Case Study: Cluster-based Learning Plans

Implementation of Cluster-based Learning Plans in a Lighting Equipment Manufacturing company.

Background:

The organization being referred to is a large manufacturer of electronic products for the lighting industry. Started in the early 1990s, the company has scaled and diversified very quickly, especially in the last decade.

With a workforce of about 5000 spread across multiple manufacturing and office facilities across India, the company’s senior management recognizes the value of developing its human capital. Towards that end, the company management in the year 2010 started identifying and assessing Learning Delivery partners to help the middle to senior management layer become more productive as individuals, by developing not only their technical expertise but also their social and people skills.

This consultant was hired by the company to help 200 of their managers improve their “Interpersonal Communication Skills”.

Context:

Some specifics about the context within which the intervention was to happen:

1. Most of the 200 managers were in the age group of 38–45 years.
2. More than 75% of them had been with the company for more than 8 years.
3. Very few of them had any formal exposure to Soft Skills/Personal development learning in a classroom. Most of them were genuinely excited at the opportunity, yet had reservations at being “taught” strategies for effective communication at this age and at this stage of their careers.
4. More than 90% of them had a Bachelor’s degree in a technical subject.
5. Many of them did not speak the English language regularly in their day-to-day work. This meant, as was confirmed by the management as well, that the classroom sessions needed to be bi-lingual.
6. The participants were spread over 5 different locations, and the sessions would happen locally at each location.
7. The participants were pre-divided into 10 batches of 20 people each, based primarily on location. Since it was a 24×7 manufacturing set-up, another key consideration in creating the batches was not to disturb the logistics of ongoing operations.
8. Given the focus area as “Interpersonal Communication”, it was essential to understand the nature of the communication that these 200 people undertook on a day-to-day basis. For most of them, the communication happened within the company, except for very few people whose roles required them to interact with vendors, customers and/or other external agencies like local government bodies.

Case details:

Given the above context, and during my interactions with the stakeholders, senior management and most importantly a sample group from the intended participants, I designed the intervention as follows:

• The larger population of 200 managers was divided into various clusters, based on the focus area of learning within the larger goal of developing interpersonal communication

Some clusters that were created:

• Comfort with the language.
• Inter-cultural sensitivity.
• Developing personal impact.
• Developing assertiveness.
• Listening and Responsiveness.
• Clarity of thought and expression.

About 30% of participants were members of more than one cluster

The intervention was designed and delivered in various phases:

The entire intervention from the time of signing the contract to the end point of submitting the final report took 6 months to execute.

Conclusion:

The approach adopted towards this intervention was unconventional. It involved giving learners well-rounded and comprehensive inputs on very specific learning topics, as against the general approach of purely classroom based ILT.

The process and the results thereof were very gratifying, both for the consultant and the learners.

The company management was very pleased with the observably evident improvement in the interpersonal skills of participants, and awarded a larger contract to the consultant for similar interventions in other areas of Soft Skills development.

Learning:

1. Short bursts of very focused learning input are more desirable and effective than traditional full-day generic sessions.
2. The context and environment within the beneficiaries of learning operate; the “personality” of each company must be a key determinant of the learning content and methodology.
3. Talk to people in their own language.
4. Creating engagement in the process of learning needs to be the guiding thought behind intervention design and execution.
5. Sometimes, learning for its own sake is also worthwhile.
6. Improvement in social skills through relevant training can be made evident, even if organizations don’t wish to commit time and resources to measuring it.
7. Learning is enhanced when people have the freedom to experiment and extrapolate what they have discovered in the process.