People are at the heart of any creative enterprise. If we are going to be truly innovative, we have to believe that our people at every level of the company have the ability to identify and then fix complex problems. Extraordinary things can be achieved when we harness a group of people with differing skills, disciplines, cultures and perspectives.

Innovation is not about the lone inventor. Rather, it’s about teams of enthusiastic (and often overlooked) people who combine energy and creative insight to design and carry forward new concepts. Success comes from people working together in “high performance” teams. So if we want to turn our firm into an innovative leader, then we must invest our time, knowledge and resources into developing and empowering our people. More than anything else they are our biggest asset, assets that can’t be seen on financial statements and reports. Breakthrough innovation is found between people’s ears. Innovation gives competitive advantage like nothing else can.

“There is no other source of competitive advantage! Others can copy our investment, technology and scale – - but NOT the quality of our people” (Managing Director, British Chrome and Steel).

Management studies have repeatedly shown that companies who have a track record of investing in their employees and developing the kind of organizational systems and support in which those people can utilize their creativity have performed demonstrably better than the average business. For example, by pouring heart and soul into his human assets and allies, Sam Walton built the little retailer Walmart into a world-class giant. This may not seem obvious to everyone, but business success is as simple as that.

Investing in our best assets means people continually become a higher priority. Training is thought of as critical and gets linked to business plans. Team structures are developed. Team leaders are formally trained. Employees are taught to work in teams in a structured way. Training in innovation can make a huge difference.

It is tempting to view labor as a cost to be minimized. Let’s be very clear: an effective engaged workforce is the one component of innovation that competitors cannot imitate or reengineer. People management, or what we would we call leadership, is a better predictor of company performance than strategy, high-quality technology, or money spent on R&D. Greater staff involvement, satisfaction, and commitment escalate productivity and ultimately financial performance. Further, patterns of corporate wide “high involvement” can be guaranteed to continuously spread throughout our business. We need our staff fully engaged if we are to overcome the difficulties of innovation required to stay competitive.

You are already suspicious your company’s training program isn’t having lot of impact, but you’re not sure because you don’t specifically measure change in Performance or return on Training investment. You are sure that transferring in-house knowledge and skills would clearly make you more productive but it just doesn’t seem to be happening at a pace you are personally happy with, if in fact, it is really happening at all. For years you have wanted to create this higher caliber capacity to perform, and you are pretty sure you could do it, but somehow it just keeps not happening, at least not the way you want…

Here are FIVE STEPS to make your training initiatives more effective:

1. Move Your Training Structure From Simulation To Real-Time

When you bring your staff to an artificial setting, they come with defensive attitudes, skeptical resistance, and too often, a silly school-child mentality. In a word, they act differently; they wear different hats than in their normal work-a-day life… and that’s a bad thing. Adults learn best when applying newly acquired skills to solve real problems. So bring your learning initiative into their world and not the classroom. We are not saying don’t use your boardroom to teach; we are saying let them apply the training to on-the-job activities. And usually, the real (required) deep down training goal is behavior change, not incremental knowledge accumulation. Positive behavior change is what evolves into true performance improvements.

Oh, and by the way, make sure you give staff at every level plenty of input into designing their skills and know-how learning agendas. They usually know what is critically needed – - much more often than we do.

2. Measure What Matters – - Impact

Very few companies have the discipline to measure the critical factors that produces their unique success. For some, the thought of doing so just seems overwhelming. Attitudinal surveys yield little helpful information, generally. Those same “feedback” surveys in fact do serve as a major deterrent against change initiatives. Change almost always means discomfort. By contrast, hard business metrics are meant to improve and measure leading-edge indicators, such as actual behavior change. Benchmarking new behavior and changed behavior is important. Focusing on improvements measurement will give you a better understanding of what’s happening with your training.

Measuring and deciding what to measure is difficult (and some times complex) work; that’s why so few companies do it. Starting with a comprehensive diagnosis is valuable. This means using validated tools to measure critical performance indicators. If possible, measure against industry benchmarks while taking particular note of the leading companies’ standards of performance and best practices. Most importantly, set up a process for valid comparison of present and future behaviors, so that incremental improvement, or lack thereof, can be easily detected at each measurement interval. By benchmarking against both industry leaders and internal comparisons, training and change initiatives put genuine punch into performance. In other words, we learn from measurement to focus on the most important skills and behaviors that drive our particular business performance.

3. Use Structured Coaching To Deal With Mindsets

Your company’s top team is the most critical factor in driving your improved organizational performance. The quickest way you can get better results is to improve the way your top team creates these results. Most organizations do not intentionally utilize a process to regularly and progressively develop their top team. Further, your top team will need to model the way for improved performance by other teams and individuals throughout the company.

Structured coaching utilizes proven processes for team and individual development. Many management development programs fail to train intact management teams. As a result team members are frequently not on the same page, fail to develop common language and concepts, and do not develop consensus on “how to“ work together as a team. When your team members go through structured coaching together, they develop their own “chartered” processes; as a result they begin to regularly emerge from meetings with a detailed and unified analysis of the opportunities and problems, and how to best attack them.

Further, the structured coaching process inherently works to deal with normal patterns of skepticism and resistance, so they do not become barriers to your learning. Sometimes the process begins with an open discussion of pre-existing and problematic mindsets as well as other myths that inhibit individual and team learning. In so doing it is also possible to create a customized program that allows training to simultaneously occur at different levels, and are real time pointed at the most needful goals, issues and challenges. Structured coaching also goes beyond a focus on just functional skills but also interweaves into the training the soft skills that are so normally overlooked. It is these soft skills that make the critical difference between strife and cohesion. Cooperation and mutual high esteem is the secret ingredient to that elusive, much sought after goal called “synergy”.

Creating a receptive mindset for training before it happens – - and ensuring a supportive environment afterward – - is what structured coaching is all about. What results is genuine behavioral changes that later translates into improved performance. Ultimately, the bottom line improves. In the case of one company, it generated more than a fourfold return on the program’s costs, including the direct costs of travel and training, as well as the oft-overlooked costs of the participant’s time.

4. The Crucible Is Your Sponsorship

The number one cause of failure in training programs and change initiatives is the lack of commitment from the very top. What the leaders do in your organization without exception will permeate your entire company. When your top managers agree with your program goals in principle yet fail to reflect such in their own behavior, they signal to each and every employee that change isn’t really necessary.

Training usually has to start at the top with individuals who have the necessary prerequisites of genuine integrity, consistency and committed drive. Even top managers (who are often in denial) need to learn the necessary skills to be effective role models. They also need to participate in the design and delivery of the training if real measures of performance are to be gained. In most cases, the importance of implementing new skills and behaviors require your top people to go through your targeted training first. Afterwards they can then teach subsequent courses, at least initially, and serve as role models to reinforce the new goals, attitudes and skill growth.

The more committed you, as the top officer, and your team become, the more likely your training initiative will turn into real behavioral and performance change. It’s actually about what you want most.

5. Follow Through With Reinforcement

The final ingredient to guarantee training success is to gain commitment and consensus to begin practicing what was learned in the program – – to begin practicing the new behaviors and skills immediately. The discomfort of implementation needs to be followed up regularly and continuously in every possible way. Management by walking around, talking up good examples, writing reports of progress – –whatever works – – need to be enthusiastically pursued.

After all, old habits die hard. You are absolutely required to reinforce and support the new kinds of behavior after they learned. Design intangible rewards that both leaders and followers will appreciate. Praise is invaluable; voice is crucial. Example is everything! (Also appreciate that monetary rewards while necessary seldom result in the permanent changes you are looking for.)

Yes, steadily modeling the way is absolutely necessary for the success. What you are is what your employees will become. Would you have it any other way? You’re the one building your company and you get to choose how that happens. So what exactly, do you want to do?

Plan to GET BETTER FASTER in a few hours per quarter… but how?

Your Invitation to a Complimentary Call or Visit

Our staff is available to discuss any organizational challenge you are facing. (We promise no sales pitch or obligation – just an opportunity to get clarity on a pressing organizational issue.) To arrange a complimentary, no-strings-attached, conversation please contact Andrew Pe’trick at 204-480-6606 or email andrew@worksystemscanada.com and the right professional will be directed to you as our gift.