Why Successful Training FailedElizabeth M., Human Resources Director for a mid-sized furniture manufacturer, earnestly shared with me her hopes for developing a skilled cadre of supervisory personnel who would effectively lead their work groups by positive example and, thereby, maximize
contributions to company profitability. She wanted front-line Supervisors to be able, through training, to develop, motivate, and inspire their subordinates to be more effective and productive contributors to Company growth and profitability.
She explained that her front-line leadership needed to learn basic leadership skills, and wanted training to address these. I asked her what had been companys prior experiences with formal training, and she explained that, in 2000, she had contracted a trainer to deliver a series of supervisory development workshops, and that these were successful; that is, they were highly evaluated by workshop participants, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed them. Training was considered a success!
I inquired, “If these workshops were successful, why was she interested in contracting for more of same training?” Elena replied that, because company failed to reinforce training, and that follow-up training was needed to reinforce 2000 training intervention.
On Day 1 of class, I asked participants to briefly review and summarize what they had learned from this prior training, and of those skills learned, which were they using, on-the-job, As an aid to developing participant responses, I briefly summarized content of previous training, together with an abbreviated review of skill points covered in all previous lessons. I then verbally polled their responses. Typical answers were, “ I learned a lot of useful things;” “ I learned how to treat people better;” “Training helped me understand how to get along with others better,” etc. Not one of twenty-one people present could name one skill learned much less presently used as a result of training.
This is an example of training dollars that were apparently poorly spent; after all, if you cannot point to specific performance improvements as a result of training, why bother doing it at all? In this case, at least, it wasnt enough that people thoroughly enjoyed themselves and that training was entertaining and upbeat.
