Training helps business activity

People have survived and thrived all over the globe because they are naturally adept at learning and adapting to changing circumstances.

Organisations need to spend more time though on becoming places where training, learning and development occurs naturally as a critical business activity.

The trick is to ensure that this happens without everybody having to be the highly driven, high potential population where ‘development' is an expected activity (some might say a burden) that is commensurate with the label of being tomorrow's future leader.

Everyone can develop and improve and training (despite what seems to happen across the Region) is not the only route to capability development — far from it!

The messages that come from an organisation's culture, and in particular their leaders, are closely linked to the organisation's strategy and its leadership and management practices, and have a great impact on the people who work there.

Apart from that there is a growing momentum of research based information that proves the relationship between a constructive culture and corporate performance, organisational quality and effectiveness, customer service, excellence, employee engagement, motivation, and retention.

Therefore if development is to be an important ethos for the organisation there are a number of practices that need to be in place to support this.

People need to start thinking about both the long and short term as far as their capability is concerned but starting to do anything differently takes time, motivation and energy.
 
Organisations need to have some slack (easy to say, hard to do) so people have time to think, plan, try new things and reflect.

Short-term objectives and activities are vital to business performance but development is very difficult if there is insufficient time to learn because every moment is taken up with "doing".

Of course if you try anything new or give people scope, mistakes are inevitable. If you make a mistake, apologise, think about what happened and why and how to avoid making the mistake in future.

If someone else makes a mistake, you can talk with that person about what happened and why and how to avoid the mistake happening again.

By working together, without blaming, you will create co-operation and learning. Blaming will create defensiveness and mistrust and so is much less constructive.

Of course in this region where a whole diverse range of different cultures exists it takes a confident person to admit their vulnerability by asking for help in the first place.

However, no one is good at everything and one of the advantages of an organisation is that there are people around whose job it is to help.

Asking for help is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. You can also offer help gently to people who appear to be struggling and let them know that you see accepting your help as a sign of strength too.

Often, just listening to someone as he or she thinks aloud is the most helpful thing you can do.

Remember talented people expect these types of opportunities to occur as that is one way to fulfil their drive and ambition to improve themselves. Can your business afford to be without those people?

I think not so, make development a business critical initiative before some one else does!

Dave Millner is consulting director of Kenexa EMEA and director of Kenexa HR Institute.