RealTime Leadership

The current global economy is forcing people and organizations to find ways to do business more efficiently and more effectively. Companies are revisiting strategy, markets, R&D, size of workforce, and their entire cost structure. There is an intense focus on business results with an added emphasis on trimming anything that doesn’t directly contribute to the success of the organization.  These same forces are affecting training and development departments at corporations across the globe.

It is within this environment, where training departments are being asked to cut back on resources while increasing their value, that my colleague Dr. Stephen Gill and I set out to use our research and experience to help organizations make their learning interventions more effective. Specifically, we want to provide training professionals and frontline managers with a simple framework and strategy to get more from their investment in learning. Our new e-book, “Getting More from Your Investment in Training: The 5As Framework,” is for training professionals and business managers who are grappling with this new environment and the heightened expectations for results.

This book is not about how to be a stand-up trainer, or how to design e-learning, or even how to get more buns on seats. It is about what your organization needs to do to ensure that people learn and use that learning to achieve business goals.  We identify the organizational factors that have the greatest overall impact on how learning contributes to business success.  And then we offer tools and strategies for increasing the impact of learning at each step in the learning process.  We call these organizational factors the 5As, and they are;

1. Alignment – Align learning with strategic goals by helping learners understand how the skills and knowledge they acquire through training can be applied to deliver business results.

2. Anticipation – Research clearly shows that if learners anticipate success before training they are much more likely to experience success.  Help your learners anticipate success.
3. Alliance – Create a learning alliance between learner and boss.  Learners need feedback and coaching, especially as they attempt to apply new skills and behaviors on the job.
4. Application – Apply learning immediately after training, not six months later or even never, as so often happens.  Create opportunities for learners to apply new skills on the job, and receive relevant and timely feedback.
5. Accountability – Hold learner and organization accountable for business results from training.  Establish the expectation from the beginning that training is critical for organizational success and all participants will be held accountable to apply what they’ve learned to meet business goals.

This is the time, more than ever, to re-examine your training function and make all of your learning interventions (classes, simulations, e-learning, coaching, internships, etc.) more efficient and effective.  By applying the 5As framework to your organization, you can immediately identify areas for improvement that will help you achieve your business goals.  Download the first two chapters free.

Trust can be difficult to define and measure, but there is wide-spread agreement that high levels of trust correlate with high levels of employee engagement.  RealTime Performance has done considerable work helping companies define values and identify competencies, and in almost every instance, establishing and building trust is designated a critical component for leadership development and organizational culture.  This result holds up across all industries, job functions and leadership levels.  There is no doubt that trust is important, but how valuable is trust to employees and to companies?

New research (Helliwell and Huang 2008) has found that a 10% increase in trust is equivalent to a 36% increase in monetary compensation.  To get to this result, the researchers took a two-step approach. First, they determined that income has an impact on life satisfaction, no surprise there.  Then:

If the influence of income on life satisfaction is significant, then the income-equivalent values of other significant determinants can be measured as the size of the change in income that would have the same well-being effect  as a given change in the other variable of interest.

And in this case, the “other variable of interest” is trust in management.  Using this methodology they were able to assign a monetary value to increasing levels of trust in the workplace.  The results were independently verified using data from three major social surveys.

Let’s consider the staggering implications of this study.  If a company is able to increase trust by 10%, it has the equivalent effect on employee life satisfaction as handing-out a 36% raise in salary or bonus.  For a company with a $100 million dollar payroll, we’re talking about a $36 million dollar value.   In other words, investing in an initiative to build trust has enormous potential.

All of this research begs the question, “how does an organization build trust?”  Last week I interviewedRoss Smith, a manager at Microsoft who faced this issue within his 85-person Windows Security Testing group.  Ross and his team came up with innovative strategies involving productivity games, wikis, social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies. 

What I find most interesting about Ross Smith’s approach is the way he encouraged his team to develop its own initiative for building trust.  He did not impose a solution from the outside, rather, he asked his team, “how can we build trust?” thereby involving them in the solution.  By taking this strategy he also demonstrated trust in his team, that they would come up with a worthy and valuable strategy.