Rothwell W.J. - Beyond Training and Development[c] The Groundbreaking Classic on Human Performance Enhancement (2004)(2-e)(en)
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I M P L E M E N T I N G H U M A N P E R F O R M A N C E
E N H A N C E M E N T S T R A T E G I E S T O
A D D R E S S O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L
E N V I R O N M E N T P R O B L E M S O R
O P P O R T U N I T I E S
The organizational environment is the world outside the organization. It includes customers or clients, competitors in the same or related industries, stockholders, suppliers, distributors, regulators, and other key stakeholders. Organizations survive and prosper only when a net gain results from their interactions with the external environment. Businesses and industrial companies traditionally measure their success with the external environment in terms of profits, return on investment, return on equity, and other financial measures. Government agencies rely on indications of constituent, executive, judicial, and legislative satisfaction (in government, the relative willingness of the legislative body to grant the agency’s appropriation request is often an important signal of how well the agency is perceived to be doing its job). Nonprofit organizations look to numbers of clients served, favorable returns on investments, and client satisfaction to judge their success.
Few traditional training departments have had significant interaction with groups outside their organizations. That may be one reason that so many training and development professionals lack power, since power seems to stem from the
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proximity of an organizational function to key external stakeholders. It may also explain why, at least in U.S. corporations, so much power resides with marketing, finance, and the executive team, which enjoy the greatest external visibility. Lower levels of visibility have traditionally been associated with such internally focused functions as human resources, training, production/operations, accounting, and management information systems.
To have the greatest impact on organizational performance and, therefore, on group or individual performance, training departments that are shifting their emphasis to human performance enhancement (HPE) should move from an internal to an external focus, beginning with efforts to improve interaction between the organization and its external environment. Such a shift implies that trainers-turned-HPE specialists can gain appropriate top management support (of course, without top management support, any improvement effort is usually doomed).
Who are the most important external stakeholders? How well is the organization interacting with its most important external stakeholders(s)? What HPE strategies can improve an organization’s interactions with its external stakeholders? How should such HPE strategies be implemented? What HPE competencies are necessary to select, plan, and implement organizational environment HPE strategies? This chapter addresses these questions.
Who Are the Most Important External Stakeholders?
The key to selecting the most powerful externally oriented HPE strategies is identifying and gaining a consensus about the most important external stakeholders.
Identifying Key External Stakeholders
Organizations interact with many external stakeholders (see Exhibit 10-1). Without agreement on who those key external stakeholders are and what they need, establishing effective HPE strategies can be difficult, if not impossible. It is therefore essential that HPE specialists identify the key external stakeholder groups and gain consensus on what each group wants, needs, or expects.
To identify key external stakeholders, ask organizational members these questions:
‘‘If you had to choose the most important groups outside this organization that influence its success or failure, who would those groups be?’’
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Exhibit 10-1. Possible key external stakeholder groups.
Suppliers
Distributors |
Customers |
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Stockholders/Owners
Others
Regulators
Identify the groups above for your organization:
Who are the suppliers?
Who are the distributors?
Who are the customers?
Who are the stockholders/owners?
Who are the regulators?
Who are other key external stakeholders?
‘‘Why did you choose the groups you listed?’’
If necessary, distribute a questionnaire like the one shown in Exhibit 10-2 for this purpose.
Gaining Consensus on the Key External Stakeholders
To gain consensus on the identities of the most important external stakeholders, summarize the questionnaire results, feed them back to participants, and ask the participants to agree on the most important groups. This process can be conducted by itself or combined with efforts sponsored by a process improvement team.
Sometimes decision makers are unable to reach agreement on one key stakeholder group and insist that two or even three groups are the most important external stakeholders. In most cases, key decision makers select one or more customer groups as the most important external stakeholders. That is appro-
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Exhibit 10-2. A worksheet for identifying key external stakeholders.
Directions: Answer the two questions appearing below. When you finish, return this worksheet to the individual whose name appears at the bottom. Responses from the worksheets will be compiled and fed back to all participants. Your responses to these questions will be anonymous, so feel free to be frank.
1.If you had to choose the most important groups outside this organization that influence its success or failure, who would those groups be?
2.Why did you choose the groups you listed in response to question 1? (Explain briefly.)
priate, since everything begins with the customer. It is no exaggeration to say that effective human performance, like quality, resides in the eyes of the customer.
How Well Is the Organization Interacting with the Most Important External Stakeholders?
The starting point for any HPE strategy should be the collection of information about how well the organization is interacting with the most important external stakeholders. To that end, consider:
How is the organization presently collecting information about interactions with key external stakeholder groups?
How could information collection efforts be improved?
How could the results of information collection efforts be used to justify HPE strategies? How could they best be summarized and fed back to employees and managers to prompt self-initiated HPE strategies?
Ask participants to brainstorm on these issues, using the worksheet in Exhibit 10-3.
What HPE Strategies Can Improve the Organization’s Interactions with External Stakeholders?
Any HPE strategy described in Chapter 9 can be applied, individually or collectively, to improve the organization’s interactions with external stakeholders in
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Exhibit 10-3. A worksheet for brainstorming about interactions with key external stakeholder(s).
Directions: Use this worksheet to structure your thinking about ways to improve interactions with key external stakeholders. Use the worksheet by yourself or work with others in a meeting, training session, or other venue.
Questions |
Answers |
1.How is the organization presently collecting information about interactions with the key external stakeholder groups?
2.How could information collection efforts be improved?
3.How could the results of these information collection efforts be used to justify HPE strategies? How could they best be summarized and fed back to employees and managers to prompt self-initiated HPE strategies?
general, as well as with specific individual key external stakeholders. The aim of any of these strategies should be to close present negative, present positive, future negative, or future positive performance gaps. Customer service interventions and strategic planning interventions are perhaps the most obvious HPE strategies to improve organizational-environmental interactions and so warrant examination.
Customer Service Interventions
Customers are usually identified as the key external stakeholder group. Customer service should be regarded as highest priority. Paying attention to customers requires constant effort and is the source of all meaningful human performance enhancement. It gives the organization an appropriately external orientation to improvement efforts.
It is important to track what is happening with customer satisfaction. To begin, consider the following issues:
Who are the customers?
How were the customers selected by the organization, and why were they selected?
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What do the customers want, need, or expect?
How are customer preferences and needs changing over time?
How do customers feel about the organization’s products? services?
What issues are important to customers, and how well satisfied are they with the organization’s handling of those issues?
How do customers perceive the representatives of the organization with whom they come in contact? How competent do customers perceive them to be? How do they compare to competitors’ representatives?
How is the organization collecting, tracking, and measuring information about customer satisfaction?
How does the organization handle such issues as customer complaints, customer compliments, and gains or losses of customers? Why are such strategies chosen, and how well are they implemented and evaluated?
The organization’s decision makers should then compare what is happening with customers and what should be happening. They should consider these questions:
Who should be the customers?
How should customers be selected, and why should they be selected that way?
What should the customers want, in the opinion of the organization’s decision makers, and why should they want what they do?
How should the organization handle changing customer preferences and needs?
How should customers feel about the organization’s products and services?
How well should the organization be satisfying customer needs? Tracking customer satisfaction? Measuring customer satisfaction?
How should customers perceive the organization’s representatives? How competent should they be perceived as being? How should the organization’s representatives compare to competitors’ representatives?
How should the organization handle such issues as customer complaints, customer compliments, and gains or losses of customers? Why should such strategies be chosen, and how well should they be implemented and evaluated?
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Once these questions have been answered, it is necessary to clarify performance gaps with customers by determining what gaps exist between what is happening and what should be happening with customers or any other key external stakeholder group identified for the organization. Exactly what is the gap? What is its current status, and how is it changing over time?
After the performance gap has been clarified, HPE specialists should lead their organizations to determine the importance of present and future performance gaps. They need to determine how important the gaps are in addressing the needs and expectations of customers or another key external stakeholder group and what their implications are for achieving the organization’s strategic goals and for divisions, departments, work groups or teams, and individuals.
When the relative importance of the performance gap has been determined, HPE specialists should help their organizations pinpoint the causes of the gaps. What are the chief symptoms, underlying causes, and consequences of performance gaps? What has happened that has prompted a problem to occur? What is expected to happen that will prompt an opportunity to arise? As part of this process, HPE specialists should consider whether problems arise from lack of agreement or lack of clarity about these factors:
Who the customers are or should be
How customers are or should be selected
What customers want or should want
How customer preferences and needs are changing over time
How customers feel about the organization’s products or services and the reasons they feel as they do
How customers do (or should) perceive the representatives of the organization with whom they come in contact
How the organization handles or should handle such issues as customer complaints, customer compliments, and gains or losses of customers
How the organization is and should be collecting, tracking, and measuring information about customer satisfaction
Finally, HPE specialists should lead their organizations to establish HPE strategies to narrow or close the performance gaps: What HPE strategies can address the causes of human performance gaps stemming from customer service? What problems and opportunities exist? What should be done about them?
Use the worksheet in Exhibit 10-4 to answer these and other issues about
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Exhibit 10-4. A worksheet for assessing customer service as a starting point for human performance enhancement strategy.
Directions: Use this worksheet to organize your thinking about how customer service can become the starting point to drive HPE strategy. For each question appearing in the left column, write a response in the space at right. If necessary, circulate this worksheet among decision makers and employees in the organization as a starting point for using customer service to drive HPE strategy.
Question |
Answer |
1.What is happening with the organization’s dealing with customers? How do we know?
2.What should be happening with the organization’s dealing with customers? Why do we think so?
3.What is the nature of the performance gap (or gaps) between what is and what should be happening with customers? Exactly what are the gaps now? How may they change in the future?
4.How important is the performance gap, or how important are the performance gaps?
5.What HPE strategies undertaken by the organization could help close the performance gaps? (Consider strategies geared to improve employee feedback, training, organizational policy, structure, plans, work design, work process, rewards, job or performance aids, and any combination of them.)
6.How should HPE strategies intended to improve customer service be formulated? implemented? evaluated?
improving customer service, recalling that any efforts to improve interactions with the organization’s key external group is an excellent starting point for driving HPE strategies into the organization, creating widespread impetus for improvement throughout.
Strategic Planning Interventions
How well have the organization’s decision makers established and communicated a clear, realistic, and achievable competitive plan? HRD professionals responding to my 2004 survey identified lack of clear organizational plans as one cause of human performance problems. An effective strategic plan can be a powerful tool for addressing (and even anticipating) external environmental trends
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affecting the organization, integrating and coordinating internal organizational efforts, and providing direction to work activities and employees.
HPE specialists can compare the organization’s strategic planning efforts against best practices obtainable through benchmarking, using a model of strategic planning like that shown in Exhibit 10-5 as a point of departure and asking how well the organization’s decision makers and employees have:
Established a clear mission statement of why it exists and what it should be doing.
Formulated clear goals and measurable objectives that are logically derived from the organization’s mission.
Identified and addressed future threats and opportunities resulting from external environmental change.
Identified and addressed the organization’s present strengths and weaknesses. (Strengths may represent the organization’s core competencies.)
Considered possible grand strategies to guide the organization. (Examples of grand strategies include growth, retrenchment, integration, diversification, turnabout, or a combination of any or all of these in different parts of the organization simultaneously.)
Selected a realistic, optimal grand strategy, given the constraints within which the organization must operate.
Implemented the grand strategy over time by ensuring that: (1) the organization’s reporting relationships (structure) match the strategy; (2) appropriate leaders have been identified and empowered based on the competencies required to make the strategy successful; (3) appropriate rewards have been tied to desired results; (4) policies have been formulated (or revised) so that internal coordination exists among divisions, departments, work groups, or teams and individuals; (5) the strategy is effectively communicated to employees and other relevant groups; (6) leaders have established a means by which to evaluate the strategy before, during and after implementation.
Use the worksheet in Exhibit 10-6 to assess the relative success of strategic planning practice in the organization. If it is not as successful as it should be, then formulate a new approach using the worksheet in Exhibit 10-7 through discussions with key decision makers inside the organization and key external stakeholders (as appropriate). Use the strategic planning process itself as a means to
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Exhibit 10-5. A model of the strategic planning process.
Establish mission/purpose.
Formulate goals and objectives.
Scan the external environment for future threats and opportunities.
Assess the internal environment for present strengths and weaknesses.
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Consider the possible |
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grand strategies. |
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Select grand strategy. |
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Implement grand strategy. |
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Ensure that reporting |
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Ensure that leadership is |
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relationships |
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(organizational structure) |
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consistent with |
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are consistent with |
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grand strategy. |
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grand strategy. |
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Ensure that policy is |
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Ensure that rewards are |
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consistent with |
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consistent |
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grand strategy. |
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with grand strategy. |
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Ensure that strategic plans |
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are communicated to |
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all levels |
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of the organization. |
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Evaluate strategy
before, during, and after implementation.