inform. educate. connect. Issue #13 - August 2011

Half The Year Down – Half The Goals To Go?

By Jim Hopkins, JK Hopkins Consulting

With more than half of 2011 behind us, it would make sense to assume that half of the employee development goals in the 2011 training plan are also behind us, and that we are looking at a banner year of successes piling up. Would that be a “Yes”?

Maybe you decided to tackle the long-overlooked development of your supervisors and managers and not only developed a skills-focused training program, but you have integrated application of the skills with coaching and/or mentoring from senior managers. Not only are your employees ready for the next promotional opportunity, they are working better with their existing staff and employee relation issues are all but extinct.

With the down economy continuing to tax the earnings of our banks, you may have decided to focus on product knowledge and sales skills and the branches are now cross-selling more, and referrals to alternative investments have doubled. Customers that never thought of getting a loan are expanding their businesses and improving their finances because employees are getting more involved with their communities and current customers.

With the increase in bank failures and the merger of banks, you saw this as an opportunity to refocus everyone on customer service and more open communications. Heck, you launched a comprehensive learning process that refreshed skills, and put them into immediate action, with everyone focused on everyone’s success they are now helping each other provide even better customer service then they have before! Your customers are now telling everyone they know about your bank and business is picking up steam!

Maybe you are one of those proactive banks that decided to tackle the hours of compliance training that seems to always get left to the end of the year, and knocked it all out leaving you the time and energy to focus more attention to sales and service issues. You not only used a verifiable online training system, but you went the extra mile and developed practical application exercises that transferred recently acquired knowledge about regulations into the ways you conduct business. Your employees not only can pass a multiple-choice test, they can apply the regulations on the job.

Or I wonder do you even have a training plan? And if you do have a training plan, have you been extremely successful in lining up excuse after excuse for procrastinating some of these initiatives? Are the employees in your training department collecting weekly paychecks and unable to justify any work that ties back to the strategic goals the company has set for employees to achieve? Are they accountable for results, or as long as they look busy all the time things pass for acceptable?

I wonder, are you talking the talk about customer service, but you haven’t trained expectations, and you don’t even monitor, reward or coach the activity to see if things are different from year to year?

Could you be one of the many companies in America that have decided management development is a skill best absorbed from peer observation and everyone gets to choose their preferred behaviors? Maybe you are devoting months of training salaries to develop a training program, that you will pilot this year, and roll out next year for more money than another option could have accomplished quicker and for less money.

Training plans require training departments to commit to projects and goals that can make a difference in their company’s success and hold them accountable to the purpose for which they exist and earn a salary. With a plan you can succeed, and without a plan you can fail. Any training department operating completely in a reactive mode without any kind of structure or annual plan is unhealthy. 

If the purpose of the training department is to prepare employees to engage in work activities that are focused on achieving company goals, what happens when the training department is too ill to perform? What happens when a core function in the body shuts down? The body dies.

What is the remainder of 2011 going to look like for your training, your bank, your success? Are you planning to succeed or continue rolling the dice and taking your chances no one will notice and you’ll keep your job?

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