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8 Powerful Performance Consulting Questions For L&D
Ross Stevenson
February 13th, 2024
Today’s Thoughts ☠️
Hey there 👋,
A lot of L&D pros reach out to me tell they don’t feel valued.
They feel like a conveyor belt of fulfilling orders vs delivering meaningful work. I get it. That sucks.
For that to change, you have to change.
You have to move from transactional to conversational. From McDonalds drive-thru to performance. One part of this is asking better questions.
Smart questions = better outcomes.
Today, we’re going to unpack 8 performance consulting questions you can use to craft meaningful solutions.
Get your tea 🍵 or beverage of choice ready. We've got lots to discuss!
(Much love to today’s newsletter sponsor - Sana 🙏)
In today’s chat👇
Est reading time: 15 mins
THE BIG THOUGHT
8 Performance Consulting Questions For Smart L&D Pros
I’ve got questions
Let's explore how to build a performance approach in your L&D work.
This continues my exploration of evolving workplace learning to performance engineering.
Performance consulting explained
No, it's not magic.
Think of Performance Consulting as being the workplace detective of the L&D world.
It’s not just about throwing a training program at a problem and hoping it sticks (or not spraying and praying as I was once told).
Nope. You dig deeper.
You chat with the team, look at the data, and figure out what’s really going wrong. Then, you come up with a game plan that might be training, but could also be other stuff like better tools, process changes, or even a morale booster.
The end game is making sure everyone performs better and the business scores a win.
The art of consulting seems lost in L&D teams.
We take a lot of questions, but ask few questions. Sometimes, you have to do this. The nature of your organisation can be tough to change.
Your mission is to partner with the workforce to understand their needs and propose the best solution.
Finding the 'real' problem
First up, how to get to the real root cause of a problem by asking better questions.
Too often I see workplace learning teams take requests like a McDonalds drive thru. A line manager comes up asks for a hamburger and our good old L&D team asks if they want fries with that, and returns 6-12 months later with the final product.
But does anyone consider if a hamburger is what the line manager needs? Not so much.
L&D HQ
The lack of probing and asking questions to understand the problem at hand is killing your organisations ability to do stuff that actually makes a difference to the performance of your people.
Here’s a very simplified example of how 90% of workplace learning teams relationships with stakeholders works:
In workplace learning teams it has been the norm to play the role of an order taker and not by choice of course.
Many of us have been trying to establish a different approach, one that’s focussed on performance. You want to be a trusted partner who gets to the root cause of problems.
Which is encouraged if you are in the pursuit of avoiding the act of creating even more problems to solve an undefined problem.
You may, like me, find that most things a business will proclaim are an L&D problem are not an L&D problem.
But, I get it. It’s hard to have to influence every person that throws themselves at you with the “I have an L&D need” to this way of thinking. We all have to pick our battles after all.
So, how do we change this?
How to performance consult like a pro
As performance engineers, our goal is to get to the root cause of the problem, remove barriers and enable improved performance.
We do this by asking the right questions to unlock a conversation and reflection in our stakeholders.
To move from order takers at a drive-thru to performance consulting, we want conversations to look less like “Can you run a 3 day workshop for my team on collaboration because they need some training and it’s one of my performance objectives for this year.” to “Hey, we’ve got this problem and we’d like your help at looking at some possible solutions.”
Remember, just because someone tells you they have an L&D problem, doesn’t mean they do.
It’s our job to help them unpack their problem and diagnose what they actually need.
Beyond Training: 8 Powerful Performance Consulting Questions L&D Must Ask
It's not as simple as asking questions and you're now a consultant.
It's a re-shift of your mindset.
Let me share some of my essential questions that I ask during the discovery phase of any project to diagnose that need:
What are we trying to solve?
Why is this important?
Do you have any data on that?
What’s your evidence?
How will you measure x?
What’s your metric of success?
What exists today?
Are your audience aware of x problem?
This is the complete reverse of what most stakeholders envisage when they’re looking for L&D support.
What they expect you to say is “Yes, I’ll find a course for you on that and we’ll get people signed up asap” - the classic box ticking scenario.
How to navigate challenges to your performance approach (3 examples)
You’re going to have to challenge a number of pre-existing limiting beliefs and stakeholders just wanting you to give them “training”.
Some of these beliefs may include:
#1: Only a training course can help me and/or my team
How to challenge this…
Walk through this scenario to the endgame - will this change anything or will you end up at the same place doing the same things 6 months later?
Tell the right story to demonstrate if any desired change will occur with this delivery method.
Take an evidence based approach.
#2: I don’t have time to do a short discovery with you
How to challenge this…
Again, highlight the benefits to identifying and solving the root cause problem by the stakeholder partaking in a very short (I’m talking 20 mins here) conversation. You can gather the right evidence to provide the best guidance this way.
This will save them time in the long run.
Don’t go to war if they’re not taking the bait. You can’t capture everyone and you shouldn’t try too.
#3: I need my team member to recognise this behaviour, so they need to do an e-learning module or go on an instructional course
How to challenge this…
Hold the stakeholder and/or manager accountable to their responsibilities as a people leader.
Simple things like I need my team members to be less direct and more aware of others emotions can be solved through coaching.
A course or instructional intervention won’t solve these issues. A good old human conversation can.
This is a classic case of managers trying to avoid a perhaps difficult conversation by using L&D interventions as a plaster and hoping that the end users realise the error of their ways somehow.
In working through a discovery phase with probing questions, you might find that the claimed “L&D” problem isn't an L&D problem at all.
The philosophy of performance
In a previous post, I defined the mission of performance engineers as follows:
“To help remove barriers to essential knowledge, work on solving workforce performance challenges and ultimately make sure people can get the stuff done to help them and the business thrive.”
To start off in the right way and truly understand if what we face is an L&D/performance problem, we can use these questions to gather evidence.
Get performance smart with Ema: The AI assistant for performance consultants
You probably saw a previous edition where I introduced Ema.
Ema is available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers in the GPT Store. Ema was designed to do one thing only and to a high level = Enhance the performance consulting skills of L&D Pros.
Learn more about how Ema works here and access this on ChatGPT.
Final thoughts
In sum:
So, next time you get a request, instead of asking “Do you want fries with that?” Ask better questions to get to the real root cause.
Good luck my fellow performance engineers!
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🤘 The Art of Performance Consulting: Coming soon
Now feels like a good as time as any to tell you this.
I’m building a new course to help you learn the very attainable art of performance consulting.
The goal of this course is enabling you to become the strategic L&D partner they can’t ignore. It will launch on Friday March 8th and is available to pre-order now. It will be available for a limited time to 50 students for the first intake.
I’ll share more on the design, development and what to expect in the coming weeks.
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SMART THOUGHTS
Content that will make you smarter.
🤔 The problem with analysis in L&D
I was fortunate to stumble across this one whilst doom-scrolling.
David James (360 Learning’s CLO) shares 3 pieces of wisdom from 25 years of experience in our world. This is the kind of post I save to reflect on in the future when the industry can become chaotic.
Check out David’s take on L&D analysis and uncovering insights here.
💡 What happens when 3 guys in L&D called Ross talk about AI together?
You're about to find out.
I chat to Ross Garner and Ross Dickie on the Mind Tools for Business pod about:
→ The current state of AI in L&D
→ What L&D pros should focus on
→ Practical tips for making the most of AI tools for your context
Plus, we do a good job of confusing each other when asking a question to a 'Ross' 😂
Join us with a tea and notebook!
🔥 Talk to any podcaster you want 24/7
An interesting AI tool found it’s way to me in the week.
You might have seen it on social already. Dexa has built a conversational AI tool which enable you easily access the knowledge of leading podcasters.
Well, their AI versions at least.
It’s an official product built in collaboration with each of the featured podcasters. Basically, they’ve sucked up all the knowledge from podcasters like Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss and others into a package where you can access credible (and generally hard to find again) content from podcast episodes.
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