Tom Short

Workplace mentoring: an old idea with new meaning (part 1)

Purpose – This article is written in two parts and is presented as research-based insight on the growth of formal workplace mentoring programs and the alignment of mentoring with workforce development strategy. Design/methodology/approach – The research is taken from a two-year study conducted in the Australian rail industry aimed at establishing a harmonized approach to the use of workplace mentoring. Using mixed-methods and an interpretive approach seven major rail organizations from Australia and New Zealand contributed to detailed case studies, on-line surveys and in-depth interviews. Responses were obtained from all levels and functional areas within the organizations Findings – Research findings support the literature and show a growing interest in the use of formal workplace mentoring to deal with a wide range of organizational issues such as employee retention, engagement, absence and turnover. Importantly, mentoring was found to be highly valued in the area of knowledge transfer and especially ac...

Exploring the vacuum in training evaluation: is this a case of mission impossible?

Purpose – This paper presents research‐based insight on the challenges of evaluating training activities in todays complex organizational settings.Design/methodology/approach – The research is taken from three case studies conducted in the New Zealand manufacturing sector, as well as sources of relevant literature. The commentary takes a critical‐realist perspective and challenges learning and development professionals to address the poor reputation of training evaluation.Findings – Human resource practitioners recognise the importance of gaining feedback from learning events, but research reports question the thoroughness of evaluation processes, claiming they rarely happen to the satisfaction of management. Consequently, training budgets become an easy target during periods of rationalization. The problem centres on overcoming the complexity of defining a meaningful cause/effect relationship between the training and resultant benefit. This research discovered the presence of an “evaluation vacuum” and ...

Exploring the Notion of Workforce Development

Workforce development is a relatively new concept that extends beyond training, and is increasingly used by educationalists, policy-makers and scholars. It draws on human resource development and management, workforce planning and workforce capability development, and is often highlighted in debates on skills shortages where there is a need to increase the pool of skilled workers in critical industries. The literature has claimed that the concept takes us in new directions, and is not merely more of the same. But what does workforce development mean? This chapter opens the book with an analysis of the concept of workforce development, why it has become prominent now and why this book has been written. It then introduces the chapters to follow that serve to illuminate different perspectives and issues that together comprise what we term workforce development.

The importance of balance in leadership development

Purpose – Describes research on the development of leaders in Australian rail organizations.Design/methodology/approach – Details five areas where the “complementarity” contained in the Chinese yin and yang philosophy could help to restore balance in modern leadership.Findings – Highlights the importance of balancing: principles and practices; technical and people skills; hard and soft skills; formal and informal learning; and self and others.Practical implications – Advances the view that these five balances are relevant the world over; one aspect of leadership and management cannot live without the other, yet each aspect lives within the other.Social implications – Demonstrates a way forward for management development at a time when the need for leadership development, capability building and talent management have reached dangerously low levels across the world and the position will deteriorate as baby‐boomers retire and leave behind a leadership “black hole”.Originality/value – Postulates that one asp...

Learning how to lead self before leading others: an industry perspective from Australia

Purpose – This paper aims to present research‐based insight on the significance of building self‐awareness and self‐efficacy as foundation to other forms of leadership developmentDesign/methodology/approach – The research is taken from a two‐year interpretive study conducted in the Australian rail industry aimed at establishing a unified approach to developing rail leaders. Using mixed methods, seven major rail organizations contributed to detailed case studies, online surveys and in‐depth interviews at various levels of management.Findings – The findings support a new variation of leadership capability that has emerged and is being applied in organizations where managers are empowered to create and define their own work roles. In order to achieve this autonomy, a higher level of self‐awareness and self‐efficacy is essential. Self‐awareness requires the leader to use a wide range of cognitive processes such as: focussing attention and evaluating current behaviour to internal standards and values; recognis...

The Challenges of Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter presents and discusses organisational leadership from a historical and theoretical perspective to identify issues and challenges for leadership going forward into the twenty-first century. Leadership and management theory, the global context, changing demographics and mobilities of workers, and contemporary perspectives on organisational structures are introduced and discussed. Particular reference is then made to the Australian context with a focus on the rail industry as an example of a large and established enterprise that is facing contemporary challenges in moving towards a workplace culture based on workforce development and participation models rather than traditional hierarchical, command-control structures and bureaucratic processes. The chapter begins with a review of external perspectives including an overview of leadership and management, and the latter part then focuses on internal perspectives including what it means to be a leader in Australia. We consider how developments in leadership and management theory and practice are viewed and dealt with in the Australian rail industry and conclude that robust evaluation tools and continuous improvement processes for leadership development programs are recommended for modern organisations to avoid costly and time-consuming mistakes.

The Future of Workforce Development—Old Wine in New Bottles?

In recent years organisations have been compelled to adopt an expanding range of workplace education and training activities in order to remain competitive and survive. Developing people to gain, maintain and obtain new employment, sometimes called employability, has become accepted practice and part of the human resource practitioners’ narrative. However, the language we use to describe these learning events has changed from one decade to the next—largely in response to adjustments in vocational education policy, developments in society and evolutions in the nature of work. Workforce development is the latest label in a long line of professional titles given to workplace education and training activities and in this chapter we attempt to discover whether the current vocabulary reflects a surge in innovation or is simply a case of putting old wine into new bottles. In this final chapter we identify a selection of important findings from each section and synthesise them into a concept model of ten topics arranged in three broad themes of environment, place and people. We conclude as a consequence of these emerging issues that the strategies and workforce development practices deployed by organisations in the future will become much less predictable than previous generations, more diverse and challenging for upcoming HRD professionals.

Harmonising Training and Development across an Industry: The Case of Australian Rail.

Purpose This paper aims to explore why harmonisation, given its potential, is so difficult to achieve. It analyses the issues and challenges in achieving harmonisation of training and development across an industry. Design/methodology/approach The approach was a meta-analysis of six research projects undertaken in the Australian rail industry. These projects varied in duration from 12-24 months. Between 2009 and 2013, rail employees in varying roles and levels of seniority, including middle managers, front-line supervisors, rail incident investigators, track workers and drivers, were interviewed (n = 176) and surveyed (n = 341). Findings The meta-analysis identified a range of characteristics associated with harmonisation. It uncovered three categories of harmonisation, seven types of risk modelled in a layered risk pyramid and analysed key structural, environmental and organisational barriers to harmonisation. The paper concludes that harmonisation struggles to gain strategic significance and is hampered by operational pragmatism. Research limitations/implications There are few published papers examining harmonisation across companies or based on meta-analyses, especially qualitatively. Despite limitations of insufficient detail to allow close analysis, potentially variable quality data across projects from which to develop a meta-analysis and the danger of comparing apples with oranges, more attempts using this approach would be helpful in gaining nuanced insights into an industry. Practical implications Achieving industry harmonisation requires significant change in the mindset of executives. To enhance the chances of harmonisation, there is need for a strong national entity with overview of the entire industry, high-quality training and development resources and activities and cost-benefit analyses and active campaigns. A major outcome of this research is the risk pyramid, which can be used by managers as a strategic evaluation tool. By using such tools based on sound research, leaders can be equipped to make informed decisions and reduce downstream risks. Originality/value This research has value in extending the literature in two main ways: through examining the notion of harmonisation across an industry as distinct from within organisations that has been the focus of most studies and through using qualitative meta-analysis in a field dominated by quantitative approaches. It analyses the grey areas between rhetoric about its potential and difficulties in its achievement.

Plato as personnel manager

Purpose – Describes how Platos philosophy has influenced, and may continue to affect, modern human‐resource management.Design/methodology/approach – Outlines some of Platos main ideas – including the role of the philosopher king in striving for the ideal – and draws out their relevance for current HR thinking and practice.Findings – Contends that the platonic HR manager would oppose the notion of flatter structures. Policy would encourage progression through education, recognizing that not everyone had the qualities or wisdom to become a top executive. Men would rise faster than women, and emphasis would be placed on age, experience and service. Training and development would be more segmented and orientated towards efficiency.Practical implications – Argues that, on the basis of Platos philosophy, educated and enlightened leaders would go the extra mile for the good of the enterprise and senior executives would set an example.Social implications – Highlights an anti‐democratic notion at the heart of P...

Workforce Development: Moving from Perspectives to Practices

Workforce development is an overarching term used to describe a wide range of education, training and professional development activities carried out in the workplace. In this series of two books, we have endeavoured to follow the emergence of workforce development from initial concept to final application. In our first book, Workforce development: Perspective and issues, we brought together a compilation of education and training topics and asked our authors to firstly, draw on their expertise in human resource development and adult education and secondly, reflect on their recent experiences of researching in the Australian rail industry We aimed to show that workforce development is an amalgam of ideas and developments that are currently shaping the organisational landscape in a period of rapid change and uncertainty. In this second volume we have extended our discussion to consider how these perspective and issues have translated into workable strategies and practices used by organisations. In this chapter, we describe the background to our book and examine further what the collective term workforce development means by analysing each part separately.