Harold Stolovitch is Emeritus Professor of Workplace Learning and Performance, Université de Montréal, Principal at HSA Learning & Performance Solutions and co-author of Telling Ain’t Training. He’s an industry expert in human performance improvement and helps companies achieve high levels of performance and business success.
What happens when trainers don’t have clear performance outcomes for a training initiative?
The same thing that happens to anybody else—if you don’t know where you’re going, you will end up somewhere else. The performance outcomes are what drive any training initiative, even if it’s not a formal training course or program. When we’re developing people, we need a sense of what we’re developing them for, if we want to achieve the desired results. Performance outcomes specification is critical in any kind of planned training initiative.
How do you counsel clients to start the process of uncovering those outcomes?
By working backwards. Begin with the end of the story—how do you want it to conclude? For example, if you want learners to be able to pass the driver’s test, you begin by stating that the objective is for them to pass the driver’s test. This means that they have to be able to adjust, start, move, stop and park the vehicle according to specified standards. You can then break each of these down into simpler and simpler components, using a task analytic method to uncover the stepping stones that will get you to the end result. You need to begin by engaging in a directed discussion with your clients to clearly determine end results. From there, you can work backwards until you have laid out all of the required sub-accomplishments that lead to the final desired result. To repeat: Start with the end of the story and work backwards.
What do companies stand to gain by linking their people’s performance with business metrics?
In the world of work, there are so many competing priorities that you have to take a hard look each time you are going to spend resources, energy and time. If you need to change people’s performance in a particular way, it’s going to require effort and resources. You’d better have a clearly-defined need for that. There has to be a strong contributing link to the business goals of the organization.
My assumption is that if you have business goals, you have to have metrics to determine whether or not you’re achieving them. And now you have to integrate the performance of your people with those business goals and use the same metrics. Simple example: if you want your salespeople to sell your product and the objective is to sell lots of product and gain targeted revenues, then you have to link efforts to create the right sales performance to produce the sales you desire. And you measure the performance with the same yardstick that you’d measure the accomplishment of the goal. Along the way you can create process measures to track en route progress, but ultimately you must link people performance to the business metrics.
Remember this key principle: You get what you measure. And if you’re measuring well, if you’re measuring the right things while others are flailing around, this definitely puts you at an advantage. This is cut-to-the-chase thinking. When you focus on the ultimate aim of the chase, you end up the winner.
What’s your number one piece of advice to HR and training professionals who are trying to align their initiatives with the business?
Once again, the end of the story is really the beginning of the story. That may sound convoluted. But you have to know where you’re headed and what you want to achieve. Once you’ve established your goals and objectives, do what we in the human performance arena call a performance or a front-end analysis to determine what it will take to achieve those desired end results. In that process, you will uncover appropriate interventions to get you from where you are to where you want to be. The process naturally aligns your initiatives to that end result.
For example, if you have a project to complete, or if you’re introducing a new system, rather than simply saying that the people who will be involved in the project or the people who are going to be using the system need to be “trained,” you have to determine what that system or what the project is going to contribute to the business, define who will play the various roles, determine precisely how they’re going to contribute, and verify where they currently are. Then build in all the support systems, including (if necessary) training to get to that end result for each group.
That whole front-end analysis process is well worth investing in. If you diagnose properly, and then you base subsequent activities on your diagnosis, you will achieve the results you’re looking for. That’s where you should be putting your effort and money. Too many organizations I encounter tend to articulate a problem along with some immediate solution. They jump to the solution before they determine the factors they must consider.
Bottom line: Invest in the analytic part. Then follow through.
Tell us about the new edition of Telling Ain’t Training.
We’re very proud of the new edition of Telling Ain’t Training, updated, expanded and enhanced. We spent two years hunting for the latest research into how people learn and how they translate learning into performance, and also dispelling a lot of myths about what contributes to effective learning and performance. The book has been updated with a vastly larger end notes section that provides resources and references for people who want to explore specific themes. It also has a whole new section on technology and its relationship with training-learning. This adds an important dimension and depth to the book. The new edition of Telling Ain’t Training is really selling well even though it’s just been out a month. We, of course, are pleased and a little bit in awe that people find it to be truly useful to them. The correspondence from readers is uniformly warm. We’re also delighted with the very positive reviews that it’s received.
What else is on your calendar for 2011?
We have three Telling Ain’t Training mini-conferences coming up this fall, which offer an experiential approach to transforming “telling” into activities that result in long-term retention and behavior change.
September 22-23, 2011: Atlanta, GA
October 18-19, 2011: Arlington, VA
October 24-25, 2011: Denver, CO
Click here for more information and to register.