Just say no to training fads: Management fads come and go—leaving disillusioned employees in their wake. Here's how to avoid fad worship and become the business partner your executives want

T+D, June, 2002 by Shari Caudron

Fad, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a "fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time." The key word here: brief. Why? Because an initiative turns into a fad when companies don't put in the time necessary for it to become truly beneficial. And often, the time isn't invested because the initiative didn't have staying power to begin with.

Ask learning professionals to describe their worst experiences with management fads, and chances are you'll hear a wide range of responses. Robert Pennington, an organizational psychologist with Resource International, a management-training firm in Houston, Texas, recalls a session he attended years ago in which participants were given drums and instructed to make music together. "The idea was that if people could create a unified rhythm on the drums, then they would probably also work well together," he explains, chuckling.

Richard Hadden, co-author of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, cites the Six Sigma quality improvement process taken to the extreme as the faddish low point at a company he once worked with. "Six Sigma became such a fad in that company that employees began to apply it to everything they did," he says. "They even tried to plan a luncheon conference by putting it through Six Sigma."

Just about every management tool to come down the pike in recent years--reengineering, total quality management, emotional intelligence, virtual teams, the balanced scorecard, and so on--has been deemed a fad, wrongly or rightly, by someone in the corporate world. Many name-brand initiatives have also gotten lumped under the fad umbrella, including those in Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, William Byham's Zapp!: The Lightning of Empowerment, and Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.

All of those initiatives have the potential to improve organizations-and, indeed, many companies have benefited from them. But the very fact that some companies profit from the initiatives turns them into fads.

On the golf course, an executive talks to his crony about a great little book called, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, and, soon, everyone in the company finds a copy on his or her desk. A vice president hears a speaker talk about her company's experience with a morale building seminar called Fish!, and, suddenly, stuffed fish are hanging around the training department. Employees learn about those programs and roll their eyes like disgusted teenagers.

It's not that the books, tools, and training programs are inherently flawed. "Many, if not most, of the concepts that I'd term management fads started out with valuable underlying principles," says Lynn Daniel, president of the Daniel Group, a strategy firm based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's just that people either took the ideas to extremes or lost sight of the objectives, or that the tools were sold into companies by charlatans who didn't understand the concepts but knew the right buzzwords.

"Every sound principle I've seen has been hijacked by consultants looking to profit from current trends," says Terry Horsmon, principal partner with True North Leadership, based in Santa Barbara, California.

Due to all of those factors, new concepts can become an end in and of themselves, rather than becoming a means to more profitable businesses.

Regardless of the reasons such initiatives fail, corporate trainers stand to lose the most by hitching their wagons to the latest hot fad. For example, career damage can occur when a trainer becomes too closely associated with a particular tool or program. When it fails to produce results, the trainer's credibility suffers. But that, says George Ludwig of George Ludwig Unlimited in Chicago, isn't the only problem.

"When I began my training company, I was focusing almost exclusively on teaching Covey's seven habits," Ludwig explains. "Like scads of other trainers at the time, I taught mission statement, roles, goals, teamwork, synergy, and so forth. But several big negatives occurred. One, I discovered that teaching what I thought was hot--as opposed to what I had a natural talent to teach--led to little or no repeat assignments. Two, business was harder to get when there was little differentiation among corporate trainers. Three, and most important, I was miserable teaching something my heart wasn't totally in."

If you follow a training fad as Ludwig did, you're bound to run into another problem: Many fads require trainers to achieve certification, which can involve a significant amount of time and professional attention. That commitment can divert a trainer's energy away from the immediate training needs of the organization, further eroding his or her credibility. If you're focused on becoming a certified mediator, for example, you may miss the fact that employees need immediate help with rapid technological change.

By following fads blindly, trainers risk being pigeonholed as cogs in the corporate wheel, explains Ray Jackson, associate dean of the Unisys University Leadership School in Bluebell, Pennsylvania. "Those trainers begin to be viewed as mere mouthpieces for come-and-go fads," he says. After a while, employees know which trainers are honest and have their best interests at heart and which are just sifting through the latest PowerPoint presentation.