Clearly, the company had to tackle these systemic issues before it could implement a productive learning program for managers. Indeed, improving cross-unit integration would itself be a capability-development experience for the senior team and key managers that would lead to a better understanding of skills gaps that training and education might address.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Why Leadership Training Fails And What To Do About It - Part 3
Overcoming Barriers to Change
In our work helping managers have honest conversations about
the effectiveness of their organizations, we hear about six common barriers.
Companies consistently struggle with (1) unclear direction on strategy and
values, which often leads to conflicting priorities; (2) senior executives who
don’t work as a team and haven’t committed to a new direction or acknowledged
necessary changes in their own behavior; (3) a top-down or laissez-faire style
by the leader, which prevents honest conversation about problems; (4) a lack of
coordination across businesses, functions, or regions due to poor
organizational design; (5) inadequate leadership time and attention given to
talent issues; and (6) employees’ fear of telling the senior team about
obstacles to the organization’s effectiveness.
Because of that fear, we call these barriers “silent
killers.” They almost always appear together, and they block the systemic
changes needed to make training and education programs effective. We saw
firsthand how they initially thwarted leadership development at a UK medical
technology company. The CEO, unsatisfied with his management bench, sought
advice on building it out. Though his partners in HR recommended investments in
training, he instead took a step back and asked us to help his senior team
enable managers in the organization to speak truth to power about barriers to
their development.
A task force empowered to conduct confidential interviews
reported that lack of training was not the issue. Rather, the senior team had
not articulated a clear strategy and corporate values, so managers did not
understand what practices and behaviors were expected of them. Nor did the top
team spend much time discussing talent and planning developmental assignments
for high potentials. In fact, because senior management had not created an
integrated corporation, leaders were hoarding the best talent and transferring
the worst to enable their own business units to succeed.
Clearly, the company had to tackle these systemic issues before it could implement a productive learning program for managers. Indeed, improving cross-unit integration would itself be a capability-development experience for the senior team and key managers that would lead to a better understanding of skills gaps that training and education might address.
Clearly, the company had to tackle these systemic issues before it could implement a productive learning program for managers. Indeed, improving cross-unit integration would itself be a capability-development experience for the senior team and key managers that would lead to a better understanding of skills gaps that training and education might address.
This is the approach to talent development that we advocate,
in six basic steps:
1. The senior team clearly defines values and an inspiring
strategic direction.
2. After gathering candid, anonymous observations and insights
from managers and employees, the team diagnoses barriers to strategy execution
and learning. It then redesigns the organization’s roles, responsibilities, and
relationships to overcome those barriers and motivate change.
3. Day-to-day coaching and process consultation help people
become more effective in that new design.
4. The organization adds training where needed.
5. Success in changing behavior is gauged using new metrics for
individual and organizational performance.
6. Systems for selecting, evaluating, developing, and promoting
talent are adjusted to reflect and sustain the changes in organizational
behavior.
Note that problems are diagnosed from the ground up. Those
confidential employee interviews are critical for exposing the silent killers,
including deficiencies in capabilities and talent management, because leaders
often lack the objectivity to spot glitches in systems they have created. By
addressing management practices and leadership behavior that shape the system
before training individual employees, leaders create a favorable context for
applying learning. The systemic changes encourage—even require—the desired behaviors.
In practice, these steps tend to overlap and are
periodically recycled for continual improvement. We list them in sequence to
emphasize the importance of placing individual development after organizational
redesign. You also want leaders, their senior teams, and lower-level managers
to develop on the job, as they learn individually and collectively to enact
their redefined roles, responsibilities, and relationships.
A consultant in HR
can take advantage of real-time successes and failures to help managers reflect
on the consequences of their actions and see alternatives. This “in vivo”
approach also allows people to learn how to learn so that they can adapt to
ever-changing circumstances—something that classroom training won’t equip them
to do. Just as important, learning and performance improvements occur
simultaneously, enabling the business to recoup its investment immediately and
more effectively.
To illustrate, let’s return to the example at the beginning
of this article. After SMA’s micro-electronic products division found that its
initial training hadn’t changed ineffective patterns of behavior, it followed
the six steps, with much better results. The new general manager asked
organizational development specialists to interview key managers and
professionals in every function and activity in MEPD’s value chain.
Their
diagnosis revealed why and how interfunctional conflict, political behavior,
and embedded managerial practices were undermining new-product development and
employee commitment. The process exposed some barriers to effectiveness:
unclear strategy and priorities, a senior team that was trying to manage
new-product development initiatives from the top but lacked the necessary
information, and a siloed organization that hindered coordination.
MEPD created cross-functional new-product development teams
headed by leaders from marketing—a major departure from the structure that had
blocked teamwork in the past. Roles and responsibilities were changed
accordingly. For instance, senior management held the teams accountable through
quarterly reviews at which they had to describe their progress in developing
products and also report on their own effectiveness and any problems in
collaboration among functional departments. This ongoing assessment helped
sustain behavioral change.
Learning and development for both senior leaders and team
members came in the form of hands-on coaching and process consultation. An
internal organizational development consultant provided guidance as senior
leaders conducted the reviews. When a few team leaders complained that senior
management was getting too involved in the details, the consultant facilitated
a conversation about how that behavior could undermine others’ commitment to
the new organization. Team members immediately embraced their new roles, which
gave them a feeling of ownership and investment.
Though early meetings were not
very effective, because people weren’t accustomed to collaborating so closely
with colleagues from other functions, consultants from HR attended most
meetings in the first year and helped the teams gel.
Within a few months, after analyzing shared information,
three teams recommended that their projects be canceled because they realized
the products could not succeed. This increased the senior team’s confidence in
the new organizational arrangements and reinforced the new pattern of
management.
Project team members said that they had learned a lot about how to
work together and had come to appreciate the complexity of business problems
and decision making in different functions. That motivated them to enroll in
classroom training, where they learned how analytics could sharpen their
approach to product planning and product management. Coming after their
immersion in the revised way of working, the knowledge felt relevant and
useful.
At the end of two years a rigorous evaluation showed a
remarkable change in leadership and teamwork. Performance had improved as well.
MEPD had developed nine new products in those two years, compared with five
over the previous four years. Revenue and profits had increased significantly.
The same organization that had not responded to a massive investment in
individual training transformed itself by redesigning its roles,
responsibilities, and relationships; learning how to live into them with the
help of coaches and advisers; and then using targeted classroom training to
pick up new methods and tools.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment