Over the Christmas Season we've experienced personally, or through our TV screens, some unsettled, exceptional weather. My partner literally escaped from Salisbury, England, to Heathrow and home as the first snows fell. Hours later, satellite pictures showed Britain blanketed in snow from north to south. Melbourne, meanwhile, shimmered in unbearable heat.
Haiti suffered a massive earthquake that followed fast on tremors felt in many parts of the globe. Ice bergs broke away from the Poles and drifted up into our warmer waters. The physical world, it seems, is trembling on the brink of major change.
Economically organisations are climbing out of difficult times. We realise we can no longer carryout business using past practices, but immersed in the business or doing business it's hard to define how we could do it better.
What skills will our employees need to help us grow our markets? What new products, opportunities or markets are opening up to us? And even if we spot an opportunity, how quickly can we respond to it? They're age-old questions coming to us now at the speed of light.
For years, training has focused on imparting skills that ensure the products or services we produce are created with quality and accuracy. Technology has now advanced in ways that reduce human fallibility, yet still our companies make costly mistakes.
At Edutech KM we've heard the stories from employees who knew that proposed production changes or a new product design wouldn't work, or would cause problems downstream. But did they speak up? Of course not! They didn't believe anyone (i.e.: 'management') would listen to them. Often their beliefs (about not being listened to) have been based on past experience. But even if an employee's belief is a false assumption, the impact is the same. There is undeniably a huge divide between what management tells employees and employees tell management.
One wakeful night I was putting my mind to this dilemma: Is training for skills enough in this new century? What type of training would make a significant change in the way we do, and succeed at, business? The world is overrun by courses that will teach managers to do business well, however, if you think about the companies that succeed best, they are peopled with employees who know they are valued and their contribution is welcomed.
Perhaps we should be looking at two streams of change in training:
1. Train employees to think and speak up
2. Train managers to listen to employees
For this to succeed, employees need to see the larger picture of how their behaviour affects company success and their own long term security. Actually, they need to understand business. Could this lead to a radical about face in training?
1. Give employees business training
2. Give managers skills training
Then we'd all be speaking the same language.
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