A hybrid program over 10 weeks
on
Training Strategy that Targets your Business Targets
When ‘Making Strategy Work’ is the cover topic of the Harvard Business Review
as it was in March 2015 (it continues to regularly occupy cover space)
it’s clear that many organizations struggle with effective strategy.
In fact, business research shows that most business strategies fail.
What could make your environmental training strategy different?
Here’s what I’ve heard some hard-working environment and sustainability managers say:
- ‘The problems are so many and pressing, there’s no time to do anything other than react to them as they crop up.’
- ‘Everything we do is equally important – we can’t prioritize any one thing over another.’
- ‘We’re just never sure that we’re doing the right thing, what we should be doing at any given time.’
- ‘We don’t have the budget to do what needs doing – we spend a lot of time asking other departments for some of theirs.’
They just don’t have the time or resources to take a strategic approach to the issues. And having to fit environmental training into the mix makes it even more difficult.
Is this you?
With no written strategy for your training, you are finding it difficult to be sure that you are:
- setting the right priorities that reflect business risks and opportunities;
- allocating your scarce training resources to the right places;
- helping the right people to support their staff after they’ve attended training;
- using the best possible training methods for the different people who need training, from ‘boots to suits’; or
- setting up your training so that you can evaluate how effective it is.
Other problems I’ve noticed over many years are that:
- strategies that do get written are so high-level that they have little or no relevance or impact at the operational level, where change has to happen;
- most environment and sustainability training initiatives are developed by subject matter experts who do not have a background in business or professional training, so their great work doesn’t realize its full potential for organizational change;
- the focus is on the urgent environmental issues, while slower-burning sustainability issues can struggle to gain traction;
- organizations struggle to execute even the most beautiful strategies; and
- strategies seldom relate to the business or policy outcomes in a way that enables measurement of their effectiveness and return on investment.
If you’re ready to create an environmental training strategy
that maps onto your organization’s strengths, weakness, threats and opportunities;
can justify its priorities and budget and measure its effectiveness;
and is persuasive and credible enough to enlist participants from all around your organization –
then this is the program for you.
Who stands to benefit from this environmental training strategy program?
Do you work for a:
- company that needs to roll out environment and sustainability training in the most cost-effective way?
- professional association trying to do the same for your members?
- government body considering or already rolling out environmental and/or sustainability training to address a range of issues across different sectors?
- not-for-profit wanting to develop a training strategy to support the work you do?
Are you:
- an environmental expert being asked to deliver training?
- an environmental manager being asked to prepare a training plan or strategy?
- responding to requests for training on a long list of very different topics and wondering how to organize them?
If you answered Yes to any if the questions above, then this program is a must.
Collaborative learning
A highlight of the workshop was its informal and workshop-style, collaboratively learning with everyone – learning from all their and your experiences. Thank you for a great workshop, Clare. Sue Ira, Koru Environmental Ltd
Heads up: this is a WORK-shop style program: every week you have outputs to deliver that inform the learning and work for the following week. You will need to set aside 3-4 hours per week – and guard them zealously if you want to derive maximum benefit.
The good news? You will choose a workplace buddy to support you, instantly doubling the value of this investment to your employer.
This 10-week hybrid program will enable you build a robust environment and sustainability training strategy that:
- makes the business case for your training;
- identifies and prioritizes the different technical topics on which you will need to develop training programs;
- identifies the audiences and the best timing for your training;
- includes well-regarded business tools to make sure your strategy can be effectively implemented and sustained;
- is based on good practice adult vocational training, including on-job support and staff induction, development and retention;
- enables you to measure the effectiveness of your training;
- sets out the time, personnel, resources and budget you’ll need; and
- is demonstrably aligned with espoused business outcomes, including financial performance requirements.
Sharing was a highlight of the day
Sharing ideas and stories was a highlight of the day. I will plan time to start my strategy development – Step 1 is to develop a process map. Would like the follow up Training Program course early next year (so I can have a milestone to complete our strategy! Claire Jewell, Environmental Manager, Bluescope Pacific Steel
In this environment and sustainability training strategy program, you will:
- have the space to work with your own corporate environment and sustainability documents and operational processes, or those of a key client;
- access leading research from the worlds of professional training and business;
- have the time to work with people facing the same challenges and opportunities that you do;
- generate a table of contents uniquely tailored to your own strategic training needs;
- identify and prioritize subject-specific topics for which you need to develop one or more targeted training programs;
- reflect on and discuss examples from business and training literature including the influence of organizational culture on change programs;
- create a reading list to help you source the information you need to flesh out your table of contents into your own completed strategy; and
- set out how you will keep up to date with developments in the worlds of business and professional training.
Loved learning from our different perspectives and experiences
It was great to work with you all last week at the Training Strategy workshop! It was such an encouraging discussion and I loved learning from the different perspectives and experiences we all have. Thanks so much for a great training session and for being so open and collaborative …. I hope this is just the beginning! Jane James, KiwiRail.
Ongoing value from the Strategy workshop
You’ll assign your own values to the variables in a winning formula:
It’s an opportunity to pull together all those strands of information you’ve been collecting – and to add a few more diverse and useful sources. All this will help you to:
- impress the people whose support you need for your work;
- gain the confidence to build your own environment and sustainability training strategy – one that will meet your organization’s own unique needs;
- identify your own criteria for setting training priorities and being confident about how allocate your time, money, other resources and overall effort;
- maintain ongoing traction by using your environment and sustainability training strategy as a change agent; and
- set up and run a simple network system that is ideal for getting people to help you action your environment and sustainability strategy.
After the program, you will:
- feel confident you can set up an approach to your training that the best professional trainers could be proud of, using tools well-proven in use by trainers all around the world;
- understand the different approaches to training and other ways of managing environmental and sustainability issues;
- understand the many benefits of taking a strategic approach to your environment and sustainability training;
- be able to develop a training strategy that “joins the dots” between high level outcomes and operational requirements
- be able to write your strategy in a way that appeals to your many internal and external stakeholders; and
- know how to evaluate the effectiveness of your training strategy against both strategic and operational outcomes, including financial as well as environmental and sustainability outcomes and other outcomes of concern.
This outcomes-based prioritizing approach helps you build on your own risk management processes and works for both environment & sustainability and health & safety training programs.
Inspiring and humorous facilitator
Many many thanks again for the great workshop! It was a wonderful and inspiring group indeed, humorous and delightful. And I did learn heaps. A big compliment to you as a facilitator – you were really wonderful. Susie Wood, Sustainability@Work
You will realize value from this program every time you’re asked to justify your training; to explain how it helps to deliver business outcomes; to ask how its aligned with your HR/Learning and Development/People and Culture training programs; and to prepare a report on the implementation and outcomes of your strategy.
Extra add-ons
In addition to the online and face-to-face time with me and your peers, registering for the Strategy program also means you become eligible to receive a package of free add-ons.
Add One: Pre-program activity
Before the program I’ll ask you to dig out several pieces of information about your organization that you may not have considered relevant to your environmental training strategy. Throughout the day you will have opportunities to see how everything in the business relates to your strategy, and how your strategy needs a smart way of relating to everything in the business. (And yes this is smart and doable.)
Add Two: Reading list
During the program you’ll learn how to keep up with developments in the worlds of environment and sustainability; professional training; economics; and business and global risk. (And yes, this is all part of building a strategy that reflects your internal and external operating environments.)
Add Three: Post-program activity
After the workshop you’ll receive a follow-up supporting activity to help as you develop your strategy, talk with key people (during the workshop you’ll have added some names to the list of ‘usual suspects’) seek their views and socialize your strategy throughout all levels of the organization. (And yes, there is a respected business model for achieving this in a time-efficient way.)
Add Four: Online interactive webinar
We all know what it’s like to take time out of our usual work: it seems we spend the rest of the day catching up. But your environmental training strategy is important to you and your organization, so you do need to follow up on your tasks and ideas. So three or four weeks after the program I’ll host a 1-hour webinar where you can revisit the workshop content and your ‘to do’ list, hear from others how they’ve been going and ask questions.
Four add-ons that nearly double this program’s wrap-around value for you.
What’s more, you could score CPD points or hours!
By attending this program you may be able to obtain Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points or hours from your professional association. Send them the link to this page and ask them to contact me.
The 10-week program is 20 hours of training activity, excluding time for your own tasks each week between meetings. Some professional associations equate 1 CPD point for 1 hour of training activity. Your own professional association can tell you how many CPD points or hours this program will earn you.
If you’re ready to take your organization’s environmental training strategy to the next level of alignment with the business, then join me!
The investment to join this very well-received program is just
$997.00 per person pre-GST.
Tailored solutions
Click here to ask me about how I can tailor the delivery of this Training Strategy Program to meet your needs:
- in-house program
- short workshops
- webinars
- 1:1 or small group mentoring.
And you can also ask me about
- scheduled dates for my next Strategy Program
- group discounts
- workshops online or in places other than Auckland and New Zealand.