Caring for
Organizational Performance Health
Training is not always the means to employee performance improvement. Frequently, all that is needed is more tending to employees by managers. Sometimes, people just need to be told what the organization expects of them. Or, they need to have barriers or obstacles to their performance removed from their working environments.
How do organizations decide if training is necessary or not? One effective way is to use a process similar to what physicians use when they care for our health. A reputable medical Doctor will not make any decisions about how to treat a patient until diagnostic information is available. This information is essential for narrowing down the possibilities so relevant, specific and effective treatments can be prescribed.
In a similar way, organizations can utilize "Performance Care™" which is a diagnostic-driven approach to employee development. In this process, developmental events are prescribed only on the basis of documented need. We have discovered that one of the most effective ways of documenting the need for development involves actually observing what employees are or are not doing in the course of their jobs. Based on such observations, organizations can diagnose a variety of needs and prescribe specific treatments to improve the "health" of employee performance. Then, organizations can follow-up with their "patients" to insure compliance and repeat diagnostic tests to make sure desired improvements have occurred.
Performance Care™ allows organizations to replace "shotgun" approaches to development with more refined and precise laser-like techniques. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that treatments will be effective and helps to minimize unwarranted expenditures for training or other developmental events.
Performance diagnosis can serve at least three critical prescriptive/evaluative functions for an organization. First, it can reveal or verify opportunities for development. This leads, as noted above, to the targeted application of specific performance improvement strategies. Second, it can be used as a follow-up tool to check on the degree of skill utilization after a developmental event. This provides useful developmental feedback both for those who are checked (i.e., the Performers) as well as for their managers. Third, it can serve as a means to achieve Kirkpatrick's Level 3 evaluation of the extent to which training actually results in behavior change on the job. The best performance diagnostic tools are those that can serve all three of these functions as needed.
The Problem with Direct Observation
For more than 20 years, we have worked to develop powerful diagnostic tools to serve the training and development needs of our clients, including some with world-wide sales forces. One tool, created specifically for diagnosis in the sales environment, is known as "Performance Imaging™." This diagnostic process allows an organization to sample key aspects of its sales operation (i.e., the sales force, sales managers, and the sales environment) using a methodology based on interviews and direct observation of sales performers and their managers in the field. Performance Imaging™, which has been used many times around the world, has proven to be invaluable in helping to create relevant, cost-effective training and development plans for clients.
One obvious drawback of the Performance Imaging™ process is expense. Depending on logistics and location, it can be very costly to deploy a team of trained observers to accompany sales people in the field to gather the required data. Even though direct observation is usually the best way to get an accurate picture of skill development and utilization, this process normally involves only a limited sample of sales people and their managers. Thus, even clients who have used (and continue to use) Performance Imaging™ as a primary diagnostic tool are interested in additional cost-effective ways to supplement this process.
The Development Inventory Family
Recognizing the problem of expense inherent in direct observation, and considering the broad applicability of performance diagnostic tools, we were stimulated some time ago to consider alternative approaches to this task. To this end, we created the Manager Development Inventory™ (MDI), a 180° feedback and evaluation instrument for the performance management component of a manager’s job within an organization. Since 1985, thousands of MDIs, or its predecessor (see below), have been administered in many industries world-wide. The success reported by our clients with the MDI as a tool to improve manager effectiveness led us to conclude this type of instrument could be employed as a cost-effective means to obtain valuable prescriptive and evaluative information in other areas of an organization.
As with the many dimensions of health care, there are likely to be many different kinds of diagnostic tests needed to assess fully the performance health of an organization's multi-faceted sales functions. We envisioned a family of diagnostic inventories to be required. Our priorities for creating this family were guided by the following diagram, which captures the main areas (i.e., contexts) wherein feedback, development, and change is often needed to improve an organization's sales operation.
Three separate diagnostic tools for personal or organizational development have been devised based on the contexts represented in this diagram. The MDI, as noted above, is a tool used to capture diagnostic information related to the performance management functions of a manager’s job. The MDI at least partly addresses the sales management oval because it addresses critical people management functions of any manager’s job, especially a sales manager.
The three inner circles of the above diagram all are related to the sales person, the critical frontline element in any organization’s sales operation. To address these facets of organizational sales effectiveness, we created another Development Inventory instrument specifically for sales people called the Sales Development Inventory™ (SDI). In designing this instrument, we drew heavily upon our work with the Performance Imaging™ tool, which revealed the existence of key behaviors in each of the three circles that were predictive of sales success. Performance Imaging™ has been conducted more than 30 times around the world within the pharmaceutical industry. After directly observing several thousand sales representatives, during the course of over 20,000 sales calls, enacting hundreds of thousands of specific sales behaviors, we were able to define a behavioral profile of the highly successful sales person. This profile was used to develop the skill categories and sub-categories included in the SDI instrument. In creating the final instrument, we took great care to insure that the categories included were applicable to sales positions in any industry.
The third tool in the Development Inventory family is called the Sales Environment Inventory™ (SEI) and also is derived from our work with the Performance Imaging™ process. This tool addresses the broader environmental context (the outer square in the above diagram) within which sales and sales management occurs. The SEI diagnostic tool uses open-ended survey items to gather employee perspectives on factors that facilitate their jobs and on obstacles or barriers to their personal effectiveness within the organization.
Taken together, this three-part Development Inventory diagnostic family enables organizations cost-effectively to implement performance diagnosis in the three separate areas we know to be critical to the success of the sales function. Our research indicates that the kind of data obtained through the MDI and SDI instruments directly parallels that provided by methodologies like Performance Imaging™ using direct observation of sales people and their managers.
