Signs you’re not doing the right kind of skills analysis – figuring out what is a skills issue and what is a process or system issue.
No, not all of the people on your leadership course are great leaders. If you took away the dozens of competing demands and strategic priorities coming from your agency, they wouldn’t instantly be the best of the best. There are many things they need to learn.
But would they be better without the agency pulling them in a hundred directions? Yes.
If they learn new skills, can they put them to use with all those distractions? Much more doubtful.
When I’ve checked in with participants after courses, the normal pattern I find is that some have used a bit of what they’d learned in the course. Others hadn’t used anything really. Many are apologetic about not doing more. Some probably could have done more. For all of them, systemic problems like a lack of organisational focus get in the way of doing a great job.
Without fixing those problems, money is wasted on courses. Some parts help some people – a bit. If they’ve never seen an Eisenhower matrix, that may help them deal with the flood of things they have to do. But it doesn’t get to the heart of it. That root cause might be beyond the scope of what your L&D team can deal with. But without an organisational attempt at dealing with it, you’ll be wasting opportunities to improve.
That’s one of the main signs that you’re not disentangling skills problems from process problems. You’re trying to fix systems issues with skills (or even worse, knowledge) focused training. That’s what this article’s about – the signs you haven’t worked out what are skills problems and what are systems problems.
A training room full of sleepy-heads
Boring courses are inevitable when you’re not separating out and trying to fix process and systems problems. Skills practice gets removed from the reality of the job. It seems either generic, or esoteric – or both.
Aid workers have serious time pressures and are much less interested in something that they can’t apply right away. Most adult learners are the same, regardless of the field.
Training where people are sure that the real issue isn’t being addressed is going to lead to them switching off and finding something else to work on.
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Despite all the logistics training you run, you hear the same kind of complaints again and again – the seeds and tools took an age to order when it should have been quick and simple. The planting season’s been missed and now people are selling the tools to buy food and blankets.
It’s possible that your training’s not very good. There’s a lot of ineffective training out there. But when you keep hearing the same kind of complaint, there’s a good chance of a systematic problem, one that your training can’t fix.
If you work out what’s going wrong in the procurement process you can change the procedures, or design the right training to help people navigate the process and avoid common mistakes. Otherwise, generic training is going to keep skating over the real issue.
No amount of training on procurement roles and responsibilities will get better results than changing the work practices so that procurement and programme teams sit together and talk about what needs to be purchased for a given project. It’s a culture or process fix, and the same things will go wrong forever if you don’t address it.
Resistance is (not) futile
As the training keeps trying to fix problems it can’t, people start to resist all training.
Your training might be about the right issue, but without a process change, everyone knows it’s pointless. Often, it’s worse and you haven’t even identified the right issue.
You’re training aid workers about humanitarian standards, when it’s how project proposals are submitted that means that communities aren’t involved in the design. No-one will be enthusiastic about training in that situation.
I often marvel at how little enthusiasm aid workers have for training. They don’t have so many opportunities to learn about their jobs and improve their career chances. But it’s no surprise that people resist it when it’s not relevant or helpful.
Money going to waste
Not many aid agencies have a real grasp on what training their staff costs. They want people to have the skills, but the money simply isn’t there to do it. Many need to be spending more on training, not less.
Instead of choosing and prioritising, most try to do a bit of everything and then wonder why it doesn’t work.
But – expensive solutions with unsatisfying results are also common. Someone has a brainwave about how to do something and it ends up going ahead. Money’s spent and the situation doesn’t change.
A real clue that you haven’t untangled the issues is that those expensive solutions are dealing in generalities, because the specific ways things are done isn’t well documented. You have procurement training, but hardly anyone has a simple flow chart of the procurement process. There’s an expensive fix, but the cheaper supporting blocks are missing.
Eternity (plus a little bit)
Training takes time. You’ve got to organise a course, persuade people to come, get them in a room, practice a skill, then go back to their work, then apply it, then see results.
It doesn’t have to take forever, but there’s always a lag. Fixing processes isn’t instant. But it can be fast.
If a manager tells their staff that from now on, they need to share their travel plans with each other so that everyone has an idea of who’s going where and who’s off on leave, that can happen right away. If your analysis was good enough and that fixes your communication and scheduling problems, you’ve got a fast fix.
When it takes forever to fix things then there’s a good chance that the process parts are not being analysed. You’ve got to get that solution to the right person to make it happen. That’s hard. But if you do, you can really move things. If you don’t, it will take a long, long time.
Any one of these signs shows you that you’ve got a mix of skills and other issues.
That won’t be news to you. You know that your organisation’s systems aren’t perfect.
What is different for many people is to think about what you do about that.
You don’t want to lose any chance of making an improvement in some massive, years long, agency-wide change process. But you can’t presume you’ll get real change if a problem is not addressed. You need to get clear on what is skills and what isn’t.
Not every process problem needs lengthy process redesign. You don’t always need policy changes which will take forever. You can do a lot to change the way departments work together by holding regular meetings, or asking for inputs earlier on in the process.
You can change how you work even when the process and the policy stay the same.
Improving process documentation and sharing it with the people who need it, when they need it, can make a huge difference. HR can share a flow chart for hiring a new staff member when someone asks a question about hiring.
There are smart ways you can tackle process problems that don’t take forever or cost the earth. They might be enough on their own, or you might need to combine them with training. If you get to the heart of it, you’ve got a chance to actually make progress.
Otherwise, you’re just making more work for yourself.
