So What?

Chances are good that your team knows what it's doing. Your team is working on a project, and that project has a specific outcome. That outcome is tied to specific objectives. Those objectives meet a particular goal, and the goal is clearly defined. Hooray, you are way ahead of the game. Most organizations aren't where you are, but you're not quite where you should be.

What's missing? The "so what" factor. What are you getting out of it? What is your organization getting out of it? Often the answer is obvious, but not always. Goals should mean something -- provide a benefit. It's pretty easy to think of reasons to do something, but those are usually objectives, not goals. A goal is the overall "thing to be accomplished." The benefit is what you get out of it. In an organization, goalsetting is a little easier because most workplaces have an overall goal, only they call it a mission to give it more urgency. In the achievement hierarchy, the goal is subordinate to the benefit. Achieving the benefit is possible without achieving the goal, which is still success. Achieving the goal and not getting the benefit is still failure.

Once you have determined a goal to achieve the desired benefit, it's time to plan objectives. Any goal worth achieving takes a certain amount of time and effort. These smaller goals you achieve on the way to the larger one can be a real goal-killer, especially if they're not really aligned with the goal. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the objectives we don't even care about the goal anymore. Care about the objectives, but reserve your real passion for the goal and its benefit. Besides, your objectives may change along the way as circumstances change. They're supposed to have agility, just like the goal needs stamina. Don't change the goal to fit the objectives. Along the way, measure how much closer you are to the goal and benefit, just as you are measuring the objectives. If you do these simple things, people with think you're brilliant, which is a popular goal. Now you just have to figure out the benefit....

4th Floor -- Results, Organizational Benefits, Objectives, Goals

I gave a seminar on elearning at a federal department this week. It was full of training managers and other human capital experts. They all had the same comment: "This is great information, but it doesn't address what I really need. How do I convince upper management that training is valuable?" As we examined that topic from different angles, a few things became clear. First, many training managers aren't measuring their training beyond a course evaluation. Second, and more shocking, upper management isn't sharing program objectives or organizational goals with the training team.

Let's take the measures first. You're probably familiar with Donald Kirkpatrick's evaluation model. Four levels of training assessment are broken down into a learner's evaluation, a learning assessment, knowledge transfer, and organizational benefit. Each level is measured and builds on the preceding one. It's pretty simple in concept, but it can be difficult to practice.

The training managers had some problems with the level one assessments. One issue was the questions didn't seem to go far enough. It's good to ask a learner how he or she liked the course, but it's better to go a little deeper. Ask how the learner would do it differently or if any information seemed to be missing. Find out how the learner would have survived without the course, and what resources he or she might have used if the course didn't exist. Another big issue was making sure the online evaluations were anonymous in the LMS -- something any good programmer should be able to provide with little difficulty.

At level two, managers seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea of a pretest evaluation of the learning population. They wanted to get on with the training. I sympathize, but it's really important to know how your training changed the learner's knowledge. If you don't know that, it's impossible to know what direct effect your training has had.

Level three, interestingly, was the easiest for training managers to handle. After all, they had numbers to justify that a particular skill was lacking in some way, and it was easy enough to do an additional evaluation to note the change in skill. Since the level two measures were lacking, however, managers could only guess that training was responsible for the change. Increased awareness, marketing, or other factors may have been responsible.

The biggest issue was level four, which is to be expected. Since training managers didn't have the first three levels of measurement on solid footing, and upper management wasn't sharing its objectives (or didn't have any), level four was an impossible climb. We've already looked at some issues with the first three levels, which are generally under the training manager's control. Since organizational goals and program objectives are the purview of higher powers, what can a training manager do?

I think the answer is simple: make something up. Training managers know enough about the organization to understand its mission. They know about the big programs and what they're designed to do. The trick is to tie the course to the program.

Though training managers may not get the news, marketing is all over this stuff. Every press release is peppered with "meeting the executive's goal of..." or "increase operational efficiency" or "reduce our risk exposure." This kind of language is all over an organization's website. Trainers should just pick a goal and march with it. Better yet, pick several. It's not a trick; any good trainer can identify organizational deficiencies instinctively. Trainers know what the organization needs, they just need a little help describing it to the folks with the checkbook.

Training must have a purpose, and that purpose should at least include an organizational benefit. As long as the first three Kirkpatrick levels are solid, it should be easy to show the way to level four.