Some of the things we pushed several years back are starting to take hold (not as a result of our efforts – more of a result of ground swell / trend) like blogs, wiki’s, and community tools. But with every roll-out there seems to be a missing strategic piece. The organization pushes out tools (some tools are decent, others have serious usability issues for people used to using these tools) but the tools basically become buckets hung out there for people to throw their stuff in. When the tools are less successful than anticipated, few will get that they failed because we didn’t apply strategy (or common sense and good community practices).

I suspect many organizations are like mine… Me-centric. If you look at the IT governance folks, their primary concern (only concern) is the system. If you look at the training folks they are tunneled in on training (and if the department is decades old… it’s resident training). Everywhere you look it’s ‘me-me-me’. Take a deeper look within these pieces and parts and you see that the sub-elements, down to the individual, also consider their specialty focus to be of primary importance. I have a strong feeling that if we can find a way to mitigate ‘me-centricity’ for even a short while we will make significant strategic progress.

My organization considers itself a leader in HPT. And even for our folks, with a government organization at an agile size (<100k), the task of merely imagining a performance ecosystem is daunting. We have a group that is building the network brick by brick, gathering believers and hoping to reach critical mass before the next transfer season (another challenge in a military structured organization).

This isn’t a zero sum game and it’s not resource neutral. If we half-heartedly roll out an ‘alternative’ and leadership doesn’t support it strongly enough to displace a less desirable intervention then the change lost at the starting gate. If the organization isn’t willing to sacrifice a golden calf or two in exchange for a better oiled machine then there’s a lot of work to do to get the organization ready to make these sacrifices.

It’s a challenge. But the potential dividends make it really exciting:) Glad to have industry voices taking our side. That’s really helpful!

Charles, fabulous contribution, and love those statistics (will be using!). Couldn’t agree more that motivation can trump a priori ‘competency’ evaluation, and barriers are a major problem. Just the amount of bad interfaces boggles the mind. Tuning the performance ecosystem is a huge opportunity to improve outcomes, and some of those steps aren’t ‘break the bank’ propositions!

I think that employee performance and productivity (the drivers of value) are certainly a lot more than the sum of the knowledge and skills of the ‘actors’. L&D departments can spend until the end of time developing knowledge and skills and still have little discernible impact on productivity and value-creation if they aren’t integrated with other initiatives/actions.

The other two important factors in driving performance and productivity where people are concerned are [1] employee motivation (engagement, willingness to go the extra mile etc.) and [2] ‘environmental inhibitors’ – the things that block people from performing optimally – such as processes that are unusable, tools that are not fit-for-purpose, lack of access to information and experts, lack of a community to extract ‘the right stuff’ from etc.

What L&D departments really need to do is to get an understanding of which tools they have in their toolkits are really capable of adding value and helping significantly improve performance (and they should be looking to expand and refresh these on a very regular basis – and dispose of the not-so-useful ones). They then need to work with other pieces of the organisational puzzle – line managers, operations, marketing, tech etc. to get the job done.

The LDR organisation published some research a while ago that indicated that managers who set clear objectives and tell their team members how they’ll be measured in their appraisals will achieve a 19.8% performance improvement. Managers who ensure their team members have the necessary knowledge and skills achieve a 6.7% performance improvement. Managers who do neither achieve nothing. Case closed.