Performance Based Learning – How to do it, a guide to a workable solution.

Aperitif   – my Take on Learning.

Learning and Development #LnD is shifting away from a traditional teaching pedagogy to a more personalised learning format. From my observation this is not a trend initiated by learners but by companies wanting results. Like with anything in life, it doesn’t usually pay to do it half measure and when we talked about “personalised learning” of past years, what we really meant was “personalised teaching”. We tailor out training materials to individual personalities and styles. It is better but still too many are left behind. Why?

Let’s look at the ideal student, the ideal learning worker. What makes him different? The answer is simple but powerful. He doesn’t need help – he may take it if offered and it should be offered(!)  - his learning is guided by how to improve his performance. He does it as needed and when needed.

I like to draw your attention to this briefly if I may. Learning is mostly about acquiring abilities, right? – however it has a negative aspect too! He has to change his old habits, patterns, approaches to new ones and some can’t let go of yesteryears’ habits.  Formal, school education, has bypassed this problem by focusing purely on data and usually limits any application to the absolute minimum. How many physics, maths, chemistry, history, biology experiments did you do in your school days?

Businesses however want the opposite, they want to see change, results and thus we find a ever wider growing gap between people who learn to “change” and people who learn to “know.”

To recap, businesses need the ‘learn to change’ approach and here is how it works. This is being done by many companies already and it works if you know the basics which I am about to share with you. The main shift, then must be, from teaching to making learning available and focus on his production as the criteria but…

Main Meat – Performance and Learning in Corporation

1.      Performance – how to govern your production

There is no job, no company who doesn’t have ups and down. Each month, hell, each new day can introduce yet another rollercoaster of production. One day it is Affluence, next it is Danger, followed by a nil, non-existence, to recover to a small rise.

If you measure your production by and with statistics and have them graphed, please grab them and take a look, you will find the slants vary but we can actually isolate 5 main types of slants. Steep up is an Affluence in production, a little up is Normal (still positive direction) and if is just going down a little you can call it Emergence (better get this reverted but not to worry to much about it). However, if it is a steep down, in terms of production we think of it as Danger (we must do something about it and urgently) and of course if it crashes to nil, we could call it Non-existence (start again.)

You will find that each of those states requires a different handling. If you are in affluence, you tend to look at what you did right and see if you can copy those actions, right?

If you are in Danger, you tend to look at what major change or what do you need to change to make it happen, right? Turns out that each has its own learnable formula which applied changes the production.

Training staff to know, how to read their own production, and formulate their plan of attack is the first step. Putting them in control of their production is vital. You will probably find the happy staff feel in control and the other don’t.

2.      Learning to change production

As soon as a person is responsible for his production and most importantly knows how to change ‘down’ to ‘up’ and keep ‘up’ going ‘up’, and sees results from it, you have a willing learner. At this stage L&D or training department change drastically from an internal training provider to a knowledge Library with personal performance coaches.

The responsibilities shift, staff is responsible for his production and training department for helping him as an assisting action.

The whole training department’s purpose has always been to correct the product or correct the worker to correct the product and not to be made responsible for the production. Why?

You can have each staff member shoulder a bit of the responsibility or the boss and a few conspirators shoulder the whole lot. Which one do you think will survive in the long run?

In essence Training departments couldn’t solve the learning riddle because it was outside its  sphere of influence and secondly the change needs to come in the form of how can a staff control or influence his production effectively so he feels safe on the job! What did he say in the movie Dune: “Fear is the mind killer!” (?)

3.      The Secret Weapon

This one is a kingpin. As I mentioned in the last one “safe.” When people feel safe and when we have managers who make their staff feel safe, we find some serious synergy to emanate from them. Recently, a small firm hired a new manager, I know her personally and she has a very approachable, team-oriented approach. Quite different to the other manager/owner who used a more adversarial/antagonistic approach. She increased production by 6x in span of 2 months, giving 3 months prior training. I’d seen this on several occasions, harsh, antagonistic management styles don’t bring the best out of people, since they don’t feel safe!

 To feel safe, only the following management rule needs to be set and applied:

 A productive staff member has protection!

 What is productive? Statistics! A person whose statistics are up-trending, be it a little or a lot! Why listen to rumours and opinions? Why make the primary criteria: “likes” – getting along with staff or manager - the main one?

 You don’t fire one who is productive if based on his statistics. Also keep in mind, that any injustice is seen or heard by others and even so they are not fired, seeing a productive member has been fired or just reprimanded has a group wide impact!

 You train staff who have positive statistics, you reward them with extra training.

If they do something wrong, be very light in your touch and if they are down the following week, be a bit firmer.

Of course, this shouldn’t include illegal activities, unless that is the company’s bread and butter. 😉

 Opinion - the History of this

In closing, people perform best if we treat them as good people. The prevailing current management patterns stem from an era of thousands of years where treating people badly was thought to be the right way to maximize production and resulted in the worst employment form: slavery.  

All success stories today have, a good manager who assumes people are like him: good.

Thank you for reading, love to hear your thought.

j.ott