It’s time for ‘People Development’ to be owned by Operations (and not HR) Under pressure to achieve results, managers habitually focus on ad hoc strategy changes and tinkering with day to day tactics. In the process, cultures develop whereby managers can survive by overworking, by looking serious, and by being able to articulate detail. Employees, instead of being the ultimate solution, then start to become the problem, since a frustrated and stressed manager always seems to suffer from their people simply not doing what’s expected of them. In turn, training is then seen as the way to ‘fix’ people and to mould a workforce to a set strategy. And so the cycle continues with an ever greater rift between HR processes and commercial expediency. It’s not that modern corporate managers have really stopped believing that people growth equals business growth, it’s simply that it’s become too risky for them to SAY that they believe it. "Do the right things and the results will come" has become a discredited strategy and one that will get a CEO sacked if the ensuing results are not up to expectations. The best and most respected training in most organisations therefore is the core technical stuff, because it has a status within the culture and frankly because it’s easy to measure outputs. The least respected (and therefore often the worst) training in organisations, if it exists at all, is the 'soft' stuff; coaching, talent development, interpersonal and communications skills and of course, ‘leadership’. It’s easy to pontificate that the solution is to breed a new generation of enlightened and less stressed leaders or to implore the current crop to somehow magically adopt the people development religion. It’s also easy to respond to the exhortations of ‘prove it’ from the cynics, by pouring more wasted energy into the ever futile search for concrete proof that people development yields an exponential return. But the pragmatic reality is that the pressure is not going to go away. So how can we bring people development activities into vogue? Firstly, HR (and therefore people development) needs to brought within the commercial operations, not be seen as separate. It needs to be run by commercially literate advocates not career professionals. Soft skills training must simulate the day to day pressures and realities. We have got to stop intellectualising change and acknowledge the psychological and emotional human journey. The way anything in organisations is brought to life is for the leaders to focus attention on it. So they should talk about people development all the time. They should ask people about it all the time. They should attend in-house training courses themselves. They should deliver them themselves. They should make people development an agenda item of every board meeting. If they truly owned it, they would stop asking for proof that it works and simply make it so. www.collaborativeequity.com
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