Allied health providers: is your employee development program muddle-headed?
The big picture:
Quality allied health care providers invest in employee development for lots of reasons, including to execute their business strategy, strengthen culture, help employees grow, meet compliance obligations, and to innovate. Sometimes, these goals conflict, and it’s important to be clear with employees about what you are trying to achieve, and why.
Zoom in:
Associate Professor Gianpiero Petriglieri has developed a useful framework that identifies three main approaches to lead learning in an organisation:
- Custodians see learning, primarily, as a way of executing business strategy and strengthening culture, with a primary goal of getting everyone to pull in the same direction and to uphold existing standards. This approach tends to favour boot-camp style learning, with explicit teaching and deliberate practice of new skills.
- Challengers are focused on developing employees, and think that employees have an intrinsic right to grow, forge their own paths in an organisation, and to be free to try out new ideas. This approach tends to favour self-guided and personalised learning plans, with less emphasis on filling gaps and more emphasis on exploring interests and experimenting with new ideas.
- Connectors attempt to find a balance, integrating business and employee-centred goals.
Why it matters:
No approach is inherently right. The best approach for an allied health provider depends on its mission, culture, size, services, and business context:
- A custodian approach might be most successful when there is a pressing need for everyone to be aligned around a common goal, e.g. following the launch of a new strategy or after a period of fast growth.
- A challenger approach might be most appropriate when a provider needs new ideas and innovations urgently. Giving employees more freedom to explore their interests can also help small and medium-sized providers increase recruitment and retention when you can’t compete with bigger organisation’s pay rates.
- A connector approach sounds great in theory. It’s really hard to pull off, and, if mishandled, can result in unfocused development plans that fail to achieve business or employee goals.
Bottom line:
For reputable allied health providers, proper staff training is both necessary and expensive. Providers should strive to communicate their learning values and approach clearly so that everyone understands their individual learning goals in the context of the provider’s mission and business.
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Tools to try:
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