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Time and again we see research that demonstrates the value of employee development as a motivation and retention tool. Even before the ‘war for talent’ was first mooted, organisations were investing significant amounts in developing their current and potential senior managers. But let’s be honest with ourselves: How targeted was that development? How much of candidate selection was based on ‘need’ and how much of it was based on ‘providing a reward’? What proportion of the participants went back to work and applied what they had learned, as opposed to putting the ‘course trophy’ (i.e. the binder of materials) on their bookshelf?
In today’s economy, we have to make tough decisions about where to invest our development spend, and there is generally less of it to go around. That investment needs to produce a return for the business.
And there’s the problem. How do we identify the return? For sure, there are tools and models out there that can be applied – the Kirkpatrick and Phillips models being perhaps the best known and most widely quoted. But it is fiendishly difficult to disaggregate the data. How can we say with confidence that participation on a programme, rather than chance, coincidence, or external drivers, achieved an actual change in behaviour or improvement in performance? And even if it did, how much of the resulting business impact was down to the change from the programme, and how much from external forces? If we were to go up in front of a tough CFO, would she believe our figures?
When we talk about ROI from development efforts, we are using a term that is loaded with meaning, and it sets an expectation for robust and unimpeachable numbers to support the claims we make. This is doubly frustrating, partly because if we’re honest, we know that those numbers are always subject to interpretation, and partly because the same people who criticise our interpretation have their own numbers that they produce that are just as open to criticism, but they have the protection of accounting standards and precedents to support the assumptions they make!
Perhaps there is another way to look at this. If we are providing customised development for our managers, perhaps we can build a pathway that enables us to identify and demonstrate ‘business impact’. We may not be able to agree specifically on the value of that impact to the business, but if we are careful it will be impossible to disagree that a positive impact has occurred. And with appropriate confidence intervals and assumptions, we should be able to demonstrate that there is real bottom line benefit to development efforts. This is especially important for customised development for managers and leaders, since by their nature, such programmes will generally run with few iterations, which makes it impossible to implement the feedback and improvement loops inherent in the development of the Kirkpatrick model. We believe there are ways to demonstrate impact with careful programme design:
- By designing the programme around specific operational issues where knowledge and methods can be integrated with real work experience. In this way, planned operational changes and improvements can be directly facilitated by programme design and delivery, reducing the time required to realise the benefits of such changes.
- By integrating ‘academic’ project work with live business issues, enabling new insights, ideas and initiatives to be developed as a result of programme participation.
- By engaging participants and their managers in strategic business issues, and enabling those participants to take a measure of ownership of the programme design and flow as it progresses, to enable targeted strategic imperatives to be addressed.
Additionally, there is always the possibility to conduct a post-hoc analysis of actions and decisions of participants to identify possible links back to programme materials, and thereby quantify the impact of the learning.
Developing current and future leaders is an imperative for all businesses. Without a strong case for the investment, it can always be ‘put off’ until it can be afforded more easily, especially in difficult business climates. But the longer we put off the investment, the longer we have to wait for the benefits.
Why wait?
Continued….
On Thursday 23rd May, Aston Business School will present an hour long online presentation which will discuss the various was management development programmes can be designed to maximise business impact.
The session will look at three real-life case studies in which impact measurements were used to effectively demonstrate improvement opportunities and generate direct business impact from their development programmes.
To attend this free session, simply click the image below and follow the instructions.
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Clik here to view.
The post How to demonstrate the business value of employee development and secure future investment without risking credibility appeared first on WTG BLOG.