The many lives of capability building programs

Technically speaking, ‘capability building programs’ are meant to do exactly that – to build the targeted capabilities. However, after spending two decades in business organizations, I have come to realize that capability building programs serve different purposes in different contexts, including those that are very different from the original purpose. 

Let’s take a look at some of the 'uses' of capability building programs (starting with those that are closer to the original purpose and then moving on to those that are quite different):  

1. Capability building programs as ‘Crossing the Rubicon’: Here the implication is that capability building programs create ‘sustainable change in behavior’ (which is the behavioral definition of ‘learning’). Of course, most capability building programs fail to achieve this.
2. Capability building programs as ‘Invitation to learn’: This is based on the philosophy that ‘you can lead a horse to water; but you can’t make it drink’.
3. Capability building programs as ‘Training’:  Here the implication is that it is something that is done to the participants. While some people do say that ‘training is only for animals’, this philosophy is very much ‘alive and kicking’ in many organizations!
4. Capability building programs as an element of the 'Employee Value Proposition': This typically happens when a company makes an explicit promise of 'x' days of capability building programs per year per employee as part of its Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Yes, this works best when these capability building programs are conducted on regular working days! This approach can be extended to positively impact the company branding/business development efforts also (by highlighting the investment the company is making in capability building to improve the product quality/ to serve the customers better).
5. Capability building programs as 'Knowledge management': When an expert is leaving an organization, the organization might ask him/her to conduct a capability building program to pass on his/her knowledge, even when that knowledge is not immediately relevant to the people attending the capability building program.
6. Capability building programs as 'Enculturation': This typically happens during new employee induction/onboarding. Another variation here is 'culture building workshops'. 
7. Capability building programs as ‘Reward’: Some organization use capability building programs as a reward for high performance. It does raise some questions. For example, won’t the employees prefer to receive an equivalent amount of money in cash as opposed to attending an expensive training program?
8. Capability building programs as ‘Paid holidays’: Capability building programs can provide ‘pleasant distractions from the unpleasant realities at the workplace’.
9. Capability building programs as ‘Detox’: Some capability building programs can indeed be fun or even 'meaningful fun'. Some programs like ‘Human Process Labs’ can also provide some degree of emotional detox. Yes, this might highlight the implicit assumption that there is something toxic about the workplace. 
10. Capability building programs as ‘Rites of passage’: This happens when training programs are linked to level transitions, Here the primary purpose is to enable the psychological transition required for the level change - in the participants and in the 'significant others' in the organization ecosystem (see ‘Accelerated learning and rites of passage’ for details)
11. Capability building programs as ‘Team building’: Here the message is that the opportunity for facilitating interactions between the team members/cross-functional team members (and the possible increase in connect between them and to the team/organization) is more important than the program content. Yes, this could trivialize the concepts of 'teamwork' and 'employee engagement'. 
12. Capability building programs as ‘Importance signaling’: If a capability building is positioned (formally or informally) as ‘only for the most valuable people in the organization’ (e.g., top talent, people who are being groomed to take up top management positions etc.), it can indeed serve as a way to signal the importance that the organization gives to the concerned employees. Yes, some of the participants might promptly include this in their CVs/mention this during the interviews for jobs outside the organization.    
13. Capability building programs as ‘External benchmarking opportunities’: This works best in the case of open training programs conducted by prestigious institutes that attract participants from across the world. Quite a bit of the learning in these programs comes from interacting with the fellow participants and from knowing what the other companies are doing.
14. Capability building programs as 'Corporate rain dance': This occurs when capability building programs are used as 'solutions' to organizational problems that are not related to capability gaps at the individual level. Yes, they do give the management the illusion that something is being done about the problems (see 'Leadership training and corporate rain dance' for details). However, they can make the participants feel 'victimized' (see 'Training the victim' for details). 
15. Capability building programs as 'Sales hook': Here capability building programs are used as an opportunity to sell other products. 
16. Capability building programs as 'Brainwashing': This happens when the focus of capability building is on 'unlearning and relearning'. 
17. Capability building programs as 'Golden handcuff': Here the idea is to send the employee for an expensive long duration learning journey program and also attach a retention clause/service bond. 
18. Capability building programs as 'Immediate profit generation': This typically happens when the monetary value of the improvements coming from the 'action learning projects' that are part of the capability building program is estimated to exceed the cost of the capability building program. While this enables the Learning & Development (L&D) function to position itself as a 'profit center' (as opposed to being a cost center), whether this 'profit' is real is often a point of disagreement between the HR function and the Finance function. Also, to maximize the 'profit generation potential' of the action learning projects, the link between the action learning projects and the learning objectives of the program gets overlooked. Yes, the capabilities built during the program can and should impact the business results (and this is very much aligned to the original purpose of capability building programs). However, they are usually more difficult to estimate/ happen over a longer period of time and therefore might not be very promising for showing immediate profit! 

I am sure that more such 'non-standard' uses of capability building programs can be found. Also, a single capability building program might serve many of the uses mentioned above. This does raise an interesting question: "why do so many alternative uses of capability building programs exist, even when they are not the most efficient ways of achieving their 'unstated' objectives?". I guess, the word 'unstated' might offer a clue. In some of the organizations, spending money on some of those alterative objectives (or even attempting to achieve them directly) might not be 'culturally acceptable'. In many cultures, learning is considered to be a 'noble' activity and hence it is put on a pedestal. Hence, by achieving some of those alternative objectives through a capability building program, they can gain more respectability! 

Of course, the above discussion was from the points of view of the organizations and/or the participants. Since there are other stakeholders involved (like the facilitators, L&D team, vendors etc.) there are additional interpretations possible from their points of view. For example, for a facilitator, capability building programs can mean multiple things like a source of income, a calling, an avenue for self-expression etc. 

Any thoughts/ideas? Any other uses of capability building programs that you have come across?

The OD Quest: Part 3 – Rendezvous with L&D

"I don’t have an opening in my OD team now. But, you can join our recruitment team and do recruitment in the OD way”, I heard the Senior HR Leader telling a candidate who was hell-bent on joining the OD team. This was my fifth ‘encounter’ with this gentleman (See 'Passion for work and anasakti ‘, 'Appropriate metaphors for organizational commitment ‘ ,‘To name or not to name, that is the question’ and ‘A Mathematical approach to HR’ for the outcomes of my previous interactions with him).

I was a bit taken aback by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind of ‘solutions’ will end in tears or worse. However, similar to what had happened during my previous encounters with him, this interaction forced me to think a bit more deeply about the underlying issue - the application of OD(Organization Development) to the various functional areas in HR (Human Resource Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this series of posts on 'The OD Quest' where we will look at the possibilities  that arise when OD ventures into other parts of the people management terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD) domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to Recruitment. In this post, let’s take our OD Quest to one of OD’s closest neighbors – Learning & Development (L&D) also known as ‘Training’ (though the term ‘Training’ is becoming increasingly unfashionable especially for behavioral training)

OD and L&D (as opposed to OD and Recruitment) are often considered to be siblings or even twins. In some of the organizations they also live in the same house (function) called 'Learning & OD'. When OD becomes more like OE/Organization Effectiveness that focuses more on the 'structural' dimension (e.g. Organization structure, job design, congruence of structural elements, workforce planning etc.) as opposed to the 'human process' dimension and/or when L&D is clubbed with Technical/Functional Training, they are more likely to live apart, in terms of the boxes and arrows in the organization chart, often with unfortunate consequences!

When it comes to the nature of work, the boundary between OD and L&D is not often clearly defined (and it varies significantly across organizations). Typically, individual level capability building is considered to be in the L&D land and group and organization level capability building is considered to be in the OD land. ‘Coaching’ is a hotly disputed territory between OD and L&D. Territorial disputes also erupt when it comes to  ‘change management’/’mindset/culture change’ kind of training.   

To me, the separation between OD and L&D is arbitrary and counterproductive. Learning’ is defined as ‘sustainable change in behavior’ and OD is about ‘facilitating change’. So, it is very difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. This is even more true these days when L&D has moved away from being primarily 'event-driven' and OD has moved away from 'conducting isolated ('hit and run')interventions'. Efforts to force a separation between the two often leads to 'things falling through the cracks'. More importantly, this can adversely affect the mutual value addition.

Let’s look at an example. One of the serious ‘crimes’ committed in the L&D land is that of ‘Training the victim’ where problems at the strategy/structure/process/culture levels are conveniently misdiagnosed as ‘capability issues’ and employees are sent for remedial training to fix their capability gaps (see 'Training the victim' for details)!  

A closer partnership between L&D and OD can improve the quality of the diagnosis/need identification and also help in better change management to sustain the ‘change in behavior’ and ‘transfer of learning’ as the OD function often brings in excellent diagnosis and consulting skills. Also ,OD can help a lot in terms of structuring the 70% (on the job learning) part of the 70:20:10 learning model (see ‘Truths stretched too far’ for more details).  Again, ‘Leadership Training’ often degenerates into some sort of ‘Corporate Rain Dance’  (see 'Leadership Training and Corporate Rain Dance' for details). Partnership with OD can help in addressing this also.

Similarly, large scale OD interventions often involve a lot of capability building where L&D can help. Again the L&D function often brings in significant program management capability that can be leveraged to enhance the effectiveness of the roll out of change management initiatives.

A closer partnership between L&D and OD also ensures that high impact domains like ‘coaching’ don’t fall through the cracks and that they are effectively addressed. Another key area where the collaboration between OD and L&D can add a lot of value is in enabling employees to transition from one responsibility level to another responsibility level that requires a different mindset in addition to a different skill-set (See ‘Accelerated learning & Rites of passage’ for a related discussion).

So where does this leave us? OD and L&D can add a lot of value to each other. This works best when their ‘natural affinity’ (in terms of nature of work) is maintained in terms of organization structure. Hence an HR organization structure that combines the L&D and OD functions into ‘Learning &OD’ is much more likely to be impactful. This also facilitates better cross-pollination of skill-sets and a more integrated perspective!

Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR land?!

Accelerated learning and Rites of passage

The words 'Accelerated Learning' appear in my current business title. This gives me an 'excuse' ('obligation' !) to think about the methods that can be used to accelerate the learning process in organizations - at individual and group levels. I must also mention that I have dabbled in the field of Anthropology and one of things that struck me (in Anthropology; see here and here for other examples) is the very useful role that 'rituals'/'ceremonies' and ‘rites of passage’ play in tribal societies. Somehow, these themes ‘fused’ in my mind and this post is the result of that fusion.

To ensure that all of us are on the same plane of understanding, let us begin by defining the two key terms - ‘learning’ and ‘rites of passage’. Of course, these are just 'working definitions' - for the limited purpose of our discussion here.

Learning: Learning is said to occur when there is a relatively permanent change in a person’s behavior. So we are using a ‘behavioral’ definition for learning, as opposed to a definition that talks merely about ‘gaining knowledge’. We will focus mainly on learning at an individual level that happens through experience.

Rites of passage: A rite of passage is a ‘ritual’ that facilitates and marks a change in a person’s status. Hence we are using a broad definition for ‘rite of passage’ that includes ‘facilitating the change’ in addition to ‘marking the change’ in a person’s status. Also, the word ‘status’ that we are using here covers not only the ‘social status’ but also the ‘psychological status’ (or state of mind or mindset).

This post explores two main themes - the importance/value of rituals in accelerating the learning process in organizations and usefulness of the 'rites of passage concept' in facilitating & accelerating role transitions in organizations.

Now, let us come back to our definition of learning. If learning happens through experience, then some of the ways to to accelerate learning should be

(a) to provide a larger amount of experience and/or

(b) to provide experiences with a larger learning potential and/or

(c) to help the person to derive more learning from the experience

Another important aspect here is to 'make the learning stick' - that is to facilitate transfer of learning/application of the learning in the workplace. I feel that 'rituals' can be very useful - for helping a person to derive meaning from experience and for making the learning stick.

Rituals can increase the mindfulness of the learner. Rituals can also increase importance/value of the learning experiences in the mind of the learner. Rituals are especially important when the learning/new behavior requires a significantly different way of functioning. Rituals can signify a break from the old way of functioning and the beginning of the new way of functioning. So in our efforts to be rational and lean, if we remove rituals from learning initiatives, we might be adversely impacting their learning potential!

Now let us come back to 'rites of passage'. A rite of passage marks and enables a leap forward in maturity. They can also indicate initiations into specialized groups. Most of the cultures in the world have rituals associated with the passage from childhood to adulthood. Growing physically into adulthood happens naturally. But the psychological transition to adulthood does not always take place automatically along with the physical transition. The objective of the rites of passage is to enable the psychological transition. The rite of passage also serves as a clear signal/statement - to the people in transition and also to the community/group they belong to - that the transition has taken place. Again, it serves as an acknowledgement from the group regarding the new status of the individual. Rites of passage are not restricted to the transition to adulthood. They are also applicable in the case of other major changes/transitions in life - like marriage, divorce, death/loss of a loved one and retirement.

It has been observed that many of the tribal societies use rites of passage to accelerate key transitions in life (e.g. the transition from childhood to adulthood). Tribal societies that have very limited resources (and hence require everyone to contribute for the survival of the tribe) can't afford a situation where many of its members are stuck in a transition state for an extended period of time where they (the members in transition) don't contribute much to the tribe. Thus, these societies have a critical need to accelerate the life transitions. There is an obvious parallel between this situation and that in many business organizations today, where it is critical for the organizations to ensure that employees making role transitions become fully productive in their new roles as early as possible (e.g. they can't afford to have a situation where a new manager takes a couple of years to discover the manager in him/her !).

Thus, I feel that rites of passage are relevant in the case of transitions in organizational life including career/role transitions. As mentioned above, an excellent candidate here is the transition from an individual contributor role to a people manager role. I think that this transition is not just a matter of developing some additional skills/capabilities. It also requires a change in the state of mind/mindset - a psychological transition. I am not saying that managers are a 'higher form of evolution' (or are 'superior') as compared to individual contributors. My point is just that the manager role requires a different state of mind/mindset.

In most of the organizations we are likely to find examples of managers who have 'become managers' without having made made the psychological transition to 'being a manager' - making life difficult - for themselves and the people around them - especially the people they manage. I feel that designing suitable rites of passage that are appropriate in the particular organization context & culture(in addition to the necessary skill building initiatives) can help the managers in making this psychological transition faster and more effectively and hence in bridging the gap between 'becoming' and 'being' that we have seen above.

Now that we have seen the 'business case' for using rituals to increase the effectiveness of learning initiatives and for using the 'rites of passage' framework to facilitate career and role transitions, let us look at more pragmatic issues. What kind of rituals can be used to increase the effectiveness of learning programs? How exactly should one go about designing rites of passage to facilitate role transitions? After all, we are talking about implementing these in 21st century business organizations where esoteric rituals and rituals might not be appropriate. Complete treatment of these issues will require a much longer discussion than what is possible within the scope of this post. So let me provide some pointers - for the time being.

If we look closely, we are likely to find that rites and rituals are very much present in 21st century business organizations. It is just that these rites and rituals look very different from their counterparts in tribal contexts.

Let us begin by looking at some of the rituals that can increase the effectiveness of learning initiatives/accelerate the learning process. As we have seen earlier, to make this work the rituals should - increase the perceived value/importance of the learning initiative, make the learners more mindful and help them to derive more learning from the experience faster. So any ritual that meets the above requirements (and that is appropriate in the particular organization/ program context) should be useful.

Hence these can include 'nominating rituals' (e.g. in terms of an in-depth interaction between the employee and his/her manager before the program that will help the employee to better appreciate the value of the program to her/him and the investment the organization is making for her/him and to be more mindful of what can be learned from the program and how it can be applied on the job), 'opening rituals' (e.g. a senior leader doing the program launch to signify the importance that the organization is placing on the program and the participants) , 'experience assimilation rituals' (structuring the learning experience and reflection on the learning experience to increase mindfulness, learning and assimilation of experience), 'action planning rituals' and 'program closing rituals'. In a way, there is nothing really new/esoteric about these activities (they are part of most of the well-designed learning initiatives). The idea is just to put ceremony/rituals (back) into these activities to enhance their learning potential.

Now, let us examine how the elements of rites of passage can be used to facilitate the psychological transition associated with role changes. If we analyze the rites of passage, we will see that there are some common elements/phases (even though the rites might look very different from one another) - separation, transition and and re-incorporation.

The key requirement for the first phase is to detach/separate from the current status/position in the social structure and from the current identity/self. The transition phase is the in-between state where one has separated from the previous state but hasn't yet 'reached' the desired new state. The key requirement here is to remain in this state of uncertainty (without regressing into the previous state) so that the self has an opportunity to reconfigure itself in a manner that is appropriate for the desired new state. The objective of the re-incorporation phase is to re-enter the group/society with the new status/identity. Let us examine how these elements can be built into a new manager orientation program.

Conducting the manager orientation program at a site away from the office has a lot of value. The physical separation from the previous state (previous role in the office) can help in the psychological separation also. Having the space and time where one can reconfigure the mindset (not being burdened by the demands/activities of the previous state) - in the company of people who are undergoing a similar transition - that too under expert facilitation/help - can be very useful in psychologically tuning into the new role. Performing 'difficult' tasks - tasks that can't be accomplished with the previous mindset/task that require the new mindset can also be of immense value here (as they drive home the point that the previous mindset is not effective in the new role and as they help the participant to discover the mindset that is required to be effective in the new role). The key is to create an environment in which deep learning can occur and in which shared experience contributes to the creation of a new identity. Ceremonies to mark the successful completion of the program ('graduation rituals'), especially if they are witnessed by the senior leaders (and hence signifying their acknowledgement/recognition of the new status/state of the individual) can help in re-incorporation to the organization - in the new role. By the way, new manager orientation sessions (like rites of transition) also provide an opportunity for cultural indoctrination, where company values/leadership traits/ perspective/ 'world view' can be made very explicit ('Who we are and what do we stand for as an organization', 'How do we do things around here', 'What does it mean to be a manager in this company etc.).

It is important to get the 'positioning' of these programs exactly correct. There requirement is to help the participants separate from their previous role (and mindset) and tune into their new role (develop the new mindset) without making them feel that they are an 'elite class'/'superior to the people who are doing roles that they were doing previously'. So while branding this program is very useful, the essential signal/message to the participants should be that "You have made a very significant and valuable transition and have become more suitable for your new role; but this does not necessarily mean that you are superior to the people you manage" !

Any comments/suggestions/ideas?

Links : Carnival of HR - March 3, 2010, Career Development & Sublimation, Career Planning & the Myth of Sisyphus