Performance Consulting Is More Than Training Delivery
If you are unfamiliar with the term, performance consulting is becoming a more important focus for organizations committed to making sure they are accomplishing their goals with as little wasted effort or resources as possible. It’s designed to help companies do more with less, stay competitive, and increase market share. The hyper-competitive market that businesses operate in today have learned that in order to stay ahead of the curve, they must increase pressure on their corporate training programs to calculate the return on learning of training initiatives, create more responsive solutions, and ensure that performance is always on the cutting edge. But there’s more to performance consulting than the training element. Here are a few things you should know about performance consulting that will help you capitalize on the growth opportunity.
The Makeup of Performance
Performance is about what people do and the skills, knowledge and resources needed for them to do well. Performance consulting helps organizations get the best results from their people in terms of performance. It helps companies understand higher level business problems and provides a more holistic strategy to improve performance across the board.
In the realm of Learning and Development, Training Needs Analyses (commonly known as TNA) often have a single outcome – a training solution. When compared to a full-fledged performance analysis, TNA only answers one question of many. It provides a broader approach that takes into account factors such as employee knowledge, skill, motivation and environment. In this way, companies can look beyond training to see exactly what is needed to improve employee performance.
Key Questions to Ask
When engaged in a performance consulting process, organizations are asked to consider a number of important questions to drill down to the root of an issue. Those questions include:
What is the problem?
This seemingly simple starting point is critical to defining performance issues that need to be addressed. It may turn out the problem is not so much a need to change or create something new, rather it might simply be an issue of underperformance. Regardless, the starting point should always be with the problem itself.
Who is involved?
You need to draw the system diagram and identify the key people involved in the performance gap while considering the full value chain.
What is happening now?
Define the current state of performance to establish an appropriate baseline to measure future performance against.
What do you want to happen in the future?
Describe how you would like to see things happening in an ideal scenario. What does success look like to you? Identify the specific outcomes to drive the measurement approach.
What is the cost of the gap?
Ask what the impact of doing nothing will be so you can confirm the work will deliver value.
What are the causes and possible solutions?
Ask whether lack of knowledge, skill, motivation or environment is contributing to the performance gap. Understanding the root causes will help you identify potential solutions.
Define an action plan.
From here you should define what and when you will take action to address the problem.
Are you looking to bring more value to your corporate training?
