Chief Learning Officer - January 2009 - (Page 45) n the wonderful world of training back in the early 1980s, the field often was referred to as “organizational development,” and OD practitioners often ridiculed the idea of linking interventions to corporate results. Many of the pioneering gurus believed even talking about results was selling out. Our job was to make organizations better because it was the right thing to do. Period. Or so went the thinking. They were wrong. We were wrong. Executives and managers are in the business of satisfying multiple stakeholders by securing results. So simply suggesting that training is an end in and of itself is both simplistic and insensitive. In the corporate world, if you don’t satisfy stakeholders, you’re out of business. This being the case, learning designers have to make the following connection. You train people. Then, in addition to thinking or feeling differently, these newly trained people actually act differently. These changes in behavior lead to changes in results. Better yet, they lead to changes in the results your company is trying to improve. Anything short of this and you’re merely entertaining, building teams, creating trust or doing whatever suits you. However, what you’re not doing is improving key corporate results. With this in mind, all interpersonal skills learning needs to be created in the following fashion: Identify the key business result you’re trying to improve. Never create or deliver training without aiming it at a key performance indicator. To find the correct indicator, ask yourself what you really want. Not all indicators are equal. In some industries, people hardly ever ask what they really want. For instance, with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), managers routinely aim their efforts at getting their products into the hands of the poor. They figure that the more people they hand out wheat to, the better. Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus turned this strategy on end when he pointed out that the primary goal of many NGOs should not be to cure daily hunger pangs but to lift the poor permanently out of poverty by creating jobs that generate more than a dollar per day. Only by asking what they really wanted was Yunus able to redirect the efforts of thousands of NGOs toward the better goal of self-sufficiency and away from merely handing out resources. So look at your key performance indicators, ask what you really want and then select from or create an indicator that measures what you value. This is the result you’ll try to effect through training. Identify the key behaviors that, if changed, will improve the result you want. Herein lies the rub: It’s hard to know what people need to do differently to achieve the result they want. Hard or not, though, I trainers have to find the link or they won’t know where to aim their efforts. That’s how generic communication training or leadership courses often are created. Trainers are not quite sure what people need to do differently, but they figure if they get better at communicating, it can’t hurt, right? Wrong. If the actions you’re teaching are not clearly linked to key results, the training is likely to take time, cost money, fail to get results and thus undermine the credibility of the training and its facilitators. Conduct a positive deviance study. To discover the specific behaviors that directly impact the results you want to achieve, find other work groups, departments or companies that are succeeding where you are routinely failing. Discover what these successful folks do that separates them from you and the rest of the pack. This is the practice of uncovering positive deviants. For instance, when trying to uncover why one company had a near-perfect safety record in an industry that suffered many accidents, researchers discovered that the safe company didn’t have a safety program. Everyone else did. They didn’t hang banners or give speeches. Everyone else did. What they did do is speak up the first moment one of the researchers stepped into a hard-hat area without a hard hat. Several people spoke up — directly and politely. In the places that hung banners, DID YOU KNOW? people didn’t speak up. They thought it was Muhammad Yunus rude or inappropriate. They let the banwas awarded the ners do the talking, and the banners didn’t Nobel Peace Prize in work. Find the distinct behavior of success2006 for his pioneerful people — in this case, speaking up when ing concept of micropeople violate safety standards — and teach credit, which involves them to your trainees. extending small loans Copy others’ work. Once you’ve identito poor entrepreneurs fied the measure you want to improve, you’ll who cannot get large usually find that the research that connects loans from traditional behavior to outcomes already exists. Scholbanking institutions. ars and practitioners have found the link Source: Wikipedia between behaviors and results, and it’s your job to search them out and then stand on their shoulders. Whether you conduct the research yourself or rely on others, the point is the same. Don’t design training until you know the behaviors you want to change, and don’t select the behaviors until you know how they affect the result you care about. Once again, if you can’t link the behavior to the result, you’re taking a huge risk. Design training that affects the key behavior. Now you’re to the point where you have to design training that actually affects how people behave at work. Even if you’ve identified the right behaviors, if you can’t enable and motivate people to routinely enact the behaviors at work, training participants can’t or Chief Learning Officer • January 2009 • www.clomedia.com 45 http://www.clomedia.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.