The importance of an effective learning and development approach

He has had a major impact on my life, as he was a great source of inspiration for me.

Professionally, he had more impact on me than anybody else. He took a deep interest in areas like learning and development, leadership, management, entrepreneurial thinking, strategy and marketing, and so do I. Weicht was a true “people person”. And one more thing that brought us closely together is our love for our favourite football club, Borussia Dortmund.

Weicht had been in charge of learning and development at the German-based pharmaceutical and chemical company, Merck KgaA, for more than 25 years. He was considered as one of the leading professionals in his field in Germany. His masterpiece was the establishment of the “Merck University”, one of the very first corporate universities in Germany. It is a programme for senior executives of Merck from countries all over the world that offered them the opportunity to attend four two-week modules in renowned universities like Kellogg (USA), University of Science & Technology (Hong Kong), WHU (Germany) and INSEAD (France). 

Apart from the resulting increased knowledge of the executives, the Merck University had a major impact on the company culture – the glue that holds the organisation together – due to the development of strong informal networks of the executives attending.

Weicht, like me, was a strong believer in the fact that it is people who are the No 1 success factor for an enterprise. It is people who are developing a business plan and a strategy. It is people who execute the plan and the strategy and who are delivering the business results.

Weicht realised that personal effectiveness and organisational effectiveness are crucial to the attainment of corporate objectives. He emphasised on the company’s responsibility to develop people in line with business needs in order to be able to achieve organisational goals. And he equally stressed the responsibility of employees for self development. Weicht, a strong advocate of life-long learning, made this point particularly to managers, as some of them, as soon as they reach a certain hierarchical level, are tempted to think that they do not need to develop themselves any more.

During my time as managing director at Merck Thailand, we had over the years more than 100 management interns from top universities, mainly from Germany. I am still in contact with many of them. On one side, I am surprised how many of them complain about a lack of development opportunities provided by their companies. On the other side, I am disappointed to hear that quite a lot of them are so busy with their daily operational work that it hardly occurs to them that they still have to actively seek learning and development opportunities.

The learning and development programmes that Weicht and his team had developed for the Merck Group had various characteristics:

_ Alignment with the business goals of the organisation

_ Practical (eg working on projects dealing with real challenges that the organization is facing)

_ A certain emphasis on young people, as they still have huge development needs and represent the future of the company

_ International

_ Holistic (across all levels of the organisation)

In this context, I can share with you a mistake that I made during my time at Merck Thailand. Initially, we focused the majority of our learning and development efforts on about 20 per cent of our employees, the top performers. Although this group of employees was very happy with our development efforts for them, the remaining 80 per cent were dissatisfied as clearly expressed in our employee satisfaction survey. When we realised that, we redistributed our learning and development budget in a way that it benefited people across the company while still having one or the other programme specifically serving our top performers.

Continuously developing their employees enables companies to succeed in today’s ever faster changing business environment and to create a competitive advantage. At the same time, it helps employees to master the ever increasing challenges and to succeed in their jobs.

I am forever grateful for the learning and development opportunities and programmes that Weicht had established at Merck. They enabled me to climb all the way from an entry-level employee (I started as an apprentice at Merck) to the position of a high-ranked employee (managing director, chairman, country manager). It is proof of the many opportunities that the learning and development approach of Weicht had offered. May his soul rest in peace!

And I wish that you as a manager are providing opportunities for your people while still seeking learning opportunities for yourself.

 

Heinz Landau is former chairman and managing director of Merck Thailand.