We Are in the Performance Business

How does a company stay in business when it does not have a way to capture mission-critical knowledge?  How does a company stay in business when it cannot ensure that people are in the pipeline and are ready to fill vacant positions in mission-critical positions?  How can a company achieve high levels of success when it has to to keep rehiring people because it does not effectively set new hires up for success? 

My answer to these questions is a business that does not pay attention to learning and development (L&D) will not reach high levels of effectiveness, efficiency, nor performance.  Research has shown a direct correlation between a strong L&D to organizational success. When L&D departments work

with internal customers and build partnerships, they add value and contribute to the organization reaching high levels of performance.  L&D professionals in successful organizations serve as a business partners, are seen as trusted advisors, and use remedy selling as a strategy to engage internal clients. 

Much of what we do as L&D professionals is all about employing good business practices and becoming trusted advisors.  When we’re serving as businesspartners, we are looking for opportunities to improve organizational performance.  We are providing possible scenarios to organizational leaders of what may happen if we don’t pay attention to succession planning, knowledge management, onboarding, and other L&D areas.  Here are a few scenarios of what happens when L&D professionals don’t serve as business partners and lead organizational efforts that focus on performance improvement.

The Knowledge Management & SuccessionPlaning Scenario

When an organization lacks a knowledge management strategy in place and businesses have failed to effectively capture and share knowledge, mission-critical knowledge walks out of the door as

subject matter experts leave.  When talent walks out of the door with mission-critical knowledge, those left behind are scurrying around trying to figure out, “How did John do that for all of these years?  We know those reports are always done, but we have no idea how he created them and where he got his data?”  Here’s an opportunity for L&D to improve organizational performance by engaging leaders in a discussion regarding knowledge management.

John is retired, what happens now?  Now that John has retired, no one is ready to fill his shoes.  John’s supervisor was extremely dependent on John being the go to person who carried a bulk of the load.  His supervisor did not use John’s expertise as an opportunity to develop other employees.  Here’s an opportunity for L&D to improve organizational performance by partnering with organizational leaders to create a succession plan.

The Onboarding Scenario

Bobby has been in her position for 6 months and she still does not know how to do key aspects of her job.  Unfortunately, her organization lacks a formal onboarding program.  Bobby went through a one day orientation where she filled out forms and was then placed at a desk with no computer or phone for one week.  

Her supervisor did not share his expectations of her, nor who she can partner with to learn her job.  Bobby was gone before the end of her seventh month due to her unpleasant onboarding experience.  Here’s an opportunity for L&D to improve organizational performance and save the cost of hiring someone to replace the person who was just hired by creating an effective onboarding program.

My guess is that these scenarios may be familiar to you.  Remember, what we do as L&D professionals is just good business.  Our end goal is always performance improvement which leads to successful businesses. What are you doing to do about turning things around in your organization?  Are you viewed as a trusted advisor?

The Untrusted Advisor

Let’s define trusted advisor.  A trusted advisor is someone who has expertise in a certain subject matter that you go to when you have a business need or challenge.  It’s not someone that you work around or ignore to get things accomplished.  Trusted advisors are reliable, knowledgeable, and skilled in a particular technical area and have your needs, as the customer, in mind. When you work in the learning and development (L&D) department and get a request from an office outside of the L&D office to provide “critical skills training needs”, your employees are not seen as trusted advisors.  This should raise a red flag that something is not working well in your department.  If your goal is to be a department of trusted advisors and you’re not even consulted with to administer a training needs assessment, you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your L&D function.  If you work in the L&D department and are asked to provide your “critical skills training needs” with no discussion about the projects that you will be working on or the skills needed for expected performance, there is a problem.  Your L&D department is not viewed as a department of trusted advisors. 

What should you do if your department is seen as a group of untrusted advisors?  If you are leading an L&D department and someone above you initiates the training needs assessment or any other effort that falls within your technical functional area, you should conduct performance consulting on your own organization.  Specifically, here’s what you should do…

1)      Review your department’s vision, mission, values, goals, and strategies

2)      Analyze your environment—what is going on within your work environment, processes, procedures, workforce

3)      Conduct discovery meetings and interviews of your senior managers, executives, employees, and customers—to prepare you to do the following: 1) identify required and current performance of essential duties and tasks, 2) identify potential causes of gaps between required and current performance, and 3) propose targeted learning and development activities that will close performance gaps.

4)      Summarize your findings and share them with your stakeholders

5)      Develop an plan for implementing viable solutions

6)      Execute your implementation plan

7)      Measure and evaluate your solutions

The best way to demonstrate credibility is to model what it is you’re trying to do for your customers and share the results.  Be your own performance consultant to move you from being an untrusted advisor to a trusted advisor.

I'm Not Leaving ADDIE For SAM

On November 16th, I wrote this post for the Metro DC ASTD Chapter blog.  I have been intrigued by the many attempts to create an ISD (instructional systems design) process that is different from ADDIE (for those who don't know what that is...an instructional design process that uses these steps...Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate). 

My curiosity started at the ASTD International Conference and Exposition earlier this year. As I was choosing my sessions to attend, I saw a recurring theme such as Leaving the ADDIE Model Behind, Instructional Design in the Fast Lane, The Secret to Learning: Four Questions that Must be Answered, and Brilliance by Design. All of these sessions had one thing in common...they all were offering a different ISD model for designing and developing training.

So what do I do?  I go buy books to read more and hopefully find a more "effective and efficient" way to create excellent training. I always end up feeling like I wasted my money and very disappointed. I often wonder that I'm missing something because I just don't get it. In my opinion, I feel like all they are trying to do is repackage ADDIE. I'm not saying that they don't offer some good tips to enhance ADDIE because many of them do, but at the end of the day it's ADDIE.

I have come to realize that ADDIE has served me well for years. I've created some very dynamic and effective learning events using good ole' ADDIE. I must admit that ADDIE isn't perfect. I do have short cuts and enhancements to fit my constraints and work environment because rarely do we have time to do all of the proper steps involved in the process. But for now, I think I'm going to end my search for something to replace ADDIE and embrace the components that it has and that others are trying so hard to re-create.

When you find something that has all of the rigor and completeness that ADDIE has, please share it with me. Thanks!  In the mean time, I will share some of the ways that I use ADDIE in the real world in upcoming posts.

Yours in learning,

Deadra

It's a Must...Attend an Industry Conference

A week ago, I returned from the ASTD International Conference and Exposition (ICE) in Denver, Colorado.  It was such a wonderful experience to be in the company of so many established and distinguished learning and development professionals!  It was an extremely positive experience. I would advise everyone to attend an industry conference at least once.  It doesn't matter if your profession is accounting, HR, engineering, or speech pathologist...attend at least once.  Trust me, you won't regret the experience.  Let me quickly explain the benefits when you attend.

• Professional development--you will learn so much!  You can find out about industry trends...create meaningful links between existing knowledge, skills, and experiences and new ones.
• Sharing best practices--you will be able to find innovative ways to enhance your current projects, process, and procedures by learning about what others have done and are doing.  You can also share what's worked for you and your organizations to help others.
• Expand your network--this is the best part of attending industry conferences.  You meet so many people who share common interests from all different parts of the country or even the world.  Just think, each time you meet someone new, you are expanding your network and potentially expand your ability to be more effective in your profession. 

These are all opportunities to GROW!

It's your job as a professional to take charge of your own development.  Eliminate those things that keep you from attending industry conferences.

Lack of Funding...no problem!  My organization didn't have training money for me to attend ICE.  I decided that I wasn't going to let that stop me, so I decided to volunteer to offset the cost of attending the conference.  I saved money to pay for my travel expenses.  Last year I missed out.  I wasn't able to go.  I was determined to find a way this year because I'm passionate about my professional development.  You can do the same thing.  Contact your industry conference point of contact to inquire about volunteer opportunities.

Attending industry conferences is one of the most effective ways to stay current and continue to add to your professional toolkit.

Instructional Design and Basketball

I am back after a break while I was trying to balance work and life.  At times through our lives, we all have to take time-outs.  The buzzer has sounded, and now my time-out is over.

Speaking of time-outs…I signed up to be the Assistant Basketball Coach for my daughter’s basketball team.  I know you’re probably wondering what basketball has to do with instructional design (ID).  Well I have the real-life example of dual-purpose learning.  Dual-purpose learning simply means using what you learn on the job in other aspects of your life.

As I started preparing for the season, my unconscious competence kicked in.  Before I knew it, I was using the ADDIE model without even knowing it.  Let me quickly explain.

ANALYZE—I started to conduct learner analysis…What age are the girls? What are their skill levels?  I know I’ll have some experienced girls and some that have never played.  I also read about the types of “tasks” that they should be able to do at this age range, as well as how those “tasks” should be performed.  The other thing I did was to think about the constraints.  What were those things that could become barriers to a successful season?  I came up with the following constraints: 1) lack of skills development, 2) bad attitudes, 3) poor fitness levels, and 4) lack of effort.

DESIGN—I began to think about what I wanted to accomplish by the end of the season.  I wanted them to be able to learn while having fun.  Those were my terminal objectives.  At this point, I began meeting with planning the season.  Each practice requires a well-structured and different “lesson plan” with specific learning objectives.

The design of the basketball season includes the following:

·       Adoption of the SAFE (Skills, Attitude, Fitness, Effort) philosophy

·       Focus on certain skill areas (“competencies”) to improve on by the end of the season

·       Results-based learning based on clearly identified goals.  Each girl will have a fitness goal, individual skill goal, and a team goal.

·      Incentives and rewards for goal accomplishment

DEVELOP—This is the fun part and is where I am now in my “instructional design” process.  I am in the process of purchasing supplies for the incentives program and writing practice plans.   I’m choosing the right drills (“instructional methods”) to align with the skills being taught.

IMPLEMENT—The season hasn’t officially started, although we have started having open gym.  I am looking forward to working with the Head Coach in actually conducting well-structured practices beginning in the next week or two.

EVALUATE—My strategy for evaluation includes checking-in with the girls to see how they feel (Level 1) about how practices.  Are they having fun?  I will keep notes on where they started based on assessments during the first practice (pre-test) and how they’re doing each week (post-tests) (Level 2).  We will be able to see how they’re learning once we start playing games (Level 3).  The test will be to see how they end the season (Level 4).  Are they a better player?  Has the team improved?  Did they have fun and learn???

I’m looking forward to this season.  I’m equally excited about being able to transfer what I’ve learned to help adults learn to have an impact on the development of several young ladies.  Wish us luck!

Everyone Has Customers

I started reflecting on my views about customer service after attending a Customer Service Symposium a few weeks ago that brought together Government employees from different organizations to discuss best practices in customer service and how can it improve.  Right after I participated in the symposium, I experienced a real-life example of excellent customer service.  My family and I were eating breakfast at a local restaurant.  As my son was getting ready to take a fork full of hash browns, he saw a fly, yes a dead fly, in his food!  We immediately got our server's attention, and she immediately got the manager.  Both the server and the manager were very apologetic and did everything in their power to show us how sorry they were about our dining experience.  Needless to say, my son ate for free that morning.  We left the restaurant feeling whole, respected, and appreciated.

When I saw a Twitter post from Wendi Pomerance Brick about Customer Service Week, which runs from October 3rd - 7th, I remembered the experience with my family and felt that it was a good time to share my thoughts about customer service with you.

My first thought is Everyone Has Customers!  No matter what your profession, you have customers.  Sports coaches have customers...the players.  Public servants have internal customers (colleagues, subordinates, and those people who we report to) and external customers (those people who use our products and services).  We have to remember that customers are the reasons why we work or have our jobs.

My second thought is there's no excuse for poor customer service!  We owe it to our customers to be courteous, knowledgable, and prompt in all aspects of our jobs.  According to Wendi Pomerance Brick's book, The Science of Service, no matter what job we have, our customers all want the same four basic things:

• To be treated with dignity and respect
• To have some control
• To be understood
• Resolution of the issue 

My third thought is we should always seek ways to continuously improve how we serve our customers!  There's always ways to improve.  A good place to start is to collect some data on our current level of customer service.  Ask your customers how you're doing?  The Science of Service is an excellent way to get some ideas on how to improve how you serve your customers.

Here are other resources that can help you create a culture of service.

Ten Ways to Improve Your Customer Service
101 Ways to Improve Customer Service
GovLoop's Customer Service Hub

I challenge you to find three ways to improve customer service during Customer Service Week. 

The Hypocrisy of Learning

I am learning that the L&D function sometimes creates its own problems with justifying our worth within organizations.  We are the part of an organization that is supposed to facilitate a learning culture.  In many cases, we don’t even work in what would be considered “learning organizations”…we don’t walk the talk.  If we don’t even live by the mantra that we’re supposed to lead, how in the world are we supposed to be viewed as credible or trusted advisors.  Let’s get specific, by asking a few questions.

How can we…

• be trusted to be performance consultants, if we don’t identify our own causes for performance problems or create strategies for addressing areas for improvement?
• use mistakes as opportunities to learn, if we are super critical of anyone who isn’t perfect?
• foster innovation and creativity, if we create environments where people are afraid to try new approaches or methods?
• create creative blended learning solutions to close knowledge and skill gaps, if we don’t even develop our own employees using blended learning solutions?
• assist our customers in reengineering business processes, if our processes aren’t effective?
• develop leaders within our customer organizations, if we don’t develop our own L&D leaders?
• perform task analysis for our customers , if we aren’t able to describe, step-by-step what we should be doing?
• create change management strategies for our customers, if we don’t use change management strategies?
• promote learning, but we don’t do anything to grow in our profession?

We as L&D professionals have enough challenges with trying to explain how we can add value to our customers.  Let’s not have to spend our energy explaining what we do to each other.  Make it a point to learn something new about the L&D profession.  If you need a little help, take a look at some of the ways that I continue to grow and develop in my April blog posts, Take Responsibility for Your Own Development, Part 1 and Take Responsibility for Your Own Development, Part 2.  I challenge all of you to make an effort to grow in our profession…do something to enhance your career and better your organization…let’s eliminate the hypocrisy of learning.