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What Is Courageous Training?

A STORY OF COURAGEOUS TRAINING

We start this chapter with a brief but illustrative story about Courageous Training. We then dissect the story to highlight the key elements that characterize the Courageous Training model.

PAT WILLIS S LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT (L&D) DEPARTMENT, like the entire company, had fallen on hard times. Increased competition and other factors had slowed sales, and all budgets were under scrutiny. A wide-scale company downsizing had resulted in leaner staff operations, and overall training enrollments had dropped consistently for the past three years. Taking time for training, it seemed, was getting harder and harder to do.

So when Pat received a call from a Senior Vice President who directed the company’s global operations that important training demands were on the horizon, she hoped this was a sign that things were changing. Her budget had been under a lot of pressure; she already had to let one staff member of the training department go; and there were persistent rumors that the company was looking at outsourcing several operations completely. Training, she knew, could likely be one of them.

The meeting with the Vice President was like a breath of fresh air. This Vice President’s division had just completed several acquisitions to help expand the company into Asian markets. The division also was launching a new sales strategy to work more closely with channel partners and to sell integrated, more comprehensive solutions to customers. Both of these strategic elements would require far greater than usual collaboration among members of the sales group. They would have to reach out not only across internal company boundaries, but also to channel partners and suppliers to bring more comprehensive, vertically integrated components into their sales proposals.

These new behaviors, the Vice President knew, were very different from the behaviors that had made the sales group successful in the past. New mind-sets, new skills, and new ways of working would be required. And it had to happen quickly, as the market was moving rapidly. The scenario the Vice President posed to Pat would entail several multiday training interventions for more than 2,500 employees in the current and newly acquired operations. Doing the rough math quickly in her head, Pat could envision a training rollout that would easily involve more than 5,000 training days—a huge increase in her scope of operations. In short, this would be a major “sale,” significant enough to elevate her stature in the company and easily sufficient to justify reinstating her department’s lost position and perhaps even adding one or two.

The Temptation of Pat

We interrupt the story for a quick review. Here’s what we have so far:

• Pat’s position and reputation in the company were more at risk than ever. The L&D department had descended from a major and “integral to the business” role to more of a minor and “commodity-like” role; its future looked grim.
• Her enrollments were consistently down, putting budget renewals at risk.
• She was hungry—perhaps even desperate—for a “win.”
• The Vice President’s request for a lot of training could save the day for her, dramatically expanding her department’s scope, budget, and life span.

It would be hard for a put-upon training leader, perhaps even one for whom things were going great, to not be salivating over what might be a great coup. The Vice President is pushing hard for quick service and an aggressive rollout schedule for getting training to a lot of people as quickly as possible. For an external training sales person, the magnitude of the potential order would be measured in the millions of dollars. For an internal training leader, the sales opportunity would be equal to that amount in scope and importance, though not measured in exactly the same way.

Back to the Story: Pat’s Courageous Action

FIRST, PAT TALKED WITH THE VICE PRESIDENT about the business stakes involved. Both she and the Vice President knew the stakes were obviously very high, but Pat wanted to be sure they each saw the issues in the same way. She wanted to be sure she understood how this strategy would be measured, what the major business challenges were, and how the new organization must operate. She also wanted to make sure that each recognized the potential benefit if the training was truly effective (that is, a sales force that was clear about the sales strategy and capable of selling value to the market) and the potential consequences if the training did not work (that is, failure to execute the sales strategy and likely permanent loss of the opportunity to establish a competitive beachhead in these emerging markets).

Next, she suggested a much more modest plan for the rollout of training. The Vice President initially suggested that she establish a crash task force to design a brand-new training initiative to be delivered on a rapid schedule to all 2,500 employees. Pat countered with a plan to even more quickly develop the training components and provide them to a strategically selected and vertically integrated sales group—consisting of fewer than 200 people—on a pilot basis.

She would precede the pilot training with teleconferences with each member of the senior leadership team who directed the overall Asian market initiative. In these calls, she would get the participants to identify the business success metrics by which the entire market initiative would be assessed, and to which she knew her training must directly contribute. She would be alert for consensus and agreement among the team, and plan to help the members resolve any lack of alignment or unclear expectations. She would close this phase with a commitment that her success should be gauged by the extent to which she helped drive these metrics, the same way that any other partner’s work would be judged.

Following these discussions, she would capture the business goals for the initiative in an “Impact Map,” which would make clear exactly how each job role that was represented in her training audience would be expected to use the training on the job in order to help drive the agreed-upon success outcomes. (See Chapter Three for a detailed discussion of Impact Maps.) She would also identify and explain the actions that the trainees’ managers must take to help trainees actually use the training in the ways intended.

Pat then suggested to the Vice President that her L&D team convene web-based teleconferences with small groups of the sales managers to review the Impact Maps to be sure that they understood the business stakes involved and how the training was intended to help their sales groups succeed. As a part of this teleconference, L&D would also briefly instruct the sales managers on actions they could take to help ensure that their sales teams were successfully using the new skills and focusing on the execution of the sales strategy. Finally, L&D would provide the managers with a template and suggestions for how they could conduct brief one-on-one discussions with their direct reports who would be participating in the training. In these one-on-one discussions, the managers would be asked to explain their expectations and to help each trainee arrive at a clear plan to leverage their individual learning into job tasks that would help them and the business succeed. She included in her plan a provision for managers to access on-line coaching tools that they could use after their direct reports were trained, pointing out again the stakes involved if this training were not successfully implemented on the job.

She also recommended a brief follow-up conference call with the sales managers within one month after the training, in which they would discuss what was working well and how they were working with their teams to coach the new approach. They would also identify any obstacles they or their teams were encountering.

The final element in Pat’s first rollout plan was a quick follow-up evaluation to find out how well all of these elements were working. She would survey trainees soon after training to encourage them to report what they were using, what they were struggling to use, or what they were not using at all—and

what, if any, progress they were making toward executing the new sales strategy. She would focus the evaluation especially on barriers that the newly trained staff members were encountering, and she would relate these barriers to the extent to which managers and senior leaders were, or were not, providing the kinds of support that Pat knew would make or break the successful execution of the sales effort. But she would also identify other factors and management actions that were helping to reinforce or support the new skills.

Pat assured the Vice President that she could get all of this done quickly, because she knew the business plans needed rapid execution. She could move quickly to get the senior leader and manager alignment work done, and to prepare and train the pilot group. She emphasized to the Vice President that there was only one real criterion by which her work should be gauged. It was not whether she got a lot of training designed and delivered; it was not how many people she could put through training quickly; it was not whether people liked her training. The only criterion that mattered was whether her actions helped the Vice President and the Asian sales group achieve their business goals and whether the sales strategy was being executed as it needed to be. Period.

What Happened to Pat’s Plan

NOT EVERY PART OF PAT S PLAN WORKED as outlined. The senior leadership group had some disagreements about the overall business strategy that did not surface until Pat began to dig into the group’s expectations. Two of the directors were not sold on the reliance on channel partners that the strategy envisioned. They wanted more company autonomy in closing financial agreements with channel partner companies. It was clear to Pat that their disagreement was likely to lead to a failure to support the strategy. She and the Vice President revised the pilot plan to exclude these directors’ employees from the first round of training until they could resolve the issues.

When the managers learned of the plans to involve them in the teleconference sessions, they pushed back hard, going straight to the Senior Vice President to voice their complaints about the time commitment. Pat only learned of this when the Vice President told her that he was removing the budget for the teleconferences. After Pat agreed to revise the teleconference from ninety minutes to sixty minutes, she got the budget and the plan reinstated. (As it was, only about two-thirds of the managers actually participated. But that was enough participation for Pat to demonstrate in the evaluation that manager participation was one of the principal elements that enabled the new skills to actually be implemented post training on the job.)

The training itself had to be rescheduled because some marketing expositions that Pat had never been told about conflicted with the training dates. These schedule changes required her to combine the training into a day-and-a-half session followed later by a single one-day session. Initially, Pat had wanted three separate days, interspersed with action learning assignments involving actual account plans. As it turned out, only slightly more than half of the remaining action learning assignments were completed, as many managers never followed through on their promise to ensure that their sales teams’ plans were completed. Again, though, this was enough for Pat’s evaluation to identify the positive effect these assignments contributed to the success of the training and sales strategy. Overall, the training led to mixed results. It worked very well for some sales units, and not for others. Where it was working, there was strong evidence that applying the training made a significant contribution to helping the sales regions execute the sales strategy. There were also many positive lead indicators of success, such as more solution-based proposals presented to customers, more proposals by channel partners, more penetration by the newly assembled cross-functional sales teams into new accounts, more C-level appointments made within customer organizations, a few early and large sales, and so forth.

Within a quarter of the sales districts, there was little if any execution of the strategy In these units, there was simply too much resistance to take the time to go in a new direction. Pat was able to report that this resistance was tied directly to a failure to participate in the support activities she had included, such as the manager teleconferences.

The upshot of this story was that the Senior Vice President was encouraged by the tangible results he saw in several districts; he realized that execution of the new strategy involved challenges that he and his senior leadership team had not anticipated. He came to see that the new go-to-market strategy and the skills necessary to execute it required a bigger change than the leadership team had initially envisioned. There was still commitment to the strategy, and the evidence that it was working helped to bolster this commitment. He also learned about some high-leverage factors that either make or break the success of implementing the training in each region.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF COURAGEOUS TRAINING

From our work with dozens of Courageous Training leaders, such as Pat in our story, we have identified four principal pillars for action that characterize and support the Courageous Training approach. These are:

• Be a business-goal bulldog.
• Build whole-organization responsibility for training impact.
• Win the hearts and minds of make-or-break partners.
• Tell it like it is with truthful measurement and evaluation.

We will briefly define the Four Pillars referring to the story of Pat to explain and illustrate each pillar. Some readers may be tempted to focus on the tactical elements in the implementation, such as: Was the training three days back-to-back or two separate sessions? Did the pilot group consist of intact work units, or did it represent a cross-section of the entire population? What were the action-learning components, and how soon after the training did they start? Was the pre-work done on-line, and how long did it last? Although these elements are interesting (and sometimes relevant to training outcomes), most of the time they are inconsequential in the overall success or failure of the implementation. To some extent they are like the fanfare and theatrics of the magician who is wildly waving his hand in the air or parading the beautiful assistant around the stage. It makes for interesting conversation but distracts attention from what really matters and what is really going on to execute the plan and achieve the goals.

Pillar #1: Be a Business-Goal Bulldog

Pat perceived her role to be that of a business partner and a leader with business responsibilities. She maintained an unwavering focus on business goals and needs. She did not see herself as someone whose principal job was to deliver training, or “sell” it, or otherwise promote and sustain a commitment to do training. Instead, she saw herself as having the responsibility to help the business be successful, using training as the vehicle to drive results. Pat passed on the opportunity to make a big training “sale” that would have, at least for the short term, enhanced her status, reinstated her budget, and made her department appear to be a responsive and diligent service provider. Alternatively, she viewed everything that guided her actions through the lens of the business and a regard for what it would take for the Senior Vice President’s division to succeed.

A Courageous Training leader has a firm grasp on the needs of the business and an unwavering commitment to business success. The courageous leader is first and above all a business leader who happens to be occupying a role in the training and development function.

Pillar #2: Build Whole-Organization
Responsibility for Training Impact

Training cannot succeed unless there is consistent commitment and action from several of the nontraining parts of the organization. Managers of trainees, for example, must provide the support, encouragement, and expectation for accountability so that employees try out training-acquired capabilities. Senior leaders must buy into and express a belief in the direction that training is steering toward. They must do this not only with words but also with actions.

Pat knew that training actions begin well before such training events as workshops, seminars, and e-learning modules. She took action to ensure alignment among all stakeholders and that accountabilities for supporting the training and the performance improvement process it drives were recognized, understood, and committed to. She knew also that once people complete participation in learning interventions, they must then practice and try out new behaviors in their work. And to do this, they must perceive positive incentives, be allowed and even encouraged to take risks, and receive feedback and coaching if needed to sustain and improve their performance. Effective training operates as a process that involves and relies on actions from different roles across an organization. Without whole-organization commitment and action, training cannot work. End of story.

Pillar #3: Win the Hearts and Minds of Make-or-Break Partners

This pillar of Courageous Training is highly interdependent with and necessitated by the previous pillar. If training is a process that requires actions by parties external to the formal training function, then training leaders must build partnerships with the people in these roles to bring them into alignment with the training and to elicit their most effective efforts.

Pat knew that she needed others to cooperate with her and to act in concert to fulfill all their mutual interests. She worked with senior leaders, for example, to help them sharpen their expectations for the execution of the new strategy and to clarify any points of disagreement or misalignment. She worked as a business partner with the Senior Vice President. She worked with line managers to understand their needs and to help them arrive at joint expectations for her and their actions. Above all, she perceived her role as a business partner, someone who worked, like her fellow line managers, on mutually held goals and issues. She did not engage them as recipients of a transactional service, attempting only to negotiate an expectation for what she would deliver. Instead, she helped gain agreement on common business goals—supported with a business rationale— then facilitated recognition of what each manager would need to do to ensure a mutually beneficial outcome.

Pillar #4: Tell It Like It Is with Truthful Measurement and Evaluation

No training will ever be 100% perfect. Inevitably, there will be omissions, shortcomings, errors, oversights, and unexpected outcomes and consequences. Parts of it, however, will go very well. Very often, for instance, people will leave training with positive learning: that is, new ways of thinking, new capabilities, or at least current but underused capabilities reinforced and validated.

There are also predictably less-successful parts of the training process. Many trainees are unlikely to successfully apply new skills on the job, due either to insufficiently learning them or, more likely, from a failure to have the requisite incentives, support, and coaching needed to employ them. Key nontraining partners are less likely than training-function players to faithfully execute their parts of the process. The training department staff, after all, has a full-time responsibility for making training work and has considerable control over the parts of the process they manage.

Pat recognized all of these issues. She avoided the temptation to evaluate and report only the parts of the process she could control, such as how much people enjoyed their training. It would have been easy to structure training evaluation to make her department look as good as possible. But effective partnerships demand the truth about who is doing what, what is working, and what is not. Above all, training leaders have a responsibility to assess what is working and what is not as far as achieving the business results at which the training was aimed. Such truthfulness, in contrast to self-serving evaluations, is much more likely to uncover negative outcomes and failed accountabilities. No one likes to hear what they think is bad news, and messengers of such news are famous for being shot. But because important problems cannot be fixed unless they are recognized, courageous leaders do not shy away from full disclosure, and they tell the truth (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) about what is working and what is not.

These then are the Four Pillars. They are the conceptual principles that guide the methods and tools that courageous leaders doggedly employ, and they form the platform on which all actions by Courageous Training leaders are executed. Each of the next four chapters is devoted to one of the Four Pillars, providing more explanations and illustrations of each.

But there is more to Courageous Training than just process. There is the personal strength of the Courageous Training leader to do as Pat did—to make the “pillars” come to life.

THE COURAGEOUS LEADER’S BACKBONE

Archimedes is noted to have said that, given a platform to stand on and a lever long enough, he could move Earth. In our view, the courageous leader’s Four Pillars provide the platform and the leverage. But Archimedes would need something else in addition to the platform and the lever, as do Courageous Training leaders who want to move the world of training in their organizations. He would also need the will, strength, and intestinal fortitude to articulate and promise world-moving results, believe they are possible, then climb up and out on the platform and stay on it despite the strong winds of difficulty and setbacks.

The platform alone is necessary, but not sufficient, without these acts of belief and will. Similarly, courage alone is not sufficient. Very often, what are initially seen as brave acts are in reality acts of recklessness. Without a careful plan, a formula for actions likely to work, and the tools and skills to accomplish the plan, bravery alone can lead to disaster. In our experience, a training leader acting courageously without the terra firma of a solid and proven conceptual base will only end up being fired, never establishing the longevity and partnerships needed to grow truly worthwhile outcomes.

We choose the concept of a backbone because a spine has to be strong, yet also supple. Courageous leaders must bend without breaking, making principled compromises, much as Pat did when she yielded to demands to shorten the manager intervention. She knew that a manager intervention was vital to having a chance at success. But she also knew that there was a great deal of resistance, and that the Senior Vice President partner would have to sustain his own political capital by showing some deference to an angry mob of managers. But she did not abandon her plan for a manager intervention, because she knew this was a key part of the process that would help ensure success. She made compromises that might weaken her chances but would not destroy them. She also designed measurement processes that would surface the truth about what role the manager intervention played in the business results achieved, or not achieved.

We revisit and deepen the discussion of the leadership spine in Chapter Seven, followed by case examples. The four case examples are written by courageous leaders who demonstrate with their real-world experience the stands they took, the processes they implemented, and the principled compromises they made to achieve truly exemplary outcomes.