David Maister, the
guru of Consulting, talks about his
extensive experience in training:
"I now believe that the overwhelming majority of all business training, by me and by everyone else, is a complete waste of money and time."
Why would someone who has earned boatloads of money doing it think training, of all things, is a waste?
"The main reason is that companies keep trying to bring about changes in behavior by training their people in new things, and then sending them back to their operating groups subject to the same measures and management approaches as before."
This is a standard metrics problem. People work toward what is measured, so training itself will fail unless the metrics are aligned with the business strategy (that's a fancy way of saying your metrics make your employees do what you want them to do). Althought it's a standard problem, the cure is worse than wasting money, for managers anyway:
"The correct process would be to sit top management down, ask ‘What are people not doing that we want them to be doing?’ and then figuring out a complete sequence of actions to address the questions – how do we actually get people to change their behavior? What measurements need to change? – what behaviors by top management need to change to convince people that the new behaviors are really required, not ust encouraged? – what has to happen before the training sessions to bring about the change? What has to be in place the very day they finish?"
This explains why when your company has "yet another <type of improvement> improvement program", you just nod and smile knowing that it's not going to affect you one bit.