I have seen the enemy; and it is us

We really can't talk about training without mentioning Sisyphus, because corporate training can be about as Sisyphean a career as it gets. I've lost count of the number of times I've climbed the mountain of educating peers and leaders about what training can and can't fix.

How many times have you been asked to train the management team on improved communication? How many times have you heard, "Sally over in Production shipped out the wrong size widget; she needs to be re-trained"? Or, my personal favorite: "Joe screwed up the contract on the Higgins account; when we talked to him, he said that he wasn't trained on the pricing matrix for our widgets. I know you've got his proficiency tests that show he passed the certification on pricing, but clearly, something was missed. Can you schedule a training session for the contract reps to get them back up to speed?"

It's enough to drive a trainer to distraction. The truth is that there are lots of reasons why people don't communicate effectively - and just as many reasons why people make mistakes - and lack of training is only one of 'em. Sure, it's easy to point to poor training as the problem (it sure is a convenient out for the employee whose feet are getting toasty from being held to the fire). And sure, sometimes poor training is the problem. But if you're going to be effective, you need to get your leadership team on board with one simple concept: training is not the answer to every performance problem.

So, how do you know whether training will fix the problem? There are all kinds of analyses you can perform to figure it out, but there is a quick and dirty method that works just as well as a full-on research project - in my experience, anyway. All you need to do is ask yourself a few simple questions (have you noticed I'm kinda big on that?):

1. Did the employee make the mistake because s/he legitimately doesn't know how to perform the task? By "legitimately doesn't know," I mean this: if I hold a gun to his head and tell him to do it right or die, will he do it right? If so, then you're not dealing with a training issue. Disclaimer: I am NOT suggesting that anyone should actually DO such a thing; it's used as a hypothetical.
2. Do you have one employee who makes this particular mistake regularly, or is it a group of employees having the same issue? If you've got only one person who keeps screwing up, that points more toward a personnel issue. If you've got two dozen employees who keep screwing up in the same way, then you need to dig a little deeper: you've got either a training opportunity or (more likely) some kind of systemic problem.
3. Is this task one that's performed frequently? Training a group of employees on a task that they'll do once a year is a waste of everyone's time; no matter how well-executed the training, no one will remember it a year from now. If that's the case, work on developing some job aids (signs, checklists, etc.) to help them when they need it.
4. Is your management team calling it a mistake, when it's really just an employee responding to the corporate culture? Sometimes people take shortcuts or work around the system because there's something bigger at play. Maybe you're engaging in performance punishing (that's when you load down the top performers, because you know that they'll get it done; eventually, they start to break down and make mistakes under the impossible load). Maybe you're engaging in rewarding the poor performers (by taking work away from them and giving it to your key players), which encourages them to continue to perform poorly. Maybe you just aren't paying much attention at all. Maybe the policy or procedure you're trying to enforce is stupid.

Look, there's an entire process (root cause analysis) designed to help businesses figure out why people make mistakes and why processes fail. And I'll definitely write about root cause analysis in the future, because it's a terrific tool in your performance management toolkit if the management team is willing to take a good look in the mirror and admit that they are contributing to many of the problems they've always blamed on the rank-and-file in the past.  But you can't execute a full-blown root cause analysis for every performance problem that comes up, so use the questions above as a starting point.

Don't be afraid to turn down the occasional request for training if you know that training isn't the solution. Training just for the sake of training is like putting a band-aid on a bruise: it might make things look better, but it doesn't fix a thing. Instead, save the day by figuring out what's really driving the performance problem, and recommending several ways to fix it.

No "ask yourself a few questions" at the end tonight, since I already did that a few paragraphs up. Tomorrow, I'll tackle communication in a politically-unstable office environment.