This blog is generated from the Performance Matters Podcast episode titled You Called My Baby “Ugly”! In it, Bob Mosher and Dr. Con Gottfredson discuss how to approach colleagues who resist shifting to a performance-first approach because they insist that organizational training-only events worked for them and should be sufficient for newer employees.
Bob Mosher (BM): I am honored to be joined today by one of my heroes in life, my dear friend Dr. Con Gottfredson. Good to have you here!
Con Gottfredson (CG): As always, these are wonderful conversations that we’re able to have, Bob.
BM: This is our 76th podcast! What’s great about this series is that we get to reach out to all of you, and when we meet you in different ways, it’s nice to hear your feedback that these episodes spur conversation and new ideas.
The title of this one has probably intrigued you. It stems from a recent interaction with a colleague and client who was running headlong into a “training” mindset. As you probably know, we talk about the mindset shift from training to performance all the time, and this wonderful, courageous learning professional, who’s done great work using the 5 Moments of Need framework and been at this for longer than most, is in a leadership position. But when he said, “We probably shouldn’t only do an exhaustive training program,” his colleague’s pushback was, “Well, it worked for me. Look at me. I’m 20 years into my career. I’m successful. I’ve made a great living, and I remember this course from when I first started here 20 years ago. I have fond memories of it, and it worked for me.” At that point, our colleague kind of felt like he was calling his coworker’s baby (aka course) “ugly”, because clearly this individual has a passion for and an emotional bond to the classroom experience in question. As a result, this interaction really set our colleague back.
Con, what are your feelings about the “it worked for me” statement?
CG: Training (at least classroom training and instructor-led training) is social. We know from history that it’s all about bonding, a shared experience, some laughs, and lots of other things. We all have fond memories of great training experiences. The question is, what did those bring us and where did those take us? Here is another question: is all training equal in its impact and ability to do what needs to be done? We can have a great memory and great experience of getting away, going somewhere, doing certain things together, etc., but that doesn’t mean we were enabled with the capacity to do the work that we need to do and that whatever we learned stuck with us. It doesn’t mean that we were able to transfer all that was covered to our work without any kind of challenge, and that we were able to then adapt and adjust in the flow of work accordingly. Most people who are making that “it worked for me” statement have a heck of a lot of experience under their belt, which is tied back to that initial training experience. But where they are today has little to nothing to do with that experience, except that it’s a fond memory.
BM: I love the language you used there, Con, because I think it’s defendable. The training experience in question initiated that person’s journey, and in its defense, they did take away some learning. It wasn’t just a great time and an entertaining trainer. We’re not saying that, but we tend to juxtapose a training event with where we are now and exacerbate the impact of that event on our journey. We will often point to such triggering events as being what got us here 20 years later, when that’s just not true. Experience is what got us here! Sure, those 4 (or however many days) of training may have started our journey, but that event is not entirely what got us here.
CG: To assume at the end of that event that I am competent in my job, that I am proficient, and that I have all that I need is simply not true. That is nowhere close to reality, because we know that it takes much more time for people to become fully proficient in their work. It takes experience and time, and the time to proficiency—the time from that initiating training experience to the point where someone is proficient on the job—takes at least twice as long as it should be taking. So, saying “it worked for me” is a myopic position to take, but when we try to talk about it, it’s like we’re saying their baby is ugly. And it isn’t! I do want to say that some babies are uglier than other babies, and like I said, all training is not equal in terms of its instructional integrity and return on instruction. For example, I just took an eLearning course. There was absolutely no return on that instructional time. None. It was a compliance course and I finished it, but what I learned from it I can’t tell you. I was all about jumping through those hoops so that I could get on to things that really matter in my life. It was something that had to be done, but there was little to no return on instruction.
BM: Let’s draw some parallels here and see if we can dissect this a bit. The frustration for this individual who was saying “it worked for me” was that they were championing a different discussion and felt like they were running up against a wall. But they did forget that probably a day or two after the training finished, they forgot half or more of what was taught. They also probably spent time bothering neighboring employees and work friends (who knew how to perform the skills taught in the training) so that they could get their job done. And they probably struggled and made mistakes that might have been embarrassing, hurtful, and/or hard. They learned through hard knocks and that’s the resiliency of experiential learning, but unfortunately, it’s a dangerous pool to swim in. The consequence of that as a strategy can be catastrophic. So, how do we talk to that “it worked for me” individual, Con? Because the problem that I’ve seen is that if you push back too hard, or if you do appear to be calling someone’s baby ugly, they will shut down and you won’t get one iota of support. They’ll nod and smile, but you’ve lost them. How do we enter that narrative, begin to turn it around, and honor what they’re feeling, but also get them to give us permission to try a performance-first approach?
CG: I think the worst place to start is saying that we need to change the classroom. I think a better place to start is saying, “Here is some additional capability that we need to address in the flow of work.” For example, we want to be able to rapidly close skill gaps that happen as people are working. At any point, if a person has a skill gap—if they’ve forgotten that skill or can’t perform it properly—we want to rapidly close it. We want to ensure that people become fully proficient and fully functioning. If people are leaving their job in 18 months, and it’s taking 18 months to get them to the point where they’re fully productive, that’s not good. We want to get them productive in their work faster. One of the things I target is the whole issue of growing in experience and developing expertise. We want to intentionally accelerate how we get people to where they need to be. That doesn’t mean that the classroom isn’t an important first phase of that, but there’s more that we need to do: growth, development, and progress.
Maybe we need to change the conversation so that it’s not about “training stinks”, even though sometimes it does (sometimes the baby is ugly). But ugly babies can become very handsome and beautiful human beings. When one of my sons was born, both my wife and I went independently to our doctor and asked if he was all right. We didn’t understand how babies are structured so that they can come into this world, but he assured us that, over time, our son was going to be a handsome human being. So, in our conversations with colleagues, we’ve certainly got to play sweeter music and talk about the whole growth and development process. Then, we can step back and say, “We want to make sure that we mitigate risk. With the analysis we’ve done, we can see that for half of the skills here, the consequence of failure is significant to catastrophic. We can’t afford to eliminate this class or for the training to be less than instructionally sound. How do we ensure success?” Those are conversations that we can have with key stakeholders, and I think they’ll get it.
BM: I think everyone can relate to what happens after any class they’ve ever taken. Who hasn’t struggled, forgotten things, or failed when they’ve tried to perform what they were taught, thinking they knew what they were doing? We can say, “That’s where we need to mitigate the risk. Let’s look at this course and make sure it optimizes the rare time we get with people. More importantly, let’s make sure that it mitigates risk in that after-the-class experience so employees can successfully perform their jobs.”
You’ve talked before, Con, about the dialogue around why we are doing training in the first place. So, before we even talk about the length of a course—let’s say it’s one that already exists and is 5 days long—what are its outcomes? What is its intent?
CG: I think this dialogue is vital. In our experience with key stakeholders, when they have a request and come to us saying, “training is not working” or “I need a new training course,” that’s when we can step back and say, “Okay, let’s talk about that. What are the challenges that you’re experiencing? What is happening that leads you to believe it’s not working? Where are the pain points?” If we can identify challenges and/or opportunities and then identify the desired measurable impact, that takes us beyond the classroom. Then you can have a conversation about that impact and how best to achieve it. This is how we go about shifting from a training mindset to a performance mindset.
BM: Also, I am always taken aback by the transformation that happens during a Rapid Workflow Analysis (RWA). Again, let’s play the scenario of having a long-standing course, a “sacred cow”, and the plan is to rerun it and reload it next year. Are we just going to say, “Okay, fine,” because climbing that mountain to make a change is going to be tough? What if we said, “We have a 2-day (or however long) exercise, and it’s been a while since we’ve really looked at this course. We reload it and redo it every year, but there has been a lot of change in the world.” Any organization would agree that this year is not the same as last year, and next year won’t be the same as this year. What if we went through an exercise to just examine the current outline? We start with an exercise just to look at the course and talk through the work. What would come out of that? In my experience, somewhere during these conversations, people start talking about much more than a course. I think that may help crack some of the code and help others realize, “Wow, the course doesn’t align as much as I thought to what we really do every day. Maybe the course alone is not enough to cover all this or make sure people perform well and don’t struggle.”
CG: I wonder too, Bob, if we can step back sometimes with these stakeholders and say, “We want to make sure that when people come out of this course, they have all the skills they need to do their work.” So you remember when we were working with the Department of Defense (DoD), and they had a 5-day training course? We did an RWA on the workflow that course was supposed to cover, and we identified tasks and supporting knowledge. Tasks are the skills, and the course was missing 30% of the tasks that were critically significant. This means if they’re not done properly, these skills result in a catastrophic impact of failure. There was one that threatened national security and resulted in loss of life, but it was nowhere in the course! That’s because the course had been developed outside of looking at the skills and performance that people need to do. Once you’re through an RWA, you sit down with key stakeholders and say, “Look, these are all the skills that people need to do their job. These are the ones where we’ve identified a significant to catastrophic critical impact of failure.” And if there’s an existing course (like what the DoD had in place) to show a comparison, that can be helpful. You can show what skills were missed, where they need to be folded in, and where the course can be restructured. An RWA certainly helps us get to the workflow, but it also helps us turn training into what it should be.
BM: It does. I think if you’re sitting across from a 20-year veteran in the job who says, “It worked for me,” maybe part of the conversation is, “We’d love to capture that journey you took over these last 20 years. Obviously, you’re accomplished at what you do. We’d love to take you through an exercise to see how all you’ve learned and your success maps to that course.” Con, we both know there will be significant discrepancies between that person’s workflow journey and that course they sat through 20 years ago.
CG: For me, the best analogy I’ve shared comes from when I had a heart valve replaced four years ago. When I was going to have somebody stop my heart, remove my heart valve, replace it with a bovine valve, restart my heart, and make sure I was able to live and function going forward, I didn’t want somebody that only completed a class. If my surgeon said, “I just finished a course on that, Con, so I’m ready to go,” I would have said, “No, no, no, no. I want somebody who has done this again and again and again, who has experience with a variety of challenges.” So, when I interviewed the surgeon who was going to perform my surgery, my questions were, “How many times have you done this? How many times have you done this with a team? What is your success rate and success pattern?” I wanted experience. I did not want somebody who had just completed a class with no real-world experience. That’s an example of how we need to shift our view of where people should be at the end of training.
BM: And back to the point you made earlier about mitigating risk, if you sit there as a 20-year professional demanding that this course worked for you, we’re assuming that it would have the same impact for others 20 years later, right? So, wouldn’t another argument be that it took you 20 years to get here, and if you think back, you will remember some hard knocks? Shouldn’t we come up with a way to mitigate those challenges? Shouldn’t we optimize the training event and experience that will follow to be even more effective and efficient?
CG: I wonder too, Bob, if in our Digital Coach design we’re missing something really important, which is to capture the experience and lessons learned of key stakeholders and of others so that they don’t see the Digital Coach as something that is supposed to replace training, but something that is going to capture the intellectual capital and experience of their teams, and make it available to others. Maybe we need to position the Digital Coach in a broader way.
BM: Well, the last level of the Performance Support Pyramid is people. People and their intellectual capital are resources. What if we captured that intellectual capital better instead of just making people available or giving performers a number to call for a coach? We can still have those options, but what if we did a better job at that level of the Pyramid in mining, recording, and archiving experiences and best practices?
Let’s kind of end with this, because I think it gets lost: there are 5 Moments of Need.
CG: It’s all about learning in all 5 of those moments.
BM: And 2 of them are met well with training. I think that’s missed sometimes in the dialogue with how committed we are to the power of a Digital Coach and the importance of the moment of Apply. We get myopic sometimes because we’ve learned and seen the power of a Digital Coach, but when you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t have that experience and all they’ve known is a classroom, we must honor that while helping them see from their current vantage point that it really wasn’t enough.
CG: At the same time, we need to have some level of appreciation for the fact that we’re asking them to go to a place they’ve never been, so there are feelings of discomfort. Sometimes their pushback is tied to fears about things that don’t really exist.
BM: You’re right, Con. They don’t know anything else. They do remember (or maybe they’ve suppressed) their past terror, failure, anxiousness, and frustration, so they think, “Just teach the course. I remember the course. I have fond memories of the course. Obviously, a course helps. It must, and without it, what have we got?” And I think that’s the power of understanding Digital Coaches: showing them, having examples, and collecting data and metrics around their effectiveness. Because you’re right. We’re asking them to boldly go where they’ve not gone before and calling their baby “ugly” puts them off.
As always, Con, thank you for your insights. To our listeners and readers, we’d love to hear what you think: the journey you’ve been on and the experiences you’ve had. We do know that all 5 Moments of Need, instruction included, are what ultimately enable us to help people to perform.
CG: Thanks, Bob.
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