THE PERFORMANCE FOCUSED DEVELOPMENT MODEL
The Foundations: Learning Professional Performance Focused Development Framework
It is time to really start with the business - So what does ‘start with the business’ mean?
• Understand business strategy and intent
• Appreciate all commercial and financial levers
• Recognise the consequential impact of learning approaches, acquisition and adjusted performance on other parts of the organisation
• Speak the business language not the language of HR
• Recognise where, when and how value can be added from learning
• Align the investment in learning approaches with the likely impact to be achieved from successful implementation. This would include the need to stand up to ‘solutioneering.’ That is, to ensure organisation funds are not wasted by simply doing as told by management who may have a limited solution lens; one that jumps to training as the answer.
• Resource commercially
• Ensure L&D role model internal productivity levels and positive wiring to the business
• Reflect the business culture required for success
• Coordinate and agree full learning support approaches which includes the clarifying of the role of all parties involved
• Ensure L&D adds value and is a lever to drive performance
Start With The Business
To really appreciate the business (we’ll continue to use business as a catch all term for organisations, non-profits, charities, businesses, academic institutions etc) all within L&D need to appreciate and master:
• Uniqueness – all businesses are fundamentally unique from each other just in that they have different people, immediate intent and current challenges, thus L&D solutions should reflect this. Programmes only need provide what is immediately useful.
• Commercial awareness – what results from training really matter? What impact would really be appreciated? What are the reasons for undertaking some classroom training, virtual training, video sharing, performance support activity, etc? Learners’ objectives should
reflect the expected output. Learning objectives do not need to be seen by learners.
• Business health – the learning organisation is deemed to be healthy. An organisation with high trust is deemed to be healthy (Senge, Covey & Covey), however it’s only healthy is if it is consistent – that learning is seen to directly impact performance by all and that trustworthiness and intelligent trust is being developed.
• Organisation approaches – people learn relatively quickly in abstract, we need to ensure that all learning is allowed to transfer to performance in a positive way.
• Organisation design – what L&D roles really reflect the intent of the organisation? How can you create time for the internal team? Where best can outsourced resource add value?
• Scale – let’s be appropriate – percentage of spend on sales training versus Indian head massage at a bank where increased cross-sales to meet customer needs was their highest priority.
We will explore these further in later issues yet underpinning this is a new way of ensuring we ‘start with business’, it looks at the way in which an L&D team adds value and is seen as a provider of something that can be a lever to drive performance.
Within L&D there is a tendency to talk about and use terms like business alignment, partnering with business management and such phrases.