The Manager's Responsibility for Employee Learning

Best Practices for Manager Responsibility
As a result of this data, I reached a simple conclusion (admittedly, one many people have known for years): For any learning program to be successful, no matter how good or bad the program, there must be manager responsibility and involvement to maximize the impact on the job. Below are my top 10 practices for manager responsibility. Unlike the David Letterman list, it is not in any particular order, nor is it especially humorous. But I hope you will find it useful in engaging managers’ sense of responsibility for learning.

1. Conduct a pre-assessment for strategic, visible or costly programs. Also, when participants register, send the assessment to the manager to get the following information:
a. Awareness that the employee enrolled.
b. Expectations to be set with employee
prior to learning.
c. Resources provided to employee to apply learning.
d. Specific projects to apply post-training.

2. Build into any on-boarding program the responsibilities of managers when approving employees to attend learning initiatives. Focus on awareness, expectation setting, resource provisions and alignment of projects with proximity of training.

3. For any strategic, visible or costly program, managers should approve the learners going to the program.

4. Prior to attending training, managers should be encouraged to have a brief meeting with the employee, review the course objectives and align those to specific job tasks and business results. During this exercise, managers should set appropriate expectations of the employee. For example, the employee is expected to give a presentation to the rest of the department on the key learning themes from the training and how this will be applied to the job.