Care enough to question Training

When I started my own consulting company serving organizational needs in the Learning & Development industry (the field formerly known as Corporate Training) over a dozen ago, I didn’t realize how different my approach was from most. I said from the beginning that I’d like to live in a world that doesn’t need what I do.

Well, that’s actually the nicer way to say it. After 20 years making, managing, & measuring training, what I really think is a little more controversial:
I don’t believe that formalized Training is justifiable in the modern workplace.
There, I said it! But please don’t hate me yet — hear me out for minute.

In my two decades of observation consulting across dozens of companies, here’s what the training we currently make actually gets used for:

1. Checking the box = Ensuring that liability shifts from the employer to the employee when the lawyers say it has to. This is the domain of compliance, pure and simple. Learning actually has nothing to do with whether the box is getting checked or not.
2. Feeling better = “ Quick! We need to look like we’re doing something about this internal issue but we don’t actually want to make the systemic changes required so…how about a new training course? ” Ouch. Again, nothing to do with learning. The saddest part is that training is being used to prevent change rather than help make it possible.
3. Making up for bad design & bad decisions = Any applications, websites, machines, processes, and products that need detailed technical explanations have by definition not been designed very well for the people who are supposed to use them. Corners got cut in the workflow design, testing, project management, or the hiring process…or most likely all of the above. Training can help resolve the downstream tension of people not knowing what they’re doing or why, but training can never solve the actual problems which are all sourced upstream.

We put all the training requests in a bucket and hand it to a team of lovely people in Learning & Development. These are people who feel like they can’t decline — or even seriously question — anything in that bucket. Which brings me to my conclusion:
Having a dedicated department just for learning seems more part of the problem than the solution. What’s needed is a function that’s interwoven through the connective tissue of the business, not a department. What’s needed is a systemic way of exposing, building, and creating direct impacts for behaviors.

Okay, now you can hate me.

I know what I’m saying is disruptive. I promise that I’m not saying it for the sake of disruption though, far from it. I’m saying this for the sake of integration, for the sake of evolution, for the sake of enabling real learning and getting to the real solutions.

What solutions do I see? Assuming that the organization has a clear reason for existing and way of knowing if it’s living up to that mission, then we:

• Hire incredible people
• Get out of their way
• Let the rest go
  Overly simple? I don’t think so. Allow me to explain…

Hiring incredible people

It doesn’t matter what kind of training we give to someone who doesn’t care about it. Nor does it matter what we present to someone who is missing the aptitude to understand it. These people will fail, and more importantly they will hide this as best as they can. We can only ever address the problems that we can see. When we hire people who can hide from us, then we ensure our own failure.

It also doesn’t matter very much how smart someone is when they walk in the door, but what matters a great deal is how curious they are and how empathetic they are.

• Are they driven to ask questions?
• Are they striving to do better?
• Do they genuinely care about others?

While these properties can certainly be stifled if we’re not careful, we cannot create them. We cannot grow curiosity, or self-improvement, or caring from scratch in-house. All we can do is hire people who are voracious learners by nature, who take pride in their work, and who have a history of treating people kindly and even advocating for the needs of their fellow humans.

These people do exist. We can find them and give them good reasons to work with us, such as a meaningful vision of the future we’ll create with their help. And we can consciously link the scale of our organizational growth to the number of these people that we find and retain.

Keeping incredible people

We’ll know we hired the right people when we can’t keep them from learning. We won’t be able to prevent them from optimizing everything they come across. There’s no way they’ll put up with the old “ this is how it’s always been done ” answer. Our organization is about to be radically transformed by their presence in ways we cannot predict. That’s a good thing.

When we put ourselves in the position of squashing pending transformations, no matter the reason, we disenfranchise the very best people we’ve got. Maybe they won’t physically leave, but mentally and energetically — they’re gonna check out a little. They’re going to have to care a bit less than they did before in order to survive at work. Eventually, they’re going to get worn down and become the very people who say things like “ well, that’s just how we do it here ”.

When we stop disappointing (perhaps “pissing off” is more accurate?) the incredible people that we already hired, they tend to stick around longer. They stay engaged longer. And their care and loyalty organically attracts new opportunities for business and profitable creativities that likely never made it into anybody’s Powerpoint deck in a board meeting.

You know as well as I that a lot of great recruiting decisions are currently being contradicted by the systems, processes, policies, and subcultures that are just waiting to put a lid on those high-performers. We can make better choices than that. We’ll need to in order for high-performers to thrive, and they’ll need to thrive in order to stay.

And what about the others?

Letting the rest go

People are the very best asset any organization can ever have. And they are also the worst problem your organization will ever face. People are either onboard with the mission and actively working towards it everyday, or they have a different vision that does not align. Or worst of all, they are simply drifting and collecting a paycheck for hours drifted.

We can choose to release the drag. Enabling high-performers needs to couple with letting go of the lowest-performers to be truly effective. We can find ways of kindly and lovingly releasing those who are a drag on our organization’s momentum. Deep down, we know that it won’t work out well for anybody if they stay while remaining disengaged or at cross-purposes. Either our people are willing to get curious about solving the problems and doing the work where we are, or they can (and should!) go find something else to do with their life that’s a better fit for them. Ultimately, we are keeping them from contributing value to the world by keeping them tethered to where they ultimately don’t want to be.

We who see people at every stage of their career development have insight into the suitability of the person to the role that few if any others do. Simply communicating what we see and allowing others to make decisions about what to do with that information is a generous gift to give those we work with, and it’s a measurable value to the organization we work for.

The Truth Is

I believe in people. I honestly believe that each of us has a unique and critical role to play in the world around us. Looking back at the last twenty years of my work in Learning & Development, I see that I’ve spent too much time doing work that doesn’t really matter for people who don’t really care.

But I do care. I care about the world we share way too much to do any more of the work that — let’s be honest — doesn’t really need to exist. As a consultant, I’m constantly asking the annoying questions that I know people would rather I didn’t. Things like:

• Why does that course really matter?
• Who actually reads this PDF now?
• Does that credit count for anything?
• What is at the root of this request?
• Do we really need to push this silly thing out to all these people? Can’t we just fix that thing that’s broken instead?
• Why can’t we test this part first?
• Wait, why can’t just we do this whole thing better?

I believe we can do better. I know that I can do more.

The truth is that a lot of us in L&D have been doing what’s asked of us instead of doing what’s needed from us for a long time now. Let’s call this the time we make a new choice. Let’s do the work that does matter, and let’s do it for the people who do care.

The Call

We the Learning & Development Professionals, the Performance Improvement Specialists, the Training Analysts, we have more insight into the places that the organization is going wrong than any other role or department.

We see the cultural issues and where they stem from, the political realities and their workarounds, the design failures and the best ways to prevent these in the future. We see it all. We just don’t necessarily know what to do with what we have, or who would listen to us and our ideas about what might be worth doing. There’s not a clear outlet for us to make improvements without upsetting people who would rather stay relatively comfortable in the world they know, rather than embracing the one they don’t.

It’s true. There isn’t a way out of this trap. The healthy organizational immune system will fend off systemic changes more often than not. So…?

So we pause. We stop doing the work that doesn’t matter to the business. We stop trying to make people who never should have been placed in their role get by. We only agree to work that clearly makes the business better in ways that are already measured directly.

We often say we want “a seat at the table” of the organization. If you’ve ever wanted the attention of those that run the business and determine the measures, do this and you’re about to get it. There is a small window here to speak truth and talk tough about how to make that person look good in the long term, if they can help you weather the temporary storm you’ve created by declining to do work that ultimately hurts the organization.

It’s a bold move. A big gamble. It might not work out.

Which is exactly the kind of decision familiar to those who are already seated at the table. The ones who decide the future of the organization, and the fate of your budget. These people say “no” to a lot of good ideas all the time. They do so in order to allocate the limited resources to the few initiatives that are great. We can choose to give them something good, or something great. We can choose to do something good with what we have, or something great.

If you’ve read this far, you already know what choice suits you better. You don’t need more time or more resources, you simply need to decide.

Is now the time you make this pivot? Or are you never going to get to

this?

This choice will never be comfortable. It will never feel safe. But you will likely not have any more resources or bravery to draw upon by this time next year.

Have a vision for the year to come. See it. Then go be it.