Without setting the organization right. The right processes that enhance results. The right goals, the right roles, with the right people, facing the right direction, with sufficient leg room to stretch. Any training & development effort is a waste of time and money.
The amount of money companies spend on training & wishing to engage people to work to full capacity is wasted when the systems do not reinforce the attempted solution.
Systems-Drive-Behavior
This applies to managerial leadership & team building. To offer these services in a broken organization can be even worse when the training is provided with a strong altruistic desire to create change, which will reinforce bad trust repelling practices.
If the focus is mainly on changing people’s psychological makeup to ‘make them innovators’ or to tap into ‘their inner charisma,’ you have made it easier for the manager and manager’s manager to abdicate their managerial duties. They can state, “We gave them the training on how to be innovative (deal with extroverts or tap into their inner peace) they must be the wrong people for the role.” This removes managerial accountability to define the work & ensure people are free from unnecessary obstacles & receive coaching + feedback to complete the work & do their best.
Systems-Drive-Behavior
When an organization is developed & designed for learning, managers are “Big Enough” people work to their full capacity within a system that is actually built upon innovation, autonomy, idea generation, learning teams, & continuous growth. With a system that works to drive out fear, we can see rapid growth & financial gains.
More importantly we see people who want to stay, want to learn & find emergent high performance ways to improve work while doing their work. This stems from an Organization Design that creates mutual trust through the existence of how it is designed.
These ideas are idyllic. But the desire to continue to move closer to this aspiration is a noble goal in itself. A company that is willing to acknowledge its need to improve & able to align its systems will achieve greatness through its work.
“The development of the decent, trust-inducing, and individual-dignity conferring managerial leadership system is one of great social challenges of our time.” – Elliott Jaques