Training Your Team Members Boosts Your Productivity

How much does your company invest in training and development for your employees?   Is the ROI positive?  Many executives scrutinize training and development programs closely.  They want to know if the payoff justifies the investment.  Typically, people measure ROI by examining the impact on the employees undergoing the training.  We ask questions such as: Are they more productive?  Are they more engaged? Do they stay at the firm longer?  

A new study examines another potentially important impact of training and development programs.  Miguel Espinosa and Christopher T. Stanton studied 526 frontline workers and 129 managers in Columbia who had undergone a 120-hour, 16-week training program.  According to HBS Working Knowledge, the scholars concluded:

"Goal achievement among frontline workers increased by roughly 10% after training.  Managers completed 3% more of their goals related to strategic tasks.  Supervisors who worked most closely with trained workers benefited the most, boosting productivity by about 8%.  An examination of email data explains why: After the training, frontline workers sent fewer emails to their managers—an indication that the training had given them the knowledge and confidence to pursue their work independently.  Trained employees enjoyed additional benefits, including career stability and growth. For example, they were more likely than their non-trained counterparts to remain with the organization over the next three years. And they were about twice as likely as their untrained counterparts to receive promotions."

Now this study examined frontline workers.  Other research should examine development programs for employees at higher levels of the organization to examine the productivity benefits.  Perhaps the benefits will not be as widespread.  However, this study certainly provides food for thought.  Executives may be looking at ROI all wrong when it comes to leadership development programs at all levels. 

Should Senior Managers Learn about AI from Younger Employees?

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Katherine C. Kellogg and her co-authors have written a fascinating new HBS Working Paper titled "Don’t Expect Juniors to Teach Senior Professionals to Use Generative AI: Emerging Technology Risks and Novice AI Risk Mitigation Tactics."  They begin by noting that experienced managers often can learn a great deal from younger, less experienced employees.  The scholars note the benefits of this "reverse mentorship" in their paper.  They point out that junior employees are often closer to the work, able to experiment with new methods more easily, and often are more open to learning about new techniques and practices.  They point, for instance, at a famous ethnographic study by Stephen Barley in which he found that senior radiologists learned a great deal about new CT scanning technology in the 1980s from their less experienced colleagues. 

However, Kellogg and her fellow scholars argue that such positive benefits of reverse mentorship do not always materialize.  For instance, senior professionals may find that their status in the organization feels threatened by such reliance on junior colleagues.  Moreover, they argue that we need to be careful in some instances, when junior colleagues may still not have clear knowledge of the benefits AND risks of emerging technologies such as AI.  If the technology is still evolving rapidly, and the risks associated with its use are still unclear, then we may not want to be so reliant on younger employees to teach senior managers.  

Junior employees may simply not be well-equipped to engage in appropriate risk mitigation strategies, and they may not know how best to convey an understanding of those risks and the appropriate ways to manage them.  To me, it seems that we need a more collaborative approach in these cases of emerging technologies with unclear risks.  Together, we need to engage in the type of two-way dialogue that enables us to learn about the appropriate application of these new technologies in our organizations, rather than depending on one set of individuals to teach another set.   Reverse mentorship has its place in organizations, but it may not be the best model for embracing new AI methods and practices. 

How Leaders Avoid Hero Syndrome

This week Kellogg Insight features a conversation with Colonel Fred Maddox, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College and Chief of Staff of the Army senior fellow at the Kellogg School.  Maddox discusses how leaders should react when the execution of a very important project falters badly.   He suggests that many leaders enjoy being the heroes, swooping into the situation and trying to solve the problem personally.   Maddox cautions against this approach, "When leaders act like they’re the only ones who can solve something, it can become an issue for the whole organization because they’re not focused on strategy and they’re doing someone else’s job.”  Moreover, he argues that such "heroic" action can demoralize team members, because they feel as though their skills and voice are not respected.   

Why don't leaders trust their team members in these spots?   Maddox argues that leaders often don't believe in the skills and expertise of their team members.  However, leaders do believe in themselves, yet sometimes that confidence is not well-grounded.  The situation may be far more complex and/or novel than the leader would like to admit.  They need help from their team members; they cannot solve it alone.  However, they somehow convince themselves that they can rectify the situation without assistance.   It's hero complex 101.  

Maddox explains how the military uses various simulations and training exercises to develop the skills of team members.  An investment in training and development does not only help the team members hone their skills; it builds the leaders' confidence in their team members.  Leaders need to find time to see their team members in action in a lower-risk, safer space.  

He explains that a good leader doesn't simply issue orders in these training scenarios.  Instead, the effective leader inquires as to how various people on the team would try to solve a specific probelm.  He calls this Socratic approach "walking in autonomy."  It's essentially a conversation in which the leader coaches and mentors, rather than solving the problem directly. Then, Maddox advocates using the "after-action review" to analyze the decisions that have been made and the impact those choices had on the results - good or bad. Providing time for reflection, feedback, and learning proves crucial for employee development, and these activities help build the leader's confidence in the people throughout the organization.

Retraining Workers as Jobs Evolve

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The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article today by Austen Hufford titled, "Companies Ramp Up Worker-Retraining Efforts."  Hufford explains that many firms are struggling to find good people given the very tight labor market.  Moreover, many jobs have evolved due to technology innovation.  Thus, companies have invested in new initiatives to retrain workers for their emerging needs.  As an example, Louisiana-based Lamar Advertising is retraining workers accustomed to painting billboards to now repair digital billboards.  These digital displays only account for a tiny fraction of the company's billboards, yet they generate more than 20% of the firm's billboard revenue.  

How should firms think about launching worker-retraining initiaves?  First, I think that companies have to recognize that these investments, while perhaps quite substantial, often pale in comparison to the alternative.  Firms have to weigh the cost of retraining against the extraordinary expenses that they often must incur to recruit and onboard new talent.   In high employee turnover situations, the recruiting and onboarding costs can be astronomical.   Retraining often proves to be a worthwhile investment when judged in this way.   Second, retraining efforts often yield other substantial benefits.   For instance, organizations may find that employee engagement increases when people feel valued and have the opportunity to better themselves through retraining.  Third, investing in internal retraining efforts enables companies to customize their worker training, development, and education to suit their organization's specific needs.   Finding talent from the outside often means that firms rely on training that is quite general and does not meet their particular needs.   Finally, retraining efforts enable dedicated employees to share their newly developed skills with others.  As people master new skills, they can become the trainers for the next group of workers who enter training programs.   Sharing expertise in this manner often has two important benefits.  It reinforces the skills that one has learned, while offering a tremendous sense of satisfaction and pride for workers.   

How Experts Can Train Novices More Effectively

Novices in many fields look to those with experience for mentorship, advice, and training.  It's quite natural for them to do so.  Unfortunately, the experts do not always make great teachers.   They can't empathize with the novices, and they sometimes have a hard time explaining how they learned to do what they do.   Scholars call this phenomenon the "curse of knowledge."  Think about the challenges some superstar athletes face when they try to coach others upon retirement.  Examples of those who struggled in this regard include Magic Johnson, Ted Williams, and Isaiah Thomas. 

Harvard doctoral candidate Ting Zhang has been conducting interesting research on how experts can break the "curse of knowledge."  She has focused on two strategies that could help.   First, experts can document their learning process while they are novices, and then look back on their notes when asked to provide coaching and advice to others.  Second, experts can "rediscover inexperience" by acting like a beginner again. 

In one study she asked undergraduates to record notes about their summer internships, and she collected the diaries.   Months later, they were asked to provide advice to others pursuing internships.  She gave one half of the experts access to their old notes, while the other half did not receive the diaries to review.   The new interns gave higher evaluations to the advice given by those who had reviewed their diaries. 

In a second study, she asked musicians to record themselves playing guitar.   One half of them could play as they wished. The other half were directed to play with their non-dominant hand.   Those in this second group felt more like beginners again, empathized more effectively with novices, and they gave more concrete and effective advice to beginners as well.