Where There’s Quality, There’s Training

By: Jerry Clor

As we see our business environment change and as the need to constantly address these changes challenge us, we must not overlook the obvious. Training has a voice…the quality of that voice is at issue.

Those of use who work in the training environment know the intrinsic value that we bring to an organization. This value is not always communicated well to senior management for a variety of reasons. It is all too easy to get caught up in our day-to-day activities and not pay attention to the strategic direction and needs of our company.

When asking trainers about strategic direction, sometime the response is “don’t we have a department for that?” and that is not entirely an unreasonable answer. The opportunity to participate in strategic direction is not always easy path. Alignment to strategy has to be more than a document for the value of training to come to the surface of most executive teams.

This never had been apparent to me until I had a live demonstration of this issue in action. A key customer of my company, a large regional health care provider, was seeking training to support a company wide “change” initiative. It is not too often that an internal group such as ours has a chance to work with the customer base. We were asked by account management to step in and provide a training service as a “value add” for this organization.

As with any training opportunity, a complete needs assessment was in order and this meeting with our customer provided the beginning to an eye-opening process that we brought back to our organization.

This account had found a need that it wanted to capitalize on, and training was the venue that they felt was the most efficient. There had been a complete change of senior management. A new “vision” for the company had been established. There was a core of forty-four key middle mangers that were needed to take this message out and implement the “new” environment envisioned by senior management. It is important to note that this health plan has no official training department, yet the critical nature of this effort certainly highlighted this deficiency. The account saw the need for a “Total Quality Management” (TQM) process, but before that could begin, an understanding of TQM was needed. Now this seemed to me to be old news. Deming style TQM that was developed in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s never had an application in health care and there is great debate still about the Deming approach. In the manufacturing environment we have seen the Six Sigma’s of the world take the center stage. Developing a Deming style TQM program for a service industry like health care had its challenges, but the motivation of this management team is what provoked us to press on with this project.

We had become part of the strategic team with senior management. The change masters of this organization were dedicated to bringing the message of quality to the forefront of every employees mind. This had not been done before here.

The training venue on TQM, while not new, provided the “voice” to the entire effort within the organization. The training program became the focus of the change effort and represented the voice of management.

Once the objectives for the program were set, the process of development began, again, under close communication with senior management. Never once during this effort did our project seem routine from a training perspective; we built and delivered the program as promised, but knowing our role was critical framed the effort with a certain urgency and importance.

This lesson was not lost on our team as we returned to the home office. We had an opportunity to debrief with our own senior management team and took the opportunity to share the experience with them. In many cases dealing with our internal customers is very much like dealing with the traditional customer base. Finding the “champion” in the market is analogous to finding that internal champion who sees the existing value and can open up communication channels so that the Training Department becomes closer to the strategic objectives of the corporation. The value of training resides most certainly in its core competency of bringing employees to the place expected by management, but offering an additional venue, a value venue, makes Training an integral part of the corporate effort in the marketplace.

SUMMARY

Although we took away a lesson learned from our customer, the opportunity arose as our own account manager saw value in what we do in training. We had an ally in the sales area that felt that we could partner with him and with the customer to meet a need. This “account team management” model provided benefit to the client account, but to our internal customer (sales) as well. Part of our new design is to position ourselves for this interaction in the future.

It is important not to forget the basics. We would not have reaped the benefit of this entire customer experience if we somehow cut back or incompletely managed the needs analysis portion of the training design.

The critical component, and undoubtedly the risk, is centered on your ability to deliver on target the end result of what the customer wanted. We felt we had the internal competency, but also the internal capacity to deliver this training and improve the customer relationship significantly by our participation. If that alone was accomplished it would be considered a resounding success. The addition of seeing a strategic link to this was an added benefit that enhanced our overall organizational effectiveness. We began internal discussions that would never have occurred without recognizing the larger context of what we were asked to do.

What has now become obvious is that there is an inextricable link between the training function and the strategic process in adding quality to both the customer, and to the corporation.

Training and Strategic Synergies

• A Training Department aligned with corporate strategy offers an additional “voice” for that strategy, both internally and externally.

• An internal “champion” can be a critical component for strategy alignment, and for upward value communications.

• The higher the quality of training the more opportunity you provide the organization to use your dept in expanded roles. (i.e. Value Ads)

• Never over-look the basics in needs assessment or complete program design.

• Understanding the sales model of your company is critical in providing synergy, and garnering support for the training venue.

• Never underestimate the opportunity to benefit from the “context” of a training program, internally or externally.

Total Quality Management

• W. Edwards Deming forged a new model of business that basically was “inclusive” from a responsibility for the process by all employees.

• Deming’s’ model took Japan and Germany manufacturing industries by storm and over took productivity of any US production methodology.

• Application to the service sector of Deming’s TQM technology has been sporadic at best and remains unstudied in most business models.

Jerry Clor is a 27-year veteran of the Pharmaceutical industry and has served in the Training Departments at the Squibb Corporation and at Bayer Pharmaceuticals. He has piloted positions in Managed Care and Managed Markets training, and has extensive managed care experience in account management. He has served on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Preferred Provider Organizations and has presented at the National Managed Care Congress in Washington DC.

Currently Clor is the Director of Operations & Training for Delphi Health Systems, Inc a Connecticut based disease state management technology company servicing the provider based market. Contact can be made via email at geclor@delphihealth.com

This article was published in the Summer 2004 edition of FOCUS MAGAZINE the official magazine of the Society of Pharmaceutical and Biotech Trainers (Volume 14, Number 3)