Training professionals is a tricky business. Around here the daydream scenario (for both the professionals and management, strangely enough) is a week in Orlando (or Vegas, yeah, Vegas, baby) on a subject that is somewhat germane but with a outfit that knows that half the attendees come in with a hangover in the morning and the other half will be on the golf course (or …) right after lunch. The professionals all want a boondoggle like this but never get it. Management thinks their professionals treat any training this way, but few actually do. Usually it is the weasels who eventually become managers who screw off, so I guess we can close that loop.
A manager gets that faraway look in his eyes when the subject of training arises. In abstract, training could do wonders for his department. One can see him wistfully thinking of the day when all his people know every detail of any possible permutation of a days events, and do all the hard labor to make it right so the manager can simply report up the chain of command that, “All is well thanks to my long-term vision.” In reality training costs money for tuition and travel and then there’s all that lost work time (and it’s the last one they seem to hate the most, because they are “at work” and you’re “not”). There’s a line item in the department budget for training, which is benign, but woe to the manager who spends any money on travel. This is real money – the kind that gets people spanked in the spending review meetings.
Poor managers don’t mind spending soft money. This is the income you lose due to lost production because people don’t have the slightest clue of the steps to take to fix things. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It doesn’t show up on the yearly salary reviews. Well, it doesn’t show up on the manager’s salary review. The effect merely trickles down…
…to the engineers and supervisors, who should have received the training in the first place. They are ultimately the people who spend their days and nights in the plant trying to mitigate the latest process screw-up (often by operators who have had some OJT but little else) and not really knowing how. They fumble around, learning as they go, sometimes hitting the jackpot but more often chewing off the brim of their hardhats in frustration. They are the ones who take it in the shorts because they cannot seem to keep their equipment humming.
Imagine you have hired a young engineer. He has a few years experience in a similar industry, but not everything he knows has value to you. The old gray-beard engineer, who you were counting on to pass on his years of wisdom (and hopefully not his cynicism) to the young guy, quits. The new guy, being young and stupid, picks up the work of the graybeard and for a time does well enough that you decide to entrust a very critical change-over to him. You know he isn’t prepared for this, but if all goes right, you’re a hero. If something goes wrong, the entire plant will go down, or, worse, someone could get hurt.
This scenario just played out at my plant this week. Unfortunately, it did not go well. The young engineer made a mistake in communication, just a very small one, but that was all it took. Before the plant was fully operational again the vigilantes were already out, looking for someone to blame (this is a topic all on its own, and that day is coming and right soon). Oh, and by the way, these were the corporate vigilantes, not the local ones. They had a rope and were planning to use it. In a strange and welcome twist, the local management fought them off, but then got out a rope of their own. Attention deficit disorder can be a good thing. The management group is afflicted (and then some) and they were distracted by another (perceived) crisis, and the engineer has so far gotten off without much more than a tongue-lashing. But he’s well aware of what might have been and he’s not impressed.
If you look at it from his point of view you can see his point. He took it upon himself to learn something new, without much help, and put together a plan that was 99% solid. He is getting paid tons less than the guys who usually do the job. The company hasn’t given him any training. Any.
The management excuses are predictable:
- “Well, I haven’t had any training, either, and I’m doing all right.”
- “He took this work on. He could have said ‘No.’”
- “It was a personality trait that caused the issue, not a lack of training.”
- “He just got out of school. He should know these things.”
- “We go through so many engineers; it’s hard to know what their abilities are.”
- “The vendors should be responsible for training our people. We should back-charge them.”
I should cut them some slack, because your brain does not get much oxygen when your head is buried in sand.
Back to the engineer, though… He is feeling put out, because he believes he went the extra mile to benefit the company, and when things went badly they turned on him like a neurotic ex-girlfriend. Do you think he’ll ever do that again? Hell no. He even went so far as to update his resume and send it to a couple recruiters.
A week in Orlando
Comments
Post a Comment