I’ve been working with an organization of a few hundred employees, and is often the case, there seems to be some ill will against supervisors/front line managers from what we at Employee Hold’em call Individual Contributors.  Other than the normal “us vs. them” infighting, there seemed to be a genuine problem with the amount of training and development these front-line employees were receiving.

Like most companies we work with, new employees normally receive some sort of training.  Whether it’s a manufacturing employee receiving training on how to work on a new piece of extruding equipment, a nurse learning about the mission, vision, and values of a new hospital, or a new teacher learning the ropes at their first school, this initial training is seldom questioned.

However, once employees are past this initial training period and are adequately doing the job they were recruited for, many supervisors and managers are hesitant to continue this job-related development.  Why?  If employees receive additional training, whether skill based or development based, they may aspire to other jobs.  Worse yet, they may be qualified.  Why would a supervisor or manager willingly let their talent go somewhere else, even if it is inside the company?  And what about the costs of training, and the associated employee down-time or opportunity cost incurred during these training sessions?

My client was experiencing exactly the same problem.  Through no fault of their own supervisors and managers were disincented to let good people transfer to other parts of the organization, even when it was good for long term financial success. What gets rewarded gets done.  Supervisors were rated on the productivity of their staff, keeping errors and redo’s to a minimum, and meeting/beating production schedules.  All good metrics which should be included in a supervisor’s performance management.  However something was missing.  What gets rewarded gets done.

We worked with the client to alter their performance management system so supervisors weren’t penalized if their good employees transferred to other places inside the organization.  Through better understanding the importance training and development had to their workforce, changes in policies were put in place to encourage managers and supervsiors to provide job-related learning to their employees, and they were no longer penalized if employees “moved up” or “moved over” inside the company.  They sure don’t want them to “move out”.