Find a focus
It sounds simple, but begin with your business needs and develop a training solution to fit them. Then instead of aligning the two, you’re just finding the most effective answer to an existing problem.
“Select your training priorities based on your business plan,” Rybka says. “Because if you just go out with a general needs assessment, people are going to tell you everything they want, everything they heard was cool but not really everything they need.”
You can’t afford to pull employees away from their daily tasks and pay for their training if you’re not teaching skills that will improve the company overall. So Rybka and her team pick through Westfield’s corporate goals, looking for behavioral or knowledge gaps that could be bridged with training.
“So if we say, ‘We want to increase our risk appetite,’ we think, ‘I wonder what we have to help reinforce how to assess risk and risk appetite in our courseware,’” she says.
Once you pinpoint areas for improvement, take the suggestions back to the executive team — not only to get approval for your ideas but also to better understand their training vision for the company.
“That partnership that you have with the business — so that you understand where they’re going — is even better than a business plan,” she says.
Departments may then request additional training beyond the companywide goals you address. Rather than giving each manager what he or she wants, dig in to what the managers really need.
All you have to do is ask. A sales executive asked Rybka to create a team development plan, but his employees had already been through team-building exercises. So she investigated beyond the initial request.
“It was the probing question, ‘Well, OK. But why?’” she says. “And then he got to the, ‘For seeing if we’ve got the right people.’”
By simply asking him to explain what his team actually needed, she was able to target the selection of salespeople rather than just developing the existing team. So instead of the traditional get-to-know-you-better icebreakers, she developed competency assessments to identify qualified candidates.
But the solution never stops there. Always look for opportunities to make training cross-functional by tying it into other areas of the business — in Rybka’s words, “an end-to-end solution.”
In this case, Rybka also transferred the results of the sales team’s personality assessments to the hiring process, crafting interview questions that would indicate competencies the team already displayed.
