Training’s Importance to the Big Picture of Business

By Hank Moore, Corporate Strategist

Professional education is the most important ingredient in corporate development. Today’s workforce will need three times the amount of training it now gets...if the organization intends to stay in business, remain competitive, and tackle the future successfully.

I advise CEOs, board chairs, and the upper echelon of companies on business strategy. Often, I find myself defending and promoting training as an important ingredient to success.

Trainers need the best business strategy advice and pointers. I hold a deep respect for training professionals. To give them the best business intelligence is why I’m doing this monthly column. The bigger picture that training sees itself, the more it will be embraced by those who employ professional trainers.

Each year, one-third of the Gross National Product goes toward cleaning up problems, damages, and the high costs of doing either nothing or the wrong things. Half of that amount goes toward some form of persuasion, instruction, spin-doctoring, or educating.

More often than not, “training” is a vehicle to tout one’s viewpoint, tinker with old problems, or blame someone else for the course of events. If training is viewed as band-aid surgery to fix problems, then it will fail. Managers who have this “fix those people” mindset are, in fact, the ones who need substantive training the most.

Training rarely is allowed to be extensive. It is usually technical or sales-marketing in nature. Employees and executives rarely are mentored on the people skills necessary to have a winning team. Thus, they fail to establish a company vision and miss their business mark.

Outside of “think tanks” for company executive committees, full-scope education does not occur. This is primarily because niche trainers recommend what they have to sell, rather than what the company needs. Niche trainers impart their own perspectives out of context to the whole of the organization.

Teambuilding must be part of the corporate vision first, not as a series of exercises delegated to trainers. I conduct Executive Think Tanks for corporate management. The success of this enables trainers with the rank-and-file employees to be optimally successful. Organizations of all sizes must have the Think Tank, which delineates future operations, including education and training.

Training is unfairly blamed and scapegoated for pieces of the organizational mosaic that strategic planning and a cohesive corporate vision should have addressed early on. Trainers cannot reconstruct organizational structure, nor can other niche consultants. 

Companies owe it to themselves to think and plan before launching piecemeal training programs. After carefully articulating and understanding direction, then training needs (including team building and empowerment) will stand a chance of being successful.

7 Steps of Professional Development

1. Teaching-Training. Conveying information, insights, and intelligence from various sources. Categorized by subject, grade level, and methods of delivery. Expert teachers (fountains of learning material) are the building block in the educational process, and the student must be an active participant (rather than a non-involved or combative roadblock).
2. Studying. One cannot learn just by listening to a teacher. Review of material, taking notes, seeking supplementary materials, and questing to learn additionally must occur.
3. Learning. The teacher instructs, informs, and attempts to enlighten. The student accepts, interprets, and catalogs the material taught. Periodically, the material is reviewed.
4. Information. As one amasses years of learning, one builds a repository of information, augmented by experiences of putting this learning into practice.
5. Analysis. One sorts through all that has been learned, matched with applicabilities to daily life. One determines what additional learning is necessary and desired. From this point forward, education is an ongoing process beyond that of formal schooling. If committed, the person turns the quest for knowledge into a life priority.
6. Knowledge. A body of knowledge is derived from years of living, learning, working, caring, sharing, failing, and succeeding. This step is detailed in my monograph, “The Learning Tree”: (1) Life. (2) Living Well. (3) Working Well. (4) Education. (5) Philosophy. (6) Self-Fulfillment. (7) Purpose and Commitment.
7. Wisdom. This requires many years of commitment to learning, compounded by the continuous development of knowledge. Few people attempt to get this far in the educational process. Those who do so have encompassed profound wisdom. This step is detailed in my monograph, “7 Layers of Wisdom”: (1) Glimmer of an Idea. (2) Learning Curve. (3) Applications for Lessons Learned. (4) Trial and Error, Success and Failure. (5) Teaching, Mentoring. (6) Insights, Beliefs, Systems of Thought. (7) Profound Wisdom, Life Perspectives.

See Training in Business Terms

1. Know your client company’s mission (ends and means).
2. Be ruthless about cost control.
3. Be obsessive about quality.
4. Find newer, quicker, and simpler ways to do what we do.
5. Improve people management.
6. Use allies and their resources. Collaborate with other professionals.
7.  Hire overachievers.

Make All Training Work Strategic

1. Identify business goals of the corporate development program.
2. Work on the desired or requested goals exclusively.
3. Demonstrate that corporate development is valuable to the business.
4. Challenge every program element to achieve goals.
5.  Empower staff to achieve business results.
6.  Define your job correctly (as to goals, not tasks).

Negotiate the Required Results

1. Measure the right things (business issues, behavior changes).
2. Measure things that management cares about.
3. Measure your contribution to the quality of the client’s success.
4. The ultimate measure is sales/profits.
5.  Measurement of reach is not sufficient. The best practitioners design the yardsticks.
6.  Ground rules for measurement and evaluation:

• Management must know, understand, and agree to the indicators.
• We are the proprietor of the scorecard (focusing upon available funding).

A regular contributor to www.trainingmag.com,Hank Moore has advised 5,000-plus client organizations, including 100 of the Fortune 500, public sector agencies, small businesses and nonprofit organizations. He has advised two U.S. Presidents and spoke at five Economic Summits. Moore advises companies about growth strategies, visioning, strategic planning, executive leadership development, Futurism, and Big Picture issues that profoundly affect the business climate. He conducts company evaluations and performance reviews. He creates the big ideas, mentors the board members, reorganizes the corporate culture and anchors the enterprise to its next tier. The Business Tree is Moore’s trademarked approach (and the title of his current book published by Career Press) to growing, strengthening, and evolving business, while mastering change. For more information, visit http://www.hankmoore.com.