Why Behavioral and Leadership Trainings Fail: Lesson for Training leaders and Practitioners

As they say, “The river which passes through many mountains has the purest of the water’s”.  I have been lucky enough to work with so many different leaders, in different organization. I have always wondered and pondered “Is there any Leader/ Practitioner who knows how to measure the effectiveness of Behavioral training”? and if so... what would he do differently and how much do one take to measure the effectiveness and derive ROI?

This has become Achilles heel in any organization, sometimes these so-called Training Managers and Leaders are so engrossed in design and deliver of the content they forget to arrive with the result. Let us explore and know how we can be far more productive and drive business result, which would help the organizations to develop apt competencies to take on the future.

We can consider broadly there are four reasons why this happens? here are those:

Culture:

Culture can be defined in many ways, there are Human resources Guru’s whom I have interacted with have no sense of what they trying to do. They are like those kites wandering wither and tither to the tunes of CEO’s of the organization. They create strategies which helps business not the people, they create culture where the results are more rewarded than the learning. Which makes it difficult for any learner to prove the real worth of learning. The most shocking part is that these training are tick mark activities rather than the result oriented. Over a period, the front-line managers, leaders and business heads think that “There is not a dime of learning in Learning and Development initiatives”.

Identifying the real need:

This is a laughing stock, I guess sometimes I ask my fellow intellectuals. Dude do you really know how do a TNI?  Firstly, most out of us do not understand the difference between TNA and TNI, and we use random old school methodologies to arrive with Training Needs. This creates more problems than the solution itself, we are conducting random trainings to fill our MIS and show our colorful dashboard. Which talks about man hours and number of participants. What a shame?

Implementing

Recently I had an instance where in one of the managers asked for training which he has identified as the problem for poor performance. L & D consultant did not even listen to problem complete but arrived at a solution with the oldest of the PPT he had in his drive. He conducted the training which was no use of anyone, they simply wasted the time, resource and money. While implementing any training programs although we have great information available online. We fail to do it; we do not understand whether it is a problem which can solved by training or any other interventions by management/ manager or fellow colleague.

Evaluating

This is a myth in most out of organization, I have almost worked in ten different organizations and not even one came close in evaluating behavioral training. Why does too many intellectuals cannot perform this efficiently? Here are the reason.

• They are simply not capable.
• They don’t know the methodologies.
• The manager and management think it’s a waste of time and money.
• Simply put no one cares!

I believe each one of us as Learning and Development consultant have a great responsibility in the organization and outside of it. It’s about creating a great learning team and a team of responsible individuals who can then contribute to the betterment of the society. 

Let me end this with a quote “What is the point of learning, when neither it sharpens your brain nor your personality” … May learning karma be with you all – until next time… So long so.