I attended a session at the recent ASTD conference in San Diego delivered by a Polish fellow who works for a large European multinational. There were many great points he made, but I had a real insight relative to the Six Boxes that we don’t often talk about.
After two failed attempts to design a corporate-wide Learning and Development function, first as a department then as an academy, they dismantled everything and started over by linking performance to business metrics.
I always love to hear that we’re on the right track, so that was good news. But as he went through his presentation, a few people in the audience cautioned that linking all learning to business results means "you lose sight of the people.”
His response is what we always purport, but it’s so good to be validated. He explained that employees liked the new learning program better because they were being trained on the things that were linked to their compensation.
What a surprise! If we set expectations (Box 1) for training that people will be learning how to produce valuable work outputs, it will be clearer to both trainers and those being trained what's important. Continuing along this same line, do we really think about Box 3 (Consequences & Incentives) when we design interventions for Box 4 (Skills & Knowledge)? If you learn what it takes to produce important results, how will the organization recognize and reward that performance -- both the learning itself and those results on the job? Whatever the reinforcers are – money, benefits, public kudos – people want to know how to do whatever it is that gets more for them....by definition.
Aligning behavior with the work outputs that produce business results isn’t coldhearted. It’s a gift to the performer. Make it simple. Make it reinforcing. Make your people happy.
Cynthia Riha, Partner
Binder Riha Associates
