Will Kenny
"Think Pieces"
(free articles)
Best Training Practices
Will Kenny
3927 York Ave N
Robbinsdale, MN 55422
612-978-3050
More or Less . . .
a retreat to core practices may be your best service to your company
(reprinted from The Training Tipsheet)
A personal confession: one of my favorite things to watch on television is Jay Leno's "Headlines" segment on the Monday edition of the Tonight Show. This is where he gathers newspaper clippings, flyers, and advertisements that viewers have sent in, all of which contain oddities or incongruities that are amusing in themselves.
Recently, he shared a page from a community education class catalog. Under the heading of "physical education," there was a list of courses on jogging, cross training, and other fitness activities.
What amused Leno about them was that these classes were all listed as being online courses. He made some jokes about wearing out your wrist, clicking in your cross training class.
Now, being in the training business, we know that the online courses probably helped people set up fitness programs, track their progress, perhaps provided for mentoring by e-mail, and the like. An online course on a fitness topic is hardly unreasonable.
At the same time, I don't think most of us believe that a purely online approach would be as effective, for something like cross training or jogging, as would be working with an instructor in person. We see a familiar pattern in which efficiency of delivery may have been embraced at the expense of effectiveness.
In other words, I get the joke, and the joke, unfortunately, is on those participants who leap at the convenience of the online course, and produce very poor results for themselves, because that particular approach is not going to help them very much.
Still, we can see this as a familiar example of "doing more with less." This is a phrase that you hear constantly these days, for as training budgets are cut back, many companies have training departments that are looking for ways to deliver all or most of what they delivered before, but with reduced resources.
What about doing less with less?
Instead of delivering the same training you are now, using fewer resources, I'm suggesting that for many companies, the best approach is to cut back what you deliver, to narrow your training goals. Rather than spread ever thinner resources over the same broad expanse of training ground, retreat.
Apply the limited resources you have, or have left, solely to the most fundamental topics in your training catalog, the ones that produce essential core results for your organization. I'm saying that if you are building a house, now is the time to make sure your crew knows how to make a firm foundation for a sturdy house, and to skip the lessons on wallpapering. If you're building a cruise ship, put all the resources at hand into making it safe and seaworthy, and scratch the tutorial on how to book entertainment for the ship's lounge -- leave them to figure it out for themselves.
Figure out what really, really matters to your company, and put all your resources into advancing those topics. Let the rest go.
Yes, your training catalog will shrink. It may give the appearance that you are doing less for your company than you were before.
And frankly, many training directors and chief learning officers won't have the courage to do that. They will go on doing many things poorly, instead of doing a few things well -- and they may end up doing many unimportant things poorly.
But in the best run organizations, the training function will do a better job than ever of ensuring that employees master the fundamentals, the core strengths of the company. It will make a direct contribution to the company's health, as we all fight to emerge from difficult economic times, and that will be good for everyone -- including for the training department.
© 2009 Best Training Practices -- Will Kenny
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