For most organizations, training — if they do it at all — is a task. Do it, check it off, done. After being crammed in a room for three days, salespeople start bouncing off the walls. Then the following Monday, the fire drills start, the training manuals go on the shelf, and everything returns to the crisis-driven state it was in before the training. But the training was implemented for a reason — some performance parameter was not measuring up. One week after the training, management looks at the lousy numbers and says, “Hey, the training didn’t work!” Even if management realizes it takes a while to affect the numbers, the results after six weeks or six months still don’t cut it; but training isn’t the problem.

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The perception of how to properly integrate training into the strategic vision of the business — as well as what it really takes for someone to change — is the problem. We aren’t in The Matrix where we can plug the trainees into a high-speed connection and digitally download the training into their heads.

Evaluations of training programs are another topic area that is often misguided and misunderstood. One of the worst questions a manager asks a trainee is, “How’s the training going?” If the training is really doing its job, then some of the people, including “top” performers, shouldn’t like the program at all. Training is about changing habits, behavior, or methods, any one of which can cause mental discomfort. Complaining is a normal response to training, so asking “How’s it going?” is entirely irrelevant.

Furthermore, most training evaluations are evaluating the wrong thing. Looking at Donald Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation (first published in 1959), it becomes apparent that Levels I and II are evaluated by most organizations, and more often than not, only Level I is evaluated. The most important levels to true behavior change for the business, Levels III and IV, are not evaluated by most businesses because management wants to see instant results. This gives not only a shallow evaluation of the training, it also gives a false one. Take the following case for example, from the August 2006 Training Magazine article “Are You Too Nice to Train” by Sarah Boehle:

“….consider the case of Century 21. When Roger Chevalier joined the organization as vice president of performance in 1995, the company trained approximately 20,000 new agents annually using more than 100 trainers in various U.S. locations. At the time, the real estate giant’s only methods of evaluating this training’s effectiveness — and of trainer performance, for that matter — were Level I smile sheets and Level II pre- and post-tests. When Chevalier assumed his role in the company, he was informed that a number of instructors were suspect based on the Level I and II student feedback.

Chevalier set out to change the system. His team tracked graduates of each course based on number of listings, sales and commissions generated post-training (Level IV). These numbers were then cross-referenced to the office where the agents worked and the instructor who delivered the training.

What did he find? A Century 21 trainer with some of the lowest Level I scores was responsible for the highest performance outcomes post-training, as measured by his graduates’ productivity. That trainer, who was rated in the bottom third of all trainers by his students in Level I satisfaction evaluations, was found to be one of the most effective in terms of how his students performed during the first three months after they graduated.”

Does this mean you have to be a jerk or hire drill sergeants to deliver the training? No. It means that if the training is designed to really affect a major outcome, which means people will have to do things differently, they are not necessarily going to be comfortable with the training program. The real bottom line for training should be the long-term effect of the training on the performance of the trainees. That can only be accomplished by training them on things they may not like to do, but have to do to improve productivity. Which means they might have to get ticked off during the training. The training also needs to simulate the real world as much as possible.

Dick Winters’ 101st Airborne Band of Brothers

The HBO mini-series documentary Band of Brothers told the true story of courageous Lieutenant Dick Winters and his Easy Company soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. From the D-Day Normandy Invasion to capturing Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, this group pulled together under pressure and delivered on one assignment after the other. Dick Winters wrote his memoirs of those events in Beyond Band of Brothers with Col. Cole C. Kingseed (Penquin, February, 2006). This book is a great lesson (as is the documentary) on leadership, and a critical part of effective leadership starts with training. Here is an excerpt from the book on that subject, where Winters writes about his troops returning to England from the battle front for a few weeks of “rest” and to train replacements coming in from the U.S.:

“I directed Easy Company to smuggle back from Normandy all the .30-caliber ammunition they could find because I knew when we returned to England I would have to train the replacements. I wanted live ammunition, which I could not obtain for training purposes. And I wanted to use that ammunition to put those replacements under live fire. The only way to gain experience for overhead fire was to maneuver under realistic combat conditions. To instill fire discipline and to prepare the replacements for combat, I conducted company live fire field operations. It was dangerous business that scared the replacements and veterans alike. Had anyone been hurt, it would have been my neck. But the training paid huge dividends… during the Holland and Bastogne campaigns (battles), time after time Easy Company maneuvered under fire very effectively.”

In order to understand the real ROI of training, management has to look at the macro strategic advancement results of the group, not the micro head-ducking results of individuals. They have to look at what they get as a permanent increase in productivity based on the fact that training is not, and should not be, a short-term measurable.

In 2009, I attended the Training Leadership Summit in Rancho Bernardo, California, a three-day gathering of more than 200 training executives that included companies like Price-Waterhouse, Pfizer, Gallup, IBM, Pixar, Booz Allen, and Nielsen. While there were several dynamic, eye-opening, and content-rich keynotes and breakouts, the best value of all the programs I attended came from a 20-minute, “mini” (one table, eight people) breakout session presented by Katica Roy, training manager for Kaiser Permanente, Colorado.

In her presentation Roy discussed how hard it was to change the corporate mindset to go from “training as a task that gets checked off” to outcomes-based training that is connected to the long-term business strategy. She initially focused on one area at Kaiser Colorado — their inbound call center. Her approach was to continuously ask management, “What is the desirable, measurable outcome? How do we measure those results?” After getting management to finally paint a clear picture of what they expected of the training, she then implemented her strategy — and this is where she made a huge difference. She said to be successful implementing training toward the measurable outcome, you have to “triangulate” the process:

1. Set expectations (for those being trained)

2. Observe workflow

a. While developing the training to see the real process. This helps design a better, more realistic training program, much like Dick Winters in
Band of Brothers.

b. Post-training observation is to see not only that they are implementing it, but to also see what processes and procedures get in their way.

3. Measure results

More often than not, steps 1 and 2 are skipped because it is assumed that straight commission sales drive both the workflow and the performance. This is false. In fact, the lack of observation of what is really going on in the field is the biggest downfall of “management-by-numbers,” because quite frankly, the numbers do lie.

Case in point: A client’s director of sales was heading into a territory to, for lack of a better term, “crack heads.” The territory’s numbers were low and unacceptable. He went on joint calls with the salespeople and realized that they had been doing their job prospecting and developing relationships, but their territory had a unique competitive situation not occurring anywhere else, which was killing their productivity. Observing workflow is not just to make sure people are doing what they were trained to do, but to observe the real world of what the salesperson is going through.

Back to Katica Roy of Kaiser Colorado. What were the results? The program, which took four years (2004–2007) of her patience and perseverance to sell, implement, and measure, was so successful that her model was then rolled out enterprise-wide within Kaiser Colorado.

And what was the result of that? Just this past December, 2010, Kaiser Colorado was one of only three Medicare Advantage (MA) Plans that achieved a CMS (Medicare) Five Star rating, a rating based mostly on quality outcome measures. The Five Star rating earned the MA Plan a higher reimbursement rate from the government and the government threw in another kicker as a bonus: The three Five Star plans are allowed to promote their plan and enroll people year-round instead of being restricted to the forty-five day Annual Election Period like all of their competitors. Wow! Money and a free rein on the market — now that’s a payoff.

Focus training on the long-term, measurable outcomes that are in line strategically with the business vision and the rewards will be great. Dick Winters’ Easy Company and Katica Roy’s Kaiser Colorado will attest to that.