Times are tough; I want performance improvement | Bangkok Post: business

BY INVITATION

Traditionally as new challenges arise, business leaders turn to their human resources departments and make them accountable for training people to work more effectively and produce tangible results. Sometimes it seems that as resources shrink, competition increases, organisations merge and partner, and fresh disasters strike, the need for tangible results grows ever greater. Many leaders I speak to, however, still express their frustration that the money spent on training just isn't turning into the tangible results they need to see. They complain that Key Performance Indicators remain missed and targets and objectives remain out of sight. They ask me is training a waste of time, and my answer is Yes _ and No.

Training will always be required, but I advise the leaders I work with to be extremely clear on what they really want their development efforts to achieve. I ask them to describe the tangible goals they wish to see, not what they want their people to learn, and to use this as a basis for designing development interventions.

Too often, organisations have sought to use what they call "training" as a means to create behavioural change. Unfortunately, most of the time a training programme can only provide new skills to use in a particular period of time. The outcomes often remain the same, with behaviour and, more importantly, performance unchanged.