In my previous article, I introduced the application of a new method known as the “academy approach” to accelerate business development, because traditional training no longer delivers the required business results. I’d like to elaborate on how this approach works in practice and share a story of a company successfully adopting it.
Organisations such as GE, IBM, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor, Cisco, Toyota, Huawei, AP (Thailand) Public Company Limited and many more have implemented an academy approach in various aspects of their business and all of them shared the same vision – real development must come from the organisation’s culture and leaders must take part in developing staff within the organisation. In practice, a 5-step plan is the simplest pattern to apply.
The first step, after defining the challenges and addressing any problems, generally begins with the alignment of the vision and direction to ensure that the organisation has a clear and consistent understanding of its strategic direction and its link to future development. In other words, this step will determine what people need to “be” to drive the desired vision.
The second step is to define a unique and specific people brand (DNA) or to outline the key unique attributes of people required to attain business goals. In the case of AP (Thailand), the company wanted to establish a “Sales and Services Academy” to transform ordinary salespeople into “Living Consultants” (LC); preparing staff to “consult” for their customers, not just “sell” and provide information without understanding and insights into the product. An academy approach ensured development was dynamic and sustainable. Initially, the company created belief in a customer service culture in order to adjust its people’s “DNA” to align with the organisation’s vision and mission.
The next step is to create assessments and benchmarks. This is to identify the critical capability gaps between the current people and the desired people brand DNA and categorise the development areas that will have the biggest impact and address performance gaps. Concurrently, criteria for rewards and recognition are created to motivate and provide opportunities for top performers to serve as role models for the future.
Next, a development roadmap must be developed to cultivate a learning culture, with organisational development initiatives to systematically transform people’s behaviours in critical functions. At AP in this stage, APMGroup helped determine the objectives and outcomes so that they could communicate with their potential Living Consultants (LC).
The final step is to measure and improve. This process typically involves third-party outsourcing to measure the results and evaluate behaviours and skills based on established criteria and whether they adjusted to the new direction or not.
This approach was introduced to AP (Thailand) back in 2009, and the company has received better results in terms of dynamic learning, with its Living Consultants paying attention to buyers’ and residents’ unique personalities. Through an academy approach, AP (Thailand) successfully created a long-term customer service culture deeply ingrained in its people, which can easily be seen as its competitive edge in a very competitive industry.
At the end of the day, human resources are still a vital factor for any organisation to be successful in delivering business results. However, traditional training is no longer an effective solution for human resources development when the real need is to provide endless learning and continuous improvement.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisation and People Development Consultancy. She can be reached by e-mail at arinya_t@apm.co.th