How Is Your Organization Perceived?

Wow – I now understand what writers mean when they say that to be a writer you have to approach it as a job. I have fallen way behind.

Not long ago my daughter had one of her friends over for play time. Since they were forced to include my son (the dreaded “little brother”) they had chosen a game they could all participate in, called “School.” As you might guess, one person plays the teacher and the other two are the students. Mostly it’s an excuse to show how much more education the girls have over my son – they are in third grade, he is “merely” a first grader. On this day I was shocked at how mean the “teacher” was portrayed:

“Sit down!”
“Back to work!”
“Do that again and you’ll have extra math problems to do!”

It made me wonder if this was normal for the school day and so I asked about it as innocently as I could. I was informed that lots of teachers are mean but you get used to it.

That got me thinking about how training departments are perceived. I’ve been in several training organizations that have been seen as obstacles to implementation. Much the way teachers my daughter and her friend have experienced, these organizations meant well and were dealing with their own constraints.

Learning organizations often find themselves caught serving two masters: they want to deliver only the best, most effective training interventions that have ROI impact. They also have Operators and Leadership telling them to “put together a course on….” Often the latter will not deliver on the former. The training manager tries to influence, coach, and persuade the organization to see things differently, to see the value of a different approach or to acknowledge issues of system failure or bad performance management.

The challenge is being seen as the team that helps the organization reach its goals in the best manner possible. By focusing on the desired behavior, we can usually offer our clients and stakeholders solutions that meet the need and get results by giving them the choice of options and showing them the ROI.

1. Always provide a good / better / best menu of choices with price points. Even the staunchest client has the good of the organization in mind. Faced with having to diminish his or her own results based on training cost, they will often choose the solution that makes the most sense. This is particularly effective if your organization requires the project owner to pay for the training rather than drawing from the L&D well.
2. Stay focused on the desired behavior. Clients love to talk about all the things they know that learners should also know to do the job. Unfortunately, all that extra knowledge might be getting in the way. Document the desired behavior, run the task analysis and return with sound data to make your case.
3. Get outside your own comfort zone. The best solution might be a simple communication piece or policy update that your organization is typically not responsible for creating. Look at that as an opportunity to collaborate across the organization and influence others to think about performance. If you drive the change, you can be seen as an organization that “gets things done.”
   

It is important for the success of your organization that you be seen as the group that says “yes.” You can’t afford to say yes to everything, but make sure that you are seen as the provider of quality solutions and not a barrier to success. You want clients and stakeholders to look forward to interacting with your team, not dreading it.

Now go out and create some great solutions or I’ll be posting differential equations!