I read an interesting article by Mary Portas in the Huffington Post this morning on the subject of responsibility in business, a topic that I find very interesting on several levels. Any company has a responsibility to shareholders, employees, customers, local community etc. but the company is actually a group of individuals - the employees (at all levels) - who share these responsibilities. So when someone asks ‘Who is the person responsible for………?’ the answer could easily be ‘Well, we all are.’
Let’s take training as an example. The person ‘responsible’ for training might be someone in the HR department - perhaps even the Training Manager - but if I work in a company and I know I have some weaknesses surely I am responsible for improving. Of course, I can ask for help from the Training Manager or Department but the ultimate responsibility for learning and developing my own skills is mine.
Assuming I accept that responsibility and start to do something to improve and develop my skills I am going to want to be sure that I can get the results I want. Likewise, any Training Manager needs to know that training paid for by the company will be effective and provide good value. Value is the relationship between price and quality. The Training Manager wants to know that the financial price paid for training and the time taken for training, and consequently away from the workplace, are as low as possible in relation to the benefit of the training. This means we need to be able to ‘measure' the benefit of the training. Not always an easy task. From my point of view, as the trainee, I also want to know that the time and energy I put into being trained will be ‘worth it’. If I can’t see or feel the benefit in some way I will lose motivation.
This brings me back to the topic of ‘responsibility’. As a trainee, it is my responsibility to apply myself to the training and to learn/study - probably in my own time too, after all, this is my personal development we are talking about here. Part of the work that I do should include my own personal assessment of how I am improving. This makes learning or training less like ‘school’ and more like ‘project management’ - you make a plan, execute it, monitor results, adapt the plan, execute it, etc. In our Business English Coaching this translates into an evaluation of need, setting of targets, working towards them through training, monitoring performance after training and re-assessing further training needs (what we should learn next).
Training should not be seen as just ‘going on a course for a few days’. Rather it should be an ongoing process, a project, with goals, plans, work, reviews, revisions and, of course, responsibility.