At the confernece Josh Bersin said one on the top five indicators of a high performing organisation (in the US) was that they had Performance Consultants. The only onganisation that I know who has Performance Consultants as a role is the Police. All my other clients have L&D Managers/Consultants and Business Partners (often ex Personnel experts with a name change) trying to use a pefoemece consulting approach. My point is that it is diffucult to ask those supporting/challenging questions when you are positioned as a helper (Training) or expert (Personnel). Perhaps we need to re-postion the role in the eyes of our clients and the simplest thing may be just to creat a new role?
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Nigel, I agree re-positioning a role may be helpful. If a new role is created, I think it needs to give a clear sense of what the tangible output is. I expect most people have a sense that the output from a trainer is training so they can approach a trainer with some confidence if they've concluded they need a training solution.
I agree that this is a sticky perception - there are real pay offs for the conspiracy of conveniece and solutioneering. When you ask questions about the performemce problem you are challenging a dominant fantasy and may be stepping on toes. For this reason it is vital to build rapport and trust before you challenge. Anything you can do to build your power, credibity,respect and permision to ask questions will help. Internal L&D departments can be better at promoting successes from goood examples of using a diagnostic approach and just by being brave enough to challenge.
Difficult one really because in L&D we still have to contend with traditional values being assigned to us and they're very sticky. It wasn't so long ago (5 years) that the senior trainer in our part of the organisation insisted on being called Senior Lecturer. So people have got years of a reinforced view that training = lecturing. Even now, people thing Learning Consultant is a fancy title for Trainer. And this is even when we don't give any training and they know it.
Whilst I like the approach and agree to some extent, the question isn't about changing the role title but changing the sticky perception that Learning = Training = Lecturing. I have some ideas on this but I'd be interested to know your thoughts.
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Difficult one really because in L&D we still have to contend with traditional values being assigned to us and they're very sticky. It wasn't so long ago (5 years) that the senior trainer in our part of the organisation insisted on being called Senior Lecturer. So people have got years of a reinforced view that training = lecturing. Even now, people thing Learning Consultant is a fancy title for Trainer. And this is even when we don't give any training and they know it.
Whilst I like the approach and agree to some extent, the question isn't about changing the role title but changing the sticky perception that Learning = Training = Lecturing. I have some ideas on this but I'd be interested to know your thoughts.