“An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.”
— Charles Kettering
We all know there is a recession, and there are many companies that seem to be failing. The media continues to feed the fear of continued economic downturn. There are no successes, or none that come to light through the media. Most people are waiting and watching with a sense of doom and apathy, and yet there are some that are filled with hope and are actively seeking opportunities. We see this in small examples, such as a professional in the IT industry that I met last month who was anticipating being laid off and had already formed a home health care company with the intent of working with his wife who is a nurse.
Every business, every manager, every professional has the opportunity to choose between apathy and creativity. Apathy will bring with it inertia: no energy, no creativity, no one initiating change, dependent on the same approaches and processes year after year. For these, there will be eventual change, but it will come from the outside, with executives making decisions to cut budgets or from clients choosing to go elsewhere, drawn by positive energy, interest, and pleasant service.
Here is one example: Recently, two medium sized companies in the U.S. took a hatchet to their training budgets and laid off every one in their education department. This decision is not entirely the fault of the executives; it is also a result of apathy in the leadership within the targeted department. It requires creative thinking by the leaders in every department to demonstrate to executives how they can increase efficiencies and decrease costs significantly through the use of different business models; it requires looking outside the bubble to find new and readily available solutions to meet their needs; and it requires speed of action as well as becoming part of the solution. It requires becoming part of the solution.
It is about people and their development:
Success in these times will be measured by an organization’s ability to achieve its goals with apathy being their number one enemy. People are tremendously important during these times; their skills along with their attitudes can make or break a company. Some organizations are cutting costs carefully while ensuring the key training elements that provide energy and core knowledge for their employees and clients remain intact while cutting peripheral training. Many are moving from traditional classroom training to a hybrid of online and live training.
With the number of innovative strategies such as the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, this is a creative time for training organizations to revamp their traditional approach, regardless of whether they use classroom or online training. This will allow them to significantly reduce costs and still meet their organization’s people development needs.
The education and training market will never revert to traditional ways of doing things. Change is here to stay. Organizations will have to adapt and begin using technology and innovative business models more aggressively.
After cutting their training budgets, many organizations are using informal and on-the-job training. This can be extremely costly in the long run. We have heard recently of a company that had to pay a $2.5 million fine to the U.S. government because one of its front line employees did not know the importance of shredding private information, dumping it in the trash can instead. This type of consistent regulatory compliance knowledge cannot be transferred informally. Interactivity and assessments are required to assure management that knowledge is consistently transmitted and is being actively used.
Remember, training is a service. This service is provided to employees and customers to increase performance, productivity, and loyalty – all of which drive revenue. Lead your organization to achieve these objectives efficiently, while reducing unnecessary costs. Find the right approaches, tools, and technology for your organization. Approaches that provide tremendous value to your organization and help you achieve maximum benefit.
All businesses today need leaders in every role and position, not just in management positions. It takes initiative and individual drive to make a business work in today’s environment. It is what attracts customers, a differentiator in these highly competitive times. Empowered Training’s newsletter this month is a call to managers and professionals to wake up, to take the bull by the horns and play an active role as a leader within their organization.
