The role of line managers in L&D, by Joanna Knight and Rob Sheppard, Training Journal, September 2011

This topic has been addressed before in our blogs but I make no excuse for choosing another article on such an important issue. It is often the ‘Elephant in the Room’ in discussions about new learning initiatives; we all know that line manager support is key to learning being applied but we also know that it is the area that we can influence least. This article does not provide any fundamental solutions but it does recognise the issue and provide some interesting ideas.

It starts off with some interesting statistics from two studies, one from the ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) and one from the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development). These are worth reproducing here in summary form as they can be useful evidence when diagnosing problems and making the case for manager support:

• 70% of failure in training takes place after the formal training has finished
• Only 12% of people being trained feel that their line managers take L&D seriously
• 90% of those involved in training believe that manager support is important to success
• Only 5% of learning practitioners’ time goes into follow-up activities

The authors start by looking for the causes of the problem and the article spends rather too much time on this diagnosis rather than the potential solutions. Most of this is quite obvious stuff - competing business pressures, not seeing L&D as part of their role, having too high expectations, wanting training to provide the ‘finished product’ rather than a foundation to build upon. There are some interesting examples of good practice - for example an unnamed company that has a KPI targeting this kind of learning support - but these are less powerful because they are reported anonymously. If the example is genuine and the practice is good, why would companies not want to be quoted?

Having broadly agreed with the causes, I was looking forward to the solutions, hoping that these would be less obvious and more original. There were certainly some obvious but frequently forgotten points - for instance seeking post-course feedback from managers - though there was no recognition of the time that this is likely to take. In practice much depends on the length and strategic importance of the programme and the number of participants; contacting every manager after every short programme is unlikely to be realistic in many cases.

The ideas that caught my attention and are worth sharing were:
• Rather than action plans, ask participants to produce a summary of learning for their line managers, which then becomes the basis for them to move forward to action together
• Take advantage of more modern technology when reminding participants and managers about follow-up, either text messaging or on-line applications (apparently there is an on-line application called ‘Huddle’ which can be used for post-course sharing)
• Inviting key managers to contribute to the course as a way of increasing their commitment (though I had a few reservations here; might there be a danger of damaging a course by inviting a poor or off-message speaker?)
• Training line managers to be more supportive

I felt that the last point was too idealistic and it reminded me again that, though interesting, the article misses out an important point, the issue of time and its cost. In most companies these days, managers are increasingly busy and problems of manager commitment are often due to their being resentful about members of their team being taken away from the job. So the idea of asking line managers to give even more time to be trained may harden attitudes.

Perhaps the answer is mainly around attitudes, partly caused by a lack of resources and spare capacity to cover the time required for training activities. Unless line managers and course participants feel that they can spend time away from the job without performance being adversely affected, the problems are unlikely to be solved by the ideas in this article.

Click here to view the article in full

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