Why Training Can Fail
‘Hmm, that’s a shame. That really should have worked’, the mechanic said to me after replacing a rather expensive sensor on my (still broken) car. My credit card, if it could speak, might have had slightly different, more colourful words to use than ‘that’s a shame’, but I was determined to press on and solve the problem with my car, knowing full well that repairs could be expensive and like finding a needle in a haystack.
The mechanic and I had agreed that the best course of action was to change the sensor because the sensor was reading as faulty on the electronic reader the mechanic had tested the car with. But in the end, after more digging, the problem the car was experiencing turned out to be related to a small, loose clip, buried deep amongst the myriad hoses and pipes under the inlet. Simply tighten back up again, and off you go. Charge, an hour or two of labour time.
The ‘parts cannon’
It was only later that I came to reflect back on this story and realise how much similarity it has with the world of training. In car circles, what happened with my car actually has a name: ‘firing the parts cannon’! The term is often used to describe what some car owners do, sometimes out of desperation, in the hope of fixing their car – they simply ‘fire parts’ at the car until the problem gets resolved, no matter how long, costly, and wasteful this approach might be.
Sadly, in some businesses, the exact same thing happens with training. Take a typical manager. He or she is working away, trying to make ends meet at work with a limited budget and ever shrinking timescales. This manager then spots a weakness or problem in the sales team somewhere. Let’s say the manager sees one team member prioritising low value tasks over safety-critical high value tasks. Or they see another with a messy desk, unable to find anything. The manager, thinking on their feet and under pressure, decides to arrange a training session for these staff members to fix the problem. They ‘fire the cannon’! Off the staff members go to a time management course.
It should be noted that the manager in question is behaving very admirably given their situation. Some other managers wouldn’t even bother, hoping the problem will go away, or worse, might pop down to the sales floor and give the team ‘a piece of their mind’. But this manager does try to do the right thing. The electronic reader has been plugged into the car, and a big flashing exclamation mark next to ‘time management’ is hovering on the screen. So, it seems perfectly logical that the time management course will help fix things.
And make no mistake, the course goes well, and the team members certainly do learn a few things about time management. But the core problems, the things that cause some of these time management issues, aren’t actually addressed. This shows in some of the feedback forms: ‘Yes, happy to go, enjoyed the course, but there were one or two other people, namely decision-makers, who should’ve gone too!’ Or another: ‘Good course, good tutor, still think having one properly defined line manager would help more though!’
The problem? The manager, while very well-meaning, has treated the symptoms, not the cause.
Shouldn’t we try to treat the cause?
Even though the problem could have been approached a different way, all is not lost. At this point, a skilled training consultant will be able to still work with the business on resolving some of the more deep-seated issues. For example, on the time management workshop the trainer discovered that the two employees who gave feedback were suffering the effects of a wider organisational problem. This is very often how some of the best consultation starts!
The first member of staff, who prioritised low-value tasks, had never actually undertaken the company’s onboarding procedure as he joined before it was written. He also wasn’t managed properly day-by-day because his line manager had recently moved to a more external-facing role. This meant that the expectations placed upon him weren’t very clear and nobody was actually reviewing his work. So, he simply completed the easy to resolve problems first while at work. No one told him this was a problem, so he assumed it was fine!
The other member of staff, who had the messy, disorganised desk, worked in a very ‘central hub’ kind of role, co-ordinating between teams. This meant that she was relied on by lots of other members of staff to keep track of paperwork and jobs. Hence the messy desk. The time management session certainly helped her here as she got some tips on organising and handling paperwork – but the fundamental problem remained that she needed support. In an organisation of this size, her job role was simply too big to handle alone. It had evolved slowly into this type of job – no one was measuring or monitoring the workload that had grown on her.
The blame game
What am I saying? The manager who booked the training is to blame? The members of staff? The other employees? The other managers? Not quite. At work, we love to compartmentalise things – everything is the responsibility of somebody; mistakes can always be attributed to someone or a single cause; everyone has a neat, well-defined box to work in, and so on. The world doesn’t work this way – businesses are messy and often grow in a hard-to-measure, haphazard way.
And very often, problems like this aren’t really a question of ‘blame’. Instead, these problems are often organic and home-grown. They slowly develop, and problems, like weeds in a garden, are only noticeable when they become overwhelming. To this end, treating the symptom, while it won’t resolve the problem itself, can still be the first step in the training journey, that goes something like this:
- Recognition of a problem, ideally with involvement from an experienced consultant.
- Treating of the initial symptoms, via a training workshop.
- Learning more of the root causes (which come out of the training workshop), via a training report and consultancy.
- Treating the root causes, via coaching and more consultancy.
Essentially, this is just a process of knowledge, learning things about ourselves and our businesses that we didn’t even realise and identifying ways of resolving them. Using the weeds example, it aims to pull the weeds up by the root rather than simply cutting them back. This ‘iterative’ process follows a similar pattern to Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous quote:
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
The problem arises, and the training fails, when this process is not followed. Luckily in our story of this manager looking to resolve a time management issue the business, in the end, did decide to continue investigating and actioned many of the points that came out of the training and consultancy. The organisation changed structurally, and staff found ways of resolving problems themselves, naturally, through empowerment. But sadly, this often isn’t the case. In other cases, the manager is satisfied that the ‘box has been ticked’ by the training and moves on to other issues. Nothing ultimately gets resolved and after a short boost of energy the trainees are straight back to doing what they did previously, the budget spent on training wasted.
Conclusion
So next time you’re looking to resolve issues in your organisation via training, don’t give up! Steering the training in the right direction initially is the best start, ideally shaped with an initial assessment meeting before any training runs, and then home in on your objectives with further consultancy and some wider, deeper questions about how things run. This will produce much more powerful results that can pay back the investment many more times in a short period.
Consultancy from Total Training Solutions
To learn more about ‘treating the cause’ of the organisational issues you might be facing (and many other pitfalls), get in touch today for a no obligation discussion of your needs. We will work with you to help empower you and your staff to achieve better results in your business and resolve team-building difficulties you might be facing.
