Climate change we should believe in – and how line managers can support it

Our previous post looked at how the current recession provides an opportunity to ‘cut the fat’ of the chronic underperformer. You might have found it outspoken or even confrontational. But too many organisations may be ignoring another confrontation issue: line managers who are actually standing in the way – consciously or unknowningly – of the development of their own teams and team members.

In the jargon of learning and development, the role and impact of managers, peers, the organisation and its culture is often called the ‘climate for transfer’. The finest training may not lead to noticeable improvement in an organisation’s performance unless the learners have an opportunity to actually put their new skills, knowledge or especially behaviours into practice.

Line managers’ support for learning – both before and after development events and courses – is one of the most critical factors in both effective transfer and its impact on individual and organisational performance. Indeed, Mary Broad and John Newstrom’s classic text, Transfer of Training: Action-packed Strategies to Ensure High Pay-off from Training Investments showed line managers to be the single most important factor – because they are the single most powerful factor that influences the learners’ opportunities to put learning into practice.

Evidence of line managers performance isn’t encouraging. The Transatlantic Blended Learning Survey 2004, for example, revealed that 85% identified learning transfer as a driving factor in their choice of training strategies and investment. 72% of responders felt the HR & training department had that responsibility at the moment, with 62% recording that line managers did play a role. However, 86% of responders wanted the line manager to be responsible for learning transfer, with the HR & training department taking less of a role.

Two years on, the lesson didn’t appear to be getting through. A Kirkpatrick Level 3 benchmark study of over 1,000 delegates from major UK public and private sector organizations showed that 30% claimed that they did not get the opportunity to apply what they learned. Of these, five out of six say they were not supported by their line manager. In other words, 25% of training investment was being wasted – and wasted by line managers as much as trainees or HR departments. And in 2008, Wick, Jefferson & Pollock were drawing an even more dismal conclusion:

Corporate training professionals estimate that, on average, only 16 percent of participants in training and development programs transfer their learning to their jobs in a way that improves performance.”

And the main reason – “failure of supervisors to encourage and reinforce application of the training on the job”.

There’s plenty of evidence of the different ways line managers can positively influence learning transfer – discussing and reviewing learning objectives and progress towards them, giving the autonomy to try new approaches, offering a genuinely empathetic ear to learners’ difficulties in applying their learning, creating time and space for skills and behaviours to be practised, and acting as mentors. Sadly, there’s also plenty of evidence that many of them don’t.

And this isn’t an issue that trainers or training providers can readily tackle single-handedly: organisations need to take this vital lesson on board. Reward and recognition schemes need to actively encourage managers to take an active interest in developing their staff – and training evaluation needs to include identification of those line managers who do (and don’t) actively support learning and transfer to help organisation reward appropriately and accurately. Managers need to take on board that developing their staff improves their whole team’s performance – and their own career may progress more strongly with a high-calibre team behind them, and an ability to demonstrate they can create value.

Ultimately, organisations should invest in training, learning and development to help employees overcome their own shortcomings and performance gaps: the time and money isn’t spent so they can wrestle – and probably fail – to overcome their failings of the people they report to. If a recession is a good time to take a head count in the lifeboats, too many line managers need to be able to argue their case rather more persuasively if their next decision isn’t going to be ‘sink or swim’.