get out of your office
be a knowledge broker
create account managers
volunteer to be a meeting facilitator.
If you want to start with a splash, consider holding an open house. Create a course catalog to hand out, talk to management from other departments, and show off your wares. Raise awareness about the types of professional development activities that are available. Explain that the internal training department is the most cost-effective way to approach professional development.
Invite people from all levels of the organization. Be prepared to give them your value statement, for example, “We link learning and performance.” Identify your products. They include needs analysis, task analysis, meeting facilitation, classroom training, internal consulting, and so forth. What can you offer line workers in terms of professional development? How can you help them get the promotion they desire?
Business partners do more than increase the skill and knowledge of their participants. As a strategic partner, analyze every facet of employee performance. Discover the standard for success in various positions. You want to know how people are measured and what incentives are offered to them. Are you dealing with a training issue, a management issue, a process issue, a tool issue, or an accountability issue? The sidebar Non-Training Case Study at right demonstrates how training is not always the answer to performance problems.
Here are some questions to start asking as a performance consultant.
What does success look like? Clearly defined, achievable objectives have to be the basis of every training initiative.
If you held a gun to their head, could they do the job? If the answer is yes, then this is not about skills and knowledge; there is a larger issue involved. Your next task is to find out what is causing a lack of motivation or find out if anything is available to them in training that is not available in their work environment.
Have they ever been able to do it? If the answer is no, then perhaps the standard is too high.
Do the systems and tools support the tasks? As Geary Rummler mentioned in a recent T+D article, “If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system wins every time.”
Does this require classroom training? Can the goal be accomplished by a job aid, computerbased training, a change in process, and so on?
What is important about this process is that at no time are you saying yes or no. A decision is impossible until you get a better understanding of the situation.
To get involved with other departments, it is imperative to study them while they are on the job instead of during an interview. You will have better information if you can see how a department works firsthand. Let them see you when they are working on their problems.
It's all too easy to get into the routine of trainevaluate-update-train. It is vital to be visible in the organization. Walk the floor, attend departmental meetings, and follow up with colleagues after meetings. Find out what is happening in other departments. This can be a great source of leads, but you won't find it in your office. Never underestimate management by walking around.
As trainers, you are the systems thinkers because you understand how all departments interact. If you don't know, you know where to find out. By capturing knowledge, you are in a position to improve efficiency. You should be the single source for training. Any request should be filtered through training before a department turns to the outside. When requests can be filled within the department, you add a direct cost savings to your ROI. If the best solution lies outside the company, you can make the arrangements. This also helps to achieve buying power when you speak for the company.
More and more is being written about capturing, archiving, and transferring the tacit knowledge collectively gained by employees. One inexpensive way to implement this is to set up a threaded discussion board to be used by co-workers at all levels in the organization. It can be a great source of information about improving efficiency within work teams or departments and can be invaluable in helping you identify potential knowledge or skill gaps that need to be addressed through training.
Many mini-training sessions happen right under your nose that you may not be aware of; for example, when a new product is introduced to the sales department, a new application is installed, or a business process is re-engineered. Even if you are not responsible for providing training, a knowledge broker is aware of their existence and what impact that might have on another part of the organization.
Establishing an account manager program will improve both your information gathering and systems view. Assign members of your department to your primary training audience. The departments who generate the most training requests will benefit from increased representation from training. The training account manager can sit in on staff meetings and represent your department.
These account managers then come back to you to discuss issues, concerns, and changes. This is a key information-sharing session. Often, changes made to policy or procedure in one department have a ripple effect throughout an organization. By catching these changes early, the training department can then forewarn other department managers who will be affected by the change. Often, trainers' counsel as to the repercussions for the proposed change can forestall an ill-advised change.
Facilitating meetings is a great way to get involved with other departments. Facilitating critical or contentious meetings is a way to expand your reach within your organization. Often during these meetings, having an impartial third party act as moderator will help increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. Allowing other departments to see you in this new capacity will enhance your credibility outside of the classroom.
Another way to get involved is to act as a meeting scribe. The advantage is twofold. First, you gain access to the information generated. This allows you to see how decisions are made and other critical factors. Second, by summarizing information and distributing the results, you have an opening to discuss the meeting with each meeting member and ask questions about the content.
Your success in this stage is tied to the job performance of your training participants and your ability to help your “training partners” achieve their goals. Note that in enabling other departments to reach their goals, you may need to work in concert with quality assurance.
Training ensures that workers have the skills and knowledge needed to be successful in their jobs, while quality assurance monitors job performance and identifies knowledge gaps. The functional areas can lead to disagreements between the two departments. To create and maintain a healthy relationship: 1) attend calibration meetings between quality assurance and supervisors to identify knowledge gaps or performance issues; and 2) work in concert with quality assurance to avoid morale issues and reduced effectiveness.
What you choose to measure is important. You can't take credit for the entire department, nor should you set yourself up to take the blame if you fall short. Focus on those performance metrics that support the goals you can most directly affect, such as reduced cycle time, reduced scrap, increased productivity, increased sales, reduced re-work, increased customer satisfaction, and reduced customer churn.
After performing outcome-based actions such as those presented in this stage, you will gain credibility as a performance consultant across the organization. Through the needs analysis and supporting actions, you have moved out of a reactionary role into a proactive one. Managers are now aware of alternatives to classroom training. With a respect for your abilities, managers are more open to non-classroom interventions.
Stage 4 is characterized by a deepening of your credibility. You now move up the organizational chart to the executive level. Credibility at this level is tied to your ability to affect strategic goals and demonstrate your value to the company as a whole. To determine where you are in your pursuit of becoming a strategic business partner with your organization, take the assessment presented in the sidebar Stage 4 Self-Assessment at right.
The critical transition step at this stage is to prepare an annual report that documents departmental ROI. This document is the culmination of your efforts and where you state your case as a strategic partner. For suggestions on what to include in your annual report, see the Job Aid.
Once you have achieved the status of a strategic partner, you need to focus on maintaining your position and establishing a reinforcing cycle. Some activities that could help you do this include:
becoming an internal consultant
making training a product
using training as an employee benefit and retention tool.
As you have progressed through the first stages, hopefully your counterparts in other departments have come to see you in a new light. Now is the time to capitalize on this change in attitude. As budgets shrink, the ability to go outside the organization to hire consulting expertise wanes. As a performance consultant, and one with a systems view of the company, you are available for identifying and eliminating performance barriers. Managers understand that they need to qualify and quantify what they want to accomplish before they come to you. They know they won't be rejected outright, because you are not there to be a stop sign. They have your attention when it comes to changing people's behavior.
You begin this process as a natural extension of your visibility. Casual water cooler conversations are a good opportunity to offer insight into performance issues. At first, you may have to reassure your counterpart that just talking through the issue can help in problem identification. Ask questions. Clarify to get a full understanding. Bring in similar issues that you may be aware of in other departments. This is where good listening skills are critical. Don't jump to solve the problem. Continue to peal away layers until you can present the issue yourself. Remember your training and performance perspective can cast a new light on the issue.
Find out what keeps department heads up at night. There is no better way to determine what the major issues are for your counterparts than to ask. Many issues are common to a number of departments. For example, recruitment and retention are always a concern for human resources.
Re-evaluate how you view training. You have shown what the tools of the training professional can do for the organization. You can apply the same industry standard processes as other organizations. Create a training product. Find a way to get in front of the paying client. This elevates the role of training, placing it right alongside other company products. Training can be used as a product differentiator, an addition to the value proposition.
When training is a product, it also can be used as negotiating leverage. Even if you end up throwing the training in for free, there is a perceived value. If you throw in training instead of lowering another product's price, you save the company money. You now generate revenue, instead of just being a cost center.
With companies scaling back financial incentives more and more, one way to attract and keep quality employees is to include training and development as part of the employee benefit package. Having a training benefit package says that the company values people so much that it is willing to invest time and resources to make them even better employees. A few years back, ASTD's T+D magazine ran a series of articles on free agent learners called “It's a Free Agent World.” These individuals seek out learning opportunities on their own in order to stay competitive in their careers. Companies run the risk of losing such employees to competition if they train them, but they also run the risk of losing them if they do not train them. Free agent learners are more likely to be loyal to a company if they feel that they are being enriched through various development and training programs. The sidebar Recruiting and Retention at right discusses some ways to make training more valuable as a recruiting and retention tool.
The key metric for this stage is departmental ROI. By moving into the role of strategic business partner, you not only solidify your value to your organization, you also adopt a position that is much more challenging, rewarding, and exciting. You are able to grow as a professional, learning new skills and honing existing ones. Just as you have educated your managers on training, you have now learned more about their roles. Most important, you have developed a track record of success that any employer would desire.