What if training really had to work?

Robert Brinkerhoff

A wise man is purported to have said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The challenge that training leaders face today is both the same, and is changing. What remains the same is that training leaders must produce worthwhile business results. The change is that they must produce them faster than ever, with greater impact from decreasing resources.

But training as an organizational function remains stuck with the fundamental weakness it has had for decades. Almost all organizational training is a marginal intervention, and has only slight effects on performance improvement. Research, and our own evaluation studies, show that less than 20 percent or so of trainees take what they learned in training back to the job and use it to achieve worthwhile results for their businesses.

If we look at training as only a sort of staff benefit, then maybe these results are tolerable. But, in many business scenarios – a merger, a new product launch, a new strategic direction – companies may be betting the business on effective training. When it truly has to work, training as usual will not fill the bill.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

In the past few years, we have dug a little deeper into the depressingly poor results shown by a lot of training and development, and we've found a glimmer of good news, and a hopeful direction for the future. The good news is that these marginal results are not uniformly dispersed across all trainee audiences; it is not the case that every employee gets just a slight improvement, if any, from training. The reality is quite different.

When we explore the impact of training we almost always find that some percentage of trainees will apply some parts of their new learning in improved job performance and get powerful results, making substantial contributions to important business goals and strategies (see chart above). The problem is, it doesn't work this well enough of the time with enough trainees, and so – on average – it produces dismally marginal results. Put another way, the typical training or leadership development initiative leaves a lot of impact – and thereby a lot of money – unrealized; on the table, so to speak.

There is more good news. The reasons why this larger percentage of trainees do not effectively apply their training is NOT that the training itself is a failure – we already know it works for some people, very well. Instead, these nonimpactful people often encounter a negative performance system environment. That is bad news, but the good part of this news is that if we do a better job of managing these factors, we see dramatically improved results: more people using their training as well as the few best ones did. This means more ROI from exactly the same training investment without changing the training itself. Here are just a few of the factors we consistently find:

• Trainees were sent to training without adequate preparation; they did not have a clear line of sight as to why the training was important, exactly what they most needed to learn, and how they could use it to drive their (and their business unit's) performance
• Trainees got trained at the wrong time, when they were not positioned to make the most of it in their work
• Managers did not support or reinforce or hold employees accountable for new learning and performance
• Incentives and other performance factors were misaligned with applying the learning in new job behaviors

GETTING OUT OF THE MORASS

There are two fronts on which we must fight the battle to turn training results around. First, with any important initiative, we have to expand our thinking beyond simply delivering a powerful learning event, and manage the larger process of getting senior leaders involved, getting managers to prepare and support trainees, and so forth. This helps us improve results, for a while. But even when we provide the very best High Impact Learning tools and methods in our arsenal, we still have large numbers of managers who do not participate, or pay lip service only to our requests for cooperation.

This takes us to the second battle front. We must begin a long-term strategy to educate the larger organization and change the way that training is perceived and managed.

The reality is that getting impact from training is the responsibility of the whole organization. Accountability for training impact cannot be delegated to a training department. Teaching this lesson and beginning the cultural transformation, however, lies squarely in our accountability laps.

Evaluation and measurement are the tools that can best help us begin and complete the journey. First, we have to stop simply delivering training, and redesign the way we plan, communicate about, and manage training, so that is a seamless process from aligning senior leaders to preparing managers to building employee skills to coaching and supporting their ongoing efforts to continue learning and performance improvement. Here, the suite of High Impact Learning methods and tools are a huge help.

Secondly, we have to be relentless in measuring and evaluating the results we get; not only measuring the business impact of the training, but assessing who did what, and providing the feedback to all of the stakeholders in the learning-to-performance process. We will not evaluate training; we evaluate how well the organization is using training to get results, what's working, and what is not. If some managers really did their jobs in preparing trainees, for example, then our evaluation should dig these facts out, and document the good work they did and the results it brought them, their employees, and the business. And we must show also what was lost when the performance support chain was broken, so that senior leaders can see that there is a true business case for holding their managers accountable for supporting training and development.

THE PRESCRIPTION IS SIMPLE:

• Stop delivering training; start building methods and tools for the organization to use to be sure training sticks and gets results.
• Educate senior leaders and managers about their role in making training work. Show them what's at stake when it works, and what's at risk when it doesn't
• Relentlessly measure the results you get, and show how the performance system factors were the make-or-break factors in success
• Provide feedback to all the stakeholders in the value chain so they can clearly see how their support (or lack of it) makes a difference

Tell the story loud and clear. When you make a strong business case for managing training as a process – and only then – will you build the organization that gets consistently great results.

Robert O. Brinkerhoff is a professor emeritus at Western Michigan University's College of Education, a senior consultant with Advantage Performance Group, and an expert on training and organizational effectiveness and evaluation. He has consulted for many years with global companies, has authored 13 books, and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of major conferences and institutes. He can be reached at robert.brinkerhoff@wmich.edu. This article is © 2006 Robert O. Brinkerhoff Advantage Performance Group.