On the first day of the Summit, we had a more organic discussion period. The idea was to have different topics situated at the four corners of the room; hence calling this the Four Corners Discussion. Based on attendee feedback, the main topics selected centered on manager-led training, generation Y, enterprise implementation, and engaging talent.
We will post summaries about each discussion and invite everyone to add your thoughts.
The topic for today – The Learning Process: Are your managers involved? The goal of this discussion was how organizations can involve managers into the learning process.
There were two perspectives shared:
1) If an organization truly wanted managers to be involved, then integrating involvement into the manager’s performance review and process would be key. The thought was if manager is measured on people development and held accountable to being involved in the learning and training process, then they would have a lot of success.
2) Conversely, if a company is unable to incorporate this into the performance management process, which was a concern from some attendees, then the solution would be to provide managers with the tools to better teach and mentor employees. The process doesn’t have to be prescriptive, but rather encourage managers to have discussions with their direct reports. The conversation is so much more invaluable then the training person doing anything.
Resource: VNU Learning publishes the Training Director's Forum e-Net that recently discussed how to get managers involved in the process. Though there is an archive search function, the most recent newsletter posted on the site seemed to be from March 2006.
From the September 21st issue, the key theme was to involve managers before the learning event and not after the fact.
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