‘Magic happens before and after’ – What a great quote I learnt from the others. And I wrote a post on this before. The same applies to the business of developmental work. For example, whether a learning workshop succeeds or not is at least 50% ‘determined already’ before it really starts. And one of the key pre-workshop work is to get the right participants into the workshop.
I was once in a workshop in Hong Kong with quite a few challenging participants. They were either:
Not knowing why they were put into this particular program (one asked me whether he has done something wrong and thus got sent to this program!!)
Not having time for the workshop. Some were actively working on deals
Not seeing the need to develop their leadership at all
Not even supported by their boss to spend time in the program
The workshop turned out to be very challenging as we had quite a few of the above and their dysfunctional behaviours influenced others a lot e.g. late-coming, working on mobile devices during sessions. Having said, there were often 1 or 2 of these ‘prisoners’, ‘tourists’ or even ‘terrorists’ in the workshops I experienced.
Well, that is why I always prefer to work on Just-in-Time learning with intact teams. Since the intervention itself is real work, the participants will naturally have the will and time for it. Unfortunately, we got to work on Just-in-Case learning as well and the risk of having ‘wrong’ participants is there.
Let me first reflect on why ‘wrong’ participants will end up in a learning program. Organisationally, the root cause is size, time and topic nature. First, when there are too many people in an organisation, there will be very different views on what a talent should develop on. The talent development team in the headquarter believes an individual (let’s say John) should develop on networking skills but John and his boss see hard skills like credit analysis to be more important. The situation becomes more complex when there are more parties in the picture e.g. local HR, business HR, local talent development, business head.
Ideally, such difference in view can be reconciled if there is time. Specifically, John comes up his own individual development plan. He discusses and agrees with his boss. They then further discuss and agree with their HR partner. And that HR partner ideally should have liaised with the other various HR specialists and business heads, and thus understands perfectly well the top down agenda on talent development i.e. what competency is needed for the organisation or a particular business. John can then adjust his individual development plan which by then takes care of his own aspiration, the immediate business and the overall organisational need. Yet, how often does an organizations have time for such alignment work? Especially for the listed ones which need to respond to short-term-ism!
Let me elaborate on the third factor – topic nature – in the next post.
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