March Madness has hit my home like a tornado. We are staunch supporters of Villanova basketball so you can imagine the ups and downs we've been going through.
My wife and I had friends over for the very exciting Elite Eight match-up with Pitt. After the game, we got into a discussion of scholar-athletes and how focused they should be on education. We spoke of athletes who leave school early for the draft and those that finish. We spoke of college tutors and how many athletes slip through the system (sorry NCAA) and have tutors do the work for them. Probably not the typical conversation in your house, but my wife is an Advanced Placement English teacher and her friend is an English teacher.
I think we all agreed that it's a shame that so many college athletes leave college early lured by big professional paychecks and miss out on a quality education and becoming "well-rounded." It's almost as if the system is failing them. As a former high school teacher, I completely related to this. What about the importance of a degree? What about the value in the entire education that gives you the experience and background to understand and relate to current events?
The problem lies in the expectation of results. For many college athletes, who have spent a lifetime training to be "best in field" the measure of success is the pro contract. Likewise, in corporate learning cultures, personal development needs to be tied to business results. Organizations want to develop the whole person; the financial ledger demands accountability to the bottom line. So how do we as learning professionals walk the fine line between developing the whole person and meeting the needs of the business?
1. Be a Performance Consultant. Don't develop training for the sake of training. Be a partner with the business and make recommendations for better accountability, enforced compliance, and motivational perks if those are the true problems. The problem may not be in knowledge or skill, it may be because the process is broken or it creates obstacles further down the line. The role of the learning professional is to point those out. It may simply be that people need the right incentive or better feedback systems, rather than more training.
2. Keep the training specific to the task at hand. Sometimes all that is required is a performance support tool that shows workers how and when to do a particular task. Don't muddy the water with extra information that only confuses the worker. Adult learners certainly need context and want to know why the task is important. I'm not arguing against this. I am saying that for some learners, the answer may be as simple as, "Because this will help you do the job the right way and you will be more successful."
3. Provide content formally and informally. Make sure that the training that drives performance is formal, tracked, measured and impacts productivity. Development for the "whole person" can be provided formally, through classes and workshops, or informally through social media. I recently viewed a video from a leadership series at Google featuring Marshall Goldsmith, renowned author and executive coach. I admit to catching it pretty late, but this served as a great opportunity for both the people in the room at Google and the thousands who viewed it later and took something away from his presentation. In fact, I recommend his library as a great place to start with leadership development. Tools like this and other shared media like Wikis, blogs, and discussion boards can be powerful and inexpensive learning solutions.
When you act in the best interest of the business, you gain credibility with the leadership team for being honest about performance and being fiscally prudent. When you provide targeted, quality learning interventions that address true training needs, your training organization will gain credibility for results. Finally, when you provide learning opportunities for your corporate citizens to develop themselves personally and professionally, you provide the whole package as a learning and development organization.
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