Don’t You Wish You Knew the Answer to This Question

Don’t you wish you knew the answer to this question: What percent of your managers actually changed their behaviors based on your most recent supervisory training program?

The question brings intrigue because we assume that head nods and positive evaluations from the program equal improved supervision. But the reality is that once managers leave the room, there is no monitoring, no reporting, and no guarantee that they change anything. In fact, given the difficulty we all have breaking habits the probably change only a little if at all.

This ties to the forever quandary of management trainers. How do we know our work actually does good? That it leads to increased productivity and hopefully even more profits?

The missing pieces can be summed up in one word: process. Years ago I co-facilitated a program for a global consulting firm and the first agenda item asked which matters most when helping a company improve its productivity: Evaluating its products, its people, or its processes?

The answer was processes because all products and people issues are determined by the processes we build around them. It’s really pretty simple.

So traditional management training brings with it no processes for measuring change. We might say that if productivity measures go up, say for sales or service, that’s because of the training. But there are usually many other possible factors for those changes based on typical day-to-day major and minor improvement initiatives.

Stay Interviews bring measurable change in part because they must be implemented as a process.  In this case process means providing a hard schedule for managers to conduct Stay Interviews such as once per year and twice for new hires, that they develop and submit stay plans for each employee, and that they forecast how long each employee will stay. This reporting connects to monthly reports that identify each manager by name with their progress against an employee retention goal…and the same type of report can be developed for engagement.

Teaching managers to conduct Stay Interviews and trusting them to do them is a wish. There’s just too much to do. But once they conduct Stay Interviews and see the all-powerful benefits for having done so, most will continue to conduct them without reminders. But it is the process described above that jump-starts implementing Stay Interviews in our organization.