Performance Consulting

Applying Performance Improvement in Human Resource Development

William J. Rothwell

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118416273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

Performance Consulting

If organizations are to be successful they must improve individual and organizational performance in order to establish and maintain a high-performance workplace, develop intellectual capital, promote productivity, and ultimately enhance profitability.

Performance Consulting reveals how to distinguish between the signs and symptoms of productivity problems from the underlying root causes and find the most ethical and cost-effective solutions to solve those problems. The book is written for performance consultants, HR professionals, and any leader who want to fulfill the role of a performance consultant in order to develop more productive workers and create a globally-competitive organization.

Filled with illustrative examples from giants in the field of human performance technology, the book describes the skills needed in order to become an effective performance consultant. Step by step the author clearly shows how to uncover and deal with challenges and opportunities to improve human performance of organizations by analyzing their present and envisioning their future. The book offers vital information for examining an organization's present conditions that are associated with data collection and analysis methods. It also describes how to foresee future conditions of an organization associated with relevant sources in order to determine their future course.

Performance Consulting includes guidelines for implementing performance improvement solutions, which are often identified as performance improvement interventions. The book explains which approaches can offer the solutions that are likely to be most cost-effective, timely, ethical, and socially-responsible.

No matter what size your organization or your current job responsibilities, Performance Consulting offers the strategies and information needed to become a dynamic performance consultant.

Part One

Thinking Beyond Training

Chapter One

Why Training

George M. (Bud) Benscoter

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Opening Vignette

Alicia is the training manager for a medium-sized manufacturing company. There are about 4,500 employees in the company, most of whom are located in the United States and Canada. The company, Elite Products, has grown at a moderate level and is considering expanding into one or more of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Alicia knows that, in order to assist with this continued growth and expansion, she and the rest of her department (five trainers and two administrative assistants) will have to adapt their practices to where the business needs to be to meet its goals.

The Training Department reports through human resources, with Alicia reporting directly to the vice president of human resources. Alicia is in her mid-thirties and has been pursuing a master's degree in human resource development (HRD) at the local university. All of her staff are college graduates, with an average of five years with Elite Products. Alicia has been with Elite for eight years now and also has a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering. Her knowledge of Elite's business processes and the level of respect that the company has for her contributed to her advancement through the ranks. When she was asked two years ago to head up the training department, she saw it as an opportunity to expand her knowledge of the company into the human resource arena. She has done well, and the reputation of her department is solid.

As part of her master's program, she was recently exposed to a course entitled “Performance Consulting Practices.” The instructor had considerable business experience and had been teaching this course and others for nearly ten years. To say the least, the experience opened Alicia's eyes to a world that she intuitively knew was there, but one for which she felt unprepared. The ideas that the instructor shared touched on much of the unrest that Alicia had been feeling since assuming her position. At the top of the list was the feeling that the training her department provided, while well received by participants and management alike, was somehow missing the mark in providing real value to the goals of the organization. After completing the course, Alicia was more determined than ever to put some of the ideas she had learned into practice.

Alicia's concerns are not uncommon among human resource professionals today. With a growing level of accountability to show results, Alicia has good reasons to question the practices she's experienced. As performance consulting concepts are developed in the coming pages, we'll revisit Alicia's challenge to see how she applies what she's learning in her world.

To better understand the transition that people like Alicia are going through, we need to appreciate the pressures that are compelling the training profession to re-examine itself. This chapter will clarify where we are, why we need to change, and what that change might look like.

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The Changing Face of Training

The reason we're beginning a book on performance consulting with the topic of training may not be obvious at first glance. For years now, the two fields have been closely linked for a number of reasons:

• Most of the thinkers and practitioners who have influenced the field of human performance improvement/performance consulting came from the instructional design/learning/training field.
• Most organizations that have evolved a performance consulting function began the journey from a training and human resource perspective.
• The two professional organizations that focus a great deal of their attention on performance consulting—The International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) and the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) are closely associated with training and instructional systems design disciplines.

In spite of these origins, training and HRD (human resource development) professionals have searched for methodologies that address the factors influencing human performance and what it means to be a performance improvement specialist. Very few organizations have an individual or a department called “Performance Consulting.” Instead, when authentic performance consulting is done at all, it is generally performed by organization development specialists or trainers/instructional designers who see the need to expand their field of vision. Recent developments, particularly in the areas of increased accountability and advanced technology, however, have opened up enormous opportunities to apply performance consulting practices to a wider range of organizational challenges.

This publication is designed to take you from a training and HRD perspective to a performance consulting perspective. There will always be a need to train people in critical skills, knowledge, and attitudes, but success in the future will be driven by the successful application of a variety of human performance tools.

To help with this journey, we'll begin by looking at the current state of training—what is being accomplished and what is likely to develop in the near and far term that will have an impact on the profession. New approaches to learning are evolving before our eyes, and everyone who has a role in performance improvement has to be aware of these advancements. We also must know where the power of training ends and the need for alternate approaches to human performance improvement begins.

A New World

As we move through the second decade of the 21st century, new business challenges, political upheavals, the influence of other disciplines, and new technologies have driven considerable change over the years. While this evolution will continue at a dramatic pace, the challenge is to decide where we think this evolution is going and get in front of it as effectively as we can.

For example, 2011 may prove to have been a pivotal year. Tremendous political change was driven, at least in part, by the application of technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networking dramatically demonstrates the power of instant knowledge and on-demand learning. Brian Solis (2012) offers a thought-provoking explanation of how product and service branding and marketing have already been dramatically affected by the social networking phenomenon. These technologies offer an as-yet untapped resource for dramatically altering the way we learn and how we work.

While predicting the future may be a fool's errand, some mega-trends are exerting increased pressure on human resource professionals.

Growing Skill Gaps

There is an increasing emphasis on talent management and the growing skills gap. This gap can be defined as the inability to fill a job requiring a particular set of skills or knowledge. Manufacturing is particularly affected by this phenomenon. The United States is going through a shift from a goods-producing economy to a service economy. Many of the high-growth sectors, though, will be unable to fill the jobs that will be available because of a shortage of skilled labor. While this puts a tremendous burden on our elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions, it also has an impact on who we hire, how we treat them once they're on board, and, in particular, how we provide learning and development opportunities.

A report entitled “Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirement Through 2018” (Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 201...