Leaders, Managers, Team Leads as Performance Coaches (Part 3), By Segun Mojeed

 Happy New Year everyone! Let’s kick off Part 3 with a quick recap of the first two parts. I have so far, in this series, submitted that performance coach is not a title or designation, sorry you won’t find it in your organisation’s organogram be it hierarchical or functional. Being a performance coach is a lifestyle. They are managers, supervisors and team leads who pull up, and do not beat down their team members. They do not shred ideas. They don’t suffer from the ‘PhD’ (pull him down) syndrome. We have also said that this group of leaders have responsibility for the following four major performance excellence and business enhancing functions:

1. Training effectiveness, and not just effective training
2. Career coaching
3. Confronting, not confrontation, and
4. Mentoring

Parts 1 and 2 have been on the introduction and the training effectiveness bit. In this episode, we would continue our discussion on training effectiveness. The space devoted to this point underlines its importance, and centrality to human capital and national development, and business growth. A few months ago, I was the lead faculty on a Performance Management & Appraisal training for the management staff of a multinational corporation, one of the top five in the land, across their locations all over Nigeria. Midway into the whole programme when we had taken about seventy managers through the one-and-a-half days workshop in batches and I was just browsing through the ‘Happy Sheets’, I wasn’t surprised at the fantastic ratings as usual, 100% (except for a couple of participants that had an axe to grind with me for the way I had challenged them in class).

Emboldened, and a bit concerned by this rating, I went back to the next class which held in Benin and summoned the courage to tell my class that my desire was to hear through their line managers and HR business partners in the next six months that ‘dialogue’ performance management and appraisal (the business expectation from the training) has become the culture. It is only then we can say learning transfer has happened and that we have added value as consultants. I recapped this encounter just to buttress the inadequacy and biasness of such immediate-after-training appraisals like the use of the ‘happy sheet’. As much as it is not advisable to ignore such immediate feedback, we counsel that it is not the real feedback the business is looking for, and that is why we push for training effectiveness and that performance coaches must stand up and be counted. Four to six months post-training, a performance coach is able to respond to Human Resources/Learning Business Partner’s assessment questionnaire on how good a recently trained team member has been applying her learning.

Line managers and team leads willing and ready for the best level as performance coaches are appropriately situated to monitor post-training behavioural and performance improvements. The foundation for this monitoring and eventual appraisal of the post-training quantum leap in performance is laid long before the learning event, even from the beginning of the financial year when identified training needs are being strategically streamlined. This is then followed by a painstakingly methodical nomination of team members for training by which time the Learning Contract is sent to nominees, and it is jointly executed by the performance coach and each nominee.

A performance coach does not indulge in the business-as-usual style of using training nomination as a ‘settlement token’ or what is known in the local parlance as ‘man-know-man’. Selecting nominees for training is a business decision and should be so handled. A few years ago, I was headhunted to head the training school of an indigenous bank. To my amazement, for the first six months of my resumption, I kept seeing same set of participants at the training school’s programme. These faces represented less than 20% of the workforce. I was curious and I took a closer look. I discovered it was a cult-like practice that negates all principles of performance coaching and getting your money’s worth from learning and development. A practice of paternalistic patronage by HR/learning officers having the liberty to invite an employee for training without recourse to his/her line manager from the beginning. That is not a partnership that works.

Under my supervision, the team quickly revamped the nomination process and we started seeing new faces at the training school, and identified training needs of many more were being met, though we could not reach the learning partnership collaboration with line managers (a very crucial stage in training effectiveness) before I left the bank for the telecoms industry where I was given the opportunity to practice all you are reading in this title. Some friends and colleagues have argued that I was able to accomplish that much in my telecoms days because my team started the talent development unit from the scratch and that my performance coach expatriate boss, Chris Bezuidenhout gave us the opportunity to exhale and excel. I have no argument against such assertions. Just to add that I didn’t come to telecoms empty handed. I brought something to the table, and my team leads of Bimbola Gbadamosi, Dickson Ojukwu and Millicent Nwadiaro were carefully selected.

The subject of training effectiveness is inexhaustible. I owe my grooming and, maybe, expertise on the subject and practice of ‘training effectiveness’ to two great sources. First is my over twenty-five years learning and talent development experience which includes a United Kingdom certification in the Kirkpatrick Four-Levels Learning Evaluation programme. Second is the body of works of Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick, Andrew Jefferson, Roy Pollock, Richard Flanagan and Cal Wick (please see acknowledgement below). The Kirkpatrick Four-Levels does not in any way discard or ignore the need for effective training (packaging and delivery). In fact, levels one and two insist on programme improvement, conducive learning environment, customer satisfaction, etc.

Levels three and four, on the other hand, lay much emphasis on training effectiveness, which among other things includes maximisation of organisational results and the demonstration of value. Is anyone still asking: Why training effectiveness? Dear Performance Coach, someday you will get a memo from your Chief Executive or your Board to show value for resources expended on training and development. To produce results, we need to up our game, moving from training aesthetics to quantifiable business results traceable to our avalanche of training programmes and huge training budgets. This calls for humility. Yes, being humble to unlearn old unprofitable ways and learn value adding, career enhancing global best practices. We do not know it all. It is time for mind-set change. It’s impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows, so says Epictetus. To learn is to be open-minded.

Demonstration of value is a three-phase activity.

1. The phase of planning – this phase starts long before the training programme takes place. It involves needs analysis, learning contract execution, pre-conference resources and joining instructions, learning assessment and behavioural change questionnaires, and knowing the end from the beginning.
2. The Execution phase is next – this is where the action takes place in the classroom or on the field. Training execution should be done in creative ways that would engage participants in unforgettable action-learning practical series of class exercises, discussions, team games, end-of-programme quizzes where applicable, role plays, crisp and non-boring video clips, etc. Training sessions must be enjoyed. All hands must be on deck to ensure learning takes place, that participants take responsibility to be fully present and participate in the programme. Every act of ‘presenteeism’ * is vehemently discouraged. There is no room for ‘sleeping partners’ so to say, or ‘passive participants’ in training whose results must impact the business, and that is why only those who are skilled in facilitation should be engaged to execute training programmes. These facilitators may be in-house performance coaches or external consultants.
3. The third phase is the Demonstration of Value – as the name implies, this is where you begin to answer the Chief Executive or the Board’s question of where is the money. Some have called this the evidence-based learning and development strategy. As a performance coach, either in HR department or on the line, the onus is on you to show the effect of the training your subordinate attended on his performance few months post training. This is doing what you promised through the learning contract execution, it is not an additional job.

To be continued…Till then, enjoy.

Postscript: We are on a family business trip. I don’t really know why Akin Fadeyi’s “Not In My Country” is screaming in my head right now. However, I saw a few of those things we frown at back home happening right here in this freaking cold first world country. Arrival hall at the airport was crowded and the line snaky. No one complained! Passed immigration, luggage collected, and then gbam! …infrastructural breakdown. Our son who offered to pick us up had parked on P5; that is the 5th floor of the parking lot because that was where he could get a parking space. There are two lifts to convey travellers and visitors. The queue was so long and the waiting in the minus four degree weather (this is a very good temperature compared to last year at this same time) was getting to me only to discover that one of the lifts has not been functioning for some time now. The good news is no one cursed anyone, civil servants or the nation. We only queued up, waited for our turn and used the only lift available. No one (country) is perfect on this side of eternity.

Also here, my Uber took a wrong turn. Yes, what readily comes to mind is our Taxify and Uber drivers who know next to nothing about Lagos roads and we tend to disparage them. This Uber driver didn’t say anything until we found ourselves at the airport and I gave him ‘one kind look like that’ and he then apologised saying he took a wrong turn. We didn’t quarrel. I’m told I can dispute the fare if it is far outside the estimated sum.

Acknowledgement/Sources of Resources for this article:

1. BezaleelConsulting/Olusegun Mojeed: A compendium of over 25 years of manuscripts of my thesis and lecture series in Talent Management and People Matters (unpublished yet), BezaleelConsulting Group Library bezaleelconsultingrw.com
2. Calhoun Wick, Roy Pollock, Andrew Jefferson & Richard Flanagan: The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to turn Training and Development into Business Results,  2006 Pfeiffer, a Wiley Imprint
3. James & Wendy Kirkpatrick: Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation, 2016 ATD.

 *‘Presenteeism’ is the loafing act of being here and yet not here.