Is cost-cutting easy? No, not unless you compare it to keeping employees satisfied and performing at a high level over many years. Compared to that challenge, cost-cutting is a breeze.
Similarly, is it easy to acquire new companies? Not particularly, but it may be easier than improving the products and services you already have. It also may be easier than providing your existing employees the training and nurturing they need to make those products and services better.
Meeting the requirements for tax breaks also is not always easy, but it’s easier than admitting you made a mistake by investing now-obsolete, superfluous office space. It’s easier to force employees back to the office than it is to come up with a remote-work solution that ensures employees are both highly satisfied and poised to do their best work.
Companies often have terrific capacity in such areas—cost-cutting, acquisitions and mergers, and going after tax breaks (I get the feeling we don’t even want to know what some companies would be willing to do to get that all-important tax break). But what about all the other areas of leadership they need to be good at?
A Training Needs Analysis for Your Leaders
The lopsided organizational competency starts with your top executives. They have gotten good at the things the company’s parent company and/or investors are most interested in.
As a Learning professional, you probably are well acquainted with training needs analyses. However, I wonder if many Learning and Development professionals are more familiar with conducting these analyses for mid-level and entry-level employees than for an organization’s top executives.
HERE is a guide by Chris Caesar to conducting training needs analyses to align with “smarter leadership development and employee performance.”
It looks like a typical training needs analysis, as far as I can see. To my mind, what makes it a training needs analysis for your leaders are the probing questions a trainer could ask executives to pinpoint how they can grow past being competent only in the areas where they are being most pressured by parent companies and/or investors.
Self-Assessment Questions and Objective Data
A sample question: “How satisfied do you think our employees are with us as their employer?”
Many leaders will respond that, from what they have observed and heard, the organization’s employees are highly satisfied.
“You’ll be surprised to learn then that X percent (a big percent) of our employees leave less than a year-and-a-half after joining the company. In other words, a high number of new hires stay for a year and then start looking for a new job. Why do you think that is? What would be your best guess as to why that’s happening?”
The leader might immediately reply: “Money. It’s competitive out there and other companies can afford to pay them more.”
The trainer then could present data showing that in exit interviews, money is not the top reason employees give for leaving: “A higher number cite unhappiness with the unfriendly corporate culture, not enough work-life balance, a desire for more flexibility in where and how they work, greater development opportunities to expand or alter their job role, and some even cite a toxic manager and unpleasant work group for leaving. Money is cited but not as often as those other factors.”
The subsequent conversation would need to move the executive to acknowledge the need for additional training related to the top reasons employees leave.
For example, the trainer could point out that executives themselves, and middle managers, are not given effective training on maintaining a positive culture and work-life experience in their group. The company may not even have a mission statement or vision statement related to the desired corporate culture. The training need in this case would be a session in which executives invite a random selection of middle managers and lower-level employees to brainstorm what the ideal corporate culture and work life would be. Trainers then would figure out the learning and development curriculum or experiences needed to make that corporate culture and work life a reality.
What About Improving What You Already Have?
Data also could be presented to executives to show them what surveys and focus groups reveal about customers’ experience with the company’s products and services.
Executives then could cite what they believe are the reasons behind negative experiences shared by customers. Trainers next would ask the executives for their top ideas on how to improve those products and services. Then they would craft training sessions to achieve those goals.
It wouldn’t just be lower-level employees who would go through training to make improvements. They would need to learn how to do the hands-on work required, but executives also would need to learn how to lead these improvements, including how best to communicate goals for better existing products and services, how to monitor progress, and how to reward success or recalibrate after failure.
It’s easy to hack away at a business, look for tax breaks, or search for the next new business to acquire. The long-term diligence and know-how required to build a high-performing, happy workforce is much harder.
How do you ensure your organization’s leaders have the skills needed to remain profitable and sustainable over time?