A Closer Look at What Goes Wrong
Education with the objective of individual growth is worthy
in its own right, of course, and people are eager to acquire knowledge and
skills that will help them advance in their careers. However, the primary
reason senior executives and HR invest in management training is to make their
leaders and organizations more effective, and results on that front have been
disappointing. Three-quarters of the nearly 1,500 senior managers at 50
organizations interviewed in 2011 by CEB were dissatisfied with their
companies’ learning and development function. Only one in four reported that it
was critical to achieving business outcomes. Decades’ worth of studies show why
it isn’t working, but, sadly, that understanding has not made its way into most
companies.
Researchers noted problems with training programs as early
as the 1950s, during the seminal Ohio State leadership studies. They found that
one program had succeeded in changing frontline supervisors’ attitudes about
how they should manage, but a follow-up study revealed that most supervisors
had then regressed to their pre-training views. The only exceptions were those
whose bosses practiced and believed in the new leadership style the program was
designed to teach.
Then, in the 1980s, one of us helped conduct a study showing
that training programs did not facilitate organizational change: Companies that
tried to launch major transformations by training hundreds or thousands of
employees across many units to behave differently lagged the only company (in a
sample of six) that didn’t kick-start its transformation this way. The problem
was that even well-trained and motivated employees could not apply their new
knowledge and skills when they returned to their units, which were entrenched
in established ways of doing things. In short, the individuals had less power
to change the system surrounding them than that system had to shape them.
The idea that organizational systems—which define roles,
responsibilities, and relationships—have a strong impact on individuals’
mindsets and behavior is supported by a number of studies. For instance,
research by Seymour Lieberman, of the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan, found that unionized frontline workers promoted to
supervisory roles adopted pro-management attitudes, and managers forced by a
recession to return to frontline jobs reverted to pro-union and antimanagement
attitudes.
Further reinforcing the idea, Harvard Business School professor
Boris Groysberg found that “star” analysts on Wall Street, as rated by an
independent agency, did not perform as well or maintain their star status after
moving to another firm. In fact, most of them never regained that status during
the five-year study. Those who did had taken their teams—the systems that had
helped them succeed—with them when they changed companies.
Those findings dovetail with research—by Amy Edmondson, of
HBS, and Anita Woolley, of Carnegie Mellon—showing that organizations need
“fertile soil” in place before the “seeds” of training interventions can grow.
When the researchers looked at a corporate training program aimed at improving
problem solving and communication between managers and subordinates, they
discovered that success varied across the company. Improvements were greater in
units that had already developed a “psychologically safe” climate in which
subordinates felt free to speak up.
From all these streams of research we’ve learned that
education and training gain the most traction within highly visible
organizational change and development efforts championed by senior leaders.
That’s because such efforts motivate people to learn and change; create the
conditions for them to apply what they’ve studied; foster immediate
improvements in individual and organizational effectiveness; and put in place
systems that help sustain the learning.
A poor return on investment isn’t the only bad outcome of
failed training initiatives. Employees below the top become cynical. Corporate
leaders may fool themselves into believing that they are implementing real
change through corporate education, but others in the organization know better,
as we saw in the MEPD example. Why don’t leaders get this? For two reasons.
First, they implicitly view the organization as an
aggregation of individuals. By that logic, people must be selected for and
developed with the “right” knowledge, skills, and attitudes in order to improve
the institution’s effectiveness and performance. So HR defines the requisite
individual competencies according to the company’s strategy and then sells top
management on training programs designed to develop those competencies,
believing that organizational change will follow.
This widely embraced development model doesn’t acknowledge
that organizations are systems of interacting elements: Roles,
responsibilities, and relationships are defined by organizational structure,
processes, leadership styles, people’s professional and cultural backgrounds,
and HR policies and practices. And it doesn’t recognize that all those elements
together drive organizational behavior and performance. If the system does not
change, it will not support and sustain individual behavior change—indeed, it
will set people up to fail.
Second, HR managers and others find it difficult or
impossible to confront senior leaders and their teams with an uncomfortable
truth: A failure to execute on strategy and change organizational behavior is
rooted not in individuals’ deficiencies but, rather, in the policies and
practices created by top management. Those are the things to fix before
training can succeed longer-term. It’s much easier for HR to point to
employees’ competencies as the problem and to training as the clear solution.
That’s a message senior leaders are receptive to hearing.
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