The Performance Improvement Blog

The Course Catalog Is (Should Be) Dead

Recently, I was asked a very thought-provoking question by the director of HRD for a large organization. I was explaining the “5As Framework” to her and she asked, “What are the implications for what we do here?” I immediately launched into my usual speech about getting managers of learners
involved in actively supporting the learning process. This led to a discussion of all the excuses she hears from managers to explain their lack of involvement in employee learning. It wasn’t until later, after further rumination, that I realized the better answer to the director’s question is, “Throw out the course catalog!” 

Like HRD departments in many large organizations, each year they offer a long list of courses and programs that have all of the current buzz words in their titles. I have no doubt that her department delivers excellent, world-class courses and programs. And I’m sure employees enjoy the courses and even say that the knowledge and skills will be very useful to them in their work. However, I’m also quite sure that very little has changed in the wider organization as a result of the many outstanding events put on by this unit. The problem is the lack of alignment between event-based instruction and important business results.

The competency model, which provides the underlying theory of event-based training, is doing a disservice to the current needs of organizations. Training and development professionals seem to believe that if they can identify the competencies that people need in order to do their jobs and then offer courses to teach those competencies, employees will be more productive and successful. The problem with this way of thinking is that performance has as much (if not more) to do with work culture as it does with job competencies. To be successful, employees need supervisors and co-workers who are supportive of learning and performance improvement, they need a supervisor/boss/mentor who talks to them regularly about learning and results, they need the opportunity to apply new learning and to receive feedback, and they and the organization need to be held accountable for learning and results. If there is this culture of learning, employees will continually improve performance.

According to my colleague, Ralph Jacobson, we have to change the local environment so that people actually “work differently”, not just learn how to work differently. All the courses in the world will not change behavior and improve results unless the local culture supports change. At one time, when jobs were static and organizational change came slowly, a menu of well-designed courses was sufficient. Now, when change has to happen rapidly, when we have to find ways to lower the cost of learning, and when we have better and better online, just-in-time, mobile learning resources, event-based learning is no longer the best answer.

We must provide learning experiences to people when and where they need it and in ways that optimizes application to achieving important business results. We need training and development that is timely, short duration, and project-focused. We need frequent on-the-job feedback from supervisor/boss/mentor to employee. For example, leadership skills are best taught during a challenging, team project while the leader is trying out new behaviors and receiving ongoing feedback from a coach. This way of learning will have much more impact on performance than a course or conference on leadership.

What do you think? Can we throw out the course catalog?

Improving Communication in High Performance Organizations

My colleagues, Leslie Stambaugh and Jim Stilwell, and I have published an ebook to illustrate principles and best practices of effective communication in organizations. Leaders in every organization in which we have worked have told us that their organizaion had a "communication problem." The
communication problem bucket is very large, making it quite easy to pour most organizational concerns into it. Lack of productivity, lack of efficiency, failure to meet budget requirements, failure to meet market demands, delivery of products to customers that are out-of-the-box failures, and a whole host of departmental, team and interpersonal issues are all attributed to a “communication problem.” No doubt there is some truth to this attribution, but what does it really mean when people say they have a "communication problem?" These problems can be extremely complex because of the multiple factors that cause messages to go awry.

We have created scenarios (short, fictional case studies) from a composite of our own experiences that reflect many of the assumptions stated above. These scenarios  provide reality-based situations that are typical of what managers face in most complex organizations. The situations are:

• Facilitating Cross-Functional Projects
• Planning for Organizational Change
• Building Support for Organizational Change
• Collaborating Between Teams and Non-Team Members
• Resolving Conflict Among Team Members
• Organizational Transparency
• Communicating Down the Organization
• Communicating Up the Organization
• Building Trust in Leadership

For example, the chapter titled, "Facilitating Cross-Functional Projects," starts out with this story: 

Bill Smith, VP of Sales at High Tech Inc, and his leadership team, had gathered feedback from customers and concluded that the sales department needed a major reorganization. Customers were complaining that they were no longer receiving the customized solutions they had come to expect from High Tech Inc.  

Originally, the department had been regionally-focused, with U.S., China, and India sales offices providing services to all industries, types, and sizes in their specific regions.  This strategy had been extremely effective during the past ten years as High Tech Inc was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the rapid regional growth in the computer industry. However, new entrants into the market had increased competition making the old structure no longer effective.  

Based on the customer feedback, Bill and his team determined that there was a clear need for change.  They decided that the structure that would enable High Tech to compete most effectively was to change from five U.S. regionally-focused sales offices and two global offices (China and India) to one centralized office with salespeople dedicated to particular industries and sizes of companies. They also understood the magnitude of this change and potential impact it would have throughout High Tech. To make a change of this size, Bill and his team would need company-wide support.

This situation requires careful planning of an organizational communication strategy. What would you do? How would you handle communication with the sales force and the wider organization? How would you ensure buy-in from all of the stakeholders? Our book offers suggestions and explains the principles that should guide managers through this situation and other similar challenges to effective communication.

 

The Learning Alliance and Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation

In response to my blog post titled, “Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation: A Critique”, Wendy Kirkpatrick wrote a comment directing me to a white paper that she co-authored with Jim Kirkpatrick, "The Kirkpatrick Four Levels: A Fresh Look After 50 Years 1959 - 2009." That document describes updated thinking that the Kirkpatrick’s call “The Kirkpatrick Model”. They’ve added some critical elements to the
original “Four Levels”, including: starting evaluation planning by clarifying intended results of training; taking into consideration what happens before and after a training event that facilitates learning; the supervisor/mentor/coach partnership in learning; and "organizational drivers" to results.  I applaud these additions to their model; they are all factors that Rob Brinkerhoff and I described in our 1994 book, The Learning Alliance: Systems Thinking in Human Resource Development.

As we did then and as we do now, Rob and I have great respect for what the Kirkpatricks have done to heighten awareness of the importance of evaluation to the field of workplace learning. However, the problem persists in organizations in the U.S. and around the globe: because people have a label for something, they believe it has value. So, by labeling a measure “Level One”, “Level Two”, “Level Three”, or “Level Four”, training managers believe they are collecting useful information when, in fact, they most likely are not. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've asked training managers about evaluation and they have said to me, "We do Level Ones and, when we can, Level Twos."

I concede that any measurement of training has some reinforcing effects on learning and, by bringing organization attention to the training, may have internal political benefits, as well. But until training and learning specialists measure the impact that a learning intervention has on the business and evaluate the organizational factors that either drive those results or prevent them from occurring, organizations will continue to learn little from evaluating training. 

 

Evaluating Training Through Stories

Participants rated the management training program 4.3 on a five-point scale. Sixty percent said that they have applied the training to their work. What do we know about effectiveness of the program? Not much.

We cannot determine from this data if the management training program made a difference for the organization. If it didn't make a difference, there is little reason to continue to offer the program to managers in the same form. Unless we’re talking about a training company, training is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is how Maggie Bayless, head of training at Zingerman’s, a “Small Giant” company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes this link between training and business results. She is quoted In an interview for a local magazine:

"We call it ‘bottom line training,’ Bayless explains, “because we know that the purpose of Zingerman’s businesses isn’t to train staff. For The University of Michigan, one of their bottom lines is education; that’s why they exist. But Zingerman’s wasn’t launched with the idea of creating an organization where we train staff. Zingerman’s was created to be an organization where people delivered a great experience, with great food and great service. To do that, we need to train staff effectively.”

 “So in order for it to make sense to do training,” Bayless explains, “it has to improve food quality, improve service quality, or improve financial results. Those are our three bottom lines; that’s why we’re here. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing it.”

So, if the purpose of training is to achieve bottom-line results, then we should measure how and to what extent the program does that and what the organization needs to do to improve results in the future. A “smile sheet”, or even a follow-up survey, is not going to give you this information. We must tell the employee's story. That is, we must create a narrative that clearly explains the causal links between what people learned in the training program, how they applied that learning, and what the effect was on business results. In addition, the story should describe what the organization did and did not do to facilitate learning and results (e.g., providing an opportunity to apply newly learned leadership skills).

David Zinger describes the power of stories in his blog post, "Employee Engagement Stories: Altering Our Personal GPS." He writes:

Stories are the building blocks of understanding. We understand the world through story. Story is not just something we read in a book or see in a movie. Story is how we make sense of ourselves, situations, and others. Stories function as fundamental building blocks of understanding and also as a social GPS. Stories are the conclusions, judgments, hypothesis and assumptions about what we see and hear. Stories are the way we communicate with ourselves.

It’s like evaluating a summer car vacation by counting the miles driven, gas used, days on the
road, and money spent. All nice to know, but it’s the experiences along the way, anticipated and unanticipated, that make the trip meaningful and memorable.