UNIT 6:

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES

LEARNING OUTCOMES
Following the completion of this unit you should be able to:
1. Evaluate

the factors that contribute to establishing learning and

development as a strategic activity.

2. Recognise the problems of establishing a HRD culture.
3. Explain the role of learning as a strategic process for change within
organisations.
4. Identify and implement steps to facilitate the creation of learning
organisations and overcome barriers to such creation.
5. Develop effective learning processes within the overall design of learning
and development activity.
6. Design effective learning and development strategies.
7. Assess the recent trend towards e-learning in organisations.

Introduction
Learning and development, in the context of organisational development, is
probably the area of highest strategic focus in Human Resource Management
today. The purpose of this unit is to develop a strategic model of learning,
development and educational activities within organisations.
In today's knowledge economy the attraction, retention and growth of talent is
fundamental to achieving competitive advantage and high performance.

Organisations pursuing a high-performance culture recognise the criticality of

Learning and Development in the context of the development of human capital and
organisational capability more generally.

It is widely recognised that an organisation's competitive edge and ability to

succeed in the future is derived from its intellectual assets, and less so from its
portfolio of products, services and offerings at any particular time.

READING ACTIVITY
As an excellent introduction to this unit and to appreciate the critical importance of
Learning & Development in today's high-performance culture, read the following
Accenture research report 'High Performance Workforce Study 2004' at
http://a456.g.akamaLnet/7/456/1701/e6e721022503a4/www.accenture.comix
docien/services/hp/research/hp_study_2004_full.pdf
In this unit
We shall examine the key processes associated with the learning cycle and
the basic ideas of how adults learn in organisations through education,
learning and development.
We will explore the broader purpose of development processes within
organisations.
We shall show how individual and collective developmental efforts at all
levels can have a positive impact upon business performance and thus
demonstrate the value of the investment in Human Resource Development
(HRD).
This unit will focus upon mapping the Inter-Related Factors that can define
strategic HRD. These include:
1. Developmental activity and its clear relationship with work activity as
organisations recognise that improved performance has a distinct relationship
to learning, innovation and creativity.
2. Embedding learning within the organisation's culture

3. The processes and attributes of the 'learning organisation' as a strategic

framework, not only to enhance the skill and expertise of the organisation,
but also to support organisational culture change.
4. The steps that organisations can take to promote learning and development
capability.

READING ACTIVITY
Please read Chapters 12 and 13 of your key text, The Strategic Managing of
Human Resources, Edited by John Leopold, Lynette Harris & Tony Watson, FT
Prentice Hall, which covers some of the subjects of this unit.

Defining the Purpose of Learning and Development

We need to look first at the purpose of learning and development. Learning and
development have been implicit in all the preceding units. Note the contemporary
use of the word 'learning' as opposed to 'training' (used a few years ago). The two
terms are generally interchangeable, and there may be references to training in
some of the older articles contained in this unit.
Employees require both formal learning and a self-development orientation to
engage in flexible, high performance organisations.
This unit will seek to review all the processes of learning and how they integrate
together

to

contribute

to

developing

organisational

capabilities.

These

PROCESSES include:
Learning as the formally designed Process Of Staff Development.
Development as the wide range of individual and collective activities that
develop skills and personal abilities.
Vocational and educational training (VET) that continues the development
of knowledge and skill for current and future work.

Holistically, these processes make up what we know as human resource

development (HRD) defined as any activity contributing to the development of
people working for an organisation.

The strategic purpose of learning has been defined in four ways:

1. Addressing skills gaps for individuals and organisations. This involves the
development of skills for new forms of work organisation, for example,
multi-skilling or managerial competence.
2. Using HRD as a catalyst for change. This broadens the narrower, vocational
perspective of HRD.
3. Using HRD as a basis for competitive advantage in terms of the HRD
content and the way it is delivered. This sees HRD as a means of integrating
business planning with human capability, from recruitment activity and
learning through to longer term career planning, as we saw in Unit 3
4. Creation of a learning environment as a way of focusing individual
learning needs towards organisational learning objectives on a continuous
basis. This involves the creation of the so-called learning organisation,
where a range of self-development, team-based activities are utilised with the
specific intention of enabling the organisation to challenge and improve work
processes and outputs.

The next activity helps you to explore and understand these purposes.

ACTIVITY
1. Take some time to define what you understand as the differences between
learning, development and education.

2. What examples can you identify under the four strategic purposes of HRM
given above? Try to think of at least one for each. For example, addressing skills
gaps might mean multi-skilling and training to achieve workforce flexibility.
ACTIVITY FEEDBACK
1. You might have defined the terms in the following ways:
LEARNING (OR TRAINING) refers to the methods of acquiring
knowledge and skills determined by the employer in order to carry out
current and future work.
DEVELOPMENT is a broader interpretation of any activity that contributes
to the development of the person currently working within the organisation.
This might include organisational development and cultural change
processes brought about by experiential change.
EDUCATION reflects a broader content and view of employee
development over the working environment typified by MBA and related
business and managerial programmes such as your BA Business
Management. This is not work or person specific but environment specific.
2. The second part of this activity might have led you to start developing the
learning, development and education equation against the four strategic
purposes:
SKILLS GAPS: multi-skilling and learning to achieve workforce flexibility;
management development to meet skill/attitude changes.
CATALYST FOR CHANGE: cultural change programmes (see Unit 8)
where organisations seek to change the ways employees think about their
organisation; that is, commitment.
ACHIEVING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: progressive training to
cultivate high calibre applicants; advanced career development schemes,
including job or career changes, to enhance retention and attraction.
CREATING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: move away from formal
courses to more person-specific development according to need; strategic

secondment (assignment) and projects for self-development; TOTAL

QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) schemes to untap (unextraxt)
employee knowledge and knowledge dissemination; on-job structured
development via coaching, counselling and mentoring schemes to develop
the individual.

Notes:
All these combined activities are aimed at releasing the potential (intangible)
assets of the organisation and creating knowledge as a strategic asset.
These processes need to be managed if we are to consider HRD strategically,
but how do we recognise a strategic approach?
Burgoyne (1977) provides a Long-Standing Set Of Principles For Evaluation. An
approach to HRD is strategic if it follows these principles:
1. Investment in VET and HRD contributes to the achievement of
organisational objectives.
2. Line managers are actively involved in the diagnosis of training needs and
the monitoring of development activities of staff.
3. VET/HRD is linked with other SHRM policies and procedures to achieve
horizontal integration, discussed in Units 1 and 3.
4. Learning and development is matched to organisational learning objectives
and the learner groups.
5. Employees are involved in, and own, the outcomes of the HRD needs
analysis. Activities are relevant to their work.

6. Senior managers participate in, and promote, learning activities to establish

a learning climate.
7. HRD becomes part of the organisational culture rather than being imposed
upon it.
Looking at these principles graphically, Shepherd (1991) offers us a view of
the relationship in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1: Shepherd's strategic approach to HRD.

ALIGNMENT WITH ORGANISATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Principle 1: business impact of VET/HRD demonstrated

INVOLVEMENT OF UNE MANAGERS

Principle 2: active involvement in diagnosis, planning and monitoring

INTEGRATION WITH HRM POLICT

Principle 3: NET/HRD have continuity with and mutually reinforced by

other HRM policies

QUAUTY OF DESIGN AND DELIVERY

Principle 4: programmes and processes match learning objectives

MOTIVATION OFTRAINEES

Principle 5: shared diagnosis of training need and relevance of programme(s)

chosen

SENIOR MANAGEMENT SUPPORT

Principle 6:senior managers promote learning culture

Principle 7:VET/HRD align with culture

HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGY:

Recruitment and selection

Appraisal and assessment

Reward and recognition

Career development

Earlier we noted four broad-based HRD purposes of strategic learning

and development. Proponents of a strategic approach to HRD suggest that
HRD processes are the 'cement' that links SHRM policies and the
achievement of business objectives.
Strategic HRD (VET Vocational and Education and Training - that is
applied development to the workforce experience) integrates employee
attitudes to support organisational objectives via appropriately designed

development relevant to employee needs, supported by effective managerial

commitment.
The TARGET in Figure 6.1 is improved business Performance. Through
the alignment of development objectives with organisational needs (across
four strategic purposes), behavioural skills and knowledge gaps are
diagnosed and addressed in an integrated way. Courses, events, and work
assignments are regarded as opportunities for development.
Development is recognised as being more than courses. Managers and
employees recognise the need for investment in qualifying courses
(education) and broader developmental activity to address employer and
employee needs.
One might regard this as a mutuality of learning goals. Involvement,
ownership and mutuality of the development equation reflect the wider
engagement and integration of employee and employer values. HRD is a
central process and the related system to support this includes appraisal,
training needs analysis and feedback and transference of learning into the
work situation. The wider SHRM processes are central in supporting an
environment for learning.

ACTIVITY
What SHRM practices do you think might support a learning environment?
Note down at least two.
ACTIVITY FEEDBACK
You might have mentioned:
Induction with recruitment and selection processes this creates a culture
of development.

 Appraisal and assessment; appraisal, feedback on performance, coaching,

work targets for job development; feedback for career assessment decisions
and development needs, for example, assessment centres for management
development.
Reward, focusing on skill development and contribution to workforce, team
and performance enhancement .
Career development, project and secondment experience to enhance
managerial experience.
Employee relations, participation and involvement: enhance accountability
and scope for experiment in performance improvement.

An alternative model of the strategic approach is the standard provided by the

Investors in People (IiP) organisation.
The IiP is a government-supported initiative to encourage the voluntary
commitment of organisations to an enhanced level of learning and
development activity in order to support business objectives.
The IiP standard provides a basis for HRD development strategy that has
been taken up by many organisations.
Organisations that apply for the standard have to be assessed and regularly
reviewed to ensure that they continue to meet this standard.
The liP standard has 12 indicators covering principles, planning, action and
evaluation. Table 6.1 identifies the indicators and gives examples of evidence
from an organisation that it is achieving the particular indicators.
Table 6.1 - The

liP Standard

Principles
Commitment
-

Indicators

An Investor in

1. The

Evidence
organisation

Top

management

can

describe

People is fully

is committed to

strategies that they have put in place to

committed

supporting

support the development of people in

to

the

developing

its

people in order
to

achieve

aims

development of its

order to improve the organisation's

people.

performance.

its

Managers can describe specific actions

and

that they have taken and are currently

objectives.

taking to support the development of

people. People can confirm that the
specific

strategies

and

actions

described by top management and

managers take place. People believe
the

organisation

committed
2. People
encouraged

to

is

genuinely

supporting

their

are

development.
People can give examples of how they

to

have been encouraged to improve their

improve their own

own performance.

and other people's

performance.
3. People
believe

People can give examples of how they

their contribution

have been encouraged to improve

to the organisation

other

is recognised.

people's performance.
People

can

describe

how

their

contribution to the organisation is

recognised.
People believe that their contribution
to the organisation is recognised.
People

receive

appropriate

and

constructive feedback on a timely and

4. The

organisation

regular basis.
Top management

can

describe

is committed to

strategies that they have put in place to

ensuring equality

ensure equality of opportunity in the

of opportunity in

development of people. Managers can

the

describe specific actions that they have

development

of its people.

taken and are currently taking to

ensure equality of opportunity in the

development of people.
People

confirm

that

the

specific

strategies and actions described by top

management and managers take place
and recognise the needs of different
groups.
People believe the organisation is
genuinely committed to ensuring
equality of opportunity in the
Planning
- An

5. The
Investor

in People is
clear

about

its aims and

its objectives

organisation

has a plan with

clear

aims

objectives

to

People can consistently explain the

which

aims and objectives of the organisation

are understood by
everyone.

at a level appropriate to their role.

Representative groups are consulted
about the organisation's aims and

need

do

aims and objectives.

and

and what its

people

development of people.
The organisation has a plan with clear

objectives.

to

achieve
them.
6. The development

The organisation has clear priorities

of people is in line

that link the development of people to

with

its aims and objectives at organisation,

the

organisation's
aims

team and individual level.

and

objectives.

development activities should achieve,

7. People understand
how

People clearlyunderstand what their

they

contribute

to

achieving

the

both for them and the organisation.

People can explain how they
contribute to achieving the
organisation's aims and objectives.

organisation's
aims

and

objectives.
Action
An Investor

8. Managers

are

The organisation makes sure that

in People

effective

in

develops its

supporting

people

development

effectively in

people.

managers have the knowledge and

the

skills they need to develop their

of

people.
Managers at all levels understand what

order to

they need to do to support the

improve it

development of people.

performance.

People understand what their manager

should be doing to support their
development.
Managers at all levels can give
examples
of actions that they have taken and are
currently taking to support the
development of people.
People can describe how their
managers are effective in supporting
9. People learn and

their development.
People who are new to the

develop

organisation, and those new to a job,

effectively.

can confirm that they have received an

effective induction.
The organisation can show that people
learn and develop effectively.

People understand why they have

undertaken development activities and
what they are expected to do as a
result.

People can give examples of what they

have learnt (knowledge, skills and
attitude) from development activities.
Development is linked to relevant
external qualifications or standards (or
both), where appropriate.
Evaluation

10. The development

of

An

Investor

in

people

The organisation can show that the

development of people has improved

People

understands

improves

the

the impact of its

performance

investment in people

the

on its performance.

teams

of

the performance of the organisation,

teams and individuals.

organisation,
and

individuals.
11. People understand

Top

management

understands

the

the impact of the

overall costs and benefits of the

development

development of people and its impact

people

of

on

the

performance

of

People can explain the impact of their

organisation,

development on their performance, and

and

the performance of their team and the

individuals.
12. The organisation

organisation as a whole.
People can give examples of relevant

the
teams

gets

better

developing

on performance.

at

and timely improvements that have

its

been made to development activities

people.

A U.K. Strategic Model for Staff Development -The liP Standard (April 2000).

Comments from IiP standard

The model is concerned with integrating and embedding training and
education policies and processes within organisational life.
It emphasises commitment from the top. We would now like you to use these
models of the principles behind strategic HRD to review a working example.

CASE STUDY
The next case study concerns a building society. (Note: A building society considers
that it performs the function of a bank. One of the key changes discussed is the
process of demutualisation, that is, opening up the company's ownership to
investors, making the company's performance acceptable to
shareholders.)
Read the case study question (below the case study) before you proceed to read the
article. You may wish to keep the question in mind as you read the article.

'Hat Trick'
by Mark Whitehead. (People Management, 29th July 1999, p38 40)
Remember the men from the Bradford & Bingley building society? Sturdy bowlerhatted City chaps oozing old-fashioned reliability, Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley
were the kind of gentlemen to whom you would be happy to hand over your hardearned cash. It would be as safe as houses.
But the besuited partners were pensioned off not long ago when the society decided
it was time to update its image.
A combination of circumstances, triggered by the arrival of new chief executive,
Christopher Rodrigues in 1996, led to a major upheaval with far-reaching
implications for management and staff. At its Bingley head office, in the
picturesque Airedale Valley of West Yorkshire, only a few miles from
Bradford, and at more than 500 branches and estate agents scattered in towns and
cities across the country, change was in the air.
Of the UK's building societies most of which date back to the days when
industrial workers needed a cheap way to house themselves the Bradford &
Bingley is the second largest. And, as its 150th anniversary approaches, things are
changing.
The bowler hats, for so long the organisation's trademark, remain. But now, in a
newly-designed logo, they appear as a set of brightly coloured motifs with a
somewhat surreal air.
The new design says much about how the society now sees itself. In a radical
programme of change, middle and top managers have gone through a rigorous
development programme aimed at transforming the way the society operates.
Many of the old core values remain, but new ones are being grafted on to make the
whole operation more flexible, dynamic and customer-focused.
"We needed to do something quite radical," says Margaret Johnson, training design
and development manager. "Many of our customers treasured our traditional values

of reliability and dependability. We knew that they trusted us more than the banks
and other financial institutions. But with all sorts of new
players arriving on the market we knew we couldn't survive as a traditional building
society. We had to develop and modernise our management thinking and the way
we operated."
The roots of the revolution at the Bradford & Bingley go back to the great
liberalising period of the 1980s, when the order of the day was to free up markets
and offer consumers more choice. Mortgages, once the virtual monopoly of
building societies, started to become available from banks and other financial
organisations. As well as buying their baked beans and washing powder, shoppers in
supermarkets could access savings and banking facilities.
The telephone came into its own, with bank accounts and various other financial
services becoming available down the line. Customers wanted quick, easy access to
their money and mortgages.
But change was some time coming at the Bradford & Bingley. Mr Bradford and Mr
Bingley's pride of place in the society's advertising, and their images in its logo,
continued until the early 1990s.
More recently, the pressure mounted when diversification brought new challenges.
The society decided to buy the Black Horse chain of estate agents from Lloyds
Bank, and Mortgage Express, a specialist business-to-business operation. The
number of Bradford & Bingley high street outlets doubled overnight to more than
500 and a completely new area of work albeit one closely linked to the society's
traditional mortgage lending business opened up.
Facilitating the smooth merger of the three organisations, so that managers and staff
work together to maximum effectiveness, has been a central objective in the
development programme.
A third major challenge came earlier this year when the society's membersvoted by
a substantial margin to demutualise and re-establish as a commercial company. As

was the case at several other building societies before them, the move came in the
face of advice to the contrary from the society's board, but the members were
seemingly determined to take advantage of the potential windfalls. The final vote
will be held next April and managers have accepted that demutualisation is likely to
go ahead in about 18 months.
All of these events confirmed the wisdom of the decision to call in experts to help
managers and staff to deal with the changes ahead.
In the first phase of the change process, a brief programme called "People First"
was put into effect three years ago, using a mix of outside consultants and internal
HR professionals, to challenge some of the old ways of thinking and prepare the
ground for new ideas. ore recently, two further programmes have pushed the
process forward.
About 260 middle managers underwent a three-day programme at Henley
Management College aimed at developing their leadership skills within a changing
organisation. Cranfield Business School was appointed to take responsibility for 76
senior managers in a five day programme with similar objectives. In devising a
seamless programme, consultants from the two institutions worked in partnership
with Christopher Rodrigues; John Melo, Bradford & Bingley's HR director; Dawn
Beadle, head of organisation development; and Margaret Johnson.
Both courses started by examining, in ruthless detail, the context in which the
society currently operates. These sessions, entitled 'Winning in a New World",
aimed to reveal what was needed to be successful in today's competitive market
place.
The workshop sessions then examined the Bradford & Bingley and the way it
worked. These sessions included, for example, senior managers explaining some of
the society's financial facts and figures that most staff had previously been unaware
of.

The third and final phase of the programme involved intense scrutiny by individuals
of their own strengths and weaknesses and those of their colleagues. This activity
was based largely on a process of 360-degree appraisal and the results of MyersBriggs Type Indicator questionnaires that were filled in by course participants in
advance.

Rob Davies, a visiting faculty member of Henley Management College and a

director of Henley-based Interactive Skills, who helped to devise the courses, says
the key to success was to involve people fully in the process.
"It was clear that it wouldn't work if you waited for the people to decide what
needed to change," he says. "The key message of the programme was that everyone
needed to take responsibility for their own role in dealing with all the new
challenges out there."
The changes put in train were dramatic and it was to be expected that not everyone
would welcome them. "Some of our managers who are now in their fifties had been
with us since leaving school and had always worked in the same way," Beadle says.
"It was the biggest change they had ever experienced in their working lives. They
were being asked to completely change their orientation." There were three main
reactions to the change taking place. Some people pretended that it was not really
happening and that it would go away if they ignored it. Others went along with the
new ways of thinking, but assumed that they could return to the old ways of
working once the courses had finished and the fuss had died down. A third group
embraced the change programme enthusiastically. Brian Wilkinson, senior audit
manager responsible for the Bradford & Bingley's branches, has seen his role
transformed. He had been thinking for some time about his department's function
and decided it could do more to support the society's business objectives.
Traditionally, the audit team was seen as a group of people who descended on a
branch once a year, inspected the books and then disappeared. But it now spends
about half its time in a consultancy role helping branches to achieve best practice.

Wilkinson reasoned that the less time branch staff spend on dealing with errors and
discrepancies, the more time they could spend dealing with customers, attracting
and retaining new business and improving results.
The new strategy quickly won full backing from senior management but, at the
time, it was a big step to take.
"The timing of the Henley course couldn't have been better for me," Wilkinson says.
"I had been doing a lot of thinking about the role of internal auditing and I wanted
to change things. We were seen as the financial police who held back the
organisation with constant red tape, but I thought we were there to promote better
practice which would in turn benefit the business.
"Henley helped me with my personal development," he adds. "I had to come out of
the comfort zone and bring my team with me. It gave me the confidence to do it I
thought I was taking a really big risk, but the more I talked to the organisational
development team here and the people at Henley, the more I realised it wasn't such a
big gamble. It was simply taking the first step that was difficult"
Management structures have also changed. There had been a traditional hierarchy in
which every member of staff worked to their line manager and up through a chain
of command to the top. But now matrix management in which someone can
work for different bosses at different times is more prevalent, particularly in the
HR and IT departments.
The whole project has been aimed at improving customer service, in line with
modern research which shows that attracting and retaining customers has as much
to do with the way they are treated as with the quality of the product on offer.

Counter productive
"I went into a branch a couple of years ago with a question about my mortgage,"
Beadle says. "The woman behind the counter went away with it and came back
saying she couldn't do anything and that 'them at head office' would sort it out. I
nearly died I couldn't believe this was the kind of thing being said to customers."

That sort of response would be much less likely now. One of the concrete results of
the change programme is that the old divisions have been broken down. Now, head
office staff apparently think nothing of contacting colleagues in the offices to
discuss ideas, which at one time would have been virtually taboo.
The new approach is crystallised in the "customer value proposition" adopted by the
Bradford & Bingley and used as a central motif in the Henley and Cranfield
courses. Far more concrete than many vision statements, it says simply: "We help
and advise our customers to find the right home and the right loan, to save for
tomorrow and invest for the future, and to protect their families and possessions
John Barker, head of the product management and general insurance department,
sees the aim of the project as being to get the three newly-merged organisations
working together.
"We had to decide how we were going to start working with these two very different
organisations and get the projects to the customer," he says. "We had to free
ourselves from the straitjacket of saying: 'We're a building society because that's
what we've always been.' We had to
say: 'We're a large organisation with a range of products and we have to provide the
customers with what they want: It was a case of standing back and seeing ourselves
as part of a team"'
Barker found the last couple of days at Cranfield the most useful. "We had to look
at ourselves as individuals," he says. "It was about realising what we were good at
and not so good at, and how we could bridge that gap. Some came out as strong
thinkers and planners, while others were better at the operational side. It wasn't
about everyone being good at everything, but about all working together. It gave me
some direction and options about how I could develop my career.
One of the positive outcomes, Barker says, is that managers across the three merged
businesses have continuing contact, meeting informally and regularly to discuss
important issues and working out how best to further the business.
This, he believes, is crucial to continuing success. "It's not something we would
expect to happen naturally, but if we don't, there are competitors out there who will.

We now have a fantastic distribution footprint and we've got to make it work. That's
the challenge:'
QUESTION:
See if you can identify the principles of strategic HRD at work and the extent to
which a range of HRD development processes have been utilised in an integrated
way to support the change process. Note these and link them to the Shepherd and
liP models by noting alongside each one the relevant principle number(s) Shepherd)
and liP indicator(s). We have done one for you as a guide.

CASE STUDY FEEDBACK

The case clearly reveals the relationship of HRD to the achievement of strategic
change. HRD is used in the following ways:
HRD Principle
Shepherd principle IiP
1. Skills gaps are addressed.
5
2. HRD assists with the merger and the
alignment of organisational style and
culture.
3. The 'people first' programme is an HRD
programme to change attitudes and
culture and to promote a 'learning
climate'.
4. There is formal development of new
leadership skills.
5. 'Winning in the New World' is an
organisational development programme
aimed

at performance

and attitude

change.
13. The 360-degree approach is critical to
rich performance feedback and to the
evaluation of whether training objectives
are met.

14. Individuals take responsibility for own

learning and self development.

15. HRD is at the centre of an integrated
change effort, which goes beyond formal
training activity.
16.There is senior management drive from
the top
17.There is line manager involvement.
18. HRD
supports
organisational
competence development - customer
value proposition.
19. There is integration with other HR
processes:

appraisal,

organisational

structure, audit team, project team, career

development.

We have, thus far, established a broader strategic purpose for HRD that covers
formal and more informal continuous processes. We have seen how it requires
mutual commitment of resources and personal commitment from both senior
management and individual staff. We have also seen how a broad-based planned
approach is fundamental to organisational development processes.

HRD in the context of Organisational Development

To understand the criticality of HRD in a highly competitive global marketplace, it
must be set in the context of organisational development. Today there is an
increased focus on organisational development in the quest for a high-performance
culture. Learning and development is central in this equation.

Organisational Development is undertaken to achieve a flexible and creative

organisation that constantly seeks to improve and reinvent the way it carries out its
business, and serves its customers.
As we have noted, a high-performance culture is its goal. Flexibility not only
enables an organisation to embrace change, but exploit change in the external
environment to organisational advantage. Central to organisational development is
integrated working; integrated working through inter-disciplinary teamwork and
cross-functional collaboration enabled by new technologies (e.g. IT technologies
such as knowledge bases, information and contextual search engines).
Such integrated working practices require culture change, and learning is vital in
bringing about change.
Organisational development has been described by French & Bell (1999) as a longterm effort to improve the organisation's visioning, empowerment, learning and
problem-solving processes through the collaborative management of organisational
culture. Thus learning is at the very heart of organisational development.
TO BE SUCCESSFUL, its people at all levels of the organisation need to
understand the criticality of life-long learning, not least, because of the rapidly
changing global business environment that we operate in. Furthermore, the adoption
of integrated working and knowledge-based practices requires organisation-wide
learning; unless the organisation as a whole embraces it, such efforts will fail.
If HRD is strategic, it needs to be promoted and embraced at the top and be
cascaded to every part of the organisation. In particular, the role and example of
management is pivotal (core). Developing a learning organisation that recognises
knowledge as a strategic asset, as we have noted earlier, is no easy task. It often
necessitates culture change. To successfully implement a learning culture, it is vital
to align performance evaluation and reward processes with organisational learning

goals. This is the most successful means of fostering the diffusion of a common
corporate learning culture. Refer also to Unit 4 on PMS.
To promote learning and development many large corporations have their own
learning organisations, corporate universities or corporate business schools. The
success of these organisations is highly dependent on how well learning initiatives
are aligned to business objectives.

READING ACTIVITY
Read the article 'Keeping learning on track to deliver high performance' (June 2004)
at the Accenture, Human Performance Insights website:
http:// www.accenture.comixdocien/services/hp/insights/hpi_governance.pdf
Based on preliminary research, the article emphasises that the best learning
organisations have an intense business focus.

LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT

We have already highlighted the fact that the role of management is critical in
promoting a learning culture.
EFFECTIVE BUSINESS LEADERSHIP recognises that it is necessary to be
highly focused on capturing the attention of its followers on factors that will change
performance.
In the learning context, effective communication and role modelling are vital.
Role modelling is itself a means of communication. It is a case of actions speaking
louder than words. The leader must demonstrate the importance of learning by
demonstrating this through his or her own actions and behaviour.

COACHING AND MENTORING are also recognised as critical tools in

enhancing performance, learning or facilitating change initiatives.
Coaching and mentoring skills are now seen by successful organisations as
necessary skills for managers to be truly effective.
The business benefits of a "coaching and mentoring culture" include
attraction and retention of talent, and the encouragement of employees to
think and work better together.
Noting the important role of management in organisational learning and
development, HRD must also focus on leadership and management development.

READING ACTIVITY
Please read Chapter I3 of your key text, The Strategic Managing of Human
Resources, Edited by John Leopold, Lynette Harris & Tony Watson, FT Prentice
Hall, which covers the subject of developing management capability.

A PROBLEMATIC VIEW OF STRATEGIC HRD

Before moving on we need to take a brief look at the problems that may surround
the establishment of a HRD culture. These are:
The wider environment.
The evaluation of learning and development.
The value placed on HRD by staff.
1.THE WIDER ENVIRONMENT
As with our previous discussions about SHRM, HRD cannot be entirely divorced
from the environmental context. Organisations sit within a national and

international context. This external context will be shaped by factors such as the
wider value placed upon educational and training by the state, employers and
individuals. There will be a need to address deficiencies in each area, and pressures
to cut costs.
For example, in Britain the voluntary approach to training and development
adopted by the state since the 1980s, and largely endorsed by employers, continues
to produce relative under-investment when compared with other EU countries.
Germany has a partnership model between state, unions and employers, and France
imposes a national training levy (tax) on employers to support training.
Britain's example has placed great emphasis on providing basic support for the
unemployed and on selected national shortages such as IT. This places great
pressure on employers to provide training, and their priority is often an
organisation's specific skills rather than broader labour market skills, or to recruit
fully trained personnel only, which detracts from the labour market potential. An
example of this working out in practice is perhaps the UK rail dispute of 2002,
which was in part about a shortage of driver skills. Thus the implications can spill
over into labour relations problems.
Individual employees have a part to play in taking responsibility for their own
learning and not waiting to be trained by their employers. Their priority will often
be in core transferable skills or accredited training, which may not be as attractive
to their employers. However, over the last ten years we do see evidence of changing
priorities in training. Most countries have been attempting to achieve benchmarks of
investment in training relating to targets of 2-4% of labour costs or turnover.
In the UK and the wider EU, it is becoming increasingly recognised that
organisations need, and employees have rights to expect, a minimum of 30 hours or
a week's development per year, to stay updated or to address change in the
organisation or the labour market.

2.THE EVALUATION OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

The cost of learning and development programmes and the ability to evaluate its
success has often led organisations to take a short-term view and to see learning and
development as a luxury or reward, when the business is generating profits, rather
than a strategic process in itself.
Strategically-thinking organisations will realise that
Learning and development is vital to organisational development,
competitiveness, growth, market leadership and, in some cases, survival.
It is also a key factor in employee motivation.
However, The evaluation of the effectiveness of the learning and development
can be hard to quantify.
Generally the business case and effectiveness analysis will be undertaken
prior to learning and development initiatives.
Strategic organisations will also periodically compare the actual benefits vs.
forecast benefits.
The key measurements may be
improvements in productivity,
improvements in quality,
increased sales wins,
etc.
However, a word of caution. Traditionally productivity has been measured at the
individual level. But the shift in emphasis to a learning organisation and the
promotion of team-based learning and knowledge collaboration, will not necessarily
render benefits at the individual level but at a higher business level.

Paradigm shifts in profitability can be achieved by the adoption of new business

processes, knowledge-based collaboration and re-use of intellectual assets,
which have only been made possible by embracing a learning culture by the
organisation as a whole. Other quantifiable benefits may include new market
sectors or reduced cycle times in sales and other business activities.
It should, however, be noted that learning and development is only effective when
the curriculum and learning initiative are appropriate and focused to business
objectives and current culture. Often the volume of education days, the traditional
basic measure of HRD success, does not address individual needs and many of the
organisational prescriptions for training and development do not match workforce
expectations. The Lucas case study below illustrates this point well.

CASE STUDY
Read the short case study below:

The role of training in turnaround

'In the period 1985-8, Lucas has spent around E40 million per annum on training
which was equivalent to about 2.5-3 per cent of its total sales revenue.
This expenditure was viewed as an 'investment' in that learning and development
was being called on to act as a major agent of change. The in-company
consciousness of the key role of training was high. It was not seen as a poorrelation, peripheral activity, but as a potent source of change. The highlights of the
contribution made by training in this company are:
Its link with the total strategy comprising marketing, product engineering,
manufacturing systems engineering and business systems.
The highly evident top management commitment to it.
Its role in developing and executing the competitive achievement plans
(CAPs) which every business unit is required to have.

 The installation of business and engineering systems into the SBUs.

The underpinning of business task forces through training on an essentially
project-requirement basis.
The Lucas case provides an excellent example of a traditional mainstream company
which, in seeking to turn itself around from a loss-making situation, has sought a
radical strategic response-part of which has clearly involved a drive to enhance the
capabilities and commitment of its human resources through the use of training.
And yet the Lucas case is, at the same time, instructive for another reason. Its
training provision especially its coherent, business-led analysis of the role of that
provision is distinctive for its singularity. Few companies and this includes
the rest of the cases involved in this project could claim to match the emphasis
upon human resource development, which has been shown by Lucas.
But despite this lead position, it has to be said that only a little digging around is
required to reveal that the impact, when viewed from the stance of the intended
recipients of such provision, is, even in this lead case, often minimal.
The approach looks coherent, sophisticated and integrated when presented by senior
exponents, but it is often experienced rather differently by shop floor workers and
indeed by many middle-level managers. Both groups relate how their own recent
training experiences have been few and how the investment in people theme is
countermanded by more visible messages of cost cutting and pressure.'
(Storey 1992: 114, 155)

Question:
Why do you think the approach was not seen as successful by the shop floor staff.
CASE STUDY FEEDBACK
You probably found from the case study that shop floor staff reported that their
experiences of training were few. The company also emphasised cost-cutting, thus
undermining the message on investment in learning and development.

The Lucas case highlights an apparent difference between organisational intentions

and practice, and the value placed by staff upon different forms of development, and
the consequent reaction to developmental activity. At Lucas, training was owned by
the company and did not necessarily meet the needs of each individual. We will
return to this point later in the unit.

A further consideration is that whilst some state schemes for technician training
work well (for example, in Germany) and there is increasing evidence of wider
access to management development, professional training and training to support
change (for example, in the UK), the pattern is not uniform. Deeks (2001) reports
that the CIPD survey of workplace training suggested that three-quarters of all
manual staff received little or no structural job related training, despite critical
changes to manual work reported widely in public organisations and service
industries.
The HRD 2001 survey also, more positively, showed that where organisations had
chosen to adapt the UK Investors in People (IiP) Standard to support integrated
strategic HRD, 90% of survey respondents concluded that:
'...both the organisational culture and climate for learning had improved
a positive correlation could be established between a learning climate and
enhanced organisational performance...'
The evaluation of training involves asking first whether training is useful to the
employee's experience or whether it is carried out to satisfy the employer's need to
demonstrate that training has been carried out and second, whether it meets the
employees' wider labour market needs. Accredited training has a value outside the
organisation.

3. The value placed on HRD by staff

HRD is not seen neutrally by staff and often it is accepted rather than embraced
enthusiastically. Sometimes managers create barriers, as we shall see later, by a
failure to motivate trainees with effective and inclusive diagnosis. At other times the
failure to allow learning to be transferred into workplace practice leads to low
motivation and dilution of the up-skilling and developmental outcomes.
There is still a lack of clear evidence of strategic linkage in HRD terms with that of
the business. Therefore, strategic outcomes and further long-term commitment to
development are hard to achieve. At the end of this unit we will address these issues
again when examining steps to promote HRD within organisations.
Despite these concerns can we find evidence of increased HRD activity? A few
indicators in the UK may show positive results.
For example, there is evidence that many (over 30,000) organisations have
achieved the IiP standard. There is also evidence of increased investment in
management development, in particular.
Despite such increases in activity, doubts remain as to whether they are strategic in
intention. Having looked at some of the problems that surround the establishment of
a HRD culture, we now turn to a consideration of how organisations are seeking to
embed training, development and education through learning.

The Role Of Learning, Strategic HRD And The Learning

Organisation Concept
In this part of the unit we explore how organisations learn and the benefits of
becoming a learning organisation. We consider the interplay between the structures,
cultures and organisational systems that can support learning.

The role of learning

Learning is a central process in achieving an SHRM approach. We have already
made the close association between SHRM and change. The process of introducing
SHRM results in adaptation of organisational structures and systems, which results
in learning about the organisation and its environmental forces and directions. So
we can say that through learning, changes will result.
The inter-relationship between learning, performance and change can be
illustrated as shown in Figure 6.2:

Figure 6.2: Inter-relationship between learning, performance and change.

If organisations want to improve performance they need to develop the capacity to

change, and learning is essential to this capacity.
This diagram revises the central goals of strategic HRM that you saw in Units 1 and
2: the enhancement of performance in turbulent conditions, where change is central
and learning is central to the process that facilitates change.
SHRM is at the centre of the diagram because it is concerned with delivering the
conditions under which learning can take place.
Some commentators argue that the management of learning and of performance are
closely associated. To explore this we shall look at the following important points:
The concept of the learning organisation.
How such a model can be used in the practice of managing learning and
overcoming barriers.
The process of learning, and how it can be designed to meet the requirements
of the integrated approach to learning and change.

The Learning Organisation (LO) concept

One of the most widely used definitions of the LO is provided by Pedler et al
(1988). A LO is: an organisation which facilitates the learning of all its members
and continuously transforms itself.
The key terms that perhaps define LOs are as follows:
ADAPTIVE LEARNING - developing skills in coping, reflecting and
improving, typified by TQM models of continuous improvement. Sometimes
this is called 'single loop' learning as described by Argyris and Schon (1978).

 GENERATIVE LEARNING - perhaps the defining quality of the LO where

organisations develop a capacity to think radically and differently about
themselves and their market. They question what they do and attempt to redefine their mission. Argyris and Schon (1978) describe this as 'double loop'
learning.
CREATIVE TENSION - a concept describing how the process of
understanding and diagnosing the present can assist with developing a shared
consensus of the future.
Another important contributor to the debate is Senge (1990), who focuses on the
role and skills of the leader as well as the learning process. He describes the
manager as acting in the following ways:
As designer, facilitating learning and not just doing and acting as a role
model.
As teacher, developing the capacity of the team and individuals to think and
act critically and self critically.
There is clearly a major challenge here in the SHRM agenda to develop a new view
of the skills and competence to manage, as we saw earlier in the unit, if these
objectives are to be fulfilled. For the SHRM planner there are some distinct
messages to be distilled here, such as:
Organisations need to be designed for development and self-development.
Learning applies to all levels in the organisation and learning transfer is
critical throughout, between individuals, teams and levels.
Continual change is implied through critical reflection on performance at the
group and individual level, which links to our PMS thinking earlier.
A careful balance is required in allowing individual creativity and
determining organisation led initiatives of change to avoid precluding
learning at all levels.

The practice of managing learning

Now let us turn to the practical implications of managing learning and the
encapsulation of these practices in the SHRM model.
One of the most influential strategic models of the LO is the blueprint provided by
Pedlar et al (1991). This is shown in Figure 6.3. There are five essential components
of a learning organisation, and feeding into these five essentials are eleven
processes and structural enablers. For example, a learning approach to strategy and
participative policy-making enable the strategy that is the first essential component.

Figure 6.3: Pedlar's strategic model of the LO.

Note the holistic approach to analysing and providing internal resource strategies to
deal with, and respond to, the external influences, to provide an integrated approach
to learning. Note also the relative absence of learning and development at the
formal level within this model and the emphasis now being placed upon working
and learning systems in the rebalancing of strategic HRD.

ACTIVITY
Now spend a few moments reviewing the LO blueprint expanded overleaf to
include some explanation. Think about an organisation you have either worked for
or read about. Spend a few minutes completing a quick diagnosis, scoring each of
the eleven characteristics on a scale from I to 5, where I is low and 5 is high.

Source: Pedlar M. et al (1991). The Learning Company: A Strategy for Sustainable Development,
2nd edition. McCraw Hill Publishing Company. Pp 26-27.

ACTIVITY FEEDBACK
Your scoring will be unique to you and the organisation that you have chosen.
A score of 40 or more probably denotes that the organisational practices are moving
towards a LO.
A score of 20 or less suggests either an ad hoc or fragmented approach to learning.

ACTIVITY
The LO concept and practice has attracted criticism.
What problems have you found in any organisations that you have worked in or
know well, in successfully implementing the LO model?
(You may want to look again at the jigsaw in the last activity)
ACTIVITY FEEDBACK
From your work to date you might have noted the following problems:
Managers' skills and ability to provide the conditions and support for
learning, for example, providing opportunities for coaching and counselling.
Short-termism and little time spent at work on reflection and learning, to
improve processes.
Willingness of organisational sub-groups to share learning for

self-

protection, creating barriers to the sharing of information and knowledge.

Different perceptions of what needs to be learnt or changed; the absence of
consensus.
Ability to learn particularly in generative ways organisations are often
stuck in the past relying on past experience as a guide to best future practice.
Emphasis on incremental versus radical change.
Organisations are increasingly recognising the importance of working with
customers, suppliers and communities but the extent to which experience and
knowledge is personalised and made more widely accessible to organisational
members is more variable.

Finally, as Lant (1992) notes, the nature and origins of poor strategy formulation
and decision-making often limit the impact of organisational learning. Managers are
often unwilling or unable to learn, so 'unlearning' paradoxically becomes a key
feature of developing operative learning organisations.

More recently, Burgoyne (1999) has responded to criticisms of the LO model by

stressing that the key features are:
Companies need to be aware of internal politics and question existing
practices and beliefs.
Managers need to be aware of where the collective learning process and
knowledge reside; in people's heads, in technology or in archives.
Strategies are required to enable collective learning, and centralisation may
be the answer.
The organisation must create its own development tools.
Interests of stakeholders must not be in conflict.
Issues of ownership of competence and intellectual property must be
addressed.
Processes are needed to deal with interaction between tacit and explicit
knowledge. Are the difficulties in bringing tacit knowledge to the surface
technical or political?
The ideas of the LO need to be open to challenge and review. We now need to
explore the learning processes that might encourage an organisation to become a
learning organisation.
Developing Effective Learning Processes in Organisations
How can the designer of SHRM strategies bring about a shift towards a LO?
Once again we are looking for a comprehensive and integrated approach that will
embrace organisational structures, cultures, decision making, developmental and

work-based processes and, within this, contribute to the strategic HRD model we
introduced earlier. We shall explore this by looking at:
The design of effective learning activities.
The role of the manager.
Structure and culture to support learning.
THE DESIGN OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
The success of the design will be a function of the nature of the learner and the
match of what has to be learnt with a framework, maximising the effectiveness of
learning. We shall briefly review some principles of learning to emphasise the need
for flexibility in the learning strategies of organisations. These may be familiar to
you from your previous studies.
Our starting point is Kolb et al's (1974) learning cycle that focuses on an integrated
and planned approach based on experience. The four stages of the cycle are as
follows:
1. There is a concrete experience for the learner, a work experience or task
performance.
2. The learner observes and reflects upon this experience.
3. Deeper analysis of the implications of the learning allows the formation of
abstract concepts and generalisations. There are new ideas.
The learner experiments and applies the new ideas to working experience.
This is the central proposition for continuous learning. Honey & Mumford (1982)
developed this model by associating with each stage an individual learning style or
preference for learning:
The activist (stage 1) learns best by trying something out, experiencing a
new situation, discussing it with others and is often a risk taker. The activist's

philosophy is 'I'll try anything once.' They enjoy brainstorming and the
challenge of new experiences but become bored with longer-term
consolidation of experiences.
The reflector (stage 2) is good at analysis and listens to what other have to
say, thinks through new ideas from many different perspectives and discusses
them. They collect data, think about it thoroughly before coming to any
conclusion, but tend to postpone reaching conclusions for as long as possible.
Their motto is caution. They enjoy observing other people in action.
The theorist (stage 3) likes to read and learn about something before trying
it out and is good at amassing information in order to develop a theory.
Theorists adapt and integrate observations into complex but sound theories.
They are logical, tend to be perfectionists and are keen on basic assumptions,
principles, theories, models and systems thinking. They tend to be detached
and analytical, feeling uncomfortable with subjective judgements.
The pragmatist (stage 4) is less interested in a theory than in its application
in reality. Pragmatists are keen on trying out ideas, theories and techniques,
which they actively seek out. They like to get on with things and tend to be
impatient with open-ended discussions. They are essentially practical, downto-earth people who like making decisions and solving problems. They
respond to problems and opportunities as a challenge.
ACTIVITY
There is a lengthy learning styles inventory that you can use to assess someone's
learning style, but for a short version look at the website:
http://www.peterhoney.com/home/

The task for SHRM is to achieve a learning climate that maximises individual
learning habits and the impact of learning activities for individuals.

Goals of Learning
The goal of learning can be depicted as shown in Figure 6.4. The top block of
Figure 6.4 represents the purposes of strategic HRM:
Data and information; for example, the basic elements of costing and
budgeting.
Specific skills; for example, the use of computer-aided design (CAD)
packages.
Self-development; for example, in broader project management roles.
The arrow indicates the spectrum from more instrumental categories at the left-hand
end to more experiential categories on the right. The boxes then represent some
examples of learning across the spectrum, with the bottom layer giving examples of
training methods.
Generally, organisations are attempting to provide integrated development linked to
the goals and needs of both the organisation and the individual. Organisations are
increasingly aware of the need for flexibility in learning; that to sustain relevant
development and a motivated response, development has to be left more open ended
and informal, based more on a discovery approach.

Figure 6.4: Goal of Learning.

The autonomy of learning

Handy (1976) offers a useful summary with his reflection on the relationship of the
two policies of learning (instrumental and experiential) and the HRD interaction.
See Table 6.1. The instrumental policies are employer/trainer-centred, while the
experiential policies are learner-centred.

Presuppositions

Trainer role

Instrumental
A body of knowledge to be taught.

Experiential
Talent, ideas, views to be drawn out.

Emphasis on the subject matter.

Emphasis on the learner.

We are part of a wider system,

We evolve our own purpose/identity

which is

in an

ultimately knowable.
Trainer is expert.

unbounded system.
Trainer is facilitator/coach/a

Trainer is responsible for success.

resource.

Distant trainer-learner relationship.

Learner is responsible for own

development. Close relationship with

Nature of

Practice deduced from theory and

trainer and other learners.

Formulate own concepts and perfect

development

then applied. Emphasis on specific

own

acquisition.

skills through trial and error.

Formalised learning methods, which

Emphasis on

are

general application to life (and work,

predetermined.

if

Close-ended assignments with

appropriate). Self responsible for

grades and

learning

comment.

using resources available.

Open-ended experimentation with

Nature of learning

High entry standard. Power and

personal feedback.
Entry open and voluntary. Power and

systems

control lie

control widely dispersed.

with providers.

Pace and direction self-regulated --

Rate and standard of progress visible quality

and

of experience is proof of progress.

closely monitored.

Learning open-ended and ongoing.

Formal qualifications (and perhaps

Honour past students.

membership of an elite).
Identify leading practitioners.
Table 6.1: Characteristics of the two policies of learning. Source: based on Handy (1976)

This model demonstrates the shift from traditional teaching, to a learning approach
whereby the learner has more control over the selection, pacing and sequencing of
learning according to need and experience.

ACTIVITY
Think of your own career to date. What value have you and your employer(s)
placed on training and your own self-development? In your current situation are you
responsible for your own learning and development?

The principles of learning that we started with introduced us to the level of control
and ownership by the organisation and the learner. The proposition made is twofold.
First, that if organisations are to develop the full potential of staff knowledge and
skill, then more 'learning' needs to take place and this needs to take place close to
the work experience of the learner. Second, organisations need to encourage a
comprehensive range of learning activities to fulfil the wider instrumental and
experiential purposes of HRD. Learning needs to be 'top down' and 'bottom up'.
The role of the manager
The second factor in the approach to developing effective learning processes is the
role of the manager.
CASE STUDY
Read the article below and as you read consider the question of what the key
features are that the effective manager needs to consider.
'How Managers Can Become Developers' by Alan Mumford (Personnel
Management, June 1993)
The manager of a hotel is called from his office. An angry customer has complained
to the receptionist that he had been interrupted in his bedroom three times in the
space of half an hour by a cleaner, the housekeeper, and someone checking the
minibar. The manager takes his new deputy with him "an interesting experience
for you" and they both listen while the customer repeats his complaint.

The manager goes through the reasons why three different employees arrived in
such a short space of time: "It is, of course, part of our policy of providing excellent
service." The customer departs, still expressing dissatisfaction.
The hotel manager and deputy return to the manager's room. The manager sits
behind his desk, blows out his cheeks and says "So how would you have handled
him?"
A great deal of management development occurs in this way. An unplanned
experience, a question from one manager to another, a discussion reviewing facts
and opinions, a decision about what to do in a similar situation. Potentially these are
all the elements of an effective learning cycle.
There are some other things we know about this kind of experience. First,
managers constantly claim that they learn from such experiences. Secondly, they
rarely recognise at the time that they are 'learning', they think they are simply
'managing'. Thirdly, they may not have been introduced to the idea of a complete
process in which the elements of learning are balanced. Finally, and most
significant, helpful interventions by the boss are all too rare.
There are three main developments in the increasing provision of work-based
learning for managers. Although they overlap both chronologically and in terms of
content, they have been action learning (Reg Revans), the learning organisation
(Peter Senge, Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, Tom Boydell), and the competency
approach (Richard Boyatzis).
The shift towards work-based learning has occurred in part because of the powerful
intellectual contribution of such people, but an even more important driving factor,
perhaps, has been the demands of consumers for valid and relevant development.
In fact, the three parts of the theoretical drive towards work-based learning
coincides with the accidental reality of informal development stressed in the hotel

scenario above. Not only are they all centred on learning from real work, they all
demand that management development should succeed in putting life into an old
management responsibility. If we accept that managers have a major responsibility
for developing those who work with them, all the themes demand a major effort
from those managers.
In the UK the competency approach adopted through the Management Charter
Initiative with its emphasis on applied prior learning or crediting competence
will require successful intervention by bosses in a form which has not seriously
been tackled in most organisations.
The stimulus provided by the theories mentioned above, and the demand from
managers for effective help with their development, mean we have to combine three
elements to produce an effective management development system:
Self-development A recognition that individuals can learn but are unlikely to be
taught, and that the initiative for development often rests with the individual.
Organisation-derived development: The development of those systems of formal
development beloved of personnel and management development specialists.
Boss-derived development: Those actions undertaken by a senior manager with
others, most frequently around real problems at work.
Formal management development systems insist that managers appraise, identify
development needs, and provide time and money for people to attend courses.
These are valuable and necessary processes through which we try to balance the
often frantic pressures at work with more effective and planned attention to
performance and development. These formal processes could certainly be improved
and extended.
The significance of the case I am making can be assessed in at least two ways. If
my analysis of the three major current themes of management development is

accurate, how far do current formal schemes effectively provide the enhanced
role of the boss in developing others?
A slightly different form of test could be applied by looking at the resources
currently devoted to helping managers to help others to learn. If we add up the
days devoted to designing appraisal schemes and to running courses on
effective appraisal, and compare that with the time devoted in most
organisations to how managers can assist in the development of others, the
disproportion is staggering. Some organisations run courses on how to be an
effective coach or mentor. Useful though these can be, they all too often give
managers the idea that the process of developing others is something which is
added on to management as a special activity, not an integral part of the
process itself.
There are a number of things we have to do to enable managers to develop
others more effectively including establishing why it is important, giving them
a better understanding of the learning process, and developing the skills
involved. The starting point for managers must be the managerial situation
which provides the opportunity for development
A boss arrives in a subordinate's office at 8:30am one Tuesday
and says: "I have been thinking about that problem with client
Y you raised with me. I think it might mean not just a specific
problem of that kind but something that runs across several.
Why don't we get together for two hours on Friday, review
what the issues are and how we might tackle them?"
A customer phones with a quality problem arising from a
recent major delivery They want the supplier to send their
production manager and quality manager to see the reality of
the problem on the customer's side.

 The production manager decides to take a graduate trainee

with him, saying 'Keep your eyes open, take notes and we will
talk about it afterwards.'
A director close to retirement has been given a significant
project to do, and recruits a young man thought to have high
potential as the finance department's representative. After the first two meetings of
the project group the director calls this person
in and says: 'I would just like to talk over some of the things that are
happening on the group. How do you think things are going?'
These examples, like the hotel case with which we began, contain some
recognition on the part of the boss (or, in the last case, the mentor) that the
work situation offered an opportunity for learning. Unfortunately such
examples are relatively rare, and that is why our first concern in helping
managers to help others learn must be with helping them to recognise
opportunities, and then to use them more effectively.
The big 0
Managers and, sadly, some management development advisers think too often
in terms of what I call the Big 0: "We have this splendid chance for you to move
from sales into marketing." Even more to the point "We are moving you to
work for Jane Smith instead ofJohn Brown. You will find she is a quite different
sort of manager."
Presenting individuals with this kind of opportunity is usually better than not
providing them with an opportunity at all. However, we need to give much
more detailed attention to exactly what kind of learning opportunities are
likely to exist within the Big 0. What new experiences will be on offer? What

are the differences in the work? Who are the new and different people the
younger manager may encounter?
The best way to help managers to help others is to get them to start by
considering the kind of experiences from which they have learned. The
following exercise has the advantage of being both simple and immensely
productive:
Identify the two most helpful learning experiences you have had, and the two
most unhelpful.
Once the general ground of learning from experience has been established, it is
possible to go to a more specific exercise:
Think of an experience of being helped by another manager. What was the
experience, and what did the other manager do to help you?
It is possible to ask people to do these exercises without any stimulus or
suggestion of what they might consider. An alternative or supplementary
approach is to give them a list of situations in which a manager can offer
assistance to others. The list is lengthy but includes learning from a new
project, membership of a task force, confronting difficult colleagues and
reviewing completed tasks.
The crucial point when helping managers to recognise such opportunities is to
get them to consider first the activity or the situation, and not to ask them to
think initially about learning opportunities at all. Managers think in terms of
activities, not learning opportunities!
It is often a discovery for managers that things they have considered purely as
work activities are learning opportunities as well. Like the Moliere character

who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life, they can be helped to
see what they have always taken to be 'natural work' can be used also as a
creative learning opportunity.
Our main concern must be to facilitate learning through our understanding of
real work in the manager's world, rather than attempting to impose separate
management development processes. Take the following examples:
A manager does a lot of coaching and counselling informally,
finding it effective and less threatening than to be called into
the manager's office. They just sit down with someone and say:
'How is it going? Tell me what you are working on.' That gives
the people a chance to raise things with the manager without
making too big a thing of it.
A factory manager is involved in making the arrangements to
close down his factory over a nine-month period. He arranges
a meeting with all his subordinates in a group where they
discuss each week what has happened, how their plans are
going and what actions need to be taken. Then at the end of it
he sets aside 20 minutes to ask what they have all learned
from what they have done that week, and whether there is
anything they should do differently.

The major message we have to convey to managers in helping them to help

others is that we are not encouraging them to take up totally new activities.
Managers do not talk about coaching much, unless they have been on a
coaching course. They talk about problem solving; we should start from there,
not from 'How to be a good coach'.

However, what we are adding to their normal understanding of their

managerial work is an extra dimension, explicitly involving learning. Learning
should be drawn out from the managerial experience, not bolted on as a quite
different extra. For people fully to get the benefit from that experience they
need to understand some concepts and techniques which will help them to
learn more effectively. One, the learning cycle, was introduced at the beginning
of this article. The factory manager quoted above is engaged in the reviewing
stage of the learning cycle.
Two important practical points emerge from thinking about this kind of
approach. The first is that if you simply suggest to a boss that they ought to lead
a learning review, the response is not likely to be favourable unless they have
already had some kind of introduction built on their own experience. Even
more significant, the idea of a review is very much a managerial concept, not
just a learning one. Managers are used to the idea of looking back to see
whether things worked out, and if not why not.
For most managers most of the time, helping others with learning will mean
retrospectively reviewing an experience rather than the prospective planning of
learning from a future experience. Of course, we need to encourage the latter, but
retrospective analysis is not only more in tune with the way in which managers
behave in other aspects of their managerial life, it also provides immediate practical
examples through which a manager can be encouraged to work.

Wrong emphasis
Perhaps this is why some formal management development processes have not
worked as effectively in the past as we would have liked. We have put too
much emphasis on planning ahead, and not enough on enabling managers to

use, understand and then build on their past learning experiences. Once
managers have been engaged in helping to interpret, re-interpret and better
understand their past work experiences, they can be encouraged to help
others to go through the same process. Beyond this there lies the rosy future
of better identified future learning opportunities.
In a sense there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the kind of approach
suggested here can work. Some managers have always given time and attention
to the development of their subordinates. The question is not whether some
managers do it naturally, but whether we can encourage more managers to do
it, equally naturally but with some previous encouragement and thought.
My experience on this is hopeful. I find managers are intrigued, stimulated and
enjoy the kind of activities described here. Again comparisons can be drawn
with appraisal training. All too often this is approached by the management
developer with a firmness of purpose only equalled by the unwillingness of
managers to participate. The situations and processes described here
recognise and build on things which managers are aware of, rather than
imposing something which is all too often outside their experience and their
sense of commitment.
Managers develop others for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the formal
system instructs them to do so. Sometimes they expect to reduce problems by
increasing the ability of their subordinates to handle problems on their own.
Nor should we ignore less self-centred reasons. For at least some of them
what I call the principle of reciprocity occurs. Managers like helping to develop
others not just because of the direct return in the sense of performance, but
because they get a glow of satisfaction from having helped someone.
The task of helping managers to develop others does not have to be as difficult
as management development systems have seemed to make it, if we base our
guidance on using real situations, rather than contriving special management
development processes.

References
Mumford, Alan. Management Development: strategies for action, I PM, second
edition, 1993.
Honey, Peter and Mumford, Alan. Manual of learning opportunities, Honey,
1989.
CASE STUDY FEEDBACK
Mumford offers the following key aspects for managers to consider:
Managers should take advantage of unplanned activity for
reflection and experimentation.
Learning is increasingly based at work and moves from
accidental to planned, yet is informal geared to the individual's
actual need.
The lessons from the hotel scenario in the case study: indicate
that work situations offer opportunities for learning.
Managers need to seek out opportunities for learning.
Three overlapping processes are self-organisation (the little o),
organisation-derived development and boss-derived
development (the big Os). They give comprehensive learning
coverage for the LO, but organisations prefer the big Os.
More attention needs to be paid to the little os.
Thinking beyond planned/coached activities toward
opportunities controlled from events.
There is an important point to be made here about managers' roles in
enhancing learning. From the work that you did previously on PMS you will
have differentiated the role of performance feedback (judging and controlling)
with learning-based processes: coaching, more directive and boss driven, and
counselling, which encourages self-development and reflection. This sits well

with the 'best practice' notion of empowered staff releasing their potential.

Effective manager behaviour to support individual and organisational

learning can be summarised as follows. Effective managers:
Draw out the strengths and weaknesses of staff.
Reward risk, experimentation and questions.
Continuously identify learning opportunities.
Devote personal time to coaching and counselling
activities beyond the annual review.
Involve staff in organisation problems.
Listen, and encourage staff to implement their own
development needs.
The third factor in developing effective learning processes is the
supporting structures and cultures.
Structures and cultures to support learning
Current management practice shows an interesting trend towards a
situation where the formal features of organisations often overlap with
attitudinal disposition within the structure. You will have looked at
organisational structure in your previous studies in HRM and in
Organisational Behaviour. One factor, for example, is the level of
flexibility of an organisation in terms of job design.
ACTIVITY
From your knowledge of organisational structure and culture write down at
least three of the trends in organisational structure that might, in your view,
stimulate an effective learning culture.
ACTIVITY FEEDBACK

You might have included any of the following:

Flexibility: multi-skilling and broadening job design.
Flatness; removal of management layers, more control.
Empowerment closer to customers, widening of responsibility and
experimentation.
Cross functional and organisational: teams, supply chain and
enhanced flow of communication, knowledge and learning.
Self-organisation: learning through doing.
Lateral communication: opening up vertical and horizontal sources
of information.
Leanness: of business processes; reduction of waste through
learning and reflection, potential for 'block study' increment to
generating change.
Total quality management, quality circles and project activity;
special improvement structures to create, disseminate and
apply new knowledge.
Networks: looser vertical and horizontal links between
organisations to share and exploit knowledge and expertise
across the value chain: design, produce, supply and
distribution.

Most of these structural innovations now require a range of employee

behaviour (culture) of which the following are examples:
Empowerment, taking responsibility.
Being proactive and responsive.
Being flexible and prepared to learn and adapt.
Sharing information and knowledge.
Generating new ideas, share opinions.

 Participating.
Working beyond contract.
Thus organisational behaviour that goes beyond the role and
procedure-based features of traditional bureaucracies is essential to
establish an effective learning culture. This is one of the biggest
challenges faced by organisations.
Having explored the processes that might support the creation of a
learning organisation, our next step is to think about the development of
a strategic HRD policy.

Developing Strategic HRD Policy

One of the challenges that organisations now face is to recognise the relationship between the
visibility and maturity of learning and development and the total environment of HRD within
organisations. Let us discuss this in a little more detail using Figure 6.5, which shows

Figure 6.5: Patterns of development of strategic HRD policy. Source: Mabey C. Salaman G,
Storey J. (1992)
three patterns of the development of strategic HRD policy; intermittent, institutional and
integrated.
The strategic management of HRD /VET suggests that the first
challenge is to invest in formalised training, such as formal courses,
both internal and external, and training day targets; moving from
pattern 1 to pattern 2 in the diagram. As line manager commitment
increases, so does the visible level of training programmes. This moves
the organisation from intermittent, non-strategically aligned activity to

institutionalised training, where investment and planning are clearly

visible.
The second level of challenge is to move the organisation from pattern 2
to 3 where a lot of development work is decentralised and devolved, but
still working towards the fulfilment of integrated organisational and
individual objectives using a mix of processes, as we discussed earlier in
the unit. In the integrated pattern, line manager commitment is at its
highest but the visible level of training decreases as people take more
responsibility for their learning and development.
You may find the HRD audit a useful tool for assessing the current
status of training or for planning an HRD strategy. The HRD audit
framework can be used to probe more deeply into strategic purpose,
into the level of integration of training and learning activities into
organisational culture, whether intermittent/fragmentary (pattern 1),
institutional/focused (pattern 2) or fully integrated (pattern 3). Note
that in the checklist the second pattern has been sub-divided into a more
operational, situation
HRD audit checklist
Fragmented

Formalised

Focused

Fully Integrated

Purpose
1 Why is HRD

To address specific

To feed wider

To support wider

To contribute to the

initiated?

problems. No

human resource

Organisational

way

necessary link to

plans

strategy

organisational

and organisation forms

decision-making

goals
Seen as a cost; to be
cut back or
eliminated in 'hard'
times

Departments bid
from a central
training budget

3 How is HRD
regarded?

Seen as peripheral
rather than central

One of a number of
other developments
and structural
tactics with which it
is linked

4 What HRD
outcomes are
expected?

A skills gap plugged

Seen as an essential
weapon to stay
ahead of
competitors

Training is piecemeal
and
tactical

Training
programmes are
linked in some way
to individual needs

Off-the-job crisisoriented
training (often
remedial)

On- and off-the-job

events, courses and
assignments

Process
5 When does HRD
happen?

6 What does HRD

consist of?

and implements its

policy

2 How is HRD
funded?

the

Seen as an
investment and
departments carry
their own
developmental
budgets
Seen as a way of
cultivating
attitudinal change
and leadership to
facilitate
organisational
growth
Personal
development needs
met

HRD is interwoven
with everyday
experience and
financed
accordingly

HRD is an approach
rather than a
programme,
focusing on
individual career
structure
Wide range of
developmental
activities designed
to meet personal
learning goals

HRD arises from a

network of informal
interactions, and is
therefore
continuous and
personal
All work activity is
HRD, with built-in
potential for
personal
development and
organisational

A way of creating a
mentality whereby
each person's
business is the
whole business
A way of tapping
individual creativity
to enhance
innovation,
motivation and
competitive
advantage

7 Who participates in
HRD?

Those 'deemed' as
needing a training
course in X

8 How do they

Attendance on course

participate?

Those selected
following
competence-based
diagnosis (e.g.
following
assessment centre)
Attendance with
learning goals
previously established

Trainers (internal or
external) deliver;
line managers
largely uninvolved

Trainers deliver; line

manager appraisals
feed training system

Involvement in
activities, with
learning being
logged and possibly
reviewed with
mentor/coach
Main responsibility
for development lies
with line manager

Training takes place

out of the work
environment

Training mainly
off-the-job, with
some on-the-job

Increasing amount
of on-the-job
development

Emphasis on
courses, especially
knowledge based

Knowledge-based,
with skill training
also emphasised

Greater emphasis
on learning as a
process, with
analysis of mistakes
as learning
opportunities

Wider range of
training styles

Generally
non-directive unless
for acquiring
knowledge
Trainers adopt a
wider role as HR
consultants

(often cancelled due

to work pressures)

9 Who administers
HRD?

Programme
10 Where does HRD
happen?

11 What does HRD

consist of?

Self-nomination for
HRD and
self-development
activities

12 How is HRD delivered?

(a) Style
Training is directive
using formal
delivery methods

learning
Everyone, through
review, reflection
and learning from
everyday
experiences
Skills, knowledge
and attitude
acquired in job role
indivisible from HRD

Everyday experience
is reflected on,
conclusions drawn
and new ideas
tested
People encouraged
to take constructive
risks - learning is
turned into action

Every functional
manager is a
general manager ...
and responsible for
their own and
others'
development

(b) Staff

Trainers deliver in
classroom setting

Trainers require
more skills in a
broader range of
courses

(c) Content

Tendency to use
academic tools and
techniques

More use of
organisation-based
material (e.g.
company case
studies)

Range of methods
includes
open/distance
learning and
self-development
programmes

Well perceived
when experienced
as helpful

Organisation felt to
benefit through
development of the
individual

An invaluable part
of the job learning

More sceptical - the

training system felt
to be obsolete or
irrelevant to
individual/
organisational
needs

Personal growth
valued, particularly
its contribution to
fulfilling
organisation's goals

Training 'success
stories' rewarded by
the organisation

HRD features in
organisation's
statement of
goals/mission

Organisation seen
as a learning
company,
constantly
monitoring and
learning from its
internal and
external
environment
Organisation
regarded as a classic
training ground by
recruits and
competitors

Prevailing culture
13 How is HRD perceived?
(a) By trainees
Training perceived
as a 'reward' at best
or a waste of time
at worst as helpful
development of the
individual
(b) More widely
Seen as a luxury at
best or a waste of
money at worst

14 What value is
placed on HRD?

Occasional mention
in company
publicity, internal
journals,
recruitment
material, etc.
Source: Willie, 1990, pp. 85-8

At all levels a
ceaseless search to
improve things to
introduce beneficial
change

ACTIVITY
You should now try to apply the audit checklist to your own organisation or to one that you know well. What is
the current HRD landscape of your chosen organisation?

As we stated above, the IiP Standard (reproduced with the permission of the UK Department of
Employment), combining top down commitment, planning, action and evaluation, provides a
sound framework for building an organisational HRD strategy. Organisations signing up to the
standard are regularly audited and assessed against the criteria. All employees are eligible to be
audited in the following broad terms:

Their knowledge of broad organisational goals for development linked to strategy.

Their ability to show how their own development goals link into the organisational goal.

Engagement in the process of development review, planning and action supported by a

knowledgeable and skilled line manager.

Taking part in development activity to a broad target specified.

Involvement in an evaluation of the effectiveness of the development activity at individual

and team level.

These points can be mapped to several points in the audit checklist; the first two to the overall
purposes of HRD, the last three to the HRD processes and the last one also to the delivery of
HRD.
Before we end this unit investigating strategic HRD, we need to include one trend in the role of
learning in organisations that may shape the mode of delivery and the processes of learning
development in the future. This is the trend towards e-learning.

Trends in Organisational Development & Learning: e-learning

Let us begin with a case study

CASE STUDY
Read the article below, in which Sloman reviews the 'new' platforms for
learning, e-learning.
`E-learning: Forewarned is Forearmed'
by Martyn Sloman (People Management, 5th April 2001)
Readers who know their Old Testament will recall the writing that appeared
on the wall at King Belshazzar's feast. The message indicated that the
Babylonian leader had been weighed in the balance and found wanting and
that the days of his kingdom were numbered.

Today the writing is on the wall for training professionals. Like the unfortunate
Belshazzar, we are being weighed in the balance as the e-learning revolution
transforms the context in which we work. Our kingdom may not be
obliterated by the Medes and Persians, but the warning is clear: we will not be
able to add value to the modern economy and our own organisations unless
we develop new ways of thinking and working.
Fortunately, many training professionals are already doing just that. Among the
organisations I studied while researching my latest book, there are plenty of
examples of good practice. Perhaps the most impressive is Motorola
University, an early adopter of learning technology that is well on the way to
making half of the training it delivers available outside the classroom. CERN,
the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has chosen a different, but
equally appropriate, approach, using bought-in content and e-learning to
develop an extended international community.
Closer to home, Ernst & Young, my previous employer, recently undertook a
significant e-learning pilot using Leap (Learning environment for accelerated
performance), a system developed by its US arm. Around 150 UK-based employees registered for a session
outlining the firm's approach to e-business.
The participants accessed the 90-minute training session from their desks
through their PCs, using both an intranet address and telephone number. They
also had the opportunity to send questions and receive immediate answers
through an e-mail facility built into the site.
There was a universally positive response to the question: "Would you
participate in another desktop learning session?" All the evidence suggested
that the participants saw huge potential in making such tuition instantly
available anywhere across the country or even the world.
Ernst & Young, like other e-learning pioneers, is a knowledge-based
organisation whose staff are comfortable with IT. Other organisations face
greater difficulties and many have fallen into the obvious trap of focusing on the
functionality of the technology rather than on how people use it.
Unfortunately, trainers aren't very good at sharing their failures no one has
yet offered the sort of conference paper parodied below. So how can they
avoid these failures and exploit the tremendous potential of e-learning? A
helpful start is to distinguish between what could be described as "hard" and
"soft" technology.

The conference paper you will never see

Gareth Holmes is training manager of Lakin Scott Golding, a manufacturing
company employing 3,000 people on three sites.
In 1999 cost pressures led the company to switch from predominantly
classroom-based training to courses delivered through CBT and, later the
corporate Intranet. The result was chaos. In this session, Holmes will describe
how:
the incompatibility of IT systems and chosen products led to
huge overruns, causing the launch and promotion to be
delayed three times;
many of the soft skill modules available on the system were
used once and found to be both trivial in content and difficult
to access;
a newly established learning cafe rapidly degenerated into a
badly maintained spare meeting room;
several concerned managers sent their employees on
unauthorised external courses with a resulting lack of
budgetary control.

Gareth Holmes, an experienced conference speaker, is soon to establish a

consultancy specialising in change management.

Gareth Holmes and Lalsin Scott Golding are entirely fictitious. Any
resemblance to real individuals or organisations is purely coincidental.
Hard technology refers to the information and communication systems the
architecture of e-learning. This is concerned, for example, with methods of
analysing user behaviour or customising learning programmes to the needs of
individual learners. Soft technology is the interaction of the individual with the
system. The term shifts the focus away from the system and on to the learner.
It is concerned with issues such as the way the learning system relates to other
HR activity, especially performance management, and what the system is
designed to achieve. Is it, for example, about getting learners to take more
responsibility for their own development? Most importantly, soft technology is
concerned with learner support both individual support, designed to help
learners take maximum advantage of the opportunities now available, and
group support, which is directed at communities or networks of learners.
So far the debate over the introduction of e-learning has been dominated by
hard technology at the expense of soft technology. We have heard a great deal
from the IT specialists and the systems providers, but not much from the
trainers. As e-learning progresses, we can expect a change of focus. This is
good news for training professionals, because they know about learners, and
the growing importance of soft technology offers them an attractive future.
There is no need for those responsible for training to stare at the new
technology like a snake at a mongoose recognising that serious problems lie
ahead, but afraid to move. They should have confidence in their own
judgement.
The critical question facing most corporate training managers is what life will
look like if between a fifth and a quarter of training is delivered via IT systems.
This question is likely to prompt two immediate responses: first, e-learning will
be most effective for the acquisition of knowledge and least effective where
interpersonal interactions are needed for learning; and second, e-learning will
be effective as part of a systematic approach that also involves the classroom
and on-the-job learning.
On this basis, the expertise and skills of most training professionals will not
lose value; they will instead be deployed in a different context. Training
managers will take on an increasingly complex and strategic role that focuses
on facilitating a broad range of learning opportunities, determining which
combinations of technology best meet the needs of the organisation and
developing a learning culture. Job titles will change to reflect these new
realities. To some extent this is starting to happen as new titles such as "chief
learning officer" or "head of learning" are imported from across the Atlantic.
One part of the training manager's traditional role, the monitoring and
evaluation of resources, will continue to be critical. But the arrival of e-learning
means that time, rather than spend, is becoming the most critical issue. Time
for individual learning competes with other organisational demands, and these
are constantly growing. Demand for better work-life balance is also increasing,
yet the ability of the connected economy to deliver training "any time, any place" threatens to intrude further into
individuals' personal time and space.
Time, therefore, is likely to become the focus of training evaluation.
This does not mean that expenditure on training no longer matters.
Investment decisions (increasingly concerned with buying technology-based
systems) must of course be analysed rigorously. But e-learning calls for a new
type of decision making.
The traditional resourcing decision facing training managers was
straightforward: courses were costed and budgets set on the basis of these
costs. With e-learning, the investment decision is a project decision: an initial

investment is required that will lead to ongoing savings. Fortunately, there is

considerable experience of such costing in IT departments, and it is to them
that training managers must look for guidance.
It is not only the training manager who has to heed the writing on the wall. The
roles of those who develop and deliver training are also changing. It is possible
that three functional specialisms will emerge: design, delivery and learner
support. In its 1998 report Models for Learning Technologies, Roles, Competencies
and Outputs, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD)
identified eight roles for implementing "learning technologies", its term for
e-learning. These reflect the emerging functional distinctions.
They include the designer, who determines content and learning methods; the
implementor, who works with technical staff to provide logistical support; and
the instructor, who facilitates learning either in a live broadcast or a high-tech
classroom. The first of these roles clearly fits into the design function, while
those of implementor and instructor would be part of the delivery function.
Then there is the organisational change agent, described in the ASTD report as
someone who "helps an organisation to adapt to new technology and see its
value and benefits' This role embraces learner support, the third specialism in
the emerging distinction. But it is important to note that thinking and practice
among US organisations is far less advanced in the softer areas of learner
support than it is among their European counterparts, where a strong tradition
of softer interventions gives trainers a real chance to take a leading role.
None of this is to say that classroom-based training, the core of the job or
consultancy portfolio for many CIPD members, is doomed to extinction. For
the smaller training consultancies, traditional delivery methods may even enjoy
a renaissance. A standard piece of advice to businesses operating in the new,
connected economy is "give your product away free; make your money
through services". Basic training content could, on this basis, become a
commodity with the premium gained from effective customisation of delivery
especially in the classroom. Put another way, for small training consultancies,
the future may lie in 'high touch' (one-to-one or group delivery) rather than
high technology.
Overall, training professionals need to develop new ways of thinking. For too
long the e-learning agenda has been driven by those who created the technical
opportunities. It is essential that those who will manage their implementation
respond appropriately. The potential gains from doing so are enormous. We can take comfort from the fact that,
although the writing is indeed on the wall, our situation is not as dire as King Belshazzar's. According to the Old
Testament, he was slain on the night of his feast.
CERN opens door to virtual classroom
There can be few organisations better placed to introduce web-based training
than CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. It was there in
the early 1990s that a team headed by Tim Berners-Lee, building on earlier
developments in IT, invented the World Wide Web in effect, the publishing
arm of the Internet.
The 6,000 physicists who share their time between their home universities and
CERN are computer-literate and accustomed to learning independently, as are
many of the employees in the organisation's Geneva headquarters. Yet only a
few of the 200 internal training sessions that CERN runs each year in subjects
ranging from office administration to software engineering are currently
supported by e-learning tools.
"Because we are a public, non-profit-making organisation, I haven't had the
resources to promote this activity," says Mick Storr, head of technical training.
"I decided to make this available and, bit by bit, the highly motivated people are
starting to use it and telling their friends. Its spreading by a process of

osmosis."
While this tentative venture into web-supported technical training relies on
content provided by external suppliers, CERN has been working on a second
e-learning project that will exploit its own lecture and seminar programme.
Developed in collaboration with the University of Michigan, this makes CERN
lectures, together with any supporting visual materials used by the lecturers,
available online.
Ultimately, everyone attending these "virtual classroom" lectures will be able
to watch them in real time and interact with the lecturers. This already
happens in some parts of the world, notably Finland. But it is in developing
countries, where universities may not have the academic resources that CERN
has at its disposal, that this project could have the biggest impact Storr, who
was closely involved in the development of the web, is convinced that
electronic learning will take off. "One of the best ways that the web can be
used is for education and training," he says.

QUESTION:
Having read the article, note down the positive and negative features of
e-learning with respect to developing a comprehensive HRD strategy and
learning organisation.

CASE STUDY FEEDBACK

You might have noted down the following:
The positive features of e-learning include:
Accessible development.
Self-paced learning.
Devolved and decentralised learning.
Time and space flexibility for learning.
Best used and currently used mainly for knowledge acquisition.
Learning design skills increase for development.
The learner, not the trainer, has control over the pace and
timing of their learning.
Monitoring and evaluation becomes more standardised and
explicit through technology.
Self development emphasised.
Growing use of Internet supports wider learning networks.
The negative features of e-learning include:
Control of design centralised and relatively inflexible.
Interaction and experiential development not highly focused.
Provision of learner support may place increasing line manager
demands over professional trainers.
Work/life balance may shift as learning time overspend
becomes critical.
It assumes a generic content to meet all needs; 'one size fits all'
approach.
CBT fragmentation and lack of strategic competence focus.
Investment is more focused on the technology.
IT decisions predominate over the 'softer' learning needs.
The key points to note for the implications for the learning organisation are
the inherent learner-centred aspects such as self-paced learning, devolved
informal learning and the scope and flexibility of learning within a supporting
environment. Self-development and the creation of learner-centred networks
are emphasised (boundary working, scanning and so on). The downsides of a
fixed curriculum, emphasis on the technology and education/training focus
impinges on the broader experiential development needs, introduced

alongside the experiential/mature but less visible development agendas.

However, the mix of media and flexibility of timing of delivery may create a
more flexible and creative approach to formal training and development. The
intention of learners has not been directly addressed and many providers now
recognise the need for synchronised and asynchronised learning opportunities
that add a fourth dimension to computer-based training (CBT)/HRD activity,
reducing the time and space divide.

It should be noted that for self-development and e-learning initiatives to be

successful in an organisation, individuals should be motivated and encouraged to
the see the value and benefits of self-initiated and constant learning. This, in itself,
may involve a culture change. It is therefore critical to have management support
for e-learning as a vehicle for professional development in the organisation. Unlike
the more conventional forms of face-to-face training (where there is an instructor
and an assessment of learning on completion), e-learning programmes are selfdriven. Thus they add little value, unless the individual is highly motivated and
accepts responsibility for learning.

Unit 6: Human Resource Development Strategies

LEARNING OUTCOMES
Following the completion of this unit you should be able to:
8. Evaluate the factors that contribute to establishing learning and development

as a strategic activity.
9. Recognise the problems of establishing a HRD culture.
10. Explain the role of learning as a strategic process for change within
organisations.
11. Identify and implement steps to facilitate the creation of learning
organisations and overcome barriers to such creation.
12. Develop effective learning processes within the overall design of learning and
development activity.

13. Design effective learning and development strategies.

14. Assess the recent trend towards e-learning in organisations.

Summary
This unit has attempted to define a broader purpose for HRD, that of
providing a clear strategic contribution to the organisation. The emphasis
shifts from training toward development.
The unit sets down the principles that define HRD and sets them within the
wider context of organisational and HR strategy. We have presented
concepts and practices of the learning organisation as a potential allembracing approach to individual and organisational learning, and as a way
of embedding and raising the profile of HRD in fulfilling the strategic
purposes of development.
We have discussed the nature and importance of the design of learning
activities, and the pivotal role line managers, alongside professional trainers,
have in the process. The concluding article on trends in the development of elearning suggests a further specialisation and polarisation of trainer roles into
design, delivery and support aligned to their traditional advisory and
diagnostic role of organisational needs.
We have introduced a framework for HRD policy developed through the
HRM audit checklist and the inclusion of the UK Department of
Employment, IiP Standard. This emphasises the centrality of HRD in
SHRM and the comprehensive policy-making requirements now needed to
support dynamic organisational change. In this, learning is the criteria and the
defining process that offers the opportunity of real innovation, creativity and
the release of employee capability.

REVIEW ACTIVITY & FEEDBACK

Question 1

What are the four key purposes of a HRD strategy?

Answer 1

The four key purposes of a HRD strategy are:

1. To address skills gaps for both individuals and organisations.
2. To act as a catalyst for change
3. To provide a competitive advantage in terms of the content and delivery of
HRD.
4. To create a learning climate as a way of focusing individual learning needs
towards organisational learning objectives.
Question 2

From your work on the units to date, what are the factors that are demanding
closer attention to HRD in organisations? ( LO 1)
Answer 2

The factors might include:

1. Performance: output and upskilling.
2. Competence enhancement.
3. Culture change.
4. Speed of response.
5. Building new work relationship within and between organisations.
6. Pace of change.
7. New knowledge.
8. Globalisation.
Question 3

What do we mean by the terms 'adaptive' and 'generative' learning in

organisations?

Answer 3

 'Adaptive' learning relates to incremental improvement, building on existing

knowledge. It is typified by models of continuous improvement such as
TQM.
'Generative' learning relates to transformational processes, where the basic
principles are questioned and revised 'thinking the unthinkable'. It could
be said to be the defining quality of a learning organisation.
Question 4

What is a 'learning organisation'? Why might it offer a more strategic

approach to HRD?
Answer 4

Pedlar et al's (1988) definition of a learning organisation is one that facilitates the
learning of all its members and continuously transforms itself. The blueprint for
such an organisation is contained in the model of the 11 attributes, which reflect a
strategic approach:
1. A learning approach to strategy.
2. Participative policy-making.
3. Information used for understanding.
4. Formative accounting and control.
5. Internal exchange.
6. Reward flexibility.
7. An enabling structure.
8. 'Boundary workers' such as customers and suppliers act as environmental
scanners.
9. Inter-company learning.
10.A learning climate with help and support when things go wrong.
11.Self-development opportunities for everyone.
Question 5

How do you define the manager's role in supporting learning in organisations?

Answer 5

Sense (1990) uses terms such as 'designer' and 'teacher' and 'creative tension'.
Mumford (1982) offers a more practical list of roles that managers perform to
support learning. Effective managers:
1. Draw out the strengths and weaknesses of staff.
2. Reward risk for experimentation.
3. Continuously identify learning opportunities.
4. Devote personal time to coaching and counselling activities beyond the
annual review.
5. Involve staff in organisation problems.
6. Listen, and encourage staff to aim and implement their own development
needs.
Question 6

Define the three goals of learning. How do they relate to the strategic purpose
of HRD?
Answer 6

The three goals of learning are

1. the acquisition of knowledge,
2. the situation specific skills and
3. the self-development.
Knowledge and situation specific skills provide competitive advantage, and

self-development can create a learning climate and act as a catalyst for

change.
Question 7

What sort of organisational structures would you recommend to support a

learning organisation?
Answer 7

The structures to support a learning organisation should be:

Flexible, with multi-skilling and broad job design.
Cross functional with teams and an enhanced flow of communication.

 Flatter with fewer management layers.

Lateral communication to open up vertical and horizontal sources of
information.
Empowering, widening responsibility and getting people closer to customers.
Lean in terms of the business processes.
Include aspects of total quality management, such as quality circles.
Question 8

Define the key activities that need to take place to support a HRD strategy?
Answer 8

The key activities are:

1. Clear explicit policy linked to business strategies.
2. Commitment from the top of the organisation.
3. Clear framework of planning training needs analysis and review
processes, objective setting.
4. Targets for action at the individual, team and organisational level.
5. Setting clear investment pattern for training, development and education.
6. Set clear criteria for allocation and responsibilities.
7. Evaluation at each level to ensure the rate of the investment and the transfer
of learning effectively into workplace practice or knowledge.

Extraction from lecturer slides

Human Resource Development:HRD is the framework for helping employees
develop their personal and organizational skills, knowledge, and abilities.

Human Resource Development includes such opportunities as:

1. Employee training
2. Employee career development

3. Performance management and development

4. Coaching
5. Mentoring
6. Succession planning
7. Key employee identification
8. Tuition assistance
9. Organization development

What People Do in Organizations?

Strategic Planning
An overall planning that facilitates the good management of a process.
Strategic Planning also:
Take you outside the day to day activities of your organization or
project.
Provide you with the big picture of what you are doing & where you
are going.
Give you clarity about what you actually want to achieve and how to
go about achieving it.

Defining the Purpose of Learning and

Learning

and

training

are

generally

Development
interchangeable.

The processes of learning

Learning as the formally designed process of staff development

Development as the wide range of individual and collective activities that

develop skills and personal abilities.

Vocational and educational training (VET) that continues the development of

knowledge and skill for current and future work.

Four strategic purposes of learning

1. Addressing skills gaps for individuals and organisation.

2. Using HRD as a catalyst for change

3. Using HRD as a basis for competitive advantage in terms of the HRD content and the
way it is delivered
4. Creation of a learning environment as a way of focusing individual learning needs
towards organisational learning objectives on a continuous basis.

Leadership and Management Development

In learning context, effective communication and

role modeling are vital.

Role modeling is a case of actions speaking

louder than words.

The Role of Learning, Strategic HRD and the Learning Organisation

Concept
The role of learning:
Learning is a central process in achieving an SHRM approach.
Through learning, changes will appear.

The role of learning

To sketch out the relationship between management of learning and of
performance, we focus on the following points:
The concept of the learning organisation.
The practice of managing learning and overcoming barriers.
The process of learning.

The learning organisation (LO) concept

A LO is an organisation which facilitates the learning of all its members and
continuously transform itself.
Key terms to define LOs:
Adaptive Learning: developing skills in coping, reflecting, and
improving, typified by TQM models of continuous improvement.
Generative Learning: the defining quality of the LO.

 Senge (1990) describes the manager as acting in the following ways:

AS A DESIGNER who facilitates learning and not just doing and
acting as a role model.
AS TEACHER, developing the capacity of the team and individuals to
think and act critically and self critically.
Key factors for SHRM planner:
Designing the organisations for development and self-development.
Learning applies to all levels. Learning transfer is critical throughout,
between individuals, teams and levels.
Continual change links to our PMS thinking.
A careful balance is required to allow individual creativity and
determine

The practice of managing learning

The key features of the LO model:
Companies need to be aware of internal politics and question existing practices and
beliefs.

Managers need to be aware of where the collective learning process and

knowledge reside; in peoples heads, in technology or in archives

Developing Effective Learning Processes in Organisations

We will focus on:
The design of effective learning activities.
The role of the manager.
Structure and culture to support learning.

The design of effective learning activities

The success of design is a function of the nature of the learner and the match
of what has to be learnt with a framework, maximising the effectiveness of
learning.
Flexibility is needed in learning strategies of organisations.
Four stages of the learning cycle are focused on an integrated and planned
approach based on experience:
1. There is a concrete experience for the learner, a work experience or
task performance.
2. The learner observes and reflects upon this experience.
3. Deeper analysis of the implication of the learning allows the formation
of abstract concepts and generalisations. There are new ideas.
4. The learner experiments and applies the new ideas to working
experience
Individual learning style or preference for learning in each stage:
The activists (Stage 1) philosophy is Ill try anything once.
The reflectors (Stage 2) motto is caution.
The theorist (stage 3) are logical, tend to be perfectionists and are
keen on basic assumptions, principles, theories, models and systems
thinking.
The pragmatist (Stage 4) are essentially practical, down-to-earth
people who like making decisions and solving problems.

Goals of Learning
The purposes of strategic HRM:
Data and information; e.g.: the basic elements of costing and
budgeting.
Specific skills; ex: the use of computer-aided design (CAD) packages.
Self-development; ex: in broader project management roles

The autonomy of learning

The level of control and ownership by the organisation and the learner:
1. If companies are to develop the full potential of staff knowledge and
skill, then more learning needs to take place and this needs to take
place close to the work experience of learner.
2. A comprehensive range of learning activities should be encouraged to
fulfill the wider instrumental and experiential purpose of HRD.
3. All in all, learning needs to be top-down and bottom-up

The role of the manager

The second factor in the approach to developing effective learning processes
is the role of the manager.
Effective manager should support individual and organisational learning by:
1. Draw out the strenghts and weaknesses of staff.
2. Reward risk, experimentation and question.
3. Continuously identify learning opportunities.
4. Devote personal time to coaching and counseling activities beyond the
annual review.
5. Involve staff in organisation problems.
6. Listen, and encourage staff to implement their own development needs.

Structures and cultures to support learning

This is the third factor in developing effective learning processes.
In organisational structure, the level of flexibility of an organisation in terms
of job design should be focused.

Structures and cultures to support learning

The structural innovations require a range of employee behaviour (culture):
1. Empowerment, taking responsibility.
2. Being proactive and responsive.
3. Being flexible and prepared to learn and adapt.
4. Sharing information and knowledge.

5. Generating new ideas, share opinions.

6. Participating.
7. Working beyond contract.

Developing Strategic HRD policy

Today challenges that organisations face is to recognise the relationship
between the visibility and maturity of learning and development and the tatal
environment of HRD within organisations.

Patterns of development of strategic HRD policy

The strategic management of HRD/VET suggests 3 challenges:
1. Investing in formalised training; moving from pattern 1 to pattern 2 in the
diagram.
2. Moving the organisation from pattern 2 to 3 where a lot of development work
is decentralised and devolved, but still working towards the fulfilment of
integrated organisational and individual objectives using a mix of processes.
3. Line manager commitment is at its highest but the visible level of training
decreases as people take more responsibility for their learning and
development.

Developing Strategic HRD policy

The broad terms in auditing all employees:
Their knowledge of broad organisational goals for development linked to
strategy.
Their ability to show how their own development goals link into the
organisational goal.
Engagement in the process of development review, planning and action
supported by a knowledgeable and skilled line manager.
Taking part in development activity to a broad target specified.
Involvement in an evaluation of the effectiveness of the development
activity at individual and team level.

FURTHER READING
Effectively Developing and Engaging Employees
by Business Dictionary
Developing and engaging. The biggest underlying theme for engaging employees
is not tracking their every move, or even their happiness, but to inspire them to do
their job to the fullest extent and to do it well, and then enjoyment with their work
will come. Employees that are properly engaged tend to be more effective and
productive.
Transparency. For many years transparency has had a different meaning. Now
employees consider insight into business performance and operations as a necessity
to fully rally behind a company. Private companies are not required to publish
financial information, however, those that choose to share this information
internally with its employees have had better luck with either encouraging or
inspiring their employees to do better. This helps employees better understand their
contribution to the company. Additionally, what is sometimes better insight than
financial numbers is performance and operating metrics.
Communication. Employees need to be informed and feel involved. As a result,
being transparent is fundamental. This can include periodic meetings or updates on
the companys status and goals; these should be broken out both broadly and
specifically, as to allow for celebrating milestones along the way.
Start early. Part of the continued employee engagement process begins with the
hiring process and ensuring solid fits with respect to company setting and culture.
This includes actively conveying the company values in the beginning and before

hiring. Also, convey expectations and goals of the position. This will go a long way
in making sure the overall engagement strategy is effective.
Team. Part of developing employees is to ensure they are not overworked. Ensure
the proper team is in place, and that employees have the right support and are not
understaffed. This includes recognizing when an employee does not fit with the
team and being able to quickly and delicately remove that person.
Continuous feedback. Assess your employees and company constantly. Monthly,
semi-annually or annually is not enough; if you wait that long to address issues your
employees will lose encouragement and leave managers frustrated. Continuous
feedback is difficult if only in-person meetings are used. Many tools offer social
based feedback and easy exchange of feedback from managers. It is hard for
employees to be able to make necessary changes and develop their skills if feedback
is only periodic.
Objectives. Set expectations, reasonable and obtainable ones. This will allow
employees to know what you expect, but also allow them to gauge their progress.
Objectives should include development goals that come from feedback reviews.
Personal engagement. Have planned company outings, either dinners or team
building activities. Also, do company lunches, even if catered into the office.
These are great ways to build rapport with employees and help the company grow
as a team. Being able to interact informally plays great to being able to provide
useful continuous feedback.
Support. Employees should have access to managers when needed, and one-onone meetings regularly. As well, companies should have company wide or
department wide meetings. The CEO should also make appearances to inspire
employees and reaffirm the company goals.
Promote from within the company. To properly engage and inspire employees,
they must be inspired and feel they have something to work toward. Promoting

from within gives employees incentive. Give your employees the opportunity to
create a career path within your company whenever possible.
Give raises and bonuses. Obvious? Maybe. One of the best way to inspire
employees is through bonuses and raises. Almost everyone is motivated financially
to some degree, although this is only one part of the puzzle. Incentive bonuses can
be useful if they are properly aligned, namely if they are based on company
objectives.
Ownership. Employee engagement is only one of the key retention tools
companies should use. Furthermore, use ownership incentives to inspire companies
to become truly vested in the company. This includes stock and option grants, and
if you have given someone equity based compensation in the past, but be sure to
look at retention grants to offer them additional grants (either stock or options) after
their initial grants vest.
Employee engagement tools. Yammer is an enterprise social network allowing
employees to collaborate and share within their own tailored social network. This
helps keep employees engaged by being able to see activity feeds of other
employees, easily ideas and thoughts, offering encouragement and help where
possible.
Rhypple is a performance management tool that helps companies engage with
employees through social goals and continuous feedback. This tool provides the
one-on-one coaching, as well as public recognition and feedback that makes for
positive employee engagement.
WorkSimple is another performance management tool focused on being social. It
combines the ability to share social goals, rally around achievements, offer
feedback and assess performance.
Marshall Hargrave