In the wake of California’s mandatory sexual harassment training requirement Professor Deborah Rhode of Stanford University laments the effectiveness of such training and its ability to eliminate unwanted behavior from the workplace.  She says there is no evidence that sexual harassment training works – that it changes attitudes and behaviors, or the frequency of harassment in the organization. 

     Actually the scant research that does exist suggests the exact opposite.  “Too many employees may end up feeling that the training is designed to placate humorless, oversensitive feminists who should get a life, not a law” with too much time being spent on “mindless” exercises, or examples that are “irrelevant,” “obvious,” or “extreme.”  She concludes that we’d be better off figuring out what really works before enacting more mandatory training requirements.  Good point.

     The challenge of delivering effective training and facilitating learning within a business setting, however, is not unique to sexual harassment training.  It is endemic to all compliance training and it is a complex issue that operates on a number of levels:

1. Training Quality – Training quality is often a matter of taste.  To a large degree it’s subjective.  Papa bear tastes the porridge and says it’s too cold.  Mama bear tastes the same porridge and says it’s too hot while baby bear thinks it’s just right.  As with any presentation, it helps to know your audience and to tailor the material accordingly.  That’s why one-size-fits-all compliance training has mixed results.  It may be easy to implement, and the standardization cuts down on cost, but if the message misses its mark, is the money well spent?   

2. Managing Audience Expectations – Why are employees attending training?  Because they are meeting some mandatory training requirement?  Or because they expect to learn something that allows them to fix a problem or do their jobs better?  How the training is teed up makes a difference in terms of what employees will get out of it – whether they’ll tune in or tune out. If the training helps them solve a problem it can be effective.  But sometimes, particularly with sexual harassment or employment discrimination training, getting employees to realize they have a problem is part of the problem.  They may be engaging in risky horseplay without know it and getting them to realize it can be tough. “I’ve worked with these people for 20 years,” said one employee, “how can I just stick to business?”  Unfortunately, one person’s teasing is another’s harassment and it’s not a problem until there is a poor performance review or a termination and the past gets dredged up.  These practical roadblocks to learning must be dealt with before training can take root and be effective.

3. Positional Power – Trainers have no positional power.  They can poke and prod but they can’t make you apply the lessons they endeavor so hard to teach.  It takes more authority to do that coupled with the proper incentive structure.  That’s where leadership comes in.

4. Leadership Responsibility– Leaders set the tone and influence corporate culture.  Their words and actions establish our frame of reference that in turn colors our expectations.  Leaders create accountability.  Which message is being sent from the top?  Are respectful working relationships encouraged, recognized, and rewarded?  If so, then harassment training is but one component of improving working relationships.  A more respectful environment across the board is a win-win for everyone.  In contrast, is the issue is framed narrowly?  In purely sexual harassment terms?  If that’s the case, it can easily be construed as favoring a select group of employees at the expense of the rest.  It’s win-lose.  
   

     Training by itself is never enough.  The ability to convert training dollars into human capital starts with a clearly articulated vision from the company’s leaders of what’s required and a system of checks and balances to enforce it.  Thus, effective training is largely a function of effective management and leadership.   It does not rest solely with the trainer. 

     Last Wednesday I commented on the unfolding Livedoor scandal in Tokyo and the hidden costs associated with poor legal literacy and casual compliance.  In the few days that have elapsed since that posting the world has sadly watched the human toll continued to grow:

1. On Thursday, January 19, a former executive of Livedoor involved in setting up one of the investment partnerships Livedoor employeed and a central figure to the investigation of Livedoor’s alleged market manipulation was found dead.  The victim of a suspected suicide.  (Perhaps the loss of face associated with even the appearance of impropriety was too much to bear?)
2. Trading of Livedoor stock was suspended again on the Tokyo exchange on Thursday after a new allegations surfaced regarding financial irregularities, and
3. Today Livedoor chief executive, Takafumi Horie, the irreverent young upstart whose brash ways challenged the starched status quo, was arrested along with three other executives for allegedly spreading false information about Livedoor’s affilate companies to cover up losses at a subsidiary and inflate stock prices. 
4. In keeping with his anti-establishment image, Horie wrote in his blog over the weekend before his arrest “I have no recollection of any of the allegations. And I don’t even know how to comment because I have no idea what kind of investigation the media reports are coming from.”

     There is an eerie similarity between the Livedoor case and Enron case scheduled to go to trial next week — the suicide, the investment partnerships, and the dumb CEO defense. It’s easy to dismiss these cases as isolated examples of greed.

Sure, dazzling riches can easily blind leaders to their responsibility of establishing decision making safeguards to protect the organization and its shareholders. But by dismissing these cases as isolated incidents we forget that poor decision making processes can result from negligence as easily as willful blindness. All negligence requires is that we know or should have known about something and did nothing about it. It means that all those casual, “good enough,” business practices could be accidents waiting to happen.