The Optimized People Development System

Author: Tim Waldo

  • Doubling Down on Internal Workforce Development Efforts

    Doubling Down on Internal Workforce Development Efforts

    The heavy cloud of concern over the American labor force continues to weigh down employers. Frustrated and exasperated leaders at all levels are struggling daily with the difficulty of finding and keeping people. My team at the Tennessee Manufacturing Extension Partnership certainly hears the frustration from those we serve.

    Driven by tenacity and a pressing sense of urgency, more business leaders are looking outwardly and investing in long-term solutions with multiple partners while ramping up efforts to attract people to work now. Investing some of that valuable time and effort inwardly could also help address the challenges of finding and keeping a stable workforce.

    Look again.

    Many manufacturers in Tennessee have already taken a close look at their people development efforts. Some have revisited their policies, some have expanded their benefits, and others have bolstered training and development. Still, there are probably other improvements to be made. In the spirit of continuous improvement, there’s always a chance to dig deeper and uncover new efficiencies and opportunities.

    The Optimized People Development System suggests that a good starting place is to create a Talent Stream Map. Based on the value stream map used in lean thinking, the Talent Stream map makes the PDS visible with all its beauty and wonder right alongside all its warts and freckles. Once all the stakeholders have their say and the TS map is complete, it becomes easier to explore possibilities for improvement.

    Look deeper.

    Asking more questions at more levels of the PDS can reveal overlooked opportunities. How can we improve recruiting is a good question. Can we expand where we recruit is also a good question. How are we attracting potential team members and when does attracting turn into recruiting? Can we do that part better? Digging into why we are recruiting will almost certainly stimulate some interesting discussions that cause other parts of the PDS to be reexamined.

    Another good question is, how are our retention efforts? What if we explore how we are personalizing retention? When do we begin our retention efforts in earnest? How can we do that part better? There are many questions that will come from looking more intently at all five areas of the PDS. Challenge the system stakeholders to stretch their question asking skills.

    Applying continuous improvement means to constantly ask more questions and explore more possibilities to make things better. If the organization has a good or even a very good people development system, there are surely other improvements that can still be made. Better questions help us to find those hidden opportunities.

    Hidden in plain sight.

    As the team explores the PDS, they often find things that were obvious, but unnoticed. In one instance, as a group of stakeholders stood in front of their TS map and discussed the flow of communication, they discovered that one tool they were using was not working as designed. They saw this after several questions about how the tool was supposed to be used and when. It was being used, but not consistently and not in the same way by all departments. They suddenly had a meaningful way to improve one of their processes.

    Stakeholders of another system unearthed persistent inconsistencies across departments regarding how training was being delivered and even what training was available. Eight supervisors described how they
    individually understood the company’s training approach, and ultimately discovered that they all had a different understanding of that extremely important aspect of people development.

    It has never been tougher to find people to help an organization fulfill its goals and purposes. Looking at and engaging with outward workforce development efforts to ease the struggle is important. However, overlooked improvements in the organization’s internal processes could also help fill positions and keep them filled.

    Discovery of these opportunities comes from thoughtful, purposeful exploration at all levels of the PDS and a willingness to dig deeper. Even though you’ve looked already, look again. Go another layer or two in. There just might be overlooked opportunities that could help reduce the amount of frustration and helplessness that your team is dealing with.

    Image by nugroho dwi hartawan from Pixabay

  • Finding the Starting Point

    Finding the Starting Point

    Finding the Starting Point

    The optimization process for the people development system is no different than any other system improvement journey. Start by thoroughly understanding the current system. Mapping the current state of the PDS with all the stakeholders can help uncover the “why” and “how” parts and allow for more precise improvement efforts.  

    Here’s an article that I wrote about one company’s mapping efforts.

    https://tmep.cis.tennessee.edu/wire-company-creates-map-improve-their-people-development-system

    Image by TheAndrasBarta from Pixabay

  • Avoiding Slow Surrender in the People Development System

    Avoiding Slow Surrender in the People Development System

    They are usually abandoned gradually, though unintentionally. They live on determination, but when discipline fades, these are among the first attributes to disappear. Ironically, growth and success often cause them to be compromised and quietly forgotten. They are the fundamentals, the essential, bedrock practices so vital for success.

    It’s been said that fundamentals win championships. Look up almost any famous athlete and they often point to their mastery of the fundamentals as the main driver of their success. The concept applies to organizational habits as well; especially when it comes to developing and keeping a strong workforce.

    “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a human being.”

    Football is a complex game. When coach Vince Lombardi embarked on a journey to build a championship team, he went all the way back to the most basic concept. He reintroduced his 1961 team to the football, not to a strategy, to some new rules, or to new ways to play the game, but to the ball itself. He refocused their attention on the most basic of the basics. A detail easily taken for granted. This article from James Clear discusses the impact of Lombardi’s simple idea.

    At its most basic level, an optimized people development system is about people. Its role is to serve people well, treat them well, and keep them well. To do this, the system must value relationships and foster effective communication. Appreciating the whole person and committing to their development and growth are basic principles for an effective PDS. But it’s easy to lose sight of the basics.

    Fast-paced workplaces busy trying to remain competitive and satisfy customers, can let important practices drift, and begin to assume that the basics are somehow happening. Surely everyone knows that the organization values people, right? A detail easily obscured by daily pressures.

    If your PDS seems to have lost something, has grown weak, or worse, has never been strong, perhaps there’s a need to revisit the fundamentals. Was there a time when the PDS was more focused on people? When the basics of valuing every individual were much more prevalent? Has the system crept away from this basic tenant?

    Of Great Consequence.

    Merriam Webster.com offers another nuanced meaning of fundamental, “It applies to something that is a foundation without which an entire system or complex whole would collapse.” The role of the PDS is fundamentally important.

    This system supports all other organizational systems. Practically every organizational system requires people (sounds basic, doesn’t it?). If those people who operate all the organization’s systems are unhappy, underdeveloped, or undervalued, there can be serious consequences. However, when systems are difficult to see (as the PDS is), it is easy to forget how important they really are.

    In practice, this means that leaders and stakeholders of the PDS must constantly assign high levels of importance to the PDS and be disciplined about maintaining this focus. Previous posts on this blog explore this idea in more detail.

    Avoid a Slow Surrender.

    Mahatma Gandhi once said, “All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.”

    Abandoning the fundamentals that empower an organization’s people development system is a slow surrender. It starts when the stakeholders fail to value relationships. When they forget that treating people with dignity and respect is non-negotiable, when they fail to encourage their people to learn and grow, they give up future potential and miss the opportunity to deepen engagement. Communication weakens and powerful components of success slowly disappear.

    When the perceived importance of the PDS diminishes, training gets pushed off and staff development sees little or no investment. When leaders take the PDS for granted, they can inadvertently compromise the organization’s vision.

    Modern methods for finding, training, and retaining people are very complex. In the spirit of Vince Lombardi, leaders should ensure that the basic practices that support their people development system are not lost in the melee. In addition, they should strive to constantly highlight the importance of the system to the organization’s goals.

    To keep the fundamentals at the forefront of the organization’s collective mindset takes discipline and determination. Champions pay attention to the fundamentals. They commit themselves to them and practice them consistently. Building a championship-caliber people development system requires the same level of commitment.

  • Make Sure Your System Can Sustain Your Status – Tip #4

    Make Sure Your System Can Sustain Your Status – Tip #4

    There’s fierce competition in all industries to find, train, and retain the talented people that thriving businesses need. In recent posts, we’ve been looking at four tips to help organizations win or improve their performance in this competition. The fourth tip is about staying power.

    Becoming an employer of choice is about more than simply having people choose your organization over others from a list of prospects. A strategy for moving up the list of preferred employers should include a commitment to continuously improve your internal people development system.

    Embarking on an effort to improve your ranking as EoC would be an exercise in futility if the system you use to find, train, and retain people is not functioning effectively. Some companies striving to become EoCs often take time-worn steps such as training leaders, working on retention plans, or maybe offering training to high-potential team members. These are all good steps, but many times they have less-than-desirable outcomes.

    If you expose your leadership team to quality training then send them back into a PDS that is inefficient, disconnected, and practically invisible, how effective can they be with this new training?

    If you add new benefits and retention bonuses and then subject the people for whom they are intended to a PDS that does not facilitate strong communication and provide opportunities for relationship building, what are the odds that your investment in retention will pay off? You get the picture.

    The PDS must be strong enough to improve your position in the EoC race then help you hold that position and possibly climb higher. Here are some ways to strengthen this important system. To start, use systems thinking to help your team see the whole PDS – its connections and interactions and the opportunities for improvement; this is where lean concepts can be applied to make the system more efficient and effective. Then, strive to become a learning organization to drive engagement and create the stickiness that keeps people coming back.

    See The System

    The PDS is a non-linear system. It is complex and involves many people acting at various times and at various levels. Making it visible starts with a current state map. Get all the stakeholders to help build the map and identify gaps and opportunities. What data is being collected? What tools are being used? Who is involved at various places across the system? How is each area influencing what is happening in the other four areas?

    Once the map is completed, a strategy can begin to take shape to improve the PDS and its effectiveness.

    Lean The System

    Like most other systems, there can be waste in the PDS. Some of that waste is tangible, like money and lost opportunities. Some are intangible, such as time, effort, and potential relationships. Once the system is more visible, efforts can be made to reduce or eliminate waste.

    Waste can occur when a trainer is investing time training someone using poorly designed training programs. In the recruiting process, waste can come from job postings that are ineffective. If a company cannot launch new products or expand operations due to workforce issues, perhaps the fault lies with a weak PDS.   

    When a good recruit is mismatched in a job, the opportunity to maximize that person’s potential can be lost; often leading to their departure from the team. If the PDS does not support great retention and performance management activities, powerful, potential relationships might not develop. This is a type of waste with long-term ramifications. Lean thinking is about continuously improving a system. This particular people-centric system should not be overlooked when it comes to pursuing perfection.

    Make the System Sticky

    A learning organization attracts people and holds their attention. In such an environment, everyone understands the importance of learning, and everyone participates in learning. Development pathways and training matrices are prominent, learning is celebrated and rewarded, and engagement deepens.

    Team learning, personal mastery, and knowledge sharing are just some of the key elements engrained in a learning organization. The best employers understand this and constantly work on creating a culture of learning. The journey to become a learning organization requires a shared mindset whereby a team works individually and collectively to increase knowledge, skills, and abilities. The PDS is the mechanism that allows this mindset to take root and thrive.

    You’re Already in the Race

    So, how do you position your firm in the minds of your employees and potential employees as a great place to work? It takes a well thought out strategy that includes:

    1. Building a strong, continuously improving system to develop people.
    2. Understanding the nature of the competition.
    3. Helping stakeholders grasp the importance of their role in the organization’s success; and
    4. Recognizing that there are important choices to be made, and not just by the talented people the PDS will bring in.

    Decent wages and benefits that attract people are the table stakes in today’s labor market. However, in this instance, winning such a ubiquitous competition involves the idea that people will not only choose your company but will enthusiastically choose to stay and make meaningful contributions. And, leaning on a time-honored axiom, remember; that becoming an employer of choice is a marathon, not a sprint.

    Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

  • Who’s in? – 4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Realize You’re in

    Who’s in? – 4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Realize You’re in

    An employer of choice makes better choices about who to bring on board because they have made good choices about their people development system and the culture they want to build.

    In this blog series, we’ve been exploring how all employers are competing to be an employer of choice, even if they don’t realize they are in the game. To improve their position in this race, the first tip is to learn about other competitor organizations they are up against. The second, is that the stakeholders of the organization’s people development system should realize that the potential employee they are after isn’t the only one making choices.

    In addition to hiring decisions, stakeholders of the company’s PDS make crucial choices about the way the system is administered and supported. Those decisions feed back into the employer of choice calculus.

    The third tip relates to the people who own the PDS.

    Let the whole team in on it.

    “That’s HR’s responsibility.” I often hear responses along these lines when I ask leaders about their internal workforce development efforts. It takes more than just the HR team to make the PDS work well.

    There are many stakeholders of an organization’s workforce development processes. These include frontline supervisors, line leads, department heads, and senior managers. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget to tell many of those stakeholders that we are aiming to be a preferred employer and that we need their help in doing it.

    They don’t know what they don’t know.

    Leaders at all levels influence the culture. A great example is their attitude toward training. If they are unwilling to give their team members time to attend training or if they complain about the process, their team will be negatively impacted. By extension, if they do not understand and appreciate the need for a learning culture, they will short circuit efforts to build such a culture.

    Stakeholders are important connectors across the five functional areas of the PDS – recruiting, onboarding, training, retention, and performance management. Do we let them know this? Do we train them to be good stewards of the PDS and the people that this system serves?

    Recruiting great potential talent is wasted when those new hires are passed on to team leaders who do not play their part well. Conversations that begin in the recruiting phase should continue through the onboarding and into the training and retention phase. The PDS should allow this communication to happen easily and consistently.

    If all stakeholders do not know the extent of their influence, and how to make that influence positive in nature, how can the company become an EoC?

    Help them see their part.

    Much of the leadership development that is offered to frontline and mid-level leaders is focused on the leader and their ability to engage people. Making good decisions, communicating well, and thinking strategically are all important learnings for leaders.

    It is just as important that all the leaders and stakeholders of the PDS see the system and understand their role in its performance. They also need the training and development to help them fulfill that part of their responsibilities.

    Building a healthy and vibrant company culture depends on the efforts of all the players. Get them involved in the competition for EoC by telling them who they are competing against and why winning (or at least moving up the rankings of employers) is so important to the company’s future and theirs.

    Once the stakeholders on board and collectively pushing to win the competition for EoC, the system must be able to sustain your new status. Which is the topic of our next post.

    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

  • Who’s choosing? 4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Realize You’re in

    Who’s choosing? 4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Realize You’re in

    Every employer is a competitor in the race to be a preferred employer, that employer that draws people in and keeps them engaged for long stretches of their careers. There are some leaders who have a watchful eye toward the goal of being an employer of choice. However, there may be quite a few who aren’t watching the race at all. If there is a list of 50 or 500 employers in your neighborhood, your company ranks somewhere on the scale of great, good, or bad places to work.

    My last post advocated that a good first step toward improving your position is to understand the nature of the competition. Recognize your competitors, get to know them, learn from them, and develop a strategy to move up the rankings. The second tip has to do with choices.

    It’s not one-sided.

    Most literature promoting the idea of becoming an EoC is written with the employee as the one whose choice is of paramount importance. While it is true that they are the focus of this competition, they are not the only ones making choices. Employers must also make important choices, and these decisions inform the EoC rankings by communicating with current and potential employees about the company’s attitude toward people.

    Consequences of choice.

    Bad hiring decisions can harm any previous efforts taken to become an EoC. If, for example, a poor choice of candidates is made because the organization’s people development system is unclear on the team’s needs, the new hire will likely leave prematurely and perhaps with a not-so-good review of the experience.

    Some choices made by employers are made well before the hiring process. Long-term decisions to support or not support training delivery will have future impacts on the morale of the existing team and therefore the atmosphere within the organization. Culture is the key to becoming (and continuing as) an EoC. Having a great benefits package within a poor culture won’t move your company up the rankings in the minds of employees. The point is that, in addition to hiring decisions, leaders and stakeholders of the company’s people development system make other crucial choices about the way the system is administered and supported. Those decisions feedback into the employer of choice calculus.

    Positioned to choose.

    The company’s PDS is the primary system within the organization that nurtures culture. It is the system that facilitates communication with employees. Ultimately, the PDS is the system that decides if you are an employer of choice or not. This is why it is important to ensure that it operates effectively and efficiently.

    Do the choices being made regarding the PDS support the success of all the functional areas (recruiting, onboarding, training, retention, and performance management)? Does the system provide data that informs decision-making? Are choices made from long-term perspectives or near term? Is culture at the forefront when decisions are made about developing people? Does the PDS accurately inform the hiring process?

    It is more than simply having people choose your organization over others from a list of prospects. An employer of choice is one who makes good choices and one who has made good choices. The best way for that to occur is to have all stakeholders engaged in the development of people. And that will be the topic of our next post.

    Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

  • 4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Even Realize You’re in

    4 Tips to Win a Competition You May Not Even Realize You’re in

    There was no starting gun. No one approached a line waiting for someone to yell “GO!” It’s an age-old, ongoing competition and if you’re an employer, you’re in it. Whether or not you recognize it, you’re in the competition to be an employer of choice. And your success, long-term and short, is directly linked to how well you do in this race.

    Imagine a list of every employer in your area, each one scored and ranked from the best place to work to the worst. You’re on that list. Even if you put little or no thought and effort into this idea of being a preferred workplace, your company is impacted by its performance in this competition. Placement on that list has many implications for your team.

    What does it mean to be an EoC? It simply means that your firm is positioned in the minds of your employees and potential employees as a great place to work. Becoming an EoC is not a simple thing to achieve or sustain because it requires a combination of several dynamic factors.

    In this series of posts, we’ll explore four strategic tips to help improve your position and move up the ranks of the best places to work. First, to become an employer of choice, there’s a need to understand the nature of the competition. Then, stakeholders should consider who is making choices. It is also important to let the whole team in on the goal. Finally, make sure your system can sustain your status.

    Who are we up Against?

    Recognizing that you are in the competition is the first step. Then you must accept the fact that you are competing against all employers for talent, not just those you consider to be in your industry. This helps you look at the recruiting pools differently and informs the development of your training efforts.

    It would be great if we could hire the talent we need and just put them in play immediately. That hasn’t been the case in a very long time. Practically every company is working to train people to do the functions required for the organization to succeed. We hear it all the time, “If you can find me someone with desire, we can train them to do the work we need done.” That person with desire may be looking at other sectors and industries. Is your internal people development system (PDS) able to attract them, and more importantly, can you really train them (and do it well) if you do succeed in hiring them?

    Getting to know them…all of them.

    Sports teams watch game films. They study their opponents and try to develop strategies to win against them. In the competition to be an EoC, there may not be game films, but there are plenty of sources of information that will help you understand how your many competitors find, train, and retain people.

    Study your opponents and learn from them. Look at the job postings from other industries. Check out their webpages. Do they show their company culture? Do they make it easy to find job postings on their site? Are their job postings attractive?  

    Some companies are actively chasing the pole position as an EoC. They are committed to the race and are making improvements that give them a competitive edge. If this were a car race, there would be super sports cars, family sedans, and even some clunkers. Your company may not be at that sports car level, but that doesn’t mean you can’t compete well.

    There are large employers with deep pockets and many resources. Certainly, going up against them seems unfair. Still, you must stay in the game. To compete against them, look at the areas where you have some advantages. Things like flexibility in scheduling shifts, skills development opportunities you can offer, connections to the community, and giving employees opportunities to contribute at meaningful levels. Use the leverage available to you to improve your ranking.

    Good teams also watch game films on themselves. This is an area where teams might findF improvement opportunities. They look over plays and talk about what happened; if it went well, they probably don’t spend too much time on it. If things did not go well, that’s where they spend time talking through the failure and learning from it.

    Can you see your PDS…all the functional areas of it? Again, there’s no film to watch, but there’s lots of data and communication that should be going on within your system. Capturing that and regularly assessing performance is crucial. Where can the system be improved? Which of the five areas in the PDS is operating the best? Which area needs help? We’ll continue to explore this system in coming posts.

    There’s fierce competition in the race to find, train, and retain the talented folks we need to succeed. Choosing to look closely at the other competitors can help you make decisions about how your PDS can be improved. Other choices come with the title of Employer of Choice. And that’s the topic for the next post.

    Image by Annette from Pixabay

  • The Flow and Pull of Human Inventory – A Lean Perspective

    The Flow and Pull of Human Inventory – A Lean Perspective

    It just sounds wrong to ask such a question. It feels insensitive, almost Orwellian in a way. Should people be considered inventory? Applying lean thinking to a system requires that we look at all the components, and inventory can certainly be a major factor. But, in this case, we’re not talking about a store of things, a list of items on shelves or in boxes. We’re talking about people.

    Inventory is one of the famous wastes in lean thinking. Usually, the goal is not to have too much or have it before it’s needed; this is because lean concepts originated from manufacturing. However, applying lean concepts to a people development system (PDS) can challenge the definition of inventory.

    Exactly Where are the People?

    I was talking to a colleague about helping organizations optimize their PDS by applying lean thinking. As we discussed how to analyze the traditional wastes of lean, my friend suggested that the stack of applications that an organization has for open job postings represents a type of inventory. That stack could be seen as an inventory of raw materials ready to be processed by the PDS. Potential, raw talent, waiting to be built up.

    Extending the analogy, perhaps these are other types of human inventories: 

    • Work in Progress – Those individuals involved in training and development.
    • Finished Goods – No one is ever fully finished learning, but these are reaching their peak in their role.
    • Reworks – those who recognize the need to change and are open to the idea of upskilling and retraining.
    • Obsolete Inventory – those people in the organization who refuse to change or whose roles are disappearing.

    There is also just the overall headcount. Donella Meadows, a leading contributor to systems thinking, often referred to stocks as the foundation of any system. She bolsters this assertion saying, “Stocks are the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, and measure at any given time.” In the people development system, headcount is the stock, making it a type of inventory; one that can fluctuate by being acted upon by a system’s feedback loops, either a balancing loop or a reinforcing loop, or a combination of both. The PDS is responsible for maintaining the stock of people in all the organizational systems.

    Working Their Way Through the System

    Looking at people as inventory in some instances can be helpful. For example, two key lean principles are establishing flow and creating a pull system.

    Flow

    In this instance, flow represents people successfully moving through the system. It happens when the recruiting process is continually finding and developing acceptable/trainable talent at all key positions. It is created by constantly looking for valuable attributes and talents, even if there is no signal from internal customers. Then, creating the opportunity for those attributes and talents to “flow” into other parts of the organization; for the good of the individual and the organization.

    Flow is not just about people physically moving through the system though. It is also about intellectual movement, emotional movement, and cognitive movement. Flow implies progress and growth. The optimized PDS creates flow by ensuring that everyone is moving (upwardly, laterally) – progressing along their development path, career ladder, skill levels, etc.

    Pull

    Pull is demand. It is created in the organization when there’s a need for people to move up, take on new roles, or add their capabilities to another team. Pull is established when organizational systems have a need for people due to growth, expansion, and success. The Optimized PDS helps find the right types of human inventory, at the right place, in the right quantity.

    Pull is driven by more than just promotions. There’s also skill level advancement and growth in leadership abilities, cognitive training, personal goal attainment, knowledge acquisition, coaching ability, cross-training in other areas, concept understanding (such as lean, kata, systems thinking, etc.), and strategic thinking.

    Signals From the System

    Together, the lean concepts of flow and pull help PDS stakeholders identify where needs are greatest and the pulling forces are strongest. These signals get transmitted back through the PDS so that the demand is met, people are added, they get training, are moved, etc. They will have names and faces, of course. They won’t be known as Works in Progress, or Reworks, or Obsolete. They will, however, be seen in the system.

    There are places in the PDS where monitoring the levels of human inventory and their developmental progress can interject a sense of urgency to ensure that people are efficiently moving through the system and they are being served well along their journey. Just the idea of labeling people as inventory may be inflammatory or sound demeaning to some. If it is meant to value people only as so many interchangeable resources to be manipulated, then it would be offensive. However, observing the PDS through this lens can help us gain a more systems-oriented view and help us manage the organization’s most important inventory.

    Reference – D. H. Meadows, (2008). Thinking in Systems, A Primer.

    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

  • Is Your People Development System Invisible?

    Is Your People Development System Invisible?

    I learned to see in my twenties and I haven’t looked at things quite the same since. I’ve always had good vision, thank God, but it took me a while to understand the difference between seeing something versus simply looking at something. This deeper, more intentional way of seeing has been very valuable, especially when it comes to systems and the relationships supported within them. To improve a system, you first have to see it. And with the people development system, that takes some effort.

    Back then, with a manual SLR and dreams of being the next Ansel Adams, I spent hours reading about photography and experimenting with the systems that yielded unique images. Some of them actually turned out quite nicely. Most of them, not so much.    I remember one writer emphasizing the need to see things… really see things. Spend time absorbing details, appreciating them, and considering how the elements interacted. He used the example of looking at the lawn versus seeing the details of a blade of grass. It was an obvious point; obvious, that is, once the concept was pointed out to me.

    Well, of Course it is!

    An organization’s internal workforce development system is an open system. It flexes to operate as data flows, demand changes, and circumstances dictate. And it does this at various times, in multiple places, at different levels, involving many stakeholders. A previous post explores this idea in depth. It is a common system within most organizations. And that often causes it to be taken for granted.

    Of course, the functions of our people development systems are connected! And, of course, this critical system is connected to the other systems that make up the whole organization. That assumption, “Well, of course it is!”, can dismiss the need to purposefully study the system. To see the connections and explore the gaps and opportunities. Some important functions just seem to happen – people come to work, they move around on the org chart, some training goes on, conversations are happening. These activities go on as seemingly automatic reactions in the background.  

    Lack of Familiarity Breeds Contempt

    If something fits into the “Well, of course it is…” category, there can be a stubborn, embedded belief that it simply does not warrant deeper exploration. Expectations have been set and accepted without question. Because of this, some not-so-obvious options to improve the system can be missed, forcing it to continue to operate below its optimal levels. Most people in the organization know at least something about the PDS. They are familiar with many of its functions. They may know some of the various stakeholders. They can see the artifacts that speak about the system, and they most likely understand something of the complexities involved. Unfortunately, some people will develop negative opinions about the whole based on their knowledge of the parts. This could be avoided if the system were more visible and more information about the system made available.

    Bring it up, Talk it up, Build it up

    What is the current state of the PDS? A mapping exercise can help the team see how the system connects and how things flow through the system – things like data, communication, and of course, the people. Hang it on a wall for all to see. Use flip chart paper and sticky notes; the more paper, the better.

    Getting all stakeholders to appreciate the system, its complexities, and how they contribute to its functioning can help identify potential leverage points to help improve the system. Let all stakeholders speak into the mapping process, and they will begin to appreciate the dynamics of the PDS. What works and should stay? What doesn’t and should go?

    Once the current state map of the people development system is captured, use lean concepts to minimize waste. Look at the various tools used in the system, and evaluate their effectiveness. Consider the data captured from the system and how that data is used.

    The PDS is the main tool for engaging the whole team. How does it communicate to all stakeholders? Where does it promote the concepts of a learning organization? Does it celebrate learning? Does it say we value learning and development for everyone? It is difficult to improve something you can’t see…or that you don’t take the time to thoughtfully examine. An optimized people development system is one that is continually scrutinized and examined for improvement opportunities. Leaders peer intently into the details and ask questions. Like all continuous improvement efforts, it never truly ends. And it could help your team see this important system in a whole new light.

    Image by Oliver Kepka from Pixabay

  • Change for the Change Maker

    Change for the Change Maker

    I believe we humans have gotten better at adapting to the pace of change. But the big, pressing changes often distract us from paying attention to other, less obvious adjustments that might make our systems work more effectively. In the last post, we looked at the internal people development systems of organizations and how they are all about change management. These systems manage change and can instigate change. They are also open to transformation to make them more effective.

    Seeing the system might be the first change needed

    The connections seem obvious; but it is easy for stakeholders to lose sight of them. The PDS is a complex, dynamic system operating at various times, in multiple places throughout the organization, and involving multiple people. The difficulty lies in seeing the whole system in operation.

    Change ripples through the system. The training function expands abilities and capacities. Recruiting alters team structure and makeup, while onboarding aims to change perspectives and motivations. Retention seeks to strengthen relationships and boost trajectories while the performance management function improves capabilities and potential. Together, these all work to sustain or change the organizational culture. Inefficiency in one area flows through the system and impacts the other areas.

    Weak, neglected connections still allow the system to operate, but with less effectiveness. On the other hand, enhanced connections share data, ensure consistent communication across the PDS, and use tools like training matrices and development pathways to engage teams.

    Constant change, aka continuous improvement

    It’s often easier to improve a visible, linear system like a production line that makes widgets than to improve a non-linear system that lives within larger systems. But lean thinking can be applied to the PDS.

    Adopting a continuous improvement mindset within the team can help ensure that the processes that make up the PDS are focused on delivering value to all of its customers.

    Lean thinking is about eliminating waste, which certainly exists within most PDSs. It might be the waste of time that occurs with outdated training methods or poor training tools. It might be wasted opportunities when performance management efforts are ignored. Wasted effort of underdeveloped trainers is another example.

    Learning organizations are always changing  

    Grow the individuals within the system, and the system itself will change. The optimized PDS appreciates and cultivates the love of learning throughout the organization. The effects of this level of improvement within the PDS show up as improved engagement, more ideas generated, and deeper relationships formed. This improvement radiates outward to all other organizational systems.

    Changes to chase

    Other changes that can impact the PDS. One is a change in expectations. Expect the system to operate better, then put in the work to make it happen. Changes in perception. Help the team see the system, understand its power, and challenge the status quo. There are also changes in the level of dedication to constantly improve the PDS. It takes concerted effort and determination to improve this system. This level of improvement requires strong leadership and commitment from all stakeholders.

    Some of the improvements we can make to our people development systems are subtle. But the system is open to continuous improvement. If it is restricted and ignored it will never be able to be the change maker it is intended to be.

    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.