The search for the return on investment from professional development activities has been a long, unresolved quest for many HR and Learning and Development professionals. It turns out, we’re looking at it all wrong. The real challenge is for an organization’s managers and leaders to CREATE the return on investment from professional development. In this article, I share guidance based on my executive experiences across multiple organizations navigating this issue.
A Discovery from Investing in Professional Development
As a senior executive, I regularly approved significant investments in training for sales, product, and marketing professionals. I sent people to Kellogg, the Center for Creative Leadership, Harvard, Pragmatic Institute, and others, and I invited some great training organizations to help our teams grow skills. And like many executives excited about investing in their teams, I always looked forward to performance improvements in our key measures and functional activities. Or rather, I hoped we would get something more than the short pop in morale from time in a great program.
I learned, yet again, that “hope” is never a good strategy.
This issue came to a head when I asked one too many people: “What are you going to do differently due to your time in training?” and received less than clear responses. I recognized that simply sending someone to a professional development experience wasn’t enough. Something needed to be done to ensure we were getting a real return from these investments. I worked with fellow executives and managers (including HR and Learning and Development, of course), and we rethought our approach to evaluating outcomes and creating returns.
Two Big Changes to Help Leverage Professional Development for Returns
Big Change Number One—Their Managers Must Be Involved
One of the failings of too many training programs is that participants gain a host of new tools, ideas, and approaches, while their managers get the short story from post-session debriefs. In our organization above, we worked with our training partners to ensure our managers were familiar with the key insights and approaches outlined in the programs. We required our managers to attend the training programs (generally separate from the sessions their contributors were in), incorporate what they learned into their function’s processes and approaches, and coach to the insights.
We tuned in to this approach when I hired a leading sales training organization that would only agree to take our money if we committed to manager training. This integration of contributor training with manager accountability for coaching to the training concepts generated massive improvements in process, coaching, and measurement that ultimately flowed through to our key sales performance indicators.
Yes, costs went up, but that isn’t the point. Our managers were now armed to create value from the learning and development efforts. This involvement of the managers was a powerful shift that ultimately allowed us to measure returns. More on that below.
Big Change Number Two: We Had to Refine our Measurement Systems
It takes time, creativity, and the willingness to experiment to fine-tune organizational measures. Success demands recognizing how difficult it is to attribute a discrete professional development investment to the organization’s results. There are a lot of variables involved, and suggesting for example, that leadership development training generated an uplift in retention or employee engagement reflects the false pursuit of precision. The development efforts may be part of the reason for a change in outcomes; however, many factors are involved.
Here are a few areas the team worked on to strive to assess our effectiveness for learning and development.
Adapt Employee Measures Tied to Professional Development
We worked to assess employee perception of several components of professional development, including access, relevance, variety, satisfaction with their manager’s direct involvement with the development, and overall perspective on the firm’s willingness to invest in them. Early in the process, we expected to receive excellent scores in these areas, and some low numbers humbled us into digging deeper to bring a positive professional development culture to life. We might think we’ve fixed something, yet it takes time, deliberate effort, and reinforcement to change someone’s view about elements of the organization’s culture.
Tune Key Performance Indicators for Our Functions
It’s excellent if individuals feel supported for professional development, as described above. After all, a case can be made that these efforts will translate to strengthened employee engagement, improved retention, and overall satisfaction with their work. Yet, creating and measuring the return on investment from professional development measures demands tuning functional or position measures.
Accept the Need for Deliberate Focus Over Time to Create Returns
Sending a group from your functional area to training might be the right thing to do. After all, they stay current with their vocation’s insights and practices and gain new ideas, approaches, and tools to use in their daily work. However, it’s up to the participants and their managers to translate this time and investment into tangible returns. And, just because the individuals come back from the training happy with the experience doesn’t mean it was valuable.
Return on Investment is Generated Based on What Happens After the Development Experience
In one organization where we invested in product management training, we worked to gauge the actual process changes, role adjustments, and ultimately impact on our effectiveness working across functions as well as the ultimate measure—our success with customers and versus competitors. In this setting, one of the product managers took it upon herself to lead the charge to build a coalition to overhaul our entire product management process. To do this, she worked with engineering, marketing, and her fellow product managers to build a coalition that brought the new processes to life. She was successful, and the changes allowed us to improve and scale our business in many ways quickly.
Sending your representatives to sales training may be great, but the return on investment is created when you adapt your sales processes and monitor their effectiveness and actively coach them over time.
Other professional development opportunities offer unique challenges to create a return on investment. I’ve trained several thousand individuals to deliver quality, constructive and positive feedback. And while spending the time learning and practicing this difficult communication skill seems valuable, the return on investment is only created over time as individuals apply the skills and improve their ability to have challenging and positive discussions about performance that lead to behavior changes. This return is only created at scale if managers practice the same behaviors and coach accordingly.
The Bottom-Line for Now
My encouragement for every senior leader reading this is to stop focusing on measuring the effectiveness of professional development and begin refining your business system that ensures managers are accountable for creating a return on investment from these efforts. When you receive requests to spend on training and development, stop focusing on the cost line and ask how the training will be leveraged and integrated to improve something important in the function or organization. Expect those seeking to invest in the work to tell you how they will coach it and ultimately measure the impact of these investments.
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