Don't Compromise!

Last month, The Work Foundation published ‘Exceeding Expectations’, a report from the first Phase of their own empirical research that is, in their own words “a major qualitative study centred on what leaders themselves believe leadership to be and how they practice it”. One of their drivers for doing so was to move our collective understanding of leadership beyond simply having faith in what we belief to the case in the various historical models of both leaders and leadership:

The problem is that in most cases these thoughts about leadership are not empirically derived rather they are conceptual. In fact it is really rather striking that what we know about leadership is on the whole derived from informed belief.”

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As well as adding a new downloadable article in PDF format to the Elsewhere page in this blog (Anton Franckeiss’ Managing Change … upheaval and resolution, publishing in Developing HR Strategy in January 2010), you can also read a recently published article by Robert Terry – Retail therapy? Training buyers beware! – online at TrainingZone.

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In early December last year, a member of the Training Zone website posted a query about measuring success that addressed one of the eternal issues of training and development – impact on business performance.

I am looking to try and find the best way to evaluate the success of my training sessions – by success I mean the affect it is having on the performance of those being trained.

The training I deliver is usually on fairly technical topics based in legal and medical areas – there is a lot of theory to cover but also how to apply that theory to real life, I suppose what I am trying to get at is that its not really procedural type training.”

Already testing learners two weeks and three months after the training, and getting informal managers’ feedback, the TrainingZone community provided tips and advice in a follow-up article, Measuring Success, last week. But it struck us there were some hints and tips missing. So, if we may so bold …

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Yesterday was apparently National Sickie Day. Naturally, I was at work, so I didn’t get to read the papers or watch/listen to the news till I got home (the national broadcasting services having decided announcing this on the morning news would obviously have been dangerously suggestive), although I did notice that today is Groundhog Day. (Radio 4 decided it was safe to mention that, although it got a little sidetracked in climate change.) When I did finally make it as far as yesterday’s news, I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn’t the only one who saw some kind of possible connection.

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