Development and Training Systems
The purpose of most development and training systems is to identify the development needs of employees through formal and informal methods and to establish plans to address those needs, taking into account the company’s strategic direction or the business unit’s objectives. Many organizations provide a range of opportunities for individuals to gain insight into their strengths and weaknesses beyond the traditional career review or appraisal meeting. Typical offerings include assessment centers, workshops, and seminars where individuals can learn about their capabilities in a confidential setting. While they may not be required to share their results, most people return to their jobs with a clearer sense of their needs and seek the help of their boss or others to set development plans and determine appropriate next steps. In addition, many organizations offer a curriculum of courses, encourage special projects or assignments, and provide mentoring or coaching to help employees learn new skills and gain the knowledge required to perform their jobs better. In a study of global HR and other executives conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), nearly 65 percent said they intended to use 360-degree feedback in the near future to measure leadership skills.4
What Is Wrong with the Traditional System?
Even in organizations in which there is a high level of satisfaction with existing development and training systems, there are usually one or two areas people would like to see improved. Cited next are the most common complaints from both human resource and line managers.
People Are Not Clear About Their Development Needs and Improvement Goals. Our experience includes running a series of eight leadership development programs over a twelve-week period for the top 150 managers in a client organization. We began the program by asking people to talk about how they had prepared for the session and what their expectations for the two days were. About one-third of the attendees had held a meeting with their bosses to discuss what they wanted to get out of the program and why they were attending. While one-third of a group would usually be considered a low response rate, we were pleasantly surprised at how many people had prepared in some way for the program. More often than not, people attending such programs do not have a clear set of learning objectives or a sense of how a particular development experience will address their needs. And, in spite of the fact that they will spend hours or days away from the job on a quest to improve their performance, some people’s choice of development opportunities has more to do with scheduling convenience than with any clearly identified need.
There Is No Focus on Training Priorities and Allocation of Training Resources for the Organization. If you review an organization’s catalogue of training programs, you will usually see an array of “basic skills” programs—time management, business writing, presentation skills—and “special need” programs—encouraging continuous improvement, customer focus, diversity training—that are added year to year in response to a particular challenge or crisis. Although the value of these programs is not in question, the issue becomes one of focus. What are the essential skills and knowledge needed to succeed in this organization now and in the future? What is the best use of limited training and development resources? What should be delivered in-house, and what should be addressed through external resources?
Other Priorities Get in the Way of Follow-Up. If, at the end of a workshop, someone can say what he or she learned or will do differently back on the job, most people would regard the program as successful. Unfortunately, most training and development events are free-standing—there is seldom any formal follow-up once participants return to work. Coupled with the fact that people often have no clear sense of why they are attending in the first place, the lack of follow-up makes it unlikely that the event will have any effect on their job performance.
The HRM Systems Don’t “Talk” to One Another. Valuable information about a person’s strengths and development targets seldom flows from one system to another. Thus, an individual who could benefit from a special assignment or who is the perfect candidate for a vacant job in another part of the organization never surfaces in the placement system. In addition, when it is not integrated into other subsystems, traditional training can be somewhat haphazard—a string of events the individual engages in without any clear direction in mind.
How Feedback Can Enhance Development and Training Systems
The use of 360-degree feedback in development and training systems brings some distinct benefits to the individual and can help address many of the concerns discussed above. Specifically, it can:
Improve Personal Awareness and Clarify Expectations. When people learn how others perceive them, they become aware of what specific skills they need to develop and can therefore better choose the training and development experiences that will benefit them. Participating in a 360-degree feedback process and completing the self-report version of the questionnaire brings home to people which behaviors are most important. This increased clarity about critical success factors helps focus managers on relevant development goals.
Improve Decisions About Development Assignments. Because 360-degree feedback provides specific information about a person’s strengths and weaknesses, an individual and his or her boss are better able to make informed decisions about appropriate job assignments or other opportunities for personal and professional growth. There is an increased likelihood that there will be a better fit of skill to task or task to development need than without the benefit of 360-degree feedback.
Clarify Training Priorities. Composite data on a representative sample of people can be used to determine the extent to which managers as a whole are actually using the behaviors identified as crucial to achieving the organization’s business objectives. If current behavior is not consistent with expectations, training needs are illuminated, and a curriculum of courses can be designed with those needs in mind. To be really useful, group profiles should be based on a representative sample of the entire audience for training.
Monitor Progress. By using the first round of 360-degree feedback to establish a benchmark and then gathering the feedback again after a specific time has elapsed, it becomes possible to determine how much progress has been made toward achieving recipients’ development targets.
Enhance Coaching Experiences. Because 360-degree feedback helps identify specific areas in need of development, it allows coaching interventions to become more focused.
Tips for Integrating 360-Degree Feedback into Development and Training Systems
Integrating 360-degree feedback into your development and training systems is relatively easy and non-threatening, since those who receive the feedback control who sees it and how it is used. Despite this apparent ease of integration, several steps should be taken to ensure that the use of 360-degree feedback will lead to sound training and development decisions.
Start with a Competency Model That Is Linked to Business Performance. Providing feedback on competencies that have been shown to correlate with superior work unit performance will increase people’s interest in assessing the degree to which their skills match up against critical success factors. It will also motivate them to devote their time and energies to improving and developing skills that will have the greatest payoff for the organization.
Establish a Clear Link Between Development Opportunities and the Critical Competencies. A curriculum of internal and external programs based on the skills, knowledge, and behaviors measured by the competency model will ensure that people’s development efforts are relevant to organizational needs. The course catalogue might describe the contents of each course in terms of the competencies addressed, and internal trainers should be encouraged to use workshop examples that illustrate elements of the competency model. This alignment of curriculum offerings and competencies will also ensure that trainers and other staff resources are used effectively.
Ensure That the 360-Degree Feedback System Has Integrity. When people perceive their feedback as fair, accurate, and credible, they feel more motivated to participate in relevant training and development events. As mentioned in previous chapters, if participants understand the model on which their feedback is based, the data collection process, and how to select raters they believe will provide useful information, they will be more inclined to trust their feedback, and thus to seek out training.
Encourage People to Share Feedback with Their Bosses and Coaches. Many people are reluctant to discuss the results of their feedback with their bosses, as they feel that this type of discussion is uncomfortably close to a performance appraisal. Some organizations avoid this problem by requiring that follow-up sessions take place with mentors, not bosses.
Although bosses may be instructed to use the information for development purposes only, not for performance appraisal, it is difficult to imagine that they will forget the 360-degree feedback at appraisal time. We therefore suggest that employees share only the conclusions that result from their analysis of the complete set of data—three or more key strengths, three development targets, and one or two areas that require further clarification. In this way, the employee is still in control of the information and only shares what he or she is comfortable discussing; the boss can serve as a coach and resource without violating the confidentiality of the feedback.
Monitor Progress. The first round of 360-degree feedback allows an individual to clarify current capabilities and establish a performance benchmark. Once development targets are established, people can monitor their progress by administering the 360-degree questionnaire nine to twelve months later, depending on the kind of information collected (improvement in some behaviors takes longer to become noticeable to others). This enables recipients or their organizations to collect hard data on progress toward achieving development goals.
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