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Letter from the Editor
I’m having a hard time starting this letter. Not because I don’t know WHAT to say; I just don’t know HOW to say it.
So let me describe a recent scenario. I was doing a needs assessment for a client – a training department at a fairly large company. Part of the needs assessment, of course, included interviews with the training department’s stakeholders: the VP of Sales, the VP of Customer Service, graduates – recent and not-so-recent – of training programs and courses.
Getting to one of the meetings, we were running a bit late because the previous interview had gone a bit long. We entered the office 10 minutes late to find six staff members patiently waiting for us. We immediately got busy and finished our interview a few minutes early.
 As the staff filed out of the office back to their jobs, the VP closed the door and asked us to sit down. He politely stated, “You were 10 minutes late. I pulled five staff members off their jobs for this meeting. This is the problem with training. You just don’t understand our business.”
Of course, the VP was right. But his indictment wasn’t simply about being late to the meeting. His indictment was, “If you knew our business –
REALLY KNEW OUR BUSINESS – you would never be late because time is all we have to work with. And since you don’t know our business, how can you teach my people to do their business?”
How often do we as trainers fail to measure up? How often are we ill-prepared for our classes? How often do we fail to start our training on time – or end on time? How often do we avoid getting on the floor, out in the field, on the job for fear of being exposed for how little we actually know?
If we are to be recognized as a legitimate, bottom-line-impacting part of the company, we need to know the business AND we need to know OUR business of training and improving performance.
In this edition of The Key, we feature our insights on trainer development – knowing OUR business of training. We also feature an interview with Tom Davenport, one of today’s thought leaders on the subject of knowledge workers – a category of workers who are increasingly crowding our classrooms.
I hope that I never fail to surpass the expectations of all with whom I work.
Terry
The Value of Trainer Certification Programs
As a company grows, the training department must lead the way in terms of skill, proficiency, and capability. It needs to not only LEAD change and growth, it must MODEL it as well. A trainer development and certification program ensures that everyone in your department measures up to the same high standards.
Do We Need a Trainer Development and Certification Program?
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Is the company growing or evolving? As training departments grow, there is a tendency to create processes that isolate the department from its clients – sales, operations, customer service, etc. A successful training evolution creates processes that keeps training tightly connected with the business, processes that get in front of performance needs (as opposed to reacting to training requests).
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Do training staff have a set of design, development, and delivery competencies?
As training departments evolve, so do the competencies that the leadership team expects of their training staff. Roles evolve and what may have been a desired skillset in the past may no longer be desirable in the future. Without clearly defined competencies, training staff are unable to develop in areas that are important for their future success.
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Do training staff have a common foundation of skills required to excel? Many companies who have grown or evolved may have training staff with skill ranging from advanced to non-existent. Some staff have migrated into the training department based on expertise in a specific subject matter. Others have been hired specifically for their instructional design or delivery skills. As a result, there exists no common foundation of skills – or even language – required to develop and excel.
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Are there benchmarks by which existing trainers are measured, new trainers are hired, and all trainers are developed? Tied into competencies and skills are metrics. Organizations – including the training department – tend to measure what’s important. Unclear – or nonexistent – metrics leave training staff members confused and the training leadership team frustrated.
How Does Development and Certification Help Grow the Company?
A development and certification program for your training staff provides the basis for accelerated growth.
A well-designed program provides specific expectations and benchmarks
for:
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Instructional design and development |
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Delivery effectiveness |
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Classroom management |
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Learner engagement and sensitivity |
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Professionalism |
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Learning evaluation |
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Overall instructional effectiveness |
A development and certification program also provides a career path for trainers and instructional designers. Once benchmarks have been established, staff can see how their self-development efforts can be rewarded with advancement opportunities.
Development and certification also provide managers and supervisors the opportunity to manage and develop employees.
From simple to complex, a development and certification program can increase the effectiveness of the training department in meeting the needs of your business.
Coaching and Developmental Activities
A key component to a Trainer Development and Certification Program is the Trainer Action Plan (TAP). The TAP is a booklet in which participants identify the potential impacts of concepts to their courses or their teaching. The TAP, in essence, becomes the trainer’s development plan.
Ongoing coaching and development is important in any position. Because most trainers work fairly independently, it is important to proactively create coaching and developmental opportunities. These opportunities can be individual – based on the specific person’s developmental needs or career aspirations, or they can be group-focused – based on trends, interesting findings in the world of training, or application of training techniques to the trainer’s company.
Entelechy is a proven, master training organization with the breadth of expertise to build a customized, Trainer Development and Certification Program for your organization. The graphic represents one such program created by Entelechy for its client.
Entelechy Speaks to Tom Davenport about the “Knowledge Worker”
 As faithful readers of
The Key know, I have had the opportunity to interview and work with some of the world’s top leaders and management gurus, from Tom Peters to Sir Richard Branson, from Sherron Watkins (Enron whistleblower) to General Tommy Franks, and from Warren Bennis to Henry
Mintzberg.
Recently, I had the opportunity to create training materials for Tom Davenport. Davenport was named one of the Top 25 Consultants in the world by
Consulting magazine in 2003. Currently, Davenport oversees Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He is also responsible for managing the college’s Institute for Process Management and co-managing the Working Knowledge program. He is the author of
Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results from Knowledge Workers as well as numerous articles published in
Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and
Financial Times, among others.
In today’s increasingly competitive business world it is obvious that, to be the best, companies should hire the best. Unfortunately, we continue falling short in our ability to fully tap into the potential of these intelligent (and expensive!) hires. As a result, companies do not fully leverage the capabilities of their most valuable resources and struggle in a competitive environment; often their valuable resources walk out the door.
 Tom Davenport has years of professional experience and research regarding the corporate world’s greatest untapped resource, knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are those who develop and utilize information in the workplace. Knowledge workers are the innovation engine of your company.
Recent studies show that 25 to 50% of the workforces of advanced economies consist of knowledge workers. Despite their prevalence, most companies don’t quite know what to do with knowledge workers. Managers try to manage them in ways similar to other employees, often resulting in low productivity and diminished morale. Compounding the challenge for many managers is the “fuzziness” of how knowledge workers do their work. Add to that the challenge of globalization – where your knowledge workers are scattered throughout the globe – and it’s easy to for a manager to despair, or worse: apply management techniques that achieve the opposite of their intent!
Addressing the challenges posed in managing knowledge workers, Davenport has identified techniques for company leaders – from C-level executives to team leads – to fully leverage the amazing brain-power at their fingertips. Dr. Davenport suggests that the knowledge workers require different approaches to increase their performance and productivity. These approaches can be grouped into information technology (IT) interventions and organizational/behavioral interventions as follows:
 Dr. Davenport recognizes that increasing the performance and productivity of knowledge workers is not a simple task. However, in most organizations, no one is in charge of improving
the performance of knowledge workers. Furthermore, when someone is in charge, they typically use only one tool.
At the same time, organizations can approach the care and feeding of knowledge workers in a more systematic and planned manner, using targeted interventions to increase the overall effectiveness of their knowledge workers – and the competitiveness of their organization.
This information comes from work Entelechy performed for Linkage, Inc. for their 2006 Excellence in Management & Leadership Series – satellite broadcasts featuring the world’s greatest leaders and management gurus. For more information, check out
http://www.linkageinc.com/...learning/default.aspx. If you’d like Entelechy to help YOU create engaging and effective training materials, contact us!
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Terence Traut, President of Entelechy "unlocking potential"
ttraut@unlockit.com
phone: 603-424-1237
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