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.