Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources.
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Staff training is as important for a manager as hitting your sales targets. You wouldn’t let anyone else set those targets yet far too many managers do exactly that for training: shifting the responsibility to Human Resources departments.
The problem is that delegation can very quickly become abdication, with negative consequences for the staff, the manager, and the company.
Properly conceptualized and executed learning and development (L&D), should be neither a chore nor a nice-to-have. In fact, in this rapidly changing continually disrupted world that we live in L&D has become increasingly important.
Companies often complain that the talent pool is far too shallow to meet their needs when they cast their net for new hires, but those same companies are in all probability not doing anything to create an internal pipeline of skilled talent.
Great companies, through the ages, have seen the need and the value in developing their own skilled employees. For them, the question today is not what to teach but rather how fast their people can learn. The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has unlocked learning opportunities in ways that were unimaginable before. At one time training was generic, sometimes rote, always in a classroom. Now it can be asynchronous, one-on-one in person or remote or both. It can even be co-created with AI. The output can range from short skills courses to formal credentials.
Like the world it seeks to unlock, learning is far more agile than ever before in scope and scale. As always it is the CEO that sets the tone for any company and learning and development are no different. A CEO who is actively learning both inspires and allows their staff to do the same by physically creating a culture of learning in the company.
Truly effective L&D though requires the involvement of the full gamut of the C-suite: The CFO needs to ensure that the old bugbear Return for Investment (ROI) is realised for the company; the CIO must implement and support the digital infrastructure required for modern learning while the Chief People Officer must create an environment that enables and encourages learning at every level.
Creating an HR enabled learning environment is so much more than just measuring attendance and completion metrics, it is about putting in place mechanisms to ensure that the training does what it is supposed to: unlock the potential of the staff who have been selected to participate in this development.
Sometimes those development interventions can be deceptively simple yet exponentially effective, like the time a company decided to send a manager to the Voice Clinic. The manager who was full of promise but failing, emerged as phenomenal deal maker and closer, having unlocked the confidence to speak in public with the actual abilities that were always on show in the office.
We need to move away from a one size-fits-all approach to learning and development; the companies that are filled with curiosity about the different kinds of learning programmes that are available and look to technology not as a mechanism to police their personnel; focusing on algorithms to manage people and track progress, but as a way of developing skills are the companies that will flourish.
As businesses evolve, so too do their needs, business leaders need to use L&D to meet both their short term staffing – and leadership – needs, as well as meet the challenges that might be looming five years down the line. Lifting your gaze beyond the immediate to the mid-future is perhaps the most important, because a five-year horizon provides a company with the runway to develop a proper in-house talent pipeline.
When you get that right, you shouldn’t need to always look outside the organisation for the talent you need, but just as there are different ways of learning for different people, so too are there different ways of attracting talent. Sometimes it makes sense to look beyond the strictures of the company organization if that is what the company needs, but equally that should only be done if the company has done everything it can to grow its own timber because creating a culture of always looking outside for leadership candidates can also be expensive and self-defeating.
We have the tools like never before, which help reduce – and even eradicate - the traditional barriers to further education. As business leaders, we do not have an excuse not to act. The greatest incentive for traditional business leaders is that over and above the very laudable goals of developing the staff that work for you, it makes real business sense too with a tangible, positive, impact on the bottom line.
There are business leaders who complain that there is no upside to training staff only to have them be poached by head hunters from rival companies. It’s a valid argument but one that is easily trumped by its corollary: not training your staff and having them stay.
*Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Fast Company