"...a thought leader in the Learning and Performance Improvement profession with a track record to prove it..."
-Jim and Dana Robinson
Dick Handshaw, President at Handshaw, Inc., is a consultant, speaker, and champion for real innovation and quality in instructional design. He is a pioneer in the field, with more than 30 years of experience as a learning and performance improvement professional and entrepreneur. Dick has served as a consultant for many organizations to help them establish a results-oriented learning strategy, methodology, and practice.
I had a good year last year teaching performance consulting skills to a few hundred people within my client base and at conferences and professional societies. By far the most common reason anyone attends these classes is because they are dissatisfied being order takers for training requests and they want to have a measurable impact on the business. Another possible motivation for improving skills in performance consulting should be the current economic situation. One would think that with increasing layoffs and tightening budgets, two factors would come into play:
Given the cost of both taking and developing training, corporations would be motivated to eliminate training that is not needed, of poor quality, or redundant.
Given that fewer employees are left to do the work of many, those key remaining employees must be valued and trained to achieve maximum productivity.
I just finished reading an article in the November/December issue of Performance Improvement, titled “The Effects of the Recession on Worker’s Moral, Ethical and Interpersonal Behavior” by Joan Marques and Nancy R. Luna. It seems that at the very time when economic needs dictate a move towards performance consulting based on the reasons cited above, the effects of the economic recession on workers themselves may be discouraging the practice of performance consulting.
Here’s how the article supports my hypothesis that while recessionary times may dictate a greater economic need for performance consulting, potential performance consultants may be less inclined to adopt performance consulting as a practice. There were two hypotheses in the study that got me thinking about the adoption of performance consulting in the workplace:
“As the effects of the economic recession increase, positive perceptions among workers decrease.”
“Greater job security contributes to worker’s levels of happiness on the job.”
Since practicing performance consulting requires an optimistic view that your actions can make a positive outcome in business for your organization, increased negative perceptions of your organization and its prospects for success does not contribute to making potential consultants take up the practice. Furthermore, since there is some level of risk involved, not many would be performance consultants want to risk a good job by taking unnecessary chances. So, at the very time when we need more performance consultants to speak up, there may be human factors working against the possible solution.
The only antidote I can find to this conundrum is leadership. Would be performance consultants need to know that someone in a leadership position will value their efforts and support them when the going gets difficult. Jim Robinson once told me that once he and Dana successfully built a strong performance consulting practice within an organization, many times the leader of that group would leave and business often returned to the prior reactive state. So it seems that the need for building performance consulting practices within organizations could last in Jim’s mind at least, “for about the next one thousand years.”
This is the part where I ask for your opinion. Is the economic recession making it more difficult to introduce performance consulting to our organizations? Or will the economic needs of the recession ultimately make it easier for us to implement performance consulting?
