Companies are confident they can develop employees’ skills, yet employees don’t feel the same, according to recent research. Managers need more support in identifying colleagues’ training needs if that gap is to be bridged, says Gina Overton.
A recent study from Cornerstone found a disconnect between the perceptions of employers and employees in several areas. While 77% of UK organisations felt confident in their ability to develop skills, only 56% of employees agreed. And while 89% of UK employers were confident that they had the resources to develop skills, only 64% of employees said the same.
This begs several questions around how organisations are conducting their training needs analyses. The disconnect between employer and employee could be due to multiple factors. High on that list though will be the capability of line managers and the extent to which organisations are investing in the critical role that line managers must play in developing skills, assessing, and identifying the needs of individuals and comparing those to business strategy and needs.
Training needs
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Line managers have a central role to play in holding conversations with individual team members and providing specific feedback to the company to inform the kind of training that those team members receive to do their jobs better. And yet, although the role of the line manager is pivotal, it has become totally underrated by many organisations.
They have frequently never been trained in that needs analysis conversation. Many are neither competent nor confident at that conversation, unable to do so without sandwiching the need between two lines of: “I think you’re brilliant at this and this but…you might need some development here.” That approach isn’t particularly productive.
Scratching the surface
More needs to go into showing line managers how to ask these questions correctly or whether they need to go deeper than, for example, a colleague needs help with strategic business planning to understand instead what part of strategic business planning the individual can’t do.
Otherwise, you will only ever be scratching the surface. You will be left with a top-line view that strategic business planning isn’t being done as well as you would like it to be, but you won’t necessarily know which aspects of strategic business planning you need to do something about.
Essentially, businesses need to do more to support line mangers in creating and keeping high performing teams by driving the impact of training curriculums and budgets.
Line managers need to be empowered and able to give consistent and quality coaching in support of a 70/20/10 capability model (where the majority of learning comes from experience, 20% from ‘social learning’ and 10% through formal means).
When you become a line manager – perhaps because you have excelled in your role as a salesperson – you become a manager, not a salesperson anymore. And yet there aren’t enough organisations that invest in line management training to help them understand their new role.
The 70-20-10 principle is the way to explain that. It is the 10% piece of this principle, the classroom-based or other formal learning, which is the most expensive, so this needs to be well targeted and well understood as to what the outcome of the training is going to be and what the impact is of what you are trying to deliver.
Finding the time
A key part of that process is to ensure that line managers have the time within their own role responsibilities to effectively accommodate their new responsibilities. In some companies, line managers are assessed 50% on their own performance and 50% on the performance of their team.
But if you’ve got a full daytime job, there is not often the time allowed to be that kind of line manager – to do the thinking, to have the coaching conversations. So it’s not only that they may not have the skills, but also because it’s not built into their job specification to have the time to be a decent, effective line manager. It’s all just on top of the day job.
In many companies, it has become fashionable for staff members to be able to personalise their learning journey. But how can that work if they can’t accurately identify where their skill gaps are? Do they just do what they fancy doing, what sounds interesting? Have they got enough self-awareness to be able to make those decisions?
If you’ve got a full daytime job, there is not often the time allowed to be that kind of line manager – to do the thinking, to have the coaching conversations.”
If a company only has a finite training budget per head, how does it prioritise and guide staff as to where they should be spending their training allocation? How can an organisation drive ways of working that are aligned to its values and competences?
This comes back to the organisation being dependent on the skills of the line managers to direct, to prioritise and to be giving feedback. Somebody told me some years ago that you should always try to train to your strengths, not train up your weaknesses. There is too much ambiguity as people move away from a truly structured, qualified, detailed capability conversation.
Companies that deploy a competency framework with a small range of core competencies and a wider list of sub-competencies can delve under the detail of some of these areas to really explore where the challenging areas are that they want to put into their training curriculum and how they want to take that forward.
The challenging part of that is that the line manager is the person that validates the competency framework after the individual has rated themselves.
Perception vs reality
The bottom line is that, even if a company has the best curriculum in the world, the learning experience will be diminished if staff feel their time is too pressured by the demands of the day job, if they can’t fully concentrate on learning because they need to keep an eye on email or have the remaining time post-training under severe pressure to make up for time taken out to learn.
There is clearly a gap between perception and reality for businesses in relation to the tools and training their teams have and therefore the ability to drive productivity and growth.
It is important for companies to look at the kind of learning culture they are adopting. This is not only to provide technological support to ensure that employees can freely access relevant, targeted and personalised learning content but more importantly to create a culture that actively encourages self-learning. They must ensure that line managers role-model self-learning and support their teams to take time to undertake learning, rather than just telling them that it’s got to be done, but not providing the support to help employees to find the time to do it.
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