"God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."
Reinhold Niebuhr
It's not our job to ensure that employees are provided with challenging work, in a pleasant setting, and are paid a fair wage. Our job is to provide them with the skills they need to do their jobs and let management worry about the rest.
Sometimes that is not enough.
Even the best-designed, thoroughly constructed, and fully multi-mediated training programs can't provide peace in the Middle East or cure global warming.
More content won’t cut it.
Many years ago someone gave me an excellent piece of advice.
"If you are going to stay in the training field, never guarantee that you will change anybody's behavior unless you can conduct long-term psychotherapy (figure on about 10 years), convert people to a different religion (new converts will do anything) or perform frontal lobotomies."
Jack Asgar
No amount of content, as sexy as it may be, will be worth a darn unless the reason people aren’t doing the "right" thing is because they didn't know how.
An old professor of mine was fond of saying, "If they can do it when you stick a gun in their head, don't bother training!"
Few of us are able to implement this rigorous form of testing, so here are a few tip-offs it may be the skills of the employee, that's the culprit.
- The organization has a history of management and employee turnover.
- Deadlines are often missed.
- You observe substantial duplication of effort.
- People “wear many hats”.
- Employee's roles and responsibilities are not clear cut.
- The flow of work appears inefficient or complex.
- Personnel spend a substantial amount of time on unimportant things, such as searching for information
- Equipment is often down.
Don't just sit there; do something!
There is just something in the physical and nonphysical work environment that's stopping them and someone's got to remove it.
Muster up the courage to blow the whistle. Tell your management that more content will not cure the problem and call their attention to what will, such as:
- Enhancing management (be specific)
- Clarifying and simplifying employee roles and responsibilities
- Providing employees with the authority they need to do their job
- Simplifying the work flow or organization structure
- Upgrading equipment and information systems
- Hiring different types of employees
Give it a shot! You might get lucky.
So what do “you” think?
I would enjoy hearing from you. Please contact me using the “Contact Us” tab on my website
http://www.fttraining.com/ 
