“ATR” Is One of the ABC’s of Success

In this decade, and into the next century, personal and organizational achievement require us to develop methods to identify and attract good people earlier than our competition. We must train them perpetually and design our business in a way that makes them want to stay. 

When asked what I do for a living, my shorthand answer is, "I'm in the ATR business." A is for attracting talent, T is for training talent, and R is for retaining talent. If there are simple definitions of achieving, ATR heads the list. 

For years American business has hailed people as our most important asset. Too bad we really didn't believe it until recently. Our new-found understanding isn't a result of profound enlightenment. We became believers only when faced with startling details on demographic changes and inadequacies in our schools. We got some religion when the abundance of qualified applicants disappeared. 

If you are in a leadership position and intend to lead an organization that has the capacity to succeed, you will increase your training budget, not only in absolute dollars but as a percentage of revenues. Some of the enlightened will do it because they understand the opportunity, although most will do it under duress and out of last-ditch necessity. Increased training needs represent a basic cultural adjustment from the long-standing assumption that training is the responsibility of our schools. 

Effective organizations will more and more mirror the diversity of the people using their product or service. If a demographically older audience uses a product, the work force making it might also be older. If Hispanics consume the service, the company providing the service will be representatively Hispanic. If the product focuses on a young demographic, the people designing the product will have similar characteristics. 

This mirroring effect and the diversity of employees it suggests, will further increase the need for–and reliance on–training for years to come. The increasing diversity of the workforce will also require more flexible, more entrepreneurial management practices. 

The leading organizations of tomorrow will be those willing to change, to look at their opportunities flexibly and entrepreneurially. They will put people at the top of their list of important assets. 

Training Trends

It's easy to document that training and skill development is a dynamic need area. How we choose to go about providing it is a subject of varied opinion. Many new training techniques and philosophies will emerge as we feel our way along. Among them will be: 

1. More precise training needs analysis. 
2. Growing belief in the need for, and desirability of, training repetition. 

John Shand, a forward-looking human resource consultant who leads Performance Development, Inc. in Charlotte, North Carolina, refers to the "surgery syndrome" in discussing the inefficiencies of untargeted training. Shand says too much training is done without adequately identifying specific areas of need. This approach is much like a brain surgeon shaking hands with a patient and saying, "Hi, I'm a brain surgeon and you need brain surgery." In the training business, as in medicine, there's a need to take an x-ray first. The training x-ray is administered through formal profiling and evaluation. 

When suggesting that training be based on formally identified, targeted needs, it is appropriate to suggest the human resource consultant understand his own limitations. A formal training needs analysis will sometimes propose training he's not capable of effectively providing. When that happens, the consultant/trainer should act in the client's best interest, even when it means referring business to another trainer. In other words, the human resource consultant should be willing to unbundle the training needs analysis and the training itself. 

The second training trend identified above is a growing belief in the need for, and desirability of, training repetition. This tendency is one I thoroughly believe in. My introduction to Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation Institute (SMI) and Leadership Management, Inc. (LMI), created this belief. Meyer has had a profound impact on my training philosophies. Mr. Meyer is one of America's profound thinkers. For years he has consistently preached his theory of spaced training repetition and applied it to the many training programs he has authored and marketed worldwide. Spaced repetition merely proposes we will not retain more than 10 percent of what we see or hear the first time we see or hear it in a training environment. While we would like to believe otherwise, that's the way it is. 

Shortly after meeting Paul Meyer, I had an opportunity to test his spaced repetition theory. While visiting our restaurant operation in Des Moines, I met with our training director. Chris Riddle has been with us many years as a capable restaurant manager, but was new to the training slot. To say he was frustrated is an understatement. He is an achiever who was pulling his hair out. 

Chris' job description included conducting an introductory training course required of new employees before they work in a restaurant. At the course conclusion everyone took a test. Their scores were uniformly good. Yet when the new employees went into a restaurant they had trouble doing what the test said they were prepared to do. 

Our general manager, operations manager, and Chris joined me the next morning for a two hour session on spaced repetition. We reformulated our entire training philosophy that morning based on the realities of learning retention and the need for spaced repetition. We continued the introductory training as before but scheduled everyone back, at spaced intervals, three more times over a four-week period to review all materials. 

It has made a significant difference in the way we teach, our training expectations, and the knowledge our people have. Spaced repetition changed our organization and transformed a self- doubting training director concerned about his effectiveness into a confident, effective teacher. 

Consider your own seminar experiences. If you are like me you have attended many. You thought the material presented was, more often than not, pretty good stuff. How much of it did you remember? What percentage did you put to use? 

Now imagine attending that seminar every week for five weeks. How much higher would your retention be? How much more valuable would the information be to you? Most of us will not remember more than 10 percent of the information during each exposure. To retain 50 percent of a seminar's potential, therefore, we would need to attend the seminar five times. If seminars were set up to train us repetitively-and we were willing to attend repetitively–our learning curve would increase dramatically. 

As new training programs and concepts are developed, look for increasing emphasis on the Paul J. Meyer spaced repetition philosophy. It really works.