Will at Work Learning

Is Your Training Course Likely to Boost Performance? Free Course Review Template.

Despite decades of advocacy by our best trade associations, our wisest gurus, and our most practical researchers, most organizations today still rely on training courses that have little impact in promoting on-the-job performance.

As I mentioned in a recent article, we as learning professionals continue to fail in five major ways. You can access that article by clicking here.

I used to think that this was just a failure of knowledge, but in most of the organizations in which I've consulted, there are at least a few learning-and-performance professionals who understand that training alone is not enough. Part of the problem is the dead weight of tradition--the "old normal" continues to blind us to new possibilities. The enlightened few have a hard time pushing back against the gravitational pull of this mass hypnosis.

I recently had a new insight--a way of looking at this problem that I think might enable organizations to break out of their bad habits. The solution is that we have to gain control of the leverage points we have to push for change. We have to change the levers that warp and control our thinking. The big lever is learning measurement. I've been pushing this for years as our most important leverage point. If we measured better, we'd get better feedback, which would push us to create better learning interventions.

But learning measurement isn't our only lever and changing your learning measurement practices is not always easy politically. Beside learning measurement, I've compiled a whole list of other leverage points that  really matter. In fact, it was only recently that I had this incredible insight (one I maybe should have had 10 years ago), that we ought to figure out all the levers we have at our disposal and change them to help push our organizations toward a performance orientation. I'd like to reveal one of those levers today.

One of the things we do in our organizations is review our training courses from time to time--either intentionally or by osmosis and feeling. Well, instead of using the wrong metrics, why not use methods that we know--based on our understanding of learning-and-performance--are likely to be good indicators of whether our training course will support actual on-the-job performance.

The Course Review Template is something that can be used on any training course--classroom training or e-learning.It includes a set of questions that are indicators of how performance-based your training course is. Each rubric in this tool is inspired by research or proven practices which I've learned in my 25+ years in the workplace learning field. 

I should give you a warning. You're unlikely to be happy with what you find. If I bet each of you one dollar for each training course of yours that doesn't support performance, I'd be a millionaire overnight.

But to be fair, I'm going to let you try out the tool yourself. It's free. Use it. And, let me know how your training courses rate. Are they likely to improve on-the-job performance or not?

Click to Download the Course Review Template

After you review a course, post your results at the following link, and when we get enough responses, we'll let you compare your results to others.

Click to Post Your Course Review Results

Maybe I'm having a momentary bout of delusional cognition, but I'm thinking right now that this simple Course Review Template might just revolutionize our ability to simply review our courses to see how performance focused they are.

Such a grandiose statement will provoke eye rolls in some, so let me stipulate a few things. First, this is a first draft, so the Course Review Template is going to be imminently improveable. Second, the Course Review Template is NOT a precision instrument. It is not psychometrically derived, the numbers it assigns to each rubric are best guesses, and there was no super-committee here--just me. Third, the rubrics themselves are subject to interpretation. Instead of overcomplicating the form and making it unusable, I decided to keep it simple and make it less precise. Finally, course reviews are just one of the levers you'll need to completely transition from a course-focus to a performance-focus.

The bottom line is that we have to try some innovate new things to push our organizations to a performance focus. The old ways have not worked. The Course Review Template--or something like it--is worth a try. And seriously, I think it could revolutionize the way your organization views its training courses.

 

Charley Morrow on Today's Employment Handcuffs

Charley Morrow, assessment guru, opens his new blog with a brilliant analysis of one of the biggest issues in today's workplace: Employment Handcuffs (my term--don't blame Charley).

More than at almost any other time, today's workers feel stuck where they are. Figuratively, they are handcuffed to their current companies, positions, and bosses.

Charley's got hard data on this, but I've seen this too. I've seen people who hate their bosses who just can't find a job when they are competing with five other applicants (there are six applicants for every job available in the United States).

Employment Handcuffs leads to depression, anger, sabotage, lack of effort, productivity decline, etc.

These handcuffs also puts managers further into the dark then they already are.

Management Blindness Worse Than Ever

Managers are always in the dark about their own leadership performance. The only people that can tell them how well they are doing as leaders are the people they're leading, their direct reports---and their direct reports are scared/inhibited/hesitant to tell the truth about their boss's leadership performance.

But now it's worse than ever. Workers are scared to death of losing their jobs. They've seen their friends and colleagues out of work for months or years. They've seen friends, family, or neighbors' houses go into foreclosure. They've heard stories about how people lose their health care insurance after the Cobra has unwound itself. 

These smart workers won't do anything to upset their bosses---the people who are most likely to fire them.

How this Hurts Organizational Performance

This hurts manager performance and hurts the productivity and performance of all the employees who have bosses. It's a spiraling down effect.

From a CLO's perspective, you better be doing something to improve your managers' performance in this time of employment handcuffing!! Contact me here for consulting advice.

How Managers Can See the Light

1. Managers have to ask for feedback from a place of authenticity. They have to want to improve their own performance. Ya just can't fake it.
2. Managers have to listen to any feedback they get.
3. Managers have to make changes/improvements in what they do.
4. Managers have to avoid being defensive---even when the feedback is harsh, cutting, or wrong.
5. Managers have to thank those who give them feedback.
6. Managers have to be patient. Your folks don't trust that you're not going to retaliate. It will take time to build that trust.
7. Managers have to ask for feedback routinely, not just at performance-review time.
8. Managers have to be available. So many managers are just too busy to be available. Stop going to all those meetings with folks senior to you!! Your job is to get work done through your direct reports---you need to be there for them.
9. Managers may benefit from multi-rater 360-degree assessments or other assessment-like interactions. Ask Charley about this stuff.

And again, Charley's great blog post is worth the read.

Thanks Charley!! And welcome to the Blogosphere!! Glad you're here.

A Better Learning to Performance Model and Job Aid

For almost a decade I've been building a model of how learning works to prompt performance. Each iteration gets better (in my unbiased opinion). Here's the latest one--this one has the advantage of pointing out the responsibilities learning professionals have AND the responsibilities that learners' managers and the workplace have in creating on-the-job results.

You can use this model for two purposes:

1. As a visual metaphor for how learning works to drive on-the-job performance and results.
2. As a job aid to assign responsibilities and tasks.

This graphic draws on many sources, many I'm probably unaware of. It draws from the wisdom of authors such as Wick, Pollock, Jefferson, and Flanagan of Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning fame, and Tim Mooney and Rob Brinkerhoff from the new book Courageous Training (which is great by the way, I'll review it within the next month).

It also draws from countless researchers on learning, memory, instruction, and cognition who have helped me understand learning at a deep level, enabling me to add to models that don't fully include wisdom on how learning and cognition really work to drive remembering.

Also, I'd like to thank my many clients who have enabled me a great real-world workshop in which to think deeply about how learning works in a practical reality. I'd particularly like to thank my friends at Walgreens, and especially Anne Laures who commented on an earlier version of this model.

Download Learning-Performance_Diagram_v2.pdf.

As always, this is a work in progress, so let me know what you like and what I might be missing. Note, of course, that human learning and performance is too complicated to include every factor of relevance. My goal is to create a model simple enough to be easily understood and precise enough to be useful and provide practical learning-to-performance improvement.

Oh, if you have to give it a name, you might call it the Learning-to-Performance Landscape Model, but I'll probably come up with a better name.

What Work-Learning Audit Reveals

I recently completed one of the most comprehensive work-learning audits I've ever been asked to do for a major U. S. retailer. The goal of the audit was to find out how their learning programs AND work-learning environment were supporting the stores in being successful. The audit involved (1) structured and unstructured interviewing with all levels of the organization, especially with store personnel, (2) focus groups held across the country with specific groups of store personnel (e.g., clerk, store managers, assistant managers, etc.), (3) task force meetings with senior line managers and representatives throughout the company, (4) learning audits of e-learning courses, (5) learning audits of a mission-critical classroom course, (6) review of company artifacts (CEO messages, publications, databases, intranet, etc.), (7) interviews with learning-and-performance professionals, (8) discussions of business strategy, (9) discussions regarding corporate information and data-gathering capabilities, (10) job shadowing, (11) store observations, etc.

Who/What Do Workers Learn From?

One of the most intriguing results came out of a relatively simple exercise I did with focus-group participants. The following is a rough approximation of those results.

What I did was ask focus-group participants who they learned from. I would hold up a large 6 x 8 index card with a position label on it, for example, "District Manager," "Clerks," or "Corporate." The group would shout out where they thought that card should go on a large diagram I had created on the wall. I would place it on the wall in a particular category based on the verbal responses and then we would negotiate as a group to determine it's final positioning. So for example, participants could say that they learned the following amounts from that person/position, and we often compromised using in-between placement:

• Learned Most
• Learned a Lot
• Learned Some
• Learned a Little
• Learned Least
• Had Little/No Contact with

See the diagram below for a rough example. This one is actually a composite based on several focus groups and more than one position. It gives a fair representation for how frontline retail clerks responded. Note that the orange boxes represent fellow employees, while the blue boxes represent other groups of people or things that they learned from.

There are several key insights from these results:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.
• The more contact, the more learning (for the most part), however there are benefits from learning from experts (e.g., store managers, head clerks), though the worker has to have at least some signicant contact with them to create this benefit. You'll notice that district staff have only a little impact and regional and corporate staff have none.
• E-learning is seen as somewhat facilitative but not a place where workers learn the most. This result may be organization specific as different e-learning designs and implementations might easily move this result higher or lower.

Frontline clerks didn't get much from company magazines and the like, but managers (not represented in the results above) did find value in these. Store managers also reported that networking with other store managers was on of the "Learn Most" entries for them. For this company, this network was even more important than learning from their district managers (their direct bosses). This makes sense because their network is more accessible throughout the heat of the daily grind.

These results were eye-opening for my client, and they are still wrangling with the implications. For example, district managers and district training staff seemed to produce very little learning benefits. So, should their roles for learning be de-emphasized or re-emphasized?

These types of result have to be understood in the larger data-gathering effort of course. Analyzed alone, they suffer from the problem of de-contextualized self-report data. Combined with multiple other data sources, they paint a really robust picture of an organization's learning environment.

Informal Learning, Social Networks, etc.

Vendors are out and about in our field now selling the benefits of complicated and expensive analysis tools for looking at how people learn through so-called informal on-the-job mechanisms. The example above shows that if you don't have the big bucks, there are simpler ways to get good data as well. 

Elliott Masie's LMS Wish List

Elliott Masie came up with a great and very insightful wish list for LMS's. Click here to access it. He even added a few suggestions in the past few days, probably based on feedback from his loyal audience.

I really like the richness that Elliott's suggestions might create for a typical LMS. Most LMS implementations are just a list of course offerings.

On the other hand, I worry about overly complicating options for users. Most workers just don't have extra time to waste. Maybe the suggestion to let users rate the courses comes into play here.

I also worry about user-generated content. It can be great, could be better than what the training folks can create, could engender more engagement, could be bottom line more effective. But we should all recognize that it is a double-edge sword. User generated content could be incorrect, could be a huge waste of time, could cause the organization to leave itself vulnerable to legal liability.

Doesn't Fix the Biggest Problem with the LMS Mentality

The biggest problem with LMS's can't be fixed with Elliott's suggestions. The biggest problem is that the whole LMS face sends a powerful hidden message that "learning" is about taking courses or accessing other learning events. This "Learning Means Sitting" LMS mentality infiltrates whole organizations.

I've seen this recently with one of my clients, a huge retailer, where their LMS has encouraged store managers and other store leaders to focus learning time on taking courses, in lieu of coaching, learning from each other, trying things out and getting feedback, encouraging store employees to take responsibility for particular areas, etc. It's not that they completely ignore these other learning opportunities; it's that the LMS focuses everyones' time and attention on courses, creating a lot of wasted effort.

To get the most from an LMS, you ought to throw away your LMS and start over. People can learn something—develop competencies/skills—from courses or from other means. A competency-management system that offers multiple means to develop oneself is ideal, where courses/events are just one option. I still haven't seen a commercial system that does this though...Most are course first designs.

Maybe I'm too over-the-top recommending that we get rid of all LMS's. I make the statement to highlight the humongous problems that the LMS mentality is causing.

Learning in the Citizenry

Learning is a many-splendored thing. Want evidence? Consider the overabundance of theories of learning. Greg Kearsley has a nice list. To me, this overabundance is evidence that the human learning system has not yet been lassoed and cataloged with any great precision. Ironic that DNA is easier to map than learning.

Being a political junkie, I'm fascinated with how a population of citizens learns about their government and the societal institutions of power. Democracy is rooted in the idea that we the citizenry have learned the right information to make good decisions. In theory this makes sense, while in practice imperfect knowledge is the norm. This discussion may relate to learning in the workplace as well.

Take one example from recent events. On September 11th, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists. The question arose, who were these terrorists? Who sent them? Who helped them? One particular question was asked. "Was Saddam Hussein (dictator of Iraq) involved?" I use this question because there is now generally-accepted objective evidence that Saddam Hussein was not involved in the 9/11 attack in any way. Even President Bush has admitted this. On September 17th, 2003, Bush said, in answer to a question from a reporter, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Despite this direct piece of information, the Bush administration has repeatedly implied, before and after this statement, that the war in Iraq is a response to 9/11. We could discuss many specific instances of this---we could argue about this---but I don't want to belabor the point. What I want to get at is how U.S. citizens learned about the reality of the question.

Take a look at polling data, which I found at PollingReport.com. I've marked it up to draw your eyes toward two interesting realities. First, look at the "Trend" data. It shows that we the citizens have changed our answer to the question asked over time. In September of 2002, 51% of Americans incorrectly believed that Saddam was personally involved in September 11th. Last month in October or 2005, the number had dived to 33%. The flip side of this showed that 33% correctly denied any link between Saddam and 9/11 in October of 2002, while today the number is a more healthy 55% correct, but still a relatively low number. If we think in terms of school-like passing-grade cutoffs, our country gets a failing grade.

The second interesting reality is how different groups of people have "Different Realities" about what is true. You'll notice the difference in answering these questions between Republicans and Democrats.

These data encourage me to conclude or wonder about the following:

1. Even well-established facts can engender wide gaps in what is considered true. Again, this highlights the human reality of "imperfect knowledge."
2. Stating a fact (or a learning point) will not necessarily change everyone's mind. It is not clear from the data whether the problem is one of information exposure or information processing. Some people may not have heard the news. People who heard the news may not have understood it, they may have rejected it, or they may have subsequently forgotten it.
3. Making implied connections between events can be more powerful than stating things explicitly. It is not clear whether this is also a function of the comparative differences in the number of repetitions people are exposed to. This implied-connection mechanism reminds me of the "false-memory" research findings of folks like Elizabeth Loftus. Are the Republicans better applied psychologists than the Democrats?
4. Why is it that so many citizens are so ill-informed? Why don't (or why can't) our societal information-validators do their jobs? If the media, if our trusted friends, if our political leaders, if our religious leaders, if opinion leaders can't persuade us toward the truth, is something wrong with these folks, is something wrong with us, is there something about human cognitive processing that enables this disenfranchisement from objective reality? (Peter Berger be damned).
5. I'm guessing that lots of the differences between groups depends upon which fishtank of stimuli we swim in. Anybody who has friends, coworkers, or family members in the opposing political encampment will recognize how the world the other half swims in looks completely different than the world we live in.
6. It appears from the trend data that there was a back-and-forth movement. We didn't move inexorably toward the truth. What were the factors that pushed these swings?

These things are too big for me to understand. But lots of the same issues are relevant to learning in organizations---both formal training and informal learning.

1. How can we better ensure that information flows smoothly to all?
2. How can we ensure that information is processed by all?
3. How can we ensure that information is understood in more-or-less the same way by all?
4. How can we be sure that we are trusted purveyors of information?
5. How can we speed the acceptance of true information?
6. How can we prevent misinformation from influencing people?
7. How can we use implied connections, as opposed to explicit presentations of learning points, to influence learning and behavior? Stories is one way, perhaps.
8. Can we figure out a way to map our organizations and the fishtanks of information people swim in, and inject information into these various networks to ensure we reach everyone?
9. What role can knowledge testing, performance testing, or management oversight (and the feedback mechanisms inherent in these practices) be used to correct misinformation?