September 2009

This Month's Features

FMI's Executive Coaching

Just as the best athletes have coaches, strong leaders often have coaches as well. In tough times, the need for coaching is even greater. Our FMI coaches bring more than 100 years of combined coaching experience coupled with specialized industry knowledge that can help you through these turbulent times.

Click here to learn more about FMI's Executive Coaching.

What FMI Executive Coaching clients are saying:

• "When you have the ability to make change and improvement to someone who affects your business, affects the growth of team members and affects your image – can you afford not to complete something like this? My answer is no!"

• "I already have made a greater contribution to this company as a result of coaching – both from a performance and a supervisory standpoint. In working with my group of a dozen people, they have their subordinates as well; I think it’s important how the impact transcends my group."

The "Practical Tools for Exceptional Leaders" booklet series is designed to help you learn and apply best of class leadership principles in your life and within your organization.
Click here to purchase

A Letter From Ron Magnus, Managing Director

This week marks the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the resulting chaos that rocked Wall Street. Few were spared from the losses that shook the stock market afterwards. The impact on 401(k)'s, home prices and brokerage accounts was shocking. This shock was made even more immediate due to the fact that instant access allows us to monitor the performance of our investments by the second.

As individuals, and as business leaders, we are used to monitoring our investments. We can look at our accounts 24 hours a day online and we can easily access the most recent performance of our businesses to find out our Return on Equity. These hard-edged measures are readily at our fingertips each day. However, when it comes to tracking the return on investment in people, the stakes are higher and yet the outcomes are much murkier. Most companies make significant investments in their people through coaching, seminars, training and orientation without taking a rigorous look at what they are getting in return.

The most effective developmental efforts are highly intentional, tightly aligned with the vision and strategy of an organization, customized to the individual, and have a clear set of outcomes that link back to the bottom line. This issue of the Leadership e-Newsletter looks at the how and why behind measuring return on investment in talent development.

Ron Magnus

Follow Up on Training and Calculate Your Return on Investment

Even the best training programs will be ineffective if the lessons learned aren’t reinforced by the company and if acquired skills aren’t used. Training should have specific objectives, and best-of-class companies always understand those objectives and measure the results of their training to ensure that it is achieving the intended purpose.

Employee development extends beyond teaching employees new skills and knowledge. The key to achieving success is to ensure employees use the new skills and knowledge when they return to work; it is not enough to send your employees to a training event and expect massive change.

Calculating the ROI for employee development is an investment in and of itself because of the costs that are involved in collecting detailed data. The process requires enormous time and resources so it is best to keep it simple. However, the training programs that are extremely costly and time-consuming can justifiably be subjected to a more detailed level of analysis.

Read on to discover three approaches for calculating training ROI.

Return on Training Investment: Measuring the Success You Build

Tim Treon

It is critically important that your organization does a little honest and introspective self-examination from time to time, paying particular attention to the organizational culture as it relates to the people within the company. Do you talk about your people like assets, but manage them like costs? People are commonly the most often neglected asset in any organization, and yet it is those very people who provide virtually all of the value and revenue that keep your organization’s engine running.

Many organizations fall into the trap of neglecting their employees because costs are obvious and value creation takes time to emerge. In fact, increasing the value of the people in your organization is a much longer proposition than merely looking at performance on a given project. Intangible assets have to be structured and managed to maximize their value; and this process must be done in much the same way you structure and manage every aspect of a project.