Get Line Managers On Board from the Beginning – comes from the Free Guide – ‘Are You Annoyed by How Little Line Managers Support the Skills Training of Their Teams?’
Your response to the title above is probably, ‘Yeah, I know’. However, few HR Managers, L&D Managers, or Training Officers actually make this happen. Getting Line Managers on board is about two things;
- Allowing Line Managers to ask questions instead of showing them yet another PowerPoint presentation of a great roll-out, and
- Sharing the actual problem. This is why…
In the Harvard Business review article, ‘Before You Can Get Buy-In, People Need to Feel the Problem’, Dr. John P. Kotter tells a great short story of how an executive got the board to buy-in to a problem. The executive dumped a lot of rubber gloves on the boardroom table. The challenge for us is that there is no immediate downside of not learning. Building a specific bigger picture is key and largely revolves around the turnover of staff. This phrase is paramount:
‘Companies won’t train workers because they might leave, and workers leave because they don’t get training.’
Our means of gaining buy-in is through ‘Learning To Learn’, which is the first part of our unique training method Sticky Learning ®. LTL helps Learners and Line Managers engage in the training programme.
On this half-day training course, the Learners are taught how to learn. They learn how to identify their learning styles, how to form habits, and how the brain remembers. It also provides a valuable opportunity for Line Managers to understand and explore the learning programme.
Action
Provide an opportunity for Line Managers to explore the training programme – perhaps over lunch provided by HR. Create a compelling problem that Line Managers are responsible for solving, e.g., ‘We spend £1.1m per year on staff turnover, including recruitment, performance reduction as people leave & as they arrive, induction training, etc. How can we reduce this by half?’.