This 2006 report for the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (DOLETA) estimated that $50 to $60 billion dollars per year is spent in the United States for employee training/education of which 93% was paid by businesses or employees, rather than government entities.  Wow!  That is a lot of money!  It is about the size of SBC Communication’s annual revenue in 2004.

Are firms getting their money’s worth?  Are their employees learning?  Can what one person has learned be transferred to another person?  Why do organizations keep repeat the same mistakes?  What can be done to help people learn and to “institutionalize” knowledge?  Think about the power of being able to answer these questions in a way that indicates employees are learning, sharing knowledge, and organizations are learning from past mistakes or, better still, the mistakes of other firms.  What would that be worth to an organization?

Let’s talk about the steps that can be taken to help people learn and steps that can be taken which will help our respective share of that $50 to $60 billion expenditure become an investment, rather than a sunk cost.

Define Goals

An organization relies on its employees for the firm’s very survival.  Where would any organization be without a loyal, well-trained, engaged, customer-focused employee base?  In light of this, it seems logical to conclude that employees are the single most important asset of an organization. 

If employees are the single most important asset of an organization, how would the organization treat the employees?  What effort would be made to help them develop their skills?  As a starting point, it seems like the organization would define goals for the training so that training dollars would be spent in the way that was most appropriate for achieving the organization’s goals.

Sometimes, the training dollars might be allocated on a per employee basis.  In other cases, it might be appropriate to allocate different amounts of money to different departments for training. 

Along with allocating the training dollars though, the organization would explore other options for sharing knowledge. 

Other Options for Sharing Knowledge

In addition to formal training, how can organizations help people share knowledge and develop their skills?  The answer varies by context.  Often, new employees can benefit from shadowing a more experienced employee for a period of time.  In other situations, self-teaching or books may be viable options.  Having employees teach their peers at staff meetings can be helpful as well.  Vendor demonstrations, process checklists, networking internally and externally, and taking time to document the lessons learned on a specific project can lead to additional insight. 

What is required for these steps to work?  One thing that is required is for employees to be receptive to taking a step back so that they can think about the big picture.  Have you ever been in a situation where you are so intently focussed on a task that you can’t see anything else? It becomes a sort of tunnel vision.  Well, that is how many managers in the corporate world feel today.  Before they can be given even one more thing, they need to be given the chance to process what they have.  In many organizations though, this is not happening. 

In addition to processing information, employees need to understand that it is important for them to share knowledge with each other and that their organizations want them to learn, to understand, to develop their skills.  This needs to be built into the culture and encouraged.  Rather than focussing on the dollars spent on training, the focus would be on the skills learned, the value obtained, and the sharing that is occurring.

More Tactical View

Now that we have talked about a general vision, let’s think about some of the steps that might be used to foster the learning.  These steps would be built into the culture of the organization.  It seems to me that the culture would encourage people to think for themselves, to help each other improve, to learn from their experiences, and to share knowledge within the enterprise.  What does this mean?  How might these steps be encouraged? Let’s consider these factors now.

Encouraging thinking

People are conditioned by our society to accept the easy answers, to take what is offered, and to be conventional. On the one hand, these steps are beneficial to an orderly society. On the other hand though, these steps also lead to the absence of critical thinking, lack of analysis, and inability to develop solutions on their own.

The first step in helping people think is to help them realize that it is okay to ask questions. We may not have the answer, but we can ask the question and, perhaps, someone else can suggest a partial answer, or help us understand how the question can be improved. Recently, I mentioned Frank Kanu’s book, Stop Telling…  Start Leading!  The Art of Managing People by Asking Questions.  The book is an easy read which allows people to avoid intimidation and to focus on the concepts, rather than struggling to understand what they are being told.

I see this issue come up every day. After years of school teaching people not to ask questions, it can be a bit intimidating for people to start asking questions. My students come into class and they are so used to not thinking that it is very difficult for them to write a “think piece.” They are happy to tell me facts about the chapters that I assign. Ask them to write about what it means to them and their eyes glaze over. Ask them to apply the rule to a different fact situation, and their reaction becomes even worse. In my business law class, the most valuable thing that I can teach my students is not what the law says, but to think about the issues they are likely to face.

Helping Each Other

Along with being encouraged to think for themselves, they would be encouraged to help each other improve.  Is this anything more than team building?  Often, people are so concerned with self-preservation in an organization that they fear helping someone else because the other person might develop more skills than the teacher has.  How can this be a good thing?  Well, it seems to me that if a person helps someone else develop more skills than the person possesses, the teacher becomes dispensable and can be promoted or move to a different job.  If a person is indispensable, that person is unlikely to be promoted, to be allowed to transfer, or even to go on vacation.  And, heaven forbid, that the person becomes ill or retires! 

What tools can be created to make it easier for people to help each other?  Some of these so-called tools might be steps as simple as working lunches where people talk about issues they are facing and brainstorm possible approaches.  Other steps might be sharing books, identifying internal and external resources, creating discussion boards, and even encouraging “water cooler” discussions.

Trust is critical to this effort though.  Employees must know that offering or requesting help is seen as a strength, rather than a weakness.  As soon as they perceive that someone has been punished for seeking help or that a person who offered help is being taken advantage of, people are likely to stop participating because they will perceive that participation is contrary to their own self-interest.  How many times have you seen the person who is willing to take on extra work taken for granted down the road?  People just assume that the person will always do so and, before long, they resent if it when the person is unable or unwilling to take on an extra task. 

Learning from Experience

How can people learn from their experience? One way of doing so is to gain a lot of experience. Along with gaining the experience though, people need to be given time to assess the facts and to think about what has occurred. How does the current situation relate to other situations they have encountered in the past?

A good way of encouraging people to learn from their experience is to talk about their relevant prior experience in team meetings. By the way, it seems to me like every meeting is a team meeting. By building time to discuss the prior experience and encouraging people to discuss what has worked (and not worked) in similar projects in the past, people are encouraged to share ideas. At a minimum, people are learning to encourage participation. Often, they are able to share information about why the prior situation worked, or failed. In such cases, they may also gain substantive knowledge.

With trust, people can also discuss their prior actions, rather than having to defend them. In such a culture, how might leaders be treated? Most likely, ever leader would be allowed to be human and still be respected. That is what I saw at SBC Communications anyway. People were willing to speak up and tell leaders when mistakes were being made, as they perceived them to be. Leaders often took a step back and asked for more information. They often thanked the people who pointed to the issues, and did so sincerely. This sort of openness to questions is one of the reasons that SBC was such a great company. It is unclear to me if the same environment exists today. Some perceived that the openness to questions existed only in my teams even at that time so, who knows? My position was simply that what is said among team members stayed among team members.

Sharing Knowledge

There are many ways that knowledge can be shared. It seems likely that the best ways to share knowledge are impacted by the organization’s existing infrastructure. Training might be required in some organizations. A telephone call, posting on a discussion board, or write up in some sort of memo might be appropriate in other cases. If the goal is to encourage sharing of knowledge, there should be a structure in place that encourages this. This structure might include:

• Requests that people share knowledge
• Sharing of knowledge from leadership
• Recognition for individuals who share knowledge
• Encouragement for employees to develop their skills
• Identification of internal resources who can help others
• Conscious development of knowledge banks and resources
• Inclusion of the sharing of knowledge in the job descriptions, compensation, and performance appraisals

Conclusion

In a perfect world, the knowledge that one person has gained could be transferred to another person.  This would provide continuity and allow organizations to learn from the past mistakes that their employees have made.  By learning from the past mistakes, people would be better qualified to evaluate information and to develop solutions. 

What steps do you see organizations taking so that they learn from the past and build towards the future? 

Filed by Coleen Davis at 2:57 pm under Business Acumen, Business Trends, Negotiations, Team Building, Training