Investing in training: a key to everyone's future!
23 August 2010
Read by 1693 persons
Training needs have never been so high in Moroccan companies, and many managers understand that their company's competitive advantage depends on developing the expertise of their executives and teams.
Eric Mellet and Philippe Pierre discuss collective intelligence as the ability of a group of individuals to project a future and achieve it in a complex context. As a training director, Eric Mellet has developed an "off-site" university, of a learning organization type, bringing together 44 countries and 5,000 people trained to date. As for Philippe Pierre, a specialist in international mobility management and intercultural management, former HRD of L'Oréal, he now advises several Moroccan companies and teaches in several international institutions.
LE MATIN EMPLOI: We are hearing more and more about corporate universities. In your opinion, why is there such development, and what are its fundamentals? Do they differ from academic universities?
Eric Mellet: We must be wary of fads. In the worst-case scenario, this development of corporate universities is done to compete with the prestige of academic knowledge, to deliver false diplomas and thus to cover oneself with laurels cheaply. In the best-case scenario, corporate universities help employees break away from a repetitive understanding of their job. They also help to break down compartmentalization because, in companies, we often face hermetically sealed silos of concepts, techniques, or habits that crystallize over time. When people are involved and train, they invent a future that includes them. They identify with what they create and naturally tend to defend their creation. The knowledge society that is emerging in companies, characterized by increased mobility of social ties, is accompanied by a need for the generalization of knowledge in "context," i.e., knowledge that takes into account action knowledge, aiming at expertise and problem-solving. In this regard, an adult in training is not someone who doesn't know, but someone who aspires to know differently to better build their own autonomy of thought and action. But above all, when the trainer is very good, the motivational effect exists, then falls. To prevent this effect from declining, it may be interesting to consider that the trained people, back in their entities, train in turn.
The rapid application of what one has learned also aims to make every manager or leader aware of their role as a "transmitter" within a course. Giving, receiving, and appreciating giving back: this is a golden rule of reciprocity that the individual assumes in informal learning. This is one of the foundations of corporate or brand universities.
Let's delve deeper into this. What is done in these corporate universities in the age of new technologies?
Philippe Pierre: Quite classically, these universities are the site of training seminars, conferences, e-learning sessions, training of trainers, coaching, and self-learning methods through, for example, the dissemination of CDs or videos.... But the most innovative of these universities also offer competitive intelligence studies in different countries, communities of practice on innovative themes, and partnerships with major universities for the development of training modules. In these places of professional knowledge, we are beginning to work not on the distribution of PowerPoint presentations with attendance sheets but on the animation of emerging collective knowledge. We are moving towards communities of knowledge. That is, we learn through collective contact with other people who want to learn. The challenge is also to animate networks often external to the company. We could call these systems "collective intelligence activators." We are looking for a multiplier effect of expertise that we lack! In this sense, a learning organization aims to give everyone the opportunity to learn continuously and possess a share of the memory of collective knowledge.
Eric Mellet: These corporate or brand universities also invite reflection on the animation of large groups of trained people. How can individual and collective energy be multiplied and an "event" be created? We are faced with a paradox between, on the one hand, new technologies that a priori favor "more together, faster" to collaborate, create, and innovate, and a form of solitude at work generated by the generalization of the "project mode" which sometimes tends to de-responsibilize, with ever-stronger economic constraints. However, the feeling of belonging to a group, which ultimately gives meaning to solitary effort, finds its recognition in the sensation of contributing and being recognized by one's peers, which the virtual alone seems, until proven otherwise, unable to generate in a strong and lasting way. It should be noted that the new fashion in schools and universities is the return to the graduation ceremony with speeches and other costumes. For salespeople used to working alone with clients, for example, the collective training moment is, provided the environment is benevolent, a unique opportunity to question themselves, try new methods, exchange, and receive "good tips" and "tricks that work." In short, to draw new motivation from the strength of the collective to return to the field. Very often, training has value by integrating, of course, "blended learning" tools upstream of our seminars or conventions, but, for us, this contributes above all to an overall engineering approach that aims to optimize face-to-face time as much as possible. The objective is that the "shared experience" is inscribed as a positive anchor in individual memories and collective memory. Thus, the necessary risk-taking to train in a new practice is recognized by the group, celebrated as it should be so that the desire to reproduce in reality outweighs the fear of failure and the return to the old habit. It is moreover through its results and the proof provided on the ground during an "on-the-job support" that the person is truly certified at a level acquired following the initial training.
What functions do you assign to training in companies today?
Philippe Pierre: Training, it is said, helps to manage change. What are we actually changing? Certainly, the representations that the actors have of the nature of the change process. Let us remember that meaning does not come from the messages transmitted by organizations, even the richest, but from the analysis that the actors make of them. Training helps to anticipate the future by building scenarios for transformation. It must help to give birth to the future. Training has always represented, for business leaders, an opportunity to adjust the workforce to changes of all kinds, technological for example. Training has also often been seen as a guarantee of social peace. This has resulted in a massive trend towards short training courses that are supposedly directly related to the company, professional work, new equipment, and means of production. But, on closer inspection, expectations regarding training have gradually evolved within a global framework of reflection, with lifelong professional training aimed at optimizing and enhancing the company's human capital.
Training in the company is the link between now and the hypothesis of tomorrow, between constraint and aspiration. Training represents, within the company, a concrete challenge for the actors since they are all concerned by their future. Training is not a simple "interlude" in professional life, neither for company managers, nor for training managers, nor for trainers, nor for trainees.
In rapidly transforming companies, immersed in an unstable economic and political environment, training is a challenge, with aspects whose nature and meaning it is interesting to discover. Training, beyond appearances, is not just a plan composed of training actions, a policy that "floats" independently, with the sole objective of acquiring new "knowledge." Training is forcing oneself to see the company as a formal organizational and management structure, a place of negotiation and power relations between actors and a place for building identities and collective cultures that explain the meaning individuals place in their actions and the legitimacy they do or do not grant to management choices.
How do you recognize the success of training?
Eric Mellet: Training sessions, when successful, are intense moments of dialogue. It is rare that trainees do not experience satisfaction in saying what they often know best and what takes them the most time: their work life. We often forget that people in training are also constant witnesses, sometimes former ones, of the company's life. For the trainer, provided they have learned to analyze them, this testimony would have invaluable, irreplaceable value in reconstructing what is today - here and now - the fabric of relationships in the company. If the facts usually collected by the sociologist or the "passing" consultant are social facts, i.e., relationships, interactions and, at first glance, observable verbal or non-verbal behaviors, one can easily imagine the interest these moments represent for the trainer. These behaviors that precede, accompany, constitute, and follow this training constitute invaluable "raw material." A good training sequence makes implicit truths explicit.
Trainers should make it a point to address with each person, after the training, the difficulties and problems that the implementation of the new skills acquired in each personal work situation will inevitably raise.
Training should also be understood as a communication action in that it is both an action consisting of disseminating new professional achievements and building a shared culture around a constantly evolving company identity to adapt to its context. Thus, if one wishes to implement a sustainable training system, it is still necessary to ensure that all feedback elements are taken into consideration to improve the entire training process on the one hand and to make it more credible in the eyes of skeptics on the other. In this sense, the important thing is not to propose a "just" model of change or organization but to accompany trained employees in constantly restoring the meaning of their actions by giving them the "power to be themselves."
We can certainly consider training as a Swiss Army knife: there is always a blade that serves what we need! In other words, the employee who follows training will always get something out of it, if only the pleasure of "recharging their batteries," networking or strengthening a network of useful colleagues... Traditionally, training is adaptation to the position, it is an attempt to adapt to technical skills that are actually changing at high speed. The challenge is to think about the identification and transmission of informal knowledge.
In what way are training sessions also real places of recognition?
Philippe Pierre: Training sessions can allow the transmission of knowledge and know-how that are too poorly codified to be integrated into databases or to be the subject of training.
To use a stimulating and deliberately polemical expression by N. ALTER in his work "Giving and Taking. Cooperation in the Company" published by La Découverte, we could say that employees are often poorly exploited by companies! "The malaise in companies comes from the company's inability to recognize the value of employees' gifts, the value of their work, rather than its desire to make the most of their contribution." HR practices are still little interested in the culture of professional environments, customs, and rituals that promote the true sharing of skills. However, N. ALTER notes, competence is becoming increasingly collective with the increasing complexity of the necessary coordination work. We want to know less who did it than what makes it possible to reproduce it again. These emotional and symbolic dimensions of the exchange are generally ignored. Experiencing the feeling of existing, of participating in a collective being that articulates cognitive, affective, formal, and informal aspects is a key dimension of training sessions, presupposing the discovery or rediscovery of a collective identity.
"But the feeling of being able to participate in a "whole" - whether it is called a profession, workshop, project, network, mission, or company - often outweighs calculation." Everyone has a taste for making procedures intelligent.
V. MERLE in "Lifelong Learning: Why, How?", which is the report of the quarterly UNESCO public hearing for the World Committee for Education and Lifelong Learning, points out that an adult in training "is not someone who doesn't know, but someone who aspires to know differently to better build their own autonomy of thought and action. From this point of view, the lifelong learning project implies not only an improvement in access to training but may above all be a restoration of favorable conditions for this desire to learn"
Eric Mellet: In the actions we carry out, we aim to create "pleasure" in training so that participants can want to transmit and learn again. The organized "Training Camps" help to develop a sense of personal effectiveness with experiences of overcoming failures, a time for self-observation, the comparison of one's own performance with that of one's colleagues. Concentration, technical mastery, and psychic relaxation... In our training, the celebrations of successes also represent a conscious moment of crystallization of the group's history and the relationship with others. We do not succeed in learning by systematically reducing the festive expressions of professional identities.
We do not succeed by constantly creating new procedures and regulations, but we risk that social exchange practices are based on this affective dimension. For Americans, "emotion is motion," it is emotion that generates movement. We always cooperate with someone because we want to cooperate with them and less because it is necessary or because the urgency of the problem to be addressed is great in the eyes of their bosses.
What makes an organization intelligent?
Philippe Pierre: It is perhaps the ability of the members of this organization to create a universe of "shared meanings." This implies listening to one's colleagues and welcoming each person's unique perspective as an opportunity. For this universe to be fertilized, employees must want to constantly scrutinize the world outside the company to discover technical expertise, knowledge in which others have already invested, thus integrating external contributions through networks and alliances. This approach combines learning and cost savings. The experience of many corporate and brand universities shows that the emphasis on competition is often the worst enemy of learning. To learn, we must recognize that there is something we do not know, or practice activities that we do not master and allow others to help us. But in most organizations, admitting ignorance is a sign of weakness; our value depends on what we know and not on what we are learning.
Eric Mellet: The key is also in exploring the "how to do it." This is where innovation lies, not only from a "best practice" that is inherently limited when it is frozen as a "form" to the detriment of the process. Only error, when corrected, is a source of lasting progress. Wisdom is transmitted by the one who knows to the learner so that he himself pushes the exploration further. The explorer does not go on an adventure in that he has meticulously prepared himself, that he has studied the existing and planned his action, but the explorer is also the one who is able to adapt, to question existing knowledge and his representation of the world if the situation requires it. Only the new idea, the new thought is appropriate in the context that presents itself. If everyone in an organization, whatever their role, shares this attitude of thought when it comes to exchanging ideas or taking action, then we can speak of an "intelligent organization."
Published July 12, 2010
Posted online August 23, 2010
Lematin.ma
Eric Mellet and Philippe Pierre discuss collective intelligence as the ability of a group of individuals to project a future and achieve it in a complex context. As a training director, Eric Mellet has developed an "off-site" university, of a learning organization type, bringing together 44 countries and 5,000 people trained to date. As for Philippe Pierre, a specialist in international mobility management and intercultural management, former HRD of L'Oréal, he now advises several Moroccan companies and teaches in several international institutions.
LE MATIN EMPLOI: We are hearing more and more about corporate universities. In your opinion, why is there such development, and what are its fundamentals? Do they differ from academic universities?
Eric Mellet: We must be wary of fads. In the worst-case scenario, this development of corporate universities is done to compete with the prestige of academic knowledge, to deliver false diplomas and thus to cover oneself with laurels cheaply. In the best-case scenario, corporate universities help employees break away from a repetitive understanding of their job. They also help to break down compartmentalization because, in companies, we often face hermetically sealed silos of concepts, techniques, or habits that crystallize over time. When people are involved and train, they invent a future that includes them. They identify with what they create and naturally tend to defend their creation. The knowledge society that is emerging in companies, characterized by increased mobility of social ties, is accompanied by a need for the generalization of knowledge in "context," i.e., knowledge that takes into account action knowledge, aiming at expertise and problem-solving. In this regard, an adult in training is not someone who doesn't know, but someone who aspires to know differently to better build their own autonomy of thought and action. But above all, when the trainer is very good, the motivational effect exists, then falls. To prevent this effect from declining, it may be interesting to consider that the trained people, back in their entities, train in turn.
The rapid application of what one has learned also aims to make every manager or leader aware of their role as a "transmitter" within a course. Giving, receiving, and appreciating giving back: this is a golden rule of reciprocity that the individual assumes in informal learning. This is one of the foundations of corporate or brand universities.
Let's delve deeper into this. What is done in these corporate universities in the age of new technologies?
Philippe Pierre: Quite classically, these universities are the site of training seminars, conferences, e-learning sessions, training of trainers, coaching, and self-learning methods through, for example, the dissemination of CDs or videos.... But the most innovative of these universities also offer competitive intelligence studies in different countries, communities of practice on innovative themes, and partnerships with major universities for the development of training modules. In these places of professional knowledge, we are beginning to work not on the distribution of PowerPoint presentations with attendance sheets but on the animation of emerging collective knowledge. We are moving towards communities of knowledge. That is, we learn through collective contact with other people who want to learn. The challenge is also to animate networks often external to the company. We could call these systems "collective intelligence activators." We are looking for a multiplier effect of expertise that we lack! In this sense, a learning organization aims to give everyone the opportunity to learn continuously and possess a share of the memory of collective knowledge.
Eric Mellet: These corporate or brand universities also invite reflection on the animation of large groups of trained people. How can individual and collective energy be multiplied and an "event" be created? We are faced with a paradox between, on the one hand, new technologies that a priori favor "more together, faster" to collaborate, create, and innovate, and a form of solitude at work generated by the generalization of the "project mode" which sometimes tends to de-responsibilize, with ever-stronger economic constraints. However, the feeling of belonging to a group, which ultimately gives meaning to solitary effort, finds its recognition in the sensation of contributing and being recognized by one's peers, which the virtual alone seems, until proven otherwise, unable to generate in a strong and lasting way. It should be noted that the new fashion in schools and universities is the return to the graduation ceremony with speeches and other costumes. For salespeople used to working alone with clients, for example, the collective training moment is, provided the environment is benevolent, a unique opportunity to question themselves, try new methods, exchange, and receive "good tips" and "tricks that work." In short, to draw new motivation from the strength of the collective to return to the field. Very often, training has value by integrating, of course, "blended learning" tools upstream of our seminars or conventions, but, for us, this contributes above all to an overall engineering approach that aims to optimize face-to-face time as much as possible. The objective is that the "shared experience" is inscribed as a positive anchor in individual memories and collective memory. Thus, the necessary risk-taking to train in a new practice is recognized by the group, celebrated as it should be so that the desire to reproduce in reality outweighs the fear of failure and the return to the old habit. It is moreover through its results and the proof provided on the ground during an "on-the-job support" that the person is truly certified at a level acquired following the initial training.
What functions do you assign to training in companies today?
Philippe Pierre: Training, it is said, helps to manage change. What are we actually changing? Certainly, the representations that the actors have of the nature of the change process. Let us remember that meaning does not come from the messages transmitted by organizations, even the richest, but from the analysis that the actors make of them. Training helps to anticipate the future by building scenarios for transformation. It must help to give birth to the future. Training has always represented, for business leaders, an opportunity to adjust the workforce to changes of all kinds, technological for example. Training has also often been seen as a guarantee of social peace. This has resulted in a massive trend towards short training courses that are supposedly directly related to the company, professional work, new equipment, and means of production. But, on closer inspection, expectations regarding training have gradually evolved within a global framework of reflection, with lifelong professional training aimed at optimizing and enhancing the company's human capital.
Training in the company is the link between now and the hypothesis of tomorrow, between constraint and aspiration. Training represents, within the company, a concrete challenge for the actors since they are all concerned by their future. Training is not a simple "interlude" in professional life, neither for company managers, nor for training managers, nor for trainers, nor for trainees.
In rapidly transforming companies, immersed in an unstable economic and political environment, training is a challenge, with aspects whose nature and meaning it is interesting to discover. Training, beyond appearances, is not just a plan composed of training actions, a policy that "floats" independently, with the sole objective of acquiring new "knowledge." Training is forcing oneself to see the company as a formal organizational and management structure, a place of negotiation and power relations between actors and a place for building identities and collective cultures that explain the meaning individuals place in their actions and the legitimacy they do or do not grant to management choices.
How do you recognize the success of training?
Eric Mellet: Training sessions, when successful, are intense moments of dialogue. It is rare that trainees do not experience satisfaction in saying what they often know best and what takes them the most time: their work life. We often forget that people in training are also constant witnesses, sometimes former ones, of the company's life. For the trainer, provided they have learned to analyze them, this testimony would have invaluable, irreplaceable value in reconstructing what is today - here and now - the fabric of relationships in the company. If the facts usually collected by the sociologist or the "passing" consultant are social facts, i.e., relationships, interactions and, at first glance, observable verbal or non-verbal behaviors, one can easily imagine the interest these moments represent for the trainer. These behaviors that precede, accompany, constitute, and follow this training constitute invaluable "raw material." A good training sequence makes implicit truths explicit.
Trainers should make it a point to address with each person, after the training, the difficulties and problems that the implementation of the new skills acquired in each personal work situation will inevitably raise.
Training should also be understood as a communication action in that it is both an action consisting of disseminating new professional achievements and building a shared culture around a constantly evolving company identity to adapt to its context. Thus, if one wishes to implement a sustainable training system, it is still necessary to ensure that all feedback elements are taken into consideration to improve the entire training process on the one hand and to make it more credible in the eyes of skeptics on the other. In this sense, the important thing is not to propose a "just" model of change or organization but to accompany trained employees in constantly restoring the meaning of their actions by giving them the "power to be themselves."
We can certainly consider training as a Swiss Army knife: there is always a blade that serves what we need! In other words, the employee who follows training will always get something out of it, if only the pleasure of "recharging their batteries," networking or strengthening a network of useful colleagues... Traditionally, training is adaptation to the position, it is an attempt to adapt to technical skills that are actually changing at high speed. The challenge is to think about the identification and transmission of informal knowledge.
In what way are training sessions also real places of recognition?
Philippe Pierre: Training sessions can allow the transmission of knowledge and know-how that are too poorly codified to be integrated into databases or to be the subject of training.
To use a stimulating and deliberately polemical expression by N. ALTER in his work "Giving and Taking. Cooperation in the Company" published by La Découverte, we could say that employees are often poorly exploited by companies! "The malaise in companies comes from the company's inability to recognize the value of employees' gifts, the value of their work, rather than its desire to make the most of their contribution." HR practices are still little interested in the culture of professional environments, customs, and rituals that promote the true sharing of skills. However, N. ALTER notes, competence is becoming increasingly collective with the increasing complexity of the necessary coordination work. We want to know less who did it than what makes it possible to reproduce it again. These emotional and symbolic dimensions of the exchange are generally ignored. Experiencing the feeling of existing, of participating in a collective being that articulates cognitive, affective, formal, and informal aspects is a key dimension of training sessions, presupposing the discovery or rediscovery of a collective identity.
"But the feeling of being able to participate in a "whole" - whether it is called a profession, workshop, project, network, mission, or company - often outweighs calculation." Everyone has a taste for making procedures intelligent.
V. MERLE in "Lifelong Learning: Why, How?", which is the report of the quarterly UNESCO public hearing for the World Committee for Education and Lifelong Learning, points out that an adult in training "is not someone who doesn't know, but someone who aspires to know differently to better build their own autonomy of thought and action. From this point of view, the lifelong learning project implies not only an improvement in access to training but may above all be a restoration of favorable conditions for this desire to learn"
Eric Mellet: In the actions we carry out, we aim to create "pleasure" in training so that participants can want to transmit and learn again. The organized "Training Camps" help to develop a sense of personal effectiveness with experiences of overcoming failures, a time for self-observation, the comparison of one's own performance with that of one's colleagues. Concentration, technical mastery, and psychic relaxation... In our training, the celebrations of successes also represent a conscious moment of crystallization of the group's history and the relationship with others. We do not succeed in learning by systematically reducing the festive expressions of professional identities.
We do not succeed by constantly creating new procedures and regulations, but we risk that social exchange practices are based on this affective dimension. For Americans, "emotion is motion," it is emotion that generates movement. We always cooperate with someone because we want to cooperate with them and less because it is necessary or because the urgency of the problem to be addressed is great in the eyes of their bosses.
What makes an organization intelligent?
Philippe Pierre: It is perhaps the ability of the members of this organization to create a universe of "shared meanings." This implies listening to one's colleagues and welcoming each person's unique perspective as an opportunity. For this universe to be fertilized, employees must want to constantly scrutinize the world outside the company to discover technical expertise, knowledge in which others have already invested, thus integrating external contributions through networks and alliances. This approach combines learning and cost savings. The experience of many corporate and brand universities shows that the emphasis on competition is often the worst enemy of learning. To learn, we must recognize that there is something we do not know, or practice activities that we do not master and allow others to help us. But in most organizations, admitting ignorance is a sign of weakness; our value depends on what we know and not on what we are learning.
Eric Mellet: The key is also in exploring the "how to do it." This is where innovation lies, not only from a "best practice" that is inherently limited when it is frozen as a "form" to the detriment of the process. Only error, when corrected, is a source of lasting progress. Wisdom is transmitted by the one who knows to the learner so that he himself pushes the exploration further. The explorer does not go on an adventure in that he has meticulously prepared himself, that he has studied the existing and planned his action, but the explorer is also the one who is able to adapt, to question existing knowledge and his representation of the world if the situation requires it. Only the new idea, the new thought is appropriate in the context that presents itself. If everyone in an organization, whatever their role, shares this attitude of thought when it comes to exchanging ideas or taking action, then we can speak of an "intelligent organization."
Published July 12, 2010
Posted online August 23, 2010
Lematin.ma
