It’s sometimes said that, if you are in any way competent, you will eventually get promoted to a position that you are not very good at. The suggestion is that, as careers progress and responsibilities start to magnify, at some point along the way you will find yourself required to perform tasks and activities that fall outside of your core skill-set.
Such a statement is a sweeping generalisation, of course, but it might also contain a grain of truth. Many engineers, for instance, are by training and aptitude technically very competent, yet sometimes lack the business and management skills that are required in an expanded role.
Universities and other places of learning might provide a solid grounding in advanced thermodynamics and fracture mechanics, but they don’t always teach softer skills such as negotiation or selling, cost estimation or project management. And that can hinder performance.
John Hattam is an experienced sales, marketing and operations professional who has enjoyed a long career at big companies such as Sainsbury’s and Nestlé. Hattam now runs training courses in leadership, management and business skills, and he thinks that more and more engineers are being expected to perform strongly in these areas.
“It’s increasingly important for engineers to have commercial management skills to enable them to become more rounded business professionals,” he says. “If you think about some of the things that engineers are involved in – negotiating with suppliers, running procurement budgets, managing vast teams of people – irrespective of context, you can see why they would need commercial and business skills.
“We often think that many of these softer skills are for sales people. But actually most of the people I teach are engineers. And often they are put into roles and desperately need some commercial training to make them function more effectively.”
Hattam admits that some engineers can be sceptical about training and development in business and commercial areas, fearing that the teaching of softer skills can end up too vague and intangible. But he says that in most cases a well thought-out process can be applied to deliver a set of key outcomes for the learner, and that, importantly, this can be achieved in an informative and stimulating way.
“Engineers are highly trained and competent, and they have all these specialist skills, but sometimes in the first half hour when you sit them in a room you can see that they think that some soft skills are all pink and fluffy. But there is a lot of specific content that can be applied.”
He says that warmth and empathy are the keys to a successful teaching style. “I’m not an automaton who wants to stand up and read out PowerPoint slides,” he says. “In fact I very rarely use PowerPoint to any degree. Interaction is so important. I never talk for more than 15 minutes without there being some kind of involvement – whether it’s a plenary with the group, or small group exercises, or people going off into pairs. It’s all kept very interactive.”
In recent years, Hattam has been working for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, delivering courses such as negotiation and leadership skills that are now available through its learning and development division. The key to this training is flexibility – no course is ever the same. And Hattam thinks this approach means that companies get a service that suits their needs better.
“It’s a tailored approach,” he says. “I think there is something in the region of 14,000 separate modules, ranging from questioning and listening skills to presentation skills, mentoring and assertiveness. The bite-sized modules can take up as little as half an hour in length. So it’s not about learning courses, so much. It’s more about us having the relevant experience to put key modules together in a way that flows and makes sense to the learners.”
One company that has experienced IMechE training courses is Konecranes, the specialist in overhead cranes and industrial hoists. The company employs 400 people in its services division in the UK, many of whom are technicians who deal with customers on a day-to-day basis out in the field.
It wanted to improve the commercial performance of its technicians, primarily by sharpening up its customer service activities. After evaluating several training providers, Konecranes contracted IMechE to deliver a dozen two-day training sessions across the UK.
Martin Wadeson, Konecranes’ national training manager, explains why he felt the training was needed and what he wants to get out of it. “We are heavily involved in training. We want our people to make the most of their ability,” he says. “Our technicians carry out a lot of maintenance on our cranes, and sometimes parts need repairing or replacing. We wanted our technicians to get better at providing advice to our customers in this area.
“That means they might pick up more orders while they are doing so, with more potential for quoting coming back to the office.”
Wadeson has sat in on most of the training courses delivered by John Hattam. He says he was pleasantly surprised by the preparation that went into the course content and by the interactive nature of the delivery.
“For a start, the trainer came up to our branch in the North East to get some background on us,” says Wadeson. “That was important, because the course could be built around our core values.
“The presentation style involved virtually zero PowerPoint. A lot of it was recorded on flip-charts, and these pages were stuck all over the walls. It was a more interactive way of getting the message across and it worked well for us. The positive feedback from our team has been high – around 90%. I am yet to receive a bad reaction.”
Two more customer service-themed courses are planned. Konecranes is also considering embarking on leadership training from the IMechE, too. In the meantime, the company is putting in place internal structures to more effectively measure the impact that the training provision has had on its business.
From the trainer’s perspective, John Hattam admits that measuring the outcome of training can be difficult. He prefers to employ the four levels of evaluation created by the respected US academic Donald Kirkpatrick. This involves initial reaction to training through ‘smile sheets’; measuring learning through the course via knowledge demonstration or tests; assessing transfer of knowledge in the three- to six-month period after the training; and establishing monetary or performance-based results that occurred because of attendance.
“We often get very high responses at level 3 and 4,” says Hattam. “This includes unprompted calls or emails from people we have trained some weeks after the course saying they employed such a technique when, say, negotiating, and that it saved tens of thousands of pounds.”
He says there is also a lot of evidence that training correlates with job satisfaction, which helps to drive staff retention and therefore saves on recruitment costs.
Ultimately, he says, business and management training can lead to a more proactive workforce, and that means a more profitable company.
He uses a nice anecdote to stress his point: “I spoke to an engineering director a few weeks ago. He asked me what happens if I train my managers and they leave? To which my response was: what happens if you don’t train your managers and they stay?
“Having a load of people who are highly technically qualified but lack basic commercial skills loitering around in an organisation with six- or seven-figure budgets is very damaging.”