The Learning Performance

Today, I concluded the mechanical part of the TNA project I mentioned few few posts back.

Last step was a half-day workshop with the sales team. There were 11 participants in the workshop. The workshop was conducted in the following manner:
a) A self-assessment questionnaire. In this questionnaire, I probed their role and responsibilities (RP), critical issues they have in achieving their RP, knowledge & skills required, and wish list for training.
b) Group discussions, with 5 leading questions designed to uncover, again, knowledge and skills required.
c) Performance gap analysis, and the reasons for the gap.

This workshop has helped to ascertain many aspects of training needs, and the criticality of the training needs, which helped to prioritize them as well.

The challenge of conducting workshop as such is in the team dynamics, and inherent working relationship between the participants. However, the objective of the workshop is not to solve any "team work" problem, though it would definitely uncover such truth. That in itself, is a training needs.

The next step is to sniff through the data, correlate, analyze, and write the TNA report. Simple? Think not!

Different customers have different needs when come to corporate training.

Some customers just want training, and any training courses will do. I like these customers the most, from business perspective.

There are customers looking for slightly more than just a training:- they want to have element of fun (may be lots of it too!). I like those customers too. Just pack them off to a resort, and we are in the blue ocean, so to speak.

Then there are sophisticated customers who would like to push the training envelop a bit. These I call "enterprise customers" (borrow the term from IT world) invariably has greater demand and looking for values, and needed to be convinced of ROI before working with you.

These customers the best. Intellectually. It would really test your sanity to propose a training solution that meet their requirements, and may be training budget. But, that is the differentiator that my company build on. This is akin to being a sundry shop vs boutique. You would never be reputable by being a sundry shop!

Then the suspecting kind of customers. You have HR managers (or training & development managers) sending out feelers to source for "free" inputs, disguise in the form "request for proposal (RFP)", for their own personal purposes, may be to make them look good to their higher management.

Well, I don't mind these type of customers, in fact. After all, I am quite happy to share knowledge.

The point this goes to show the amazing ways of the working of human mind. Each can take a basically simple tool (in this case, training), and creatively use it for different purposes.

But then, I think I have digressed a bit here.

Last week has been a rather exhausting but rewarding week.

I conducted a strategic planning workshop for a company in the business of exporting furniture to US and Canada. It was a two days workshop, conducted with the company's four shareholders. An extremely interesting mixed of nationality as the group consist of: 2 Malaysians, one American but very much "Malaysianised", and one true-and-true American whom is in-charge of US's operation.

The company has been in business for six years, and doing well. Entering into the next phase of organization life cycle, they needed to chart their course. My services to them consisted of two major scope of works:
1) Business Review to see where they are at now;
2) Strategic Planning to chart their next course of expansion plan.

At the end of the two-days workshop, we have accomplished (as promised of course):
- Vision, Mission
- Values
- Business Model and Business Definition
- Did the SWOT Analysis
- Defined Strategic Issues
- Determined Strategic Thrust
- Stated Strategic Objectives, including 5-years financial projection.

The main challenge is not the strategic planning process itself. I guess, many high profile consultants (from high profile consultancy firms, may be), professors in the higher learning institutions (Dr. So-and-So with numerous accompanied alphabets after the name) would arguably can do a better job than me, in taking about SP process and theory per se . That would be disastrous, in actual business context. My strength is in the instinctive understanding and framing of critical issues sorted from myriad strands of information and statements, and facilitate the SP process from the angle of what is doable, achievable, taking into consideration of client's maturity, organizationally, and most importantly, in terms of competency in planning (yes, planning is a competency by itself, and company need to learn to be competent in doing it).

And, in this case, possessing multi-linguistics skills helps:- English, Chinese, Malay, plus two other local dialects!

Like I said in the beginning, it was rewarding, and may I mention also, fun!

On Monday (5/3/07), I completed step 2 of the TNA project I mentioned a few posts back.

Step 2 is to interview Head of Department (Step 1 is interviewing the General Manager). I interviewed 6 HOD, with half-an-hour each.

Let me share my experiences in conducting a successful TNA interview.

Firstly, you must prepare or structure your interview questions. I used all open-ended questions. Some literature will call this as semi-structured questionnaires.

Secondly, you must remember that what you are trying to do is to collect information on behaviours required, gaps compared to current abilities and then what knowledge and skills people need to develop to be able to close these gaps.

Thirdly, be confident, and use active listening technique always. The art of getting the interviewee at ease is crucial to create an open & trusting environment so that there is free flow of information. Problem is you only have the first 2 minutes to achieve that. Two key thoughts:
1) Ask the question
2) SHUT UP and LISTEN!

Fourthly, record the key points of the interview.

Fifthly, look out for hidden rocks. Observe the body language of the interviewee, the tone of their voice, and other non-verbal signals. You may need to dig and probe to uncover the rocks below. The "truths" could be the crucial information to bring a good programme to become a great one. However, you should only concern about matters pertaining to "training". Don't waste time on other non-training issues.

Lastly, remember the objectives of the interview. The session is not for small talks. Be focus. When it is time for the last question, mentioned that to the interviewee. At the completion of the last question, thank the interviewee, shake his/her hand, and say good-bye.

The session should not take more than 45 minutes.

Note that I only used two methodologies (interview & workshop) for the TNA project. There are others methods you can use, like written questionnaires, phone interviews and even observations. Each method has its pros and cons. But I would advise you to only employ two methods in a project to avoid confuse the hell out of yourself.

There is a saying:" In the land of blind, one eye is king".

That is very true.

To take a company to the next level, I believe that leadership is key. Business world is getting tougher, more and more competitive, and the external factors are becoming greater and greater a big hairy puzzle to untangle (just think about USA, China, Iraq war, SARS, fuel price, bird flu, etc, you would get what I meant). Without doubt, companies that have a clear vision with forward thinking leadership stand a better chance to survive and achieve desirable growth.

The fact of the matter is past successes do not guarantee future successes.

The question is are leaders born? May be. But the goods news, leadership can be taught and learned. According to research done by ASTD, there are 10 major competencies of leadership:
1) Self-understanding
2) Resilience
3) Interpersonal and relationship skills
4) Communication skills
5) Employee development (motivation and coaching)
6) Customer orientation
7) Strategic business acumen
8) Project leadership
9) Creating and actualising vision
10) Create, support and manage change.

Anybody can acquire the knowledge and skills and internalise the above 10 competencies, through systematic training intervention, and becoming a leader with great leadership skills.

Go through above list of 10 competencies and decide for yourself at what stage of leadership development is you (or your company) stand at the moment.

Then ask yourself, what is the desirable state of leadership.

If there is a gap to bridge, then a leadership training programme is in order.

And by the way, you have just done a simple training needs analysis on leadership!