In most organizational environments, individual procurement skills are not enough. Overcoming organizational barriers is the real key to success.
“There is nothing worse than sending a changed person back into an unchanged organization.” – Warren Bennis
Many organizations invest in training programs to build capability in procurement across their teams. Yet despite the rave reviews for the workshops, months later the same managers confess that little has changed in the way they go about their work.
Why is it that building procurement capability skills can fail to produce organizational results?
Conventional wisdom suggests that it is simply difficult for employees to break old habits. But such failures also occur because leaders focus too much on building general procurement skills, and not enough on assessing and changing organizational constraints — in the way that roles, processes and incentives are structured — that compromise their teams ability to apply what they learned.
Success in leading organizations comes from going beyond individual training. Instead they work to implement effective processes, to support their teams and provide opportunities to apply learning and to align goals with appropriate success metrics and rewards.
Skills training alone is unlikely to overcome organizational barriers to change.
In large organizations, training and development expenditures are often earmarked for a particular service, such as coaching, training or consulting. When a vendor seeks to provide a more valuable integrated solution, finding the clients key master to unlocking the value from an integrated solution, can be problematic. The answer, is not simply to revert to training.
At Purchasing Practice we seek to report to clients what we observe about learners’ chances of succeeding after training:
- Success is unlikely without an organizational learning plan that diagnoses the challenges, pinpoints opportunities for improvement and provides resources to make change happen.
- Implementing the plan requires identifying multiple internal champions who can guide and select targeted interventions — including tailored training, coaching and aligning success metrics with individual and group performance rewards — to catalyze organizational change.
IN OTHER WORDS, TRAINING SHOULD BE A FIRST STEP TOWARDS A REAL RETURN ON INVESTMENT.
This is best achieved by forming a KNOWLEDGE PARTNERSHIP between your organization and outside experts, and leveraging the strengths of both.
Making change happen
Making meaningful changes can be a challenge, given existing strategic and structural barriers:
- At the strategic level, it can mean describing a new value proposition, a new strategy for building a coalition or a new way of structuring compensation or risk.
- At the structural level, it might mean re-engineering procurement processes to increase effectiveness.
- At the individual learning learning, it could mean providing a model, a language, shared concepts and opportunities to practice that involve the specific challenges faced in their organization.
The best procurement organizations understand that capability is not just the byproduct of individual skill-building, but a critical organizational capability:
- For organizations, this means procurement behaviors and outcomes are most likely to change when an organization is willing to go beyond a commitment to training individuals. Instead, it actively situates teams within the structures, strategies and incentives that will enable them to apply more powerful behaviors in their roles.
- For procurement professionals, it means they should insist that their senior management take a more systemic approach to improving training & development outcomes, by moving beyond training workshops and mentoring to interventions that will improve the execution environment for their teams.
And one more thing, research indicates that procurement leaders outperform followers by 32%.
Nuff said…
At Purchasing Practice we have developed the Procurement Capability Chain which recognizes the impact the organizational environment has upon individual capability. Our Academy supports organization wide learning and with our iProcure Analytics platform we support organization wide capability building and program embedded learning.
To learn more contact us at [email protected]
To learn more about iProcure Analytics go to www.purchasingassessments.com