Nigel Cassidy: When learning fails to hit the spot, here’s how to do it better by asking the right questions first. I am Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD Podcast.
Now, planning on running a course before you really know what people need to learn sounds crazy and a waste of your organisation’s money yet it’s all too common. It’s only after all those feedback forms have been collected and business life goes on, the penny drops that all those custom-designed, state of the art, digital training has failed to boost skills and people performance as it was meant to. So, this month, how to set up your learning and development for success by asking the right questions before diving into your planning.
We’ve got three wise learning and development heads here, all with thoughts and ideas to help you, hopefully, get better bangs for your learning bucks.
Natalie Richer is a consultant with over 20 years’ experience designing and delivering learning solutions on a range of topics including performance management so I’d better watch out. Hi, Natalie.
Natalie Richer: Hi.
NC: From the home team, a welcome return to podcast for Steve George who has a background in cognitive psychology and is now CIPD’S interim Head of Learning. Hello, Steve.
Steve George: Hi there, Nigel. Good to see you again.
NC: And we have the Chief People Officer from Little Gurus, a consultancy in Dubai in the Middle East. She says she’s on a mission to give HR a makeover, it’s Payal Gaglani-Bhatt, welcome.
Payal Gaglani-Bhatt: Thank you very much for having me, Nigel. Hi.
NC: So, Payal, just before we get stuck into all the good stuff, the advice, can you talk us through maybe one or two typical situations where L&D, kind of, gets the cart before the horse, where you just fail to ask the right questions or the wrong ones before you start?
PGB: I’d like to start out by saying have you ever been to the doctor, gone there and said to the doctor ‘can you give me headache medicine?’ as your opening statement? That’s what we often hear within HR and L&D. People will come to the L&D department within organisations and say ‘I want to run a time management course’ or ‘I want to run something on team building’ and this is the solution. It’s not really understood, it’s just a feeling, sometimes a gut feeling and that’s where people come in. Now, I’ll give you a recent example; one of my recent clients came to me saying we want to run a time management programme. I said brilliant, okay, tell me more and they said yeah, our team is not able to really meet the deadlines and they are not able to achieve what we want out of them within the strict SLAs that we have and I said that’s fair enough, what would you like them get at the end of it. They were like we just want them to work together a little bit better. So, the ideal situation would have been let’s think about a time management programme, let’s think about some strategies to improve their time management skills, so on and so forth. Having said that though, a few more questions reviewed what the actual problem was. I’m going to leave it at a cliff-hanger there and wait for my colleagues to say what else have they experienced.
NC: Well, we’re getting a strong feeling there that often, people ask for one thing but there are much deeper underlying issues. Steve George, I mean, I just wonder how learning teams usually, typically diagnose the needs for learning, for training. I mean, it sounds like from what Payal says, there are, kind of, maybe drawbacks with the traditional way things used to be done.
SG: Absolutely. So, there’s that traditional learning needs analysis approach which looks at learning as the solution for the problem. So, I love Payal’s example. I’ve had similar myself where going into a client and they’ve got some business partners, for example, who are underperforming as business partners so they want business partner training and you ask the questions and you discover what they actually need, the skills that they need to build are more organisation design, for example. So, it’s very much uncovering that what people think they need doesn’t necessarily solve the problem that they’re looking to solve. So, that traditional learning needs analysis can sometimes be based on subjective information so you don’t necessarily get to the core of what the problem is. It can sometimes rely on people being open about their own performance gaps and, if that’s the case, people may not want to reveal them because they’re not sure what that might lead to, so what the outcome is of them talking about their gaps. It can also fall foul of limited documentation. So, your reliance on other people in the organisation performing that consultancy work and identifying what the barriers to performance are. So, traditional learning needs analysis has its place, perhaps, but it’s limited within the context of what we’re talking about here.
NC: Well. So, Natalie Richer, I am already getting the sense here that life is going to start getting more complicated once you start asking these questions. You’re going to have to start responding to what you hear and, really, you have to challenge people all over the show.
NR: Yeah, I think challenge is an interesting word. I think you have to do it carefully. I like the examples we've already heard but quite often, I’m approached with a learning solution and asked to execute it. A bit like an order-taker, we want this solution and here’s the date and here’s the number of people and my job is to very gently challenge whether the solution they have in mind will fix the problem maybe they haven’t shared yet. So, my role is to very carefully do some questioning and sometimes that involves building trust and building rapport before I can do that.
SG: I absolutely love what you said, Natalie, about people coming to you with a solution. If I go back in my mind to my darkest period of work as an L&D professional, it was people coming up and just saying we want a one-day piece of training on fire safety or we want one hour for learning on quality standards and they came in with that much of a prescriptive definition of what it was they wanted to the length of time, as well, and, quite often, once you do that consultancy piece and you ask the questions, you might find that learning isn’t even the solution that they need, it’s actually a comm’s piece or something else.
NC: And, Payal, is it easy sometimes for internal departments to actually ask those questions because, I mean, you’re often up against people you work with every day and that might be awkward?
PGB: It is, indeed, very awkward and depending at which layer of the organisation you are working at and the culture of the organisation, it can be very tricky, as well. So, colleagues in L&D all across the hierarchy of the organisation will get questions and queries like this. We will get suggestions of what solutions to provide, however, not everybody has the professional courage to ask those questions and the higher up you get, the tricker it becomes because you’re not just thinking about challenging, as Natalie said, you have to use that word carefully, it’s not about challenging somebody’s idea or recommendation, it’s about really getting them to critically think through what is it that they really want and sometimes that’s scary for the person on the other end listening because they may have not thought it through. So, it’s like going to the doctor and saying I want a headache medicine but then when the doctor says okay, so what are your symptoms, you know, what is it that you are feeling, what is it that you would like to improve. Sometimes they have an answer, sometimes it’s just oh, I have got a general feeling in the subregion of my head that’s aching and I feel like headache medicine would solve it but that might not really be the case.
NC: Is it easier for you, Payal, because you’re a freelancer?
PGB: I’ve got both the hats on. So, I have worked in corporate for a very long time and only recently, in the last five years, become a freelancer. I think no freelancer or consultant would be able to do a good job if they didn’t ask these questions and it does become easier because, at the end of the day, freelancers are much more measured against what they deliver compared to somehow the in-house team and so you’re held much more accountable, often your financials or your reward at the end doesn’t come through until it’s delivered on what it’s supposed to. So, most professionals who are working as freelancers tend to ask these questions and are a lot more rigorous in their approach to questioning at the start to demonstrate that impact, whereas L&D teams are in a little bit of a safer cushion sometimes and, therefore, might find it more challenging to ask those questions.
NC: Okay. So, Steve George, should we, kind of, start getting into the meat of what those questions are and how you ask them and who you ask them to. Set us up for moving into this, well, I suppose it’s what’s some people call performance consulting, isn’t it, rather than just running the course or whatever it is.
SG: Yeah, sure. So, I am going to quote my good friend and CIPD colleague, Andy Lancaster, who has a great definition for performance consulting that it focuses on diagnosing organisational needs and opportunities, it defines the contributing causal factors, it describes the required future state and delivers the appropriate solution. So, if you start with those around diagnosing the organisational needs and opportunities, then you need to think around what the problem is that you are looking to solve for the organisation. So, that would be where I would start. So, is it something relatively simple or is it a symptom of something more complex.
NC: Okay. Now, I was chatting to both of you briefly beforehand and I noticed Natalie Richer has seven steps and I think Payal has five but I’m sure the broad thrust is going to be similar. So, Natalie, just, kind of, take this up from here. What sort of conversations do you have, what are you trying to find out when you’re setting up learning?
NR: Yeah, I totally agree with Steve’s point. What we need to start with is what the presenting problem is or, certainly, what the person I am talking to perceives it to be and where they’re hoping to get to. Normally, with a performance consulting conversation, I am looking at two goals; I am looking at the goal for the conversation itself and the overall goal which is usually solving a problem or meeting a need and I do, I have a seven-step process. It requires me to ask lots of questions and before I jump into any of those, I start of by doing some contracting and that contracting is around my role, their role, asking for permission to ask all the questions; how long we’ve got together, who needs to be in the room and in that process, I am working hard to build trust because, as we’ve already acknowledged, quite often people are coming to us and they want a quick fix and we’re, really what we’re doing is slowing down and that can be really frustrating. So, I’m trying to get them on side and I am trying to be as connecting as possible. So, I will spend quite a bit of time in that contracting phase, talking about the problem, the expected outcome and so on before I start moving on to the remaining seven steps.
NC: Okay. Payal, how do you tackle all this?
PGB: Natalie put it way more eloquently than I would have said it. I’ll just cut to the chase but, absolutely, you have to build that trust and rapport at the very beginning. It’s creating that psychological safety where people feel it’s okay to share with the consultant or with the coach or with the L&D partner some of their concerns around their team.
NC: How do you actually have those conversation, Payal? Do you sit down with people face-to-face, do you just send them lots of e-mails, have lots of exchanges; how does it work?
PGB: It’s never on e-mails, Nigel. These sorts of things, the more you can get into a dialogue, the better. Face-to-face would be ideal but, if not, a tele-conferencing facility is equally good but the idea is to understand the nuance that it’s not just what they are saying, it is also what they are not saying and, you know, the points at which their eyes kind of go up and they’re looking at and thinking and pondering, those are when the meaty answers come in. So, it’s kind of like what you do in coaching, as well, you setup the stage and you allow them the freedom to express themselves without coming across as threatening or condescending or an expert. You’re just there as an investigator trying to find out, very open enquiry, what it is that you would really like to see out of this and, you know, sometimes the question that I begin with is really, what is the pinpoint, you know, what is the one thing you would like solved out of this. If you get them to nail that one question down and you might have to ask it in six different ways using six different sentences and six different questions but it’s about that pinpoint and once they feel comfortable sharing that pinpoint, then the rest of the conversation flows a lot more easily.
NC: And Steve George, you kind of see the great variety across the country of the way different learning and development teams do this kind of work. Have you any kind of thoughts about how practice is changing, whether people are learning these lessons?
SG: I think they are, yeah. I think there is a real move towards what Payal referred to as demonstrating impact and the way you demonstrate impact is by meeting that organisational need. So, if you ask those questions from the outset and you have that organisational trust and you understand where it is that they’re looking to get to and you can demonstrate having achieved that then it puts you in a really good place. So, yeah. I think there is a move towards that. One of the ways that I’ve seen it myself in recent years is around data protection. So, I always pick on GDPR because when GDPR came in, it was really hard to find training done well. So, quite often it would go into incredibly unnecessary detail about legislation, about Acts of Parliament and Acts of European Parliament, about the fines that you might get but in reality, what people need to know can be broken down into a far more simple, almost checklist of, so, they need to know what it looks like if there’s a breach and what they need to do. They don’t need to know incredible amounts of extraneous information and I think that kind of performance consulting approach has improved a lot of learning such as data protection learning over the past few years.
NC: It also strikes me, Natalie, that while sitting in your home office, quietly devising a course might seem rather attractive on a wet Thursday, getting stuck in is more time consuming, it involves more conversations and requires different skills. I just wonder whether L&D is geared up to understand and deliver on the kind of skills necessary to have those successful conversations and then devise learning that matters and will do the job.
NR: I am noticing a real need for L&D experts to get better at having performance consulting conversations and I think that comes from the need for organisations to prove the impact of learning to prove the return on investment and I think there is a real realisation that it doesn’t start at the end, it’s not an afterthought where we deliver learning and go gosh, we ought to now measure it, let’s send out some happy sheets or let’s observe some people. I think there’s a real connection with let’s ask some really, really sound questions upfront and let’s set ourselves up for success. Let’s start talking about not just where we are not but where we want to get to and building a step-by-step path to get there and making sure we have some really sound measures along the way in order to check people’s understanding so it’s not a come to some training and fingers crossed, you remember it and apply it. So, I’m noticing in my role, as I work with HR teams and L&D experts, that the questioning is getting more sophisticated. I think people are buying much more into performance consulting and more so than what was called training needs analysis which, kind of, made the assumption that training was going to happen. So, to Steve’s point, I think I am noticing people getting better at asking questions knowing that the solution might not be training after all.
SG: What you’ve touched on there, Natalie, as well as how the value to L&D professionals extends beyond just the impact, as well. It’s really important as L&D professionals, we’re demonstrating organisational understanding, strategic awareness, a bit of business acumen and by asking these questions, we’re building our organisational networks, our organisational allies and we’re demonstrating that knowledge as well as building that knowledge which enhances our credibility as well as our impact.
NC: And it’s important you get, Natalie, to the most important questions. Have you any, kind of, techniques, anything you do to make sure that you do have those conversations?
NR: Yeah. I think one of the critical steps in asking performance consulting questions is to establish the system in which the organisation or teams perform. One of the important questions I ask is who is involved and I will draw, normally, sat side-by-side with someone, a rich picture of the system which involves the performers, stakeholders, sponsors and all the various teams and people that are connected and this is quite early on in the process and it’s quite early on with the questions I ask but sometimes it’s the bit that uncovers the problem. Sometimes in drawing out, mapping out on a big piece of paper who’s connected to who and where they sit and who’s performing well and who’s, perhaps, underperforming and what the budget is and so on, we actually figure out at that stage where the problem is and sometimes, we don’t go any further.
NC: And that, to me, paints a brilliant picture of why the wrong kind of training or learning doesn’t work because it hasn’t got to grips with that. It’s just tinkering at the edges.
NR: Absolutely.
NC: Payal, I just wondered if any particular examples of work that you’ve done spring to mind as to how this works in practice and what the benefits are?
PGB: Yes. Before I go into that, just very quickly, just to add to what Steven and Natalie have said about business acumen, absolutely, a very evidence-based approach, absolutely and then critical thinking. Where performance consulting is a little bit different from training needs analysis is training needs analysis is more collecting the data, analysing what’s there and then coming up with a solution. Critical thinking is taking it a step back and thinking, hang on a second, let’s not look at the data just yet. Let’s look at the problem. Let’s start with observation. It starts with what is practically missing, it starts with where are the gaps and then goes into thinking well, what data can we pull up to help us really understand this in a lot more depth. So, do I have a practical example, absolutely. I left the listeners with a little bit of cliff-hanger. So, with my client that asked for time management training, they came up with exactly that thinking we do some time management training, it’s a team of 12 people, they work across three geographical regions within the Middle East and they just don’t seem to be hitting their SLAs.
So, the very first question I asked was ‘Okay, what would you really like to see happen?’ and the answer was ‘well, I really want to see the process move smoothly and, you know, the SLAs being achieved, our customers and clients receiving their sales orders on time.’. I said ‘Brilliant, what do you think is stopping them from achieving that right now?’ and this is where the question was directed not at the person that came to me but with his team who are actually the people day-in-day-out running this process and their response was well, that team doesn’t understand what my commitments are, when they delay their work, my work gets delayed, when this happens it has a consequential impact on this, I need three days for this, I need two days for this and there’s just no understanding of this and so the entire conversation was around how do you get the team communicating better. It was nothing to do with time management, that was a by-product. They didn’t need an L&D intervention at all. All they needed was the teams to get together and a facilitator to help them understand their process. Once they understood the process and the interdependencies, they suddenly realised oh, I didn’t realise my work impacted you this way or that way and they started communicating with more transparency and expressing their requests with a little bit more saying here’s the leeway, here’s where you can shift around a little bit and, eventually, they were able to meet their SLAs. So, sometimes, the solution out of performance consulting conversations is not an L&D scenario, it’s just open and transparent communication. So, do I need a headache pill for a stomach-ache? Probably not.
NC: Natalie Richer, all this might sound daunting for some, this approach to learning and development. I just wonder what barriers might make this approach challenging to use the word, again?
NR: I think we mentioned one of them already which is time pressure. When I’m working within organisations, my internal customers have often got to a solution because the problem has existed for quite some time and really what they want me to do is fix it quick and so it can seem really laborious going through a performance consulting approach when somebody just wants a quick answer and a quick fix and also, I come across people who are quite challenging themselves and can be quite manipulative, actually, because they want something set up quickly. So, it can feel a little bit daunting, we’ve said it already, but I think the key is building trust and building rapport and establishing relationships but also bringing people on side to understand that, actually, you’re partnering with them to help them fix a problem. So, it’s incredibly important to do that partnering, to really listen to make sure people are really heard, to empathise which is why when people come to me with a solution, I always accept that solution as being a thing we’re going to talk about because if I challenge too quickly, people get defensive quickly. So, it’s really important that we partner and I do that, you know, normally, sitting side-by-side with someone as Payal said, never really on e-mail, always in a room with someone if I can and sometimes with groups of people in a room working together on solutions.
NC: And, Steve George, that Learning at Work Report 2023 noted that the workload of learning teams is already has already significantly increased. I just wonder whether this kind of approach is going to help or hinder that overload because it is a worry for people?
SG: I think it helps.
NC: It helps?
SG: Yeah, it absolutely helps take away some of that workload because while you’re putting in the investment of time at the beginning because your impact is greater, ultimately, you’re serving your organisation and its people better. You’re also reducing your future work because you’re actually solving the problem as opposed to a short term fix which just delays solving the problem to a later date. Exactly to Natalie’s point that having all the people in the room when you have those conversations so you have your stakeholders and you have, perhaps, well, you have learners in there, as well, then you’re building your advocates for the learning. So, you don’t get into such a situation where you’re launching learning to people who either don’t want it or don’t understand the benefits of it or don’t even do it and this is made mandatory. So, you’re building those advocates and you’re reducing your workload through doing that, as well.
NC: Presumably, some of that is easier, Steve, if you really have a clear agreement on what people want to see as a result of learning?
SG: Absolutely. So, it’s about what Payal said around making sure you understand what the desired outcome is. So, where is it that they’re trying to get to and then Natalie speaks about contracting. They’re absolutely critical in defining that.
NC: And, Payal, you were saying to me beforehand something about it’s useful to have a critical friend, who is that and how do they help?
PGB: The critical friend is our performance consultant and the way they are being a critical friend is very much by being on their side. So, they’re very friendly, they’re very approachable, they’re on their side and listening to what they are saying but, at the same time, are not afraid to say here’s what I am hearing, could there potentially be a different way of solving this and so the critical aspect of it is in asking more open-ended questions which is not about the solution, which is more about how they’re going to improve their organisation. So, connecting it back to organisational KPIs or organisational outcomes rather than what they want to see within their teams sometimes gives them that bigger-picture thinking and that’s the job of a critical friend or a performance consultant to just get that tunnel vision slightly upwards and to get people to think a little bit more widely and broadly.
NR: I love the idea of the critical friend. I’ve been in performance consulting conversations before where somebody said to me thank you for holding the mirror up and I am not sure I was a critical friend but I was playing back a lot of what I was hearing, particularly in talking about the, kind of, the cost of the gap, the cost of doing nothing. So, when people talk about we are here and we want to get there, I challenge them a little bit about what if we did nothing, what would be the worst that could happen and people are often quite surprised by what they say about where their teams are going, where the business might go and sometimes people get quite emotional and I think, sometimes, people are a little bit surprised by what comes out and that’s where I got that comment ‘thank you for holding the mirror up’. So, it, sort of, spoke to me this part about being a critical friend.
NC: Steve George, can we say any more about how you monitor progress as you go rather than being disappointed at the end when it’s too late?
SG: Yeah. So, if you’ve got your clear outcome definition, so you know what the performance training is going to be and what the outcome of that performance training is going to be towards the end and you’ve asked the right questions and you’ve done your consultancy piece then you can keep referring back and make sure that those questions are being answered by the steps that you’re taking. Part of that consultative approach, I think, is understanding that it may attritive. So, where you start with a solution isn’t necessarily the solution that you finish with. So, by maintaining those conversations, keep asking those questions, is this doing what we set out to do so you don’t get into that sunk-cost fallacy of doing something just because it’s what you started on. Keep going back and keeping yourself honest, keep holding the mirror up as you go.
NC: And, Steve, if you have one bit of advice for organisations wanting to raise their game a bit?
SG: So, I would ask people to consider what assumptions they’re making. Ask that critical friend if they need, what assumptions were you making in the request that we’re presenting and then trying to move those assumptions.
NC: Okay. Natalie Richer, for you, what are the benefits of this, kind of, modern performance consulting approach to planning and delivering learning?
NR: I think just finding out in partnering with organisations that there are really creative ways of solving problems and helping organisations to see that often what they need already exists within the organisation. We’ve said it before but quite often we’ve set out thinking we need training and we end up finding out we actually needed a really good poster in the staff room or we needed a subject matter expert to coach others and sometimes we save organisations money and sometimes we help people to realise they have expertise already in the business and they don’t necessarily need the help of an external training provider. So, I think that’s really exciting.
NC: Wow, you’ve probably saved somebody a lot of money already. Payal, we’re focusing very much on questions to ask before you start. So, a few final tips from you on actions to make sure you end up with the best learning solution.
PGB: One of my favourite questions to ask is what would make you feel like you’ve achieved what you wanted, what is success going to look like for you, how will you know the training has made a difference and just asking them to reflect on those three questions asked in different ways, it can make such a huge difference to the design process, it can make such a huge difference to the way you deliver it, it can also definitely make a huge impact on the impact you see at the end of it and just to add to what Natalie was saying, one of the added benefits, the hidden, the unexpected benefits of doing this performance consulting right is it gives L&D professionals a chance to be creative. Naturally, L&D professionals tend to be creative and they are natural problem solvers, however, sometimes, it can be limiting whereas when you keep the doors completely open to asking what success looks like and thinking about multiple options, multiple scenarios and situations in dealing with this, then that’s where the creativity really comes in.
NC: Brilliant. Great stuff. That’s Payal Gaglani-Bhatt from Little Gurus in Dubai, Natalie Richer from Natalie Richer Consulting and Steve George from the CIPD, he is the interim Head of Learning. As always, go to the website for more professional learning and development resources. This is, in fact, our last edition of 2023. So, on behalf of the podcast team, let me wish you a happy, peaceful and productive family and work life in 2024. We are back with another great topic in the new year, simply asking what makes a great human resources person. So, please subscribe where you get your podcasts but until then, from me, Nigel Cassidy, it’s goodbye.
