February 7, 2017 – MIAMI, FL
Dr. Roy Pollock, Chief learning Officer of the 6Ds Company, delivered a keynote speech on the opening night of the NIIT Confluence Conference in Miami.Dr. Pollock’s theme was: “So You Want to Be a Leader, Do You?” He proposed that for L&D professionals to earn the respect of their business colleagues, they had to do four things:
- Stop taking orders for training. Instead, become trusted business advisers by aligning themselves with business priorities recommending non-training solutions when appropriate.
- Eliminate learning scrap. Learning scrap is training that employees attend but never use in a way that improves performance. Pollock and colleagues coined the term in 2004 to draw the analogies between manufacturing scrap and wasted training. Both cost companies time, money, and opportunity.
- Involve others, both within and outside your organization. Within your organization, you need the active engagement of line managers for training to produce results. Outside your organization, look for best practices and outsource functions that can be done better and less expensively by someone else.
- Answer “So what?” and “Now what?” In other words, evaluate the outcomes of learning and development initiatives to answer a business leader’s key questions: “So what?” – Were the results worth the time and money? And “Now what?” – should we do more of the same or something different in the future.