Yes, You Can Guarantee Business Results from Training!

By Robert O. Brinkerhoff and Tim Mooney

I want you to imagine yourself in this scenario. You are busy working away at your desk planning a major training implementation to support a critical organization initiative, and in walks the CEO, who says to you, “This initiative is vitally important to our business strategy. We are investing millions of dollars in this strategy, and we see training as an integral piece of this initiative. The training must work. Can you guarantee it?”

In that brief second that your career begins to flash before your eyes you think about all the things outside of your control that can cause training to fail, for example:

• the training participants who may not really grasp the importance of the change initiative and therefore won’t even use the new skills back on the job
• the managers who may not be willing or able to coach the new skills
• various senior execs who may not be committed to the success of this effort.

And while these concerns are racing through your mind, the CEO asks, “Would you be willing to bet your paycheck on it?”

This scenario dramatizes the challenge that we, as workplace learning and development  professionals, face every day. Organizations are counting on their learning investments to pay off, and they are putting the full  responsibility on the learning department to deliver the results. At the same, time we fully recognize that training events alone—no matter how well-designed, well-facilitated, or stupendously engaging—will never be enough to guarantee the business outcomes our organizations are banking on.
How can we live up to these expectations and ensure our efforts are delivering the results the organization needs and wants?

We have had the opportunity to work with several leading companies that consistently deliver business results by using an approach that can guarantee business impact from training. The enlightened learning and development professionals from these companies operate with a few simple concepts to help their organizations produce business impact routinely:

• They recognize that turning learning into business results is a process and have moved beyond the mindset of training as an event. They all start by being “business-goal bulldogs” and having a firm grasp of the business goals the training is supporting.
• They act as change agents and lead the charge for building whole-organization accountability for turning learning into results.
• They use evaluation strategically to help drive change and educate their organizations.

Bulldogs are known for being strong, persistent and courageous. They clamp down on something with their powerful jaws and won’t let go! Similarly, the business-goal bulldogs in learning and development clamp down on the business issue associated with a project and won’t let go of it until they clearly understand the connection between the training and the business goals.

This is not just a superficial connection, such as “we need to do customer service training so we can improve customer loyalty and retention.” Instead, the business-goal bulldog establishes a deep business link that explicitly connects the business results to on-the-job performance and then finally to the learning program. Once they clearly understand this step-by-step link, they document the “business case” and ensure that the other key stakeholders—senior execs, training participants, and their managers—are on the same page and are clear on how the training can help them improve their personal and department results.

Organizations that are successful at turning training into business impact operate with the belief that getting results from training is a whole-organization responsibility. They have clearly defined processes for the senior stakeholder, manager, participant, and learning professional. These processes are elegantly simple, but provide step-by-step concreteness. At this point, you may be thinking: “My managers are incredibly busy and under tremendous pressure to produce results; it is impossible to get them to support training.” This concern is very real.

Managers are not measured on how well they support training; they are paid to produce results. To overcome this time-and-focus challenge, enlightened learning departments never ask managers to support training. Their processes are carefully geared toward helping managers achieve their departments’ goals for which they are being held accountable. This takes us back to the business case for the training.

By being business-goal bulldogs, learning professionals are able to focus the managers’ efforts on the results and the few simple behaviors that will help drive those results. The managers are asked to have a brief discussion with their training participants in advance of the training to ensure that their direct reports are clear on why this training is important to the department’s (and their own personal) objectives and how they are expected to use the new skills and knowledge back on the job. A similar discussion is held after the training to confirm an action plan for using the new capabilities to drive results.

The third principal lever that these organizations use to drive results from training is evaluation. They take a strategic approach to measurement that is designed not to prove the value of training, but to improve the value of training for the organization. They systematically collect evidence on the entire learning-to-performance process, examining how well all the players fulfilled their roles and followed the process, as well as the results achieved. The evaluation collects evidence to answer three principal questions:

• What benefit did this training provide to the business?
• When the training produced results, why did it work?
• When the training failed to produce results, why didn’t it work?

This isn’t a self-serving exercise to defend the learning department’s work, but a balanced approach that examines the learning program, the players’ efforts, and the environmental factors that affected the results—the good, the bad, and the ugly. These progressive learning leaders help their organizations use this information to make mid-course refinements in the current implementation and to educate management on how to gain greater business impact in the future.

Members of our user’s group have consistently been able to double or triple the business impact of their learning solutions by using this approach. In addition to the benefit of improving the impact of their training, they have used this information to help their organizations tighten up performance management processes, refine their sales processes, and remove barriers for customers. They have transformed their role from training partner to business partner.

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Tim Mooney is managing partner and practice leader at Advantage Performance Group; tmooney@advantageperformance.com. Robert Brinkerhoff, EdD, is a senior consultant at Advantage Performance Group and professor emeritus, Western Michigan University; robert.brinkerhoff@wmich.

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