The Day You Lost 20% of Your Manufacturing Capacity

The chemical industry executive turned slightly pale for a moment at 10:52pm on a Wednesday night.  He just finished a challenging call with his Vice President of Supply Chain Management based in Asia who informed him that their primary contract manufacturing organization (CMO) supplier was going out of business because the Chinese government was taking over their building and land to build a park.  Apparently this is now a common practice as the government puts into play plans to address pollution and smog.  The production was going to cease within a month leaving the chemical company almost no time to find a viable solution to produce the tons of their products that have already been sold to their customers.  In the span of a 15 minute conversation, the company had just lost 20% of their manufacturing capacity.

There are several major selling models that most organizations chose as their core selling approach including Consultative Selling, SPIN Selling, Strategic Selling, Challenger Selling, and Strategic Business Selling.  They all have many positive aspects and they all have detractors or limiters.

If you have embraced social selling, then you know everything is different.  The foundational laws of strategic business selling physics have changed and there will be three types of sales professionals in the world of 2017 and beyond; those who will cling to the “old ways”, those who have no clue what to do, and those who embrace all of the tools available to achieve dramatic success.

Consider for a moment, one of the most significant trends in the ecosystem of Talent Development:

• In 1990, the challenge to most Talent Development professionals was how to squeeze all of the stand-up content in five days of live training.
• By 1995, the challenge to most Talent Development professionals was how to squeeze all of the stand-up content in three days of live training.
• By 2000, when eLearning and “CBT” started to become mainstream, the challenge to most Talent Development professionals was how to blend eLearning with stand-up training to reduce the amount of time “away from the job” to two-days.
• In 2005, most Talent Development professionals started asking “what can you do in a day?”…
• In 2010, most Talent Development professionals started asking “what can you do in half-a day?”
• And now, in 2017, too many Talent development professionals are asking, “We’ve purchased this library of eLearning content, what can you do in a two hour workshop to supplement it?”

Despite the fact that the eLearning marketplace is contracting, the global spend of all eLearning training in 2017 will be over $45 billion.

At the same time this trend of eLearning vs. classroom vs. blended learning is evolving, so are the competencies business organizations are looking to develop.  Business Leadership skills such as developing team talent, coaching and feedback, understanding personality styles, leading change, leading innovation, etc. continue to be critical as they relates to the execution of business strategy through people.  Another “hot” competency is Business Acumen; the ability to understand how a company makes money and make the right business decisions to execute the strategy to achieve goals and objectives.

Unfortunately for many Executives, Vice Presidents, and Directors of the lines of business that are responsible for setting and executing strategy, Talent Development professionals are becoming more disconnected from the business and relying on eLearning to solve the talent development needs of employees because nobody has the time to learn effectively anymore.

It is important to recognize and understand that crappy, poorly developed, and poorly executed eLearning is ineffective and ultimately will hurt business results.

A case in point…

I was recently engaged by a client from the healthcare industry to perform an assessment of a Business Acumen library of eLearning.  The client is trying to leverage a multimillion investment in this library by creating a “curated playlist” of effective modules to cover basic concepts such as reading an Income Statement and Balance sheet.

I was shocked by the poor quality, ineffective instructional design, and lack of context to the application of the content.  The eLearning content teaches participants how to read an income statement for a small, independently owned bicycle shop outside of London, England.

Huh?  How in the world is a scientist of a major healthcare company in the US responsible for a $300 million budget – and who desperately needs real Business Acumen skills – going to learn anything from hearing a cartoon character explain how to understand financial data of a bicycle shop?

The problem is that when the participants are finished the modules, the Talent Development organization can sit back and give Business Acumen a big “checkmark” and cross that need right off of their to-do list.

But participants won’t be able to do anything different, won’t be able to make better business decisions, and could perhaps make a bad business decision!

When that happens, Executives will think even less of the Talent Development function, and in the future will either not rely on them for help or worse yet save the money for other things leaving the employees with less skills, capabilities, and abilities.

Business Leaders, Talent Development Professionals, and HR Business Partners, there are better ways!  Don’t take the easy way out. Invest the time and effort and look into alternative methods of virtual learning such live webinars, business simulations, artificial intelligence coaching, custom videos, and even good old fashioned books.

I urge you to consider some of these ideas before you wake up one day and wonder why your company is underperforming and close to being out of business.