Ep 281 - When to Train and When to Talk

Hello and welcome to the HR room Ireland's longest running HR podcast. I'm Dave Corkrey, the content lead here at Insight HR. Now training a development is a huge part of what organizations do to improve performance but not every performance problem is a knowledge or skills problem and putting someone on a course isn't always the answer. So how can managers and HR professionals work out when somebody genuinely needs training, when they need coaching or when they simply need a conversation? As always I've joined by Mary Cullen, my co-host and the founder and managing director of Insight HR. How are you today Mary? I'm doing great, thanks Dave. And I guess today has extensive experience in talent, learning and development and she's the author of the book Helping Others Learn in the Workplace, a practical guide for trainers and managers. Welcome to the show and Haller and how are you Ann? Okay great, thank you Dave and thanks for having me on your podcast. Howard delighted that you've joined us today. So I guess let's start with that question I raised in the intro. So what do you do when someone isn't performing as expected and manager needs to sort of distinguish between whether they need training or whether they just need to have a conversation? I guess what's your recommendation in that and that question? Well I've worked in industries most of my career where not performing to standard isn't an option. I've worked in biopharma medical device healthcare and I think the question you have to ask is what's holding the learner back from doing their best work? And I remember once being a training manager and the warehouse supervisor in the company came to me and they had an employee who wasn't performing and the manager had identified this three-day course that they could send them on and I think they believed that if they went on the course they'd come back all shiny and new and motivated and working to standard but it turns out that the manager hadn't actually sat down with the learner and talked about what good looked like and what the consequences were of not reaching the standard and hadn't offered any coaching to help them get there or you know set deadlines. So I think sometimes managers pick courses because it feels like you're doing something and it's a polite option but it's actually avoiding the harder conversation. Right, so they're jumping to a solution that may be the right solution but they've skipped it like a few steps before that to identify what the right approach is. Mary, what about you? In your experience dealing with organizations who may have performance issues that they need assistance with, how often does the problem turn out to be something other than a lack of skills or training? It's a really good question Dave because the reality is most managers know quite early if they have a performance issue with someone and yes time and time again we see that it can take absolute months for them to even raise the issue in the first place and it's almost like they talk around it and the person never really understands that there's something wrong or there's an issue and next thing there's massive performance issue and the conversation has been avoided, the person never knew and it becomes a bit of a mess and that it doesn't surprise me one bit that a manager might actually go and do something as you say in a polite way. Hey, let me put you on a course and that's going to fix you but you've never told them why you want them to go on the course in the first place and it's the course's right option and often it is not and it still comes back down to a difficult conversation that must be had and so often that just doesn't happen and I've often looked at it and thought why? Why are managers afraid to have the conversation? Is that a training issue in itself from an organizational perspective or are they just so ill equipped to do it that they avoid us and I think that really does come down to personality style leadership approach management, organizational investment and management development and so probably rather than putting the employee on the training course maybe the the best serve looking towards themselves and thinking do I need training because I'm avoiding this conversation. It's a good question look it look inwards it does feel like it could be it could be a result of a manager who has a fear of confrontation right so instead of having the difficult conversation with my my employee I'm going to come to them with a nice shiny as you say and you know here oh look we're putting it on a course isn't that great aren't I a great manager and then secretly hoping that's going to fix the the issue instead of having to have a conversation about it. Very much related years ago a manager that I was working with came to me to say that one of the employees had a BO problem and he threw various means of talking about things like washing and deodorant and all sorts of generalized comments and still the employee never understood that he was actually talking about her and you know there were complaints from other staff members and all of that now I pick something like BO is a particularly difficult thing for a manager to raise it's an employee and however the conversation was absolutely avoided and if you can think about something that was causing such an issue in this manager's team yes there was no way he was actually going to just sit down with her and and see what's wrong is is there something happening here is there something we need to do and just being straight yeah talking talking around the problem instead of just addressing yeah and that's a particularly challenging issue yeah no I mean who wants to have that conversation nobody and there's no training or development program that will address that unfortunately and let's let's stick with your example here so and let's let's take a few steps back so let's say this man this this this hypothetical manager leap straight to training let's let's go back what should they have done so before deciding somebody needs training what questions should should a manager be asking and how do they diagnose what might actually be preventing somebody from performing yeah well sometimes poor performance can be down to poor training design and it's worth taking a look at that what was was the learner given very clear objectives was the training done in a realistic time frame and where the outcomes checked afterwards and how close was the manager to the whole process and I once worked in CR Bard they were one of the first medical device multinational startups in Galway and it was a brand new site and we had to set up new assembly lines higher new operators now there were very clear instructions or specifications on every line as to what you had to do but you still had to translate that into a format that you could give to the learners and so I had to do a job analysis which was a four stage process you look at the knowledge you look at the method you look at the hazards and the faults and you turned all that information into a logical training program that sequenced and we hired a lot of training instructors in and they sat with the new operators and we found out that our years were way higher than sister plants in America who'd been going for some time so that investment in training continued and I think one of the reasons it was so successful was that the operators were thinking well they've put some up beside me all day this job must be important and I think it gave them pride in what they were doing you know and yeah and I think it motivated them so I think if you do take pay attention to the way you're designing your training it can do an awful lot to help consistent performance further on okay excellent great example Mary can you can you give us some examples of some of some of these underlying problems that that might emerge that our performance issues that that might initially look like training issues but but they require a bit more investigation yeah I mean I think whenever a manager is faced with a performance issue they they need to take a diagnostic approach to it as opposed to jumping in with solutions it's bit like sticking a plaster on top of something without ever really understanding what's wrong in the first place so in my view when you're dealing with performance first thing you've got to do is you've got to establish is it a capability issue is a competence issue, is a motivation issue. Is there some factor within the work environment that is causing this person not to perform? Is there some conflict you're not aware of? What is actually happening? So I don't think you can remove the need to diagnose from any performance issue, otherwise the chances of you getting as right are very slim it's a shot in the dark. So before you get to design any training intervention or any learning intervention you always have to diagnose and I think a lot of that is missing these days through the overreliance on LMS systems for example. So we have a learning need, maybe to communicate an issue what go off and do this Marju-Lung communication online and that'll fix it but it doesn't. It's very hard to teach some of the soft skills which someone might not inherently have through the LMS system. So to me a lot of the training needs analysis is not being done in the way used to be done in the way we traditionally did it back in the day and it's almost like that skipped and there's a whole library of resources for people to access and understand themselves what they're lacking in and be most based enough to complete the training or have the time to complete the training. So I do think it's the analysis piece that's key to designing any intervention and particularly when it comes to proof. That's interesting so it's almost like we're asking people to self-diagnose by providing them with a huge suite of training on the LMS and here you go you need some training. You're underperforming, go train yourself up. Yeah and the reality is that for most people who are underperforming their own awareness is not there because if their awareness was there most people would try and change something to do better because most people value the job that they have and need the money and need the income and the benefit from working. So to ask people to self-reflect to analyze their own training needs and to be certain that they're most based enough to do us it's a tall order and I do see these key steps getting missed these days. And what about yourself? I mean you have decades of experience in training and development and obviously you've published this book on the subject. What has that taught you about how adults actually learn in a workplace? Like what's effective? What makes learning stick? Yeah well absolutely agree with Mary there about it's easy to have an over-reliance on learning management systems and in my book I've identified six conditions that are needed to make learning effective and I'll talk about how to make the learning stick after because they're two separate tasks and the six conditions I've summarized in an acronym called Ripple to help me remember it. It might be useful for someone else and it's in the checklist that I've given you the link for Dave I think you'll be putting it in the show notes. Yeah head to the show notes everybody it's right there. So the first one is results you've got to make it clear to the learner what's expected from them after the training then you've got eye for involvement I always had a rule that when I was running workshops I wouldn't talk for more than 20 minutes you've got to get the learners involved then you've got P for psychological safety and does a learner feel comfortable saying I just don't understand what you're talking about you know are they a bit afraid of looking foolish so you have to set the tone for that and then the next P is for pace and that's where I see most learners get it wrong in that they try and cram way too much into a session thinking they're doing a good job but the learner is just like a rabbit in the headlights you know so um so that's the the P and then you've got L for level has the trainer or the manager take the time to figure out what the learners already know and pitched it correctly and then ease the last one and have they made it easy for the learners to get it right first time because that will reduce errors down the road and I can talk more about that later but that ripple is all very much in the trainers remiss but how do you make it stick afterwards and that's where the manager really comes in and I've got another acronym for that but there are there are four things that the manager needs to think about reinforcement accountability reward and encouragement and the acronym I came up with was rare because it really happens because after a training course you know things move on and it gets forgotten about and the manager might say oh come and talk to me about that but it's not scheduled and so the learning transfer doesn't happen and it makes you know it makes it very wasteful but you know I'm sure Mary can Mary's probably witnessed that an awful lot in your line of work absolutely and and that's why so much money is spent on training and learning interventions that just simply don't stick and I absolutely agree I love the acronyms because I think it does make it simple for people to understand but it's one of the things that has always puzzled me is when you're investing in in training or an LMS system or whatever you're investing in yes there's a place for it all but it has to be thoughtful and you have to think through exactly how it's actually going to work I'm a big believer in action learning and reflective practice as essential particularly when it comes to management and and HR work in itself and I know we're facilitating a session David in September on reflective practice for HR practitioners and where we're going to look at common issues and problems that they face and then look at them working together in groups to share knowledge amongst their peers but it's important then to have someone who has knowledge in the background that can help them and help guide those discussions so that people can actually reflect and learn from each other and so in my view if you're training managers for example which is our particular area of expertise and particularly around some of the employee relations and industrial relations issues the training course is central to transfer knowledge but then what are those managers doing when they go back to their teams how are they handling those conversations about B.O. or performance or bad behavior you know lack of politeness in the workforce or communication whatever it is they're addressing how are they going to do that if they're not working with each other to reflect on what they did well and what they didn't do well and whether that's individual coaching group coaching group reflective practice action learning whatever way you like to look at how do you actually embed so that it sticks so that your managers are doing what your managers should be doing and that you and HR are also engaged in the same kind of reflective practice and I think it's too much to ask individuals who may not reflect at all on how they perform to do with themselves and that's why those structures do need to be in place to embed that kind of learning. So let's continue on this example because I like it so obviously in the best situation the training is completed and then the manager as you as you both say you know is completely monitoring monitoring this afterwards you know constant reinforcement ensuring ensuring that it's been adopted but what happens when something has been somebody's been trained it's been explained it's been demonstrated they've been given opportunities to practice and then they're supported but the performance isn't still isn't there at what point should our listeners identify this is this is no longer a training issue this is something deeper and what's your thoughts on that? Well yes I mean if the person can't do the task unless you're with them then it's probably a confidence or a practice issue but if there's if you know they can do the task and they're not performing well then you do do need to have a conversation and you have to give them feedback and how you structure that feedback is really important so for example if I had someone on my team and they came to me with a report and it wasn't very while written. If I see to them, you know, you really need to look at your report writing skills. That's not going to help because they don't know what they have to do to improve. It hasn't been specific enough, so it would be much better to say something like, "I really like the way you laid out the report in different sections, but I want you to go back and look at the summary because I think if you made that more concise it would really land." So then the learner knows what to do with it, and as well it's about being timely. You can't gather up all the performance issues and then hit them with it at a meeting. Yeah, that's not going to work. So you have to catch them in the moment so that you can give them that feedback, and ideally as well, you've got to catch them doing something right and give them some praise because that's so motivational, especially if it's done in front of other people. So it's really all about the conversation, and that's so important for building respect and the relationship. Well said. Mary, what obviously development is owned by the employee themselves, and it's the responsibility of the employer to support them and provide opportunities like training, but what does a healthy balance look like here between an employee taking ownership of their own development and the employer coaching them along? What's good look like in that situation? Ideally when you're dealing with employees, they're interested in their own development because if they're not interested in their own development it can be very difficult to start putting them on training programs or on courses that they don't want to do, they don't want to learn, and so you've got to have the interest there right from the beginning, but just to go back a little bit because we are talking about performance as well. So I think it's really important that we're able to separate us out what can actually be improved through a learning intervention and what simply cannot. So there are two different things and different processes apply. So if we're dealing with capability and competence, for example, and we're not convinced that training or education or learning is actually going to improve the situation, then we probably are looking at a performance improvement process, which is a pre-disciplinary measure and a structure process, or we're talking about, and if that fails then we're talking about a disciplinary process and getting people to a different point using a very serious structure around which their capability or their competence is being addressed. So that's important to separate out from what can and can't necessarily be influenced or improved through training and development. However, you might still as part of a performance improvement process or a disciplinary process put people on mandatory training that they have to participate in order to develop whatever skills you're looking for them to develop or whatever ability or approach you want them to take. Then when it comes to, you know, things that can be improved through training design and the training intervention, you're looking at, well, okay, for example, if we take hands example about report rising, I mean, this is one of the things that has been close to my own harsh over the last 25 years. I think I tortured Liam Barton, our commercial director on report rising in particular and the approach I took initially was I would review the report second pair of eyes, good to look at, and change us for him. Believing that would result in a better quality report. Of course, it didn't just meant that first draft would be whatever it was, and then I'd actually in effect finish the reports and bring it to whatever standard. Then it didn't work, and lean hated rising reports at that time. And later, when I started saying, hey, I can't keep fixing this, so you've got your responsible for it, it changed entirely, changed entirely because you're very well capable of rising a report, and it just required a different approach. From me, I think primarily, not necessarily from him, he had the ability, he was just trying to get a done quickly and efficiently. It's a normal reaction, I think, and could that be improved through a training course? Probably not. Probably not. It needed a conversation. I think sometimes it is, just sometimes it is just having a conversation that might be difficult, or I've experienced that as a manager as well, where you just describe Mary, where the easy thing to do often is just to do it yourself, because I know how to do this, I know exactly what I want, and I'll have it done in five minutes, so I'll just do that and we'll move on to the next thing, but I think it's a great example you've just given where that actually doesn't change anything or address anything. No, and the person has no opportunity to learn exactly. You're actually taking responsibility for somebody else's work, which of course is a manager, you have to have overall responsibility, but that doesn't mean you have to do the job for someone, your job is to teach, and so if there's as skills as that you believe someone has the capability and the skills and the desire to improve, I think, a training or a learning intervention can be really helpful and supportive in that way. You know, would English classes help someone? Would, you know, one-to-one coaching help someone with the report writing? Would providing examples of good reports do something maybe, or maybe it isn't? I think what I'm hearing from both of you a lot here is that this comes down to managers just being having the confidence to be direct and to diagnose an issue here, right? That's what Mary said earlier, that business is maybe lacking in just this this diagnosis, this analysis, like what is the problem here? And then is training the right answer, or is it not? And bring you back in here. I'll give you the same question I give Mary around this ownership piece around development. So how much responsibility sits with the employee, and how much sits with the organization and the manager, and is there a danger sometimes that the manager or the organization can end up with too much responsibility? Well, you can't make a learner learn if they don't want to. And so it's very much their responsibility, but the manager and the trainer can do an awful lot to motivate them and get getting them to see a different perspective. And I've worked in a lot of organizations where they've used individual development plans, or IDPs, which is a great tool whereby the learner has to list out what development they want for the coming period, say a year, whether that's on the job or on the training course, and they bring that to the manager to discuss, but the tool only works if the manager has the right approach, because they don't want to take responsibility for that plan. So in that situation, if I was a manager, I might say, on a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that you're going to achieve all that in a year? And the learner might come back and say, well, maybe about five or six, I think. So then they can go back and have a discussion and maybe refine it a bit and make it more realistic, you know? And then the manager could say, well, what's the one thing I can do to help you make that happen? So you're keeping the owners very much on the learner rather than on the manager or the trainer. And there's another situation as well that I just like to cover, and that's, you know, I've done a lot of workshops whereby I've had people turn up and I asked them, why are they there? And they said they've been sent. You know, it's happened so much. And what's gone wrong there is that the manager hasn't sat down before the event and said, this is what I'd like you to get from the training course. And this is how you can apply it. And then sat down with them afterwards and helped them with the learning transfer. And the trainer maybe hasn't done their homework to see, you know, what, you know, what the trainer knows, sorry, what the learner knows already. And maybe made that connection and given them pre-work and followed up after the course with more notes and support and so on. So I think the learner, the trainer, the manager, all three are responsible. for the learning and development. And if they don't all work together, it's an awful waste of resources, you know. Yeah, they're all just dancing around a dancing around an issue and nobody really knows what the issue is. I think it sounds like, as always, this old comes down to culture as well. Mary, like for anyone listening, particularly HR professionals listening, how can they help to build a culture where managers can identify these issues where managers can become better supporters of their employees development, you know, without having to turn every manager into a professional trainer. But how do we, how do we, how do we create a culture where they're at least, at least acknowledging the problems, doing the diagnosis and having direct conversations? Yeah, look, it's a tall order. And, you know, it's not only HR's responsibility or learning development professionals responsibility. I mean, there's a role for the HR practitioner, the learning and development specialists to, you know, do an organizational wide training needs analysis, understanding what is our LMS delivering? Where do we need classroom type training? Where do we need structured education? And how does it all work together? And very importantly, how do we ensure our people are learning in the flow of work? And the example around report writing or communication or whatever it is, that that piece in which how are people learning and work? Is that by sitting beside people? Is that by being mentored by people? Is that by being shown how to do something? All of these things are a complex range of interventions. They're not singular. So, for example, if you're in HR and all you have is the LMS system and you have provided that library resources to people and you do nothing more than that, I can tell you that your culture isn't a learning culture. It's unlikely to be because there's no real thought put into it. And I often hear employees talk about their frustration doing the same compliance training every year, exactly the same compliance training, exactly the same thing that might take up to an hour of their time on compliance alone. And they hate us and they resent us and they're just getting it done because they have to do it. So, in my view, if we're using LMS, we've got to ensure that it's only part of the solution, it's not the full entire solution, and that from a management perspective, we can't create a learning culture unless there's a learning culture within management itself. And that's why I always say we've got to look at the organization as a system and as a whole and think about what kind of culture we're trying to create, what kind of investment are we actually making in management and leadership development? Does that apply to everyone from the CEO all the way through to our supervisors? For example, if we have the SLT, the management team, a supervisory layer, you know, whatever that looks like, do we have a learning culture there? Because if you want a learning culture to exist, your managers are central to us. Not HR. HR can touch everything and everyone and everywhere within an organization, but it can put in place the structures. It can ensure that the LMS has customized Irish centric or UK centric or whatever modules. So, you're not driving people absolutely crazy with the Americanized off that just doesn't resonate in Ireland and so often, if you hear what the employees have to say about the LMS, I think a lot of people think twice. I don't know if you agree with that. Oh, I absolutely agree, you know, about this whole culture thing, I think it's really fascinating. And I've always loved, you know, thinking about the strategy, how are we going to build a learning culture? And, you know, I think it comes from the senior team, as you said, I think. And it trickles down and you could, you could look at the organization structure in 2D who's reporting to who. But I'd like to look at it as a 3D setup. Who are the people with the power and the influence and who's getting on with who? And often you find departments don't talk to each other very well or don't communicate. And there's a silo mentality. And for me, you've got to build this web and it's all based on trust and relationships and connection. That's how you get the learning culture going. And I've been fortunate to work in a couple of organizations that are really good at that. I was with Abbott Laboratories and also with Lonzo Biologics who made the Moderna vaccine in the UK. And I can share a few examples of just how that looked. And it's not driven, particularly by L&D. You know, it can be driven by anybody. One of the things they used to do were service level agreements. So they would get departments to think of who are their internal customers. So the people they gave their work to, they would sit down with them and they'd figure out a one-page, a one-pager on how to work better together. And that created a lot of learning as well as relationships. And then another initiative was internal mentoring. So you can get these apps these days that make it very easy to connect up, you know, a senior leader with someone in another department that's maybe more junior. And that was really valuable for generating learning and connection. And I was responsible for the graduate program. And I used to have group calls with the graduates because these people were, you know, high performers and they were getting head down to the whole time. And so I felt that if they were connected better into the organization, we're more likely to hang on to them for longer. And one of the calls, one of the graduates said, why don't I share what we do in our department? And then we'll all take turns. So that whole idea of shared learning or peer learning, it just took off and it made my job very easy on the course. And then the last example I remember, which was a really powerful one, was I got the graduates to present to the senior team on what they'd learned in each rotation. But more importantly, what impact they had and have some metrics because the senior team are all about metrics. You know, what's the investment we're making here? How can we see the payback? And the senior team were really open to listening to those presentations. And it's said that, you know, even at senior level, they were willing to learn. So that really was very valuable, I thought. So I think that everyone in the organization can build a learning culture. It's not just for the HR department or the L&D department. And you just got to look at what you can do within your own sphere of influence. And, you know, you might have a bad day at home and you turn up at work. But if you forget that and you're positive and you're, you know, you connect with people and that in itself will help build a learning culture. Nicely said, great examples. Thank you, Anne. We're going to bring this conversation to a close. I just want to give everyone a chance to share any final thoughts or key takeaways from this conversation with our audience. So Mary, I guess what's the, what's the one thing you would encourage our audience members to take away from this and do differently when they're trying, when they're identifying, whether it's kind of a performance or a development gap. Yeah, it's train your managers because if you don't train your managers and they don't recognize the difference, then you have a problem in itself. So to me, what seems to be fundamentally missing in lots of organizations is that focus on management and teaching management to reflect, to learn, to be able to fine tune their communication skills, their conflict management skills, their addressing of performance concerns. And I think if you were to look at a program that supported management in that way, I think you would see a lot more engaged employees because they're the people that touch the daily working lives of the teams, not HR, not L&D, not even the SLT or the senior management team. It's the direct line manager who has the greatest positive or negative influence. Or negative. Yeah. That's the, we touched on this previously, didn't we? Did they have, they have more of an impact on your mental health than, then there's the kind of or a doctor or a spouse or anywhere. So, yeah, I think you're dead right, Mary. It's an incredibly powerful position and can be incredibly influential. And what final takeaways would you like the audience to focus on, I guess, from our conversation? And do you want to maybe tell everyone a little bit about your book and where they can find it? Yes, well, I grew with Mary about the manager's role. It's so critical, and it's not an easy one, you know. But I remember working with a manager once who was very influential. He was particularly senior, but everyone had a lot of respect for him. And his mantra was, you had to be fair, firm and friendly. And I thought that was a great thing to keep in mind. The thing I would say to finish off, I wanted to tell a story just to highlight it. And I once started working in an organization where my manager had been there for years. And I was new and I didn't know the jargon, I didn't know the systems, I didn't know the stakeholders. And I could just sense her frustration and her impatience because I wasn't at her level in terms of knowledge. And I think, you know, she wasn't a bad manager, but I think when you get very experienced at something, you forget what it's like not to know. And I would say, put yourself in your learners shoes and walk the walk with them. And you've got to be very alert to giving them feedback and having continuous conversations and supporting them. Because as we talked about earlier, you know, everyone can build that learning culture and that's one of the ways to do it. And yeah, and as for the book, yeah, I've just published the book called Helping Others Learn in the Workplace. It's available on Kindle and on paperback. And I've designed it because I wanted a practical guide for managers and trainers to pick up. Because sometimes managers, in particular, are expected to train others because they're experts. But they're not given the manual for how to do it. And they think it's supposed to happen instinctively. But there's a lot you can do to make that an enjoyable and productive experience. So I hope they find the book useful. I think you can read it quite quickly. And I'd love feedback. I'm on LinkedIn. My name's Anne Hallorin. That's Anne without the E. And yeah, hope to hear from you. - Berlin, well, thank you so much for joining us, Anne. And thank you, Mary, for sharing your insights. As always, I've learned a lot just from this conversation. And I hope it's been useful to everyone listening. If it's resonated with you, or if you have training needs, please do also check out our training and development programs. I'll link to those in the show notes along with Anne's book. So we run a variety of courses with soft skills for managers, which is something that's clearly very important. As Mary's highlighted, group management circles, coaching, mentoring, and much, much more. If it's your first time listening to the HR Room, welcome to the HR Room. Please do subscribe to us wherever you're listening. You can follow inside HR on LinkedIn. If you have a topic you'd like us to cover on the HR Room, or if you'd like to appear on the podcast, reach out to me. My contact details are in the show notes. And if you'd like to speak to any of our HR professionals about workplace investigations, HR services, or indeed training and development, you can contact us at [email protected] or give us a call 05-6-770-1060. Thanks again to Mary and Anne, and thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week.