The Manager's Responsibility in Learning

John R. Mattox II - 7/5/11

Learning is just facts and figures without managerial support. Like a great baseball coach, a supportive manager can ensure learning events produce the equivalent of a home run.

Selling Sales Managers on Coaching

One cannot have a superior sales team without great front-line sales managers who know how to coach.

Great baseball managers extract more from their players than others have. They manage the egos of franchise players, guide team dynamics and manage resources — putting the right pitcher in for middle relief and another in as closer. To generate offense, they shuffle the lineup and insert designated hitters as needed.

Assembling a winning baseball team — not unlike putting together an effective, performance-driven corporate team — can be a bit of a gamble. But organizations cannot afford to gamble that their managers could be great. Like great baseball managers, they must actively develop managerial talent.

Transferring Learning
In Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare wrote, “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” The playwright’s sentiment rings true in the modern workplace. Through rigorous recruiting and hiring processes, an organization attempts to identify the next great lineup, those who are born with great management skills. Other organizations take raw talent and develop it with extensive training, on-the-job experiences, intensive coaching and mentoring (Figure 1). With either approach, development is the critical element to create successful outcomes.

Managers typically align to either projects or people. The former adds value by controlling quality, cost and time on individual projects. The people managers make organizations more effective by making their direct reports more productive. They play a specific role before and after learning: providing appropriate tools, strategic direction, guidance regarding project tasks and helping to solve problems.

Many factors other than managers influence performance after a learning event. Ed Holton, a human resources professor at Louisiana State University, developed the Generalized Learning Transfer Systems Inventory (GLTSI), a tool to assess whether the post-learning environment supports or hinders learning transfer and skill application. The original model consists of 16 transfer factors that align with three main areas that influence learning transfer: the ability to use learning, motivation to use knowledge and skills, and the work environment (Figure 2).