How to get into your customer’s knickers

You know how “words of the day” are. Someone uses them, they sound cool and before you know everyone adopts them. It goes from one to the other. Like some secret in a circle game. Before you know it, no one knows what it means.

The term interlock is like that. Interlock groups in training organizations placed a catchy label on a good concept, but something got lost in translation. Recently, a senior executive asked me what the interlock group in his company’s training department does and does he really need all of those people.

I believe, though I am not sure, since I am not in the inner circle, that the role of such groups is to create a link between business units and training departments; to live with these functional groups so that they truly feel their pain and translate it into training requirements. They act as an ombudsman between business groups and the training department. As I understand it, interlock groups get into the knickers of their customers.

Knowing that my friend has never been able to figure out what his training department does in the first place, I answered that if you have to ask that question, they probably aren’t doing their job well and you may be better off without them.

Having been in the training and performance improvement world long enough, I have noticed that the pendulum swings between creating a centralized training department to optimize resources and reduce expenses and creating business units training groups to increase their alignment and responsiveness. When times and good and money is flush, companies go for smaller, more aligned, and more responsive. When money is tight, they more to the centralized model.

Neither model is perfect. One tends to not be as aligned and the other creates some duplication and waste. Centralized training departments create interlock groups in an effort to get the best of both worlds.

In my friend’s case, it didn’t work. Pick your poison.

Which training model do you feel works best and why? Have you worked with interlock groups? What has been your experience? Are you a member of an interlock group? What have you done to make it work well?

I look forward to hearing from you,