In their ground-breaking book ‘Built to Win: Creating a World Class Negotiating Organization’, Hallam Movius and Lawrence Susskind provide insight into a number of reasons why organizations waste millions by investing in Negotiation training. They also provide a range of ideas, strategies and tools for organisations to deliver much higher returns on investment in training, overcoming barriers and challenges to Creating a World Class Negotiating Organization.
The authors find the tendency of many organizations to invest in one off and off the shelf training for individual employees is largely ineffective without addressing the organizational barriers to employees implementing what they have learnt. They suggest that while HR has a training budget they can draw upon to send off staff to one off training activities, there is often a failure to establish a development budget and commitment to ensure the organizational processes, incentives and structures needed are in place to enable staff to implement what they learn in the workplace. Citing Warren Bennis, Hal Movius commented in an interview ‘There is nothing worse than sending a changed person back into an unchanged organization’. This observation is not restricted to negotiation training alone, and I wonder how prevalent it is within the L & D domain of HR.
Yet organizations continue to send people off to training that is focussed upon individual skills, without building the overall competence of the organisation to implement those skills – why do you think this is so?
For those who may be interested to learn more about the concepts of Built to Win, I will be interviewing Hal Movius (webinar) on 10th December, 2014 (Aust. EST) – and you may follow up with me for details on how to participate.
The Book Built to Win may be purchased through The Negotiation Channel book library, http://www.thenegotiationchannel.com.au/resources/books; the Consensus Building Institute Website http://www.cbuilding.org/publication/book/built-to-win; or through Amazon Books.
