In the late 90’s, I was for­tu­nate enough to attend a work­shop taught by Jim and Dana Robin­son, who devel­oped the con­cept of Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing. What I learned in that work­shop and from read­ing the Robinson’s books is an inte­gral part of how I ana­lyze any train­ing request that comes across my desk. Very rarely is pure train­ing or re-training the answer to a per­for­mance prob­lem. It’s usu­ally a com­bi­na­tion of tweak­ing work processes, expand­ing the knowl­edge of the worker, and then a lit­tle bit of train­ing to cement that knowl­edge or tweaked process into place.

I’ve always worked within train­ing groups, some­times embed­ded in an IT depart­ment, some­times in HR. But always in a group of train­ing pro­fes­sion­als focus on train­ing imple­men­ta­tions. In recent years, I’ve tran­si­tioned to more of a con­sult­ing role within an HR group. My team man­ages the yearly per­for­mance cycle for the com­pany, and being involved in that process has opened my eyes to another side of per­for­mance consulting.

I had looked at per­for­mance con­sult­ing from the aspect of how a per­son could do the task at hand more effi­ciently, more pro­duc­tively, or sim­ply do it bet­ter. I’ve looked at the employee’s envi­ron­ment, the process as a whole, the def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess for the task, etc. What I’ve haven’t been as suc­cess­ful includ­ing in my analy­sis equa­tion is how the task or process fits into orga­ni­za­tional goals.

It’s not really sur­pris­ing that I’ve strug­gled with this. Most orga­ni­za­tions that I’ve worked for don’t do a good job of set­ting orga­ni­za­tional goals, or com­mu­ni­cat­ing those goals down to lower lev­els. In fact, I’ve worked for com­pa­nies where there not only aren’t any orga­ni­za­tional goals, but there isn’t a mis­sion or vision state­ment either. Most often, the stated mis­sion or goals are so vague and finan­cial focused that it’s impos­si­ble to draw a direct cor­re­la­tion down to the indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor with­out mak­ing some big assumptions.

I want to share some thoughts on how you might do a bet­ter job of mak­ing those con­nec­tions in your own train­ing projects if you are not for­tu­nate enough to have clearly defined orga­ni­za­tional goals.

When you find your­self deal­ing with orga­ni­za­tional goals that are vague or non-existent, one approach is to make some rea­son­able assump­tions your­self, or if your orga­ni­za­tion sets enterprise-wide goals, take a look at those goals and how they might apply to the training/performance issue you are work­ing with. What kinds of behav­iors should employ­ees exhibit in order to con­tribute to the goals? For exam­ple, is cus­tomer ser­vice a big pri­or­ity in your orga­ni­za­tion? How does the process or task you’re work­ing with relate to that? These employ­ees are not cus­tomer fac­ing? Then they prob­a­bly directly or indi­rectly sup­port some­one who is cus­tomer fac­ing. How does that relate to the over­all suc­cess of the company?

Some­times, you just can’t draw the line from those orga­ni­za­tional goals to your train­ing. Then what? This is where my expe­ri­ence with the per­for­mance man­age­ment cycle has helped. If your com­pany has a robust per­for­mance man­age­ment process, the man­ager of a depart­ment *should* have set some goals for their employ­ees. Even if they didn’t, they have some idea in their head of what their team should be accom­plish­ing, and how it should look and feel. Sit down with them and talk about the goals they’ve set for their team, either on an indi­vid­ual or team level. Find out what is impor­tant to that man­ager in terms of *how* the task is com­pleted, not just that the task get com­pleted. Has team­work been an issue for the employ­ees? Is over­all busi­ness knowl­edge lack­ing? How could the behav­ior of the employ­ees con­tribute to the suc­cess of the task/process you are teach­ing them?

Let me illus­trate with an exam­ple. Let’s say that through your dis­cus­sions with the man­ager you find out that work­ing as a tea m has been an issue for the group you are train­ing. It’s some­thing the man­ager has set at goals for the team on their yearly per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions. You’re tasked with teach­ing them how to build a wid­get. You real­ize that the wid­get build­ing process would go much more effi­ciently if they were a smooth run­ning team. So you incor­po­rate aspects of team­work into the wid­get process train­ing, rein­forc­ing the manager’s efforts to build the team, and help­ing the employ­ees to be suc­cess­ful at both work­ing as a team and build­ing the wid­gets. Had you not helped the employ­ees with their team­work, the wid­get process – and there­fore your train­ing out­comes — would have been less successful.

When you’re look­ing at cre­at­ing wide-scale change across the orga­ni­za­tion, or ensur­ing that dis­parate parts of the orga­ni­za­tion are work­ing as a team, hav­ing com­mon orga­ni­za­tional goals and incor­po­rat­ing those goals into every train­ing imple­men­ta­tion is crit­i­cal to suc­cess. I encour­age you to get involved in the Per­for­mance Man­age­ment process in your orga­ni­za­tion. Your train­ing will be the bet­ter for it.