“We have invested in, and trained our people, so why aren’t we seeing a significant lift in performance?”
This was a question put to us by leaders in one of Australia’s largest companies (over 35,000 staff). The context behind the question was a rollout of a major investment in a new customer-first methodology and training, as well as a proposed multimillion dollar sales methodology and training program – the third such program within a decade.
After an extensive round of interviews, facilitated workshops and research we discovered answers and solutions that fell into 3 categories:
Speed to Competence (S2C)
The desire to get new employees fit for role in a reduced timeframe is a clear corporate objective. This also applies to existing employees entering a new role, or businesses transforming existing processes and practices. Traditional learning practices for increasing an employees S2C is instructor-led training combined with lots of on-job development, and at times coaching support.
But what we found was Speed to Competence learning phase was hit or miss in regards to creating high performing employees; more often a significant miss in getting people fit for role and aligned to corporate cultures and norms. This was compounded by a significant trend toward reducing time spent in the classroom and pushing as much information as possible into e-learning (with increasingly varied quality), under the guise of learner-led learning. With little to no assessment of an employee’s ability to demonstrate capabilities to a required competence within their role before they were deemed fit.
Best Practice S2C has 4 elements which deliver a consistent fit-for-role outcome:
- Highly engaging training – which effectively transfers the requisite knowledge, skills, processes, and cultural norms required for competence. Instructor or digital does not matter; engaged learning does.
- Deliberate practice – we all know you cannot be a high performer without constant and consistent practice, yet companies do not make this available, and individuals do not make the time. “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”
- Coaching support – especially through the on-boarding period. It means more than formal coaching conversations; the fastest shortcut is to model excellence – learn from what the best do.
- Objectively assess competency – while this stands to reason because it provides a clear role-excellence development path, there is often no independent or consistent approach to how this is managed.
Maintenance of Competence (MoC)
Maintaining capability is often the role of the manager through effective feedback and supporting on-the-job training. A tweak to what you do here and a tweak there. There are a number of problems with this approach and which go to the heart of why the ROI on learning is not good.
Most important is the role of the manager. Feedback as coaching is, under the constraints of time, most often a discussion of directives – what we often hear called “GSD – Get Stuff Done”. This is not developing employee competence; it’s just moving through the task list.
This is compounded by the cognitive load we all experience in an economy and society suffering information overload, always-on connectedness, and reduced employee numbers while expecting growing corporate outputs. Burn out is the new normal. If you aren’t exhausted, you aren’t working hard enough.
With all this, we do not prepare for the greatest of all challenges: change. A new system, process, project, skill, or role. While these things are situational, it is our adapting to change that does our head in. And given corporate behaviours around fitter and faster, the introduction of new software systems, and the rapid advance of technologies that disintermediate so much of what we now do, we are constantly in flux without time to learn to adapt.
In most of our conversations with organisations across many different sectors and industries, we hear that managing the learning requirement around change is almost never done, and certainly not effectively.
Best practice capability of competence has 4 elements:
- Objective assessment of competency
- Deliberate practice – using digital simulations and the like (not e-learning)
- Coaching support – again, using digital tools such as a thin ‘bottom up’ coaching app
- Objective assessment of competence
Extension of Competence (EoC)
We undertook a survey of Learning & Development professionals earlier this year and found that the number 1 corporate learning investment for 2016 and beyond is growing internal talent. There are many reasons for this, none the least is the relatively high cost of hiring vs the cost of internal development.
What often goes wrong in leadership development is not the program of learning itself, but whether or not the person identified has the emotional intelligence to be a leader of people in the first place. The well-known data that says 3 in 4 people leave their job because of their manager, should be sending warning bells about the lack of EI in the workplace.
The ability to work with people is both fundamental and critical to organisational life. While EI as a componentry of effective leadership is well known, testing for EI is often put aside as “another cost we cannot do right now”. That’s understandable – and so is the result you get by not testing.
The New Wave
So how do we best manage learning to ensure more people are fit for ever-changing roles?
Best practice learning consists of 3 fundamental approaches:
- Highly Engaging learning interventions.
Anything that engages the learner and gets them motivated. This includes instructor-led training and also gamification, quality e-learning and digital learning (the 2 are not the same)
- Deliberate Practice
Anything that forces people to practice. Learning is a process, not an event.
- Coaching Support
And an acceptance of 1 unarguable truth about human beings: learning to do and achieve more is an unfolding process, not a 1-off event.