If you could wave a magic wand and give all your people the training they need so they would be performing at peak levels, then that would truly be a magical experience. It isn't, however, the reality. Nevertheless, you use assessment to pinpoint employees' training needs and devise personalized training to them.
For training to be effective, it must be meaningful to the student. The content must resonate with the individual and move him or her further along in career experience and job performance.
According to a Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) white paper, "The results of the needs assessment allow the training manager to set the training objectives by answering two very basic questions: who, if anyone, needs training, and what training is needed?"
The Right Prescription Can Cure What Ails Your Organization
Using a simple tool, you can become the training doctor, able to diagnose employees' training needs and identify and prescribe the cure. After performing a training needs assessment, you can prioritize training based on critical needs. Assessment allows you to determine the number of employees who need a specific type of training, and it helps you determine how to best use your available resources to enhance performance.
The Aches and Pains of Today's Changing Workforce
Providing the right training for managers, supervisors and team leaders is essential to every organization during these challenging times. Identifying areas of strength and growth can improve management in the following ways:
• Leading and developing teams
• Communicating more effectively with an increasingly diverse workforce
• Setting and achieving goals
• Resolving issues
By assessing training needs promptly, you can reduce difficulties in your organization, save time, reduce costs and build a culture that supports training wisely.
Diagnosis Helps Achieve Business Objectives and Goals
Human capital is the most important asset of every organization. Identifying whether leaders possess the skills necessary to lead that capital should be one of the training organization's most important tasks. Training needs assessment also serves to stimulate employees' awareness of their own areas for development. Identifying the gaps and then focusing the training to close those gaps can move your organization closer to fulfilling business objectives and goals.
The New Cure for Leadership
Vital Learning recently introduced the Leadership Skills Needs Assessment to help organizations identify the areas in which employees need training. The assessment's results are based on each employee's self-perception, and the assessment process evaluates certain areas focused on the essentials of leadership and beyond.
This easy, interactive assessment process provides each individual with a development plan that indicates the relative priority of the recommended courses. Combined with the power of Vital Learning's Leadership Essential Series and Leadership Plus Series, you can easily prescribe pinpointed training for any employee, leading to greater performance throughout the organization.
Examine the Vital Learning Leadership Skills Assessment by clicking on this link. It will take you to a brief contact information form, and then off you go!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Leadership Training: Not the Same Old Highway
Your leadership talent is critical to your organization's success. During tough economic times, reaching goals and outpacing the competition is especially crucial. In 2010, the essential move for training divisions is to transform and change in order to keep up with the times. It's not the same old highway.
Investing wisely in new and existing supervisors requires focus on what is happening on the frontline and on the individual needs of that talent. According to Training + Development Magazine, three essential components for training in the New Year include organizational, analytical and interpersonal focus.
Harvard Business School professor and author Michael Beer says that CEOs who recognize the need to achieve "sustained high commitment from all stakeholders," recognize the value of high commitment, high performance (HCHP), and their organizations will stand out among others because of long periods of excellence. Beer points to firms like Southwest, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard and Toyota as leaders in excellence. Achieving commitment and performance is attainable in any industry; however, most companies haven't reached the HCHP club.
The differentiator, Beer says, is that these companies sustain performance because they achieve three goals:
• Performance Alignment: Organizational design, business processes, goals and measures, and capabilities targeted for a winning strategy.
• Psychological Alignment: Leadership toward a higher purpose, challenging work and making a difference. Human resource management policies and practices geared toward leadership "managing with heart."
• Capacity for Learning and Change: Honest communication at all levels about anything that is a roadblock for meeting goals. Creating a performing organization that equally values a strong learning system and a strong culture.
A Case for Changing What Highway Your Supervisors Are On
Consider this scenario: Ron works for a pharmaceutical company in Indiana. He's been with the company for five years as a sales representative. Six months ago, Ron was promoted to sales manager and relocated to the home office in New York. Upper management's rationale was that his success in the field would make him a top manager who would increase the productivity of three other regional teams.
It hasn't taken long for upper management to realize that Ron isn't the manager they'd hoped for. It took Ron's staff only a few months to come to the same conclusion. What went wrong?
Success depends on leaders who can create common purpose, identify opportunities and new markets, and motivate and engage their teams.
Ron is a great salesperson, but he is not a great communicator. He failed to articulate his vision to the regional teams and to involve them in the process. He managed by fear, setting unrealistic goals without input from his team. He sent a message in a memo, "If you don't like the goals, then consider looking elsewhere for a job."
It doesn't take long, either, for today's diverse employees to recognize a poor manager. Some of the company's top salespeople have already left the organization. Ron's heavy hand was his own style and did not reflect the values of the organization. As a result, the regional teams have missed their sales goals two quarters in a row. Ron has blamed the teams for poor performance, and he raised goals again without team input.
Innovation for a New Highway
Upper management at the pharmaceutical company is looking to replace Ron, but the damage is done. Having a great person from the field doesn't always translate to great leadership. The truth is that this situation is not only Ron's fault. This has been a pattern in this company for over a year.
The company has stalled along the highway. Due to the economy the company chose to drop its leadership training program and suspended other training programs, citing a lack of time and resources.
What the company should be doing is practicing innovation and transformation to boost its training division. Ron, and others like him, could have become a better leader if assessment and training had been in place to pinpoint needs for the following:
• Fundamental management and communication skills
• Goal-setting and performance standards skills
• Motivation for productivity skills
• Coaching skills
Time and resources need not be the fallback issues anymore. Today's technology provides innovative training options with blended learning with online training. In addition, asking seasoned leaders or team members to mentor junior leaders and staff through collaborative communication spaces, such as online portals, e-mail, webinars and online corporate communities, can give employees the precise training they need, when they need it.
These solutions can be transformational and cost effective, turning lackluster performance into leadership and teams focused on business processes. Realistic and relevant goals and measures as well as capabilities targeted for a winning strategy are within reach.
According to a study by Jim Trinka, Ph.D. and chief learning officer for the FBI, focusing on developing others and their communication competencies can increase overall leadership effectiveness by 50 to 60 percent.
Study evidence supports the establishment of a performance-managed organizational culture - not from a command and control perspective but rather one that involves a coaching environment and conscious attempts at continuous dialogue within work teams to achieve a balance between driving for results and interpersonal skills.
Transforming Training in 2010
Vital Learning's innovative training tools can put your organization's training on the new highway to optimize learning and maximize your return-on-investment (ROI). Armed with assessment, online programs and training strategies through its affiliate network of professionals, Vital Learning can help you transform your organization with sustainable leadership.
Investing wisely in new and existing supervisors requires focus on what is happening on the frontline and on the individual needs of that talent. According to Training + Development Magazine, three essential components for training in the New Year include organizational, analytical and interpersonal focus.
Harvard Business School professor and author Michael Beer says that CEOs who recognize the need to achieve "sustained high commitment from all stakeholders," recognize the value of high commitment, high performance (HCHP), and their organizations will stand out among others because of long periods of excellence. Beer points to firms like Southwest, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard and Toyota as leaders in excellence. Achieving commitment and performance is attainable in any industry; however, most companies haven't reached the HCHP club.
The differentiator, Beer says, is that these companies sustain performance because they achieve three goals:
• Performance Alignment: Organizational design, business processes, goals and measures, and capabilities targeted for a winning strategy.
• Psychological Alignment: Leadership toward a higher purpose, challenging work and making a difference. Human resource management policies and practices geared toward leadership "managing with heart."
• Capacity for Learning and Change: Honest communication at all levels about anything that is a roadblock for meeting goals. Creating a performing organization that equally values a strong learning system and a strong culture.
A Case for Changing What Highway Your Supervisors Are On
Consider this scenario: Ron works for a pharmaceutical company in Indiana. He's been with the company for five years as a sales representative. Six months ago, Ron was promoted to sales manager and relocated to the home office in New York. Upper management's rationale was that his success in the field would make him a top manager who would increase the productivity of three other regional teams.
It hasn't taken long for upper management to realize that Ron isn't the manager they'd hoped for. It took Ron's staff only a few months to come to the same conclusion. What went wrong?
Success depends on leaders who can create common purpose, identify opportunities and new markets, and motivate and engage their teams.
Ron is a great salesperson, but he is not a great communicator. He failed to articulate his vision to the regional teams and to involve them in the process. He managed by fear, setting unrealistic goals without input from his team. He sent a message in a memo, "If you don't like the goals, then consider looking elsewhere for a job."
It doesn't take long, either, for today's diverse employees to recognize a poor manager. Some of the company's top salespeople have already left the organization. Ron's heavy hand was his own style and did not reflect the values of the organization. As a result, the regional teams have missed their sales goals two quarters in a row. Ron has blamed the teams for poor performance, and he raised goals again without team input.
Innovation for a New Highway
Upper management at the pharmaceutical company is looking to replace Ron, but the damage is done. Having a great person from the field doesn't always translate to great leadership. The truth is that this situation is not only Ron's fault. This has been a pattern in this company for over a year.
The company has stalled along the highway. Due to the economy the company chose to drop its leadership training program and suspended other training programs, citing a lack of time and resources.
What the company should be doing is practicing innovation and transformation to boost its training division. Ron, and others like him, could have become a better leader if assessment and training had been in place to pinpoint needs for the following:
• Fundamental management and communication skills
• Goal-setting and performance standards skills
• Motivation for productivity skills
• Coaching skills
Time and resources need not be the fallback issues anymore. Today's technology provides innovative training options with blended learning with online training. In addition, asking seasoned leaders or team members to mentor junior leaders and staff through collaborative communication spaces, such as online portals, e-mail, webinars and online corporate communities, can give employees the precise training they need, when they need it.
These solutions can be transformational and cost effective, turning lackluster performance into leadership and teams focused on business processes. Realistic and relevant goals and measures as well as capabilities targeted for a winning strategy are within reach.
According to a study by Jim Trinka, Ph.D. and chief learning officer for the FBI, focusing on developing others and their communication competencies can increase overall leadership effectiveness by 50 to 60 percent.
Study evidence supports the establishment of a performance-managed organizational culture - not from a command and control perspective but rather one that involves a coaching environment and conscious attempts at continuous dialogue within work teams to achieve a balance between driving for results and interpersonal skills.
Transforming Training in 2010
Vital Learning's innovative training tools can put your organization's training on the new highway to optimize learning and maximize your return-on-investment (ROI). Armed with assessment, online programs and training strategies through its affiliate network of professionals, Vital Learning can help you transform your organization with sustainable leadership.
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