Yes, this post is likely to morph into a rant; the first clue is in the title. Is there a difference between your onboarding process and the process of waterboarding? One uses water…and the other holds the new hire down and administers enough information at a continuous pace so they get the overwhelming sensation of drowning. Which one do you put your new hires through?
Tag: sustained capability
At first glance Change Management (CM) and Change Leadership (CL) may be considered interchangeable and simply more jargon used to confuse a familiar concept. Stay with me on this post as there is a significant difference when the end-game is the desire to create full adoption and sustained capability of any Change initiative.
Boss: “I have some unfortunate news.”
Me: (thinking to myself) ‘Here we go…again…’
Boss: “Your position has been eliminated effective a week from Friday.”
Me: “Hmmm, something tells me this is not a joke.”
Boss: “I’m sorry. This is no joke.”
Bah-dump-tssshhh!
(Not sure that’s the correct spelling for a rim shot, but that’s the audio clip that played in my head.)
<Rant>
To answer the question suggested by the title I offer another question – “Who gives a rip?” – as long as the end-game drives sustained workforce capability. The correct ratio is only correct if the end-game is reached.
Recently, I learned that it takes approximately 30 square miles of ocean for a loaded oil tanker to reverse course 180 degrees. That seems like a lot of ocean, but then, that’s a lot of boat to turn around – and a lot of momentum related to the existing course direction. It’s funny how momentum proves to be the primary challenge and source of resistance when standing in the way to a change in direction. While 30 square miles represents useless trivia, the significance and parallels represented by factors of time, effort, and mind space to change direction and overcome the momentum of long-held L&D strategies are no less remarkable.
When we are chasing sustainable business system implementation there are a number of activities organizations pursue. The traditional stand-by includes training for end-users…and I own several of those t-shirts…most reminders of a failure. Not a failure of rendering a quality training product from the teams I led, but a failure that manifests post-deployment – adoption – optimization – sustained capability – take your pick of those three in any combination.
At the recent Masie Learning 2013 conference in Orlando, I was sitting at the bar two nights in a row nursing the business end of a decent cabernet. On the second night I found myself sitting next to the same guy, Murray Christensen. Earlier that morning at the General Session, Conrad Gottfredson made a point of introducing us with the instructions to both of us “Get to know this guy!” So I did. After a prompting like that I’m thinking this guy could quite possibly be another Performer Support fanatic. And he was…is…Murray feeds off it as well.
Implementing Embedded Performance Support [EPS] can be as daunting a task as eating an entire elephant. Not sure I’d ever want to eat an elephant, but if I did, it would be one bite at a time versus scarfing down the whole thing. One bite at a time rings true for implementing EPS as well. Keep in mind that EPS is not a technology [though technology may well be part of the effort]; EPS is a discipline.
Once again, I find motivation flung upon me to grind out a new post based upon an awesome question asked this morning in one of my networking groups. The question, “Do we see a myopic view by training [L&D] limiting training’s impact?” And a second part, “What do we need to do to overcome it?” One response suggested it was not so much “myopic” as it was “funnel vision!” I heartily agree, and on either view [sorry…], if our vision does not peek through a more holistic lens to view the learning environment as a dynamic ecosystem, we will never progress beyond our current limits.
The title of this post sort of implies an “either/or” relationship, and I wanted that to come across – at least initially. Why? Because these two outcomes are attained at two different stages of competency development over the span of time that learning occurs. Not only what learning occurs but where, when and how it occurs. There is no shortage of flashy jargon and countless descriptive labels used in the learning industry these days that promise performance impacts, and I am probably guilty of using most of them at one time or another. Funny thing though…if you stick with the running dialog long enough, some of what appears “jargon-ish” actually has a ring of reality to it…and some of it is actually becoming mission critical.