Professional HR by Kearns Paul;Gershkoff-Stowe Lisa;Rakison David H.;

Author:Kearns, Paul;Gershkoff-Stowe, Lisa;Rakison, David H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

• Reaction to the training (usually a happy or smile sheet).

• Checking what has been learned (usually a test).

• Behavioural transfer (checking to see if they are using the learning in practice, in the workplace).

• Business impact ($’s)

The Phillips version adds an extra, but entirely superfluous, fifth level to produce an ROI calculation that can be adequately calculated at level 4; as long as a Baseline has been established first.

These models might look perfectly innocuous but a properly trained L&D Professional will be able to highlight their flaws. The most glaring error is that the first level, Level 1, starts much too late; after the training has already happened. There is no requirement in these standard ASTD models to produce a Baseline of evidence, if there were the BBC would not have spent £35 million on a leadership programme with no Baseline. This very obvious point is the equivalent of a General Medical Council imposing no requirement on doctors to record symptoms, collect data and undertake a thorough diagnosis before prescribing treatment. (For further technical detail on the theory and practice of evaluation see ‘Kearns 2005’).

So, if you believe you have a problem with leadership, the only evidence-based way to manage that belief is first to translate it into a Baseline, with evidence of what damage or missed opportunities poor leadership is causing. You cannot take another single step until you have a Baseline. There is no point in reaching for the academic journals on research into leadership at this stage. Academics that research leadership, using surveys and case studies in accordance with the conventional pyramid of evidence, might expect to reach the apex of that pyramid with systematic reviews of leadership studies. Yet such systematic reviews can only ever be as good as the Baseline from which they work. If academics have never pinned individual leaders down to a personal baseline it is impossible for their subsequent studies, systematic or otherwise, to produce any causative evidence of performance improvement that is attributable to leadership. Their research would have to fall back on correlations between leadership development and company performance. Any such connection would be tenuous. Using regression analysis and the peer review process cannot improve the quality of such correlations without a solid evidence base. It does not matter how many academic peers review the data, they will not be able to add any weight to this poor quality evidence.

It appears we have stumbled across another alarming fact. The peer review process in social and management science, where the outcomes are difficult to determine, is rather meaningless if your peers are not all, uniformly, evidence-based. We saw earlier that there is certainly no consensus on EBM in academia and how some academics even ridicule ‘the very idea’. This is why we have no evidence today of what effective leadership or Professional management looks like. The academic research and peer review system has failed to produce any meaningful evidence. The implications of these findings are very worrying.

The consequences of this

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