4

ALIGN Results

Once you understand what’s driving stakeholder decision making (wants, preferences, beliefs, and perceptions), you can determine the measurable organizational results, indicators, independently verifiable data, and critical gaps (needs) you can address. This is the ALIGN Results phase. Table 4-1 shows objectives to accomplish and activities to help you meet them.

The ALIGN Results phase starts with discovering more information relevant to the key issues identified in the ALIGN Expectations phase. During this phase, you will be aligning client wants and expectations with valued and clearly defined organizational results. You will determine the key results the organization wants to achieve, while avoiding the temptation to commit to what it will take to get there at this point. You will discover more relevant results by examining stated goals and priorities, strategic plans, operational plans, action plans, current or past performance reports (including those from other consultancies or studies), strategic reviews, and any other relevant sources of performance information. You will also work with stakeholders to determine what successful achievement of those goals or worthy performance looks like. Essentially, you will ask: “How will we know when we’ve successfully reached the goal?” “What are the markers along the way we should pay attention to so we can track our progress toward the goal?” Knowing this information, you can then determine the gaps between the desired level of performance results and the current levels of those results.

Distinguishing Means From Ends

The key to any successful journey is arriving at the right place, at the right time, and in good condition. First, defining the right place is vital. Identifying where you should head and justifying why you should get there will provide you with the critical data on which to design, develop, implement, manage, and evaluate your L&D solutions.

You began to define the direction of the journey in phase 1, when you identified the expectations of stakeholders. As noted, if there is a universal weakness in how organizations go about deciding how to improve their effectiveness and efficiency, it is that they tend to start with solutions rather than a clear understanding of the problem they want to address. While you may have useful information and consensus about some of the key issues that must be addressed from the perspective of stakeholders, the ultimate success of your efforts depends on the extent to which your solutions can contribute to organizational results. Whether you can fulfill this promise depends on you and your team being able to distinguish means from ends (Kaufman 2000).

Reaching our ends is about delivering results. Simply stated, a result is the effect of doing something-it is not what we do, but the consequence it brings. But delivering solutions is not the same as delivering results. We implement solutions to achieve positive results that our organization values.

Means are the way in which we achieve our ends. They are what we do and how we do it. We often have various means from which to choose, but do not always stop to consider the full range of options. The clearer we define our problems in terms of measurable results (and root causes, as we will discuss in the next chapter), the clearer our full range of means becomes. Means are important but there is little inherent value in consuming resources in activities, solutions, and initiatives if they do not help us arrive at a desired end or result. Table 4-2 provides a side-by-side comparison of some examples.

Sometimes, the means distract us on our way to the desired results. You may want your team to achieve higher productivity, but if you focus on training them, or transforming them into a “self-directed work team,” rather than on foremost reducing the productivity gaps, you risk becoming attached to the means and ignoring evidence that suggests these are not the best means. Recall the discussion of the escalation of commitment or the sunk-cost cognitive trap in decision making, which leads you to throw good money after bad. You decide whether to stay with ineffective means based on what you have already spent on them, rather than on future costs and benefits. The best way to minimize this risk is by remaining flexible about how you reach your ends, and focusing instead on your defined results: where you want to go. It is also important to understand the factors that influence your route to those results, as they give us clues about what routes you will have to take to get there in the most efficient and effective ways.

Objectives

Our definition of results can often be stated in terms of general goals (something we aim for or seek), or in more specific terms that include the precise result of what will be accomplished, a timeline for when it will be accomplished, the conditions under which the result will be observed, and specific targets or measurable criteria to judge the degree to which the result was accomplished. Results stated with this level of precision are called objectives.

But not all objectives are about results. While results-oriented objectives focus on output and outcomes of interest to the organization, process-oriented objectives express the concrete actions to be taken to achieve those outputs and outcomes. An example of a results-oriented objective is, “100 percent of our salespeople will deliver informationalproduct-use presentations by the end of the first year.” An example process-oriented objective is, “By the end of Q2 this year, we will launch a new customer information program on how to better use our products.”

Looking deeper, not all results are equal. In fact, they exist in networks and hierarchies. For example, there is a distinction between work output objectives, organizational objectives, and value-add objectives. That is, people produce work outputs to contribute to greater organizational objectives, and add value to customers and society:

•   Work Output Objective:

        Increase the percentage of salespeople to 100 percent who are delivering informational product-use presentations by the end of Q3 during the first year.

•   Organizational Objective:

        Increase sales in North America by 18 percent by the end of the first year.

•   Value-Add Objective:

        Decrease injuries due to improper product use to less than two per year by the end of year two.

        Increase customer satisfaction ratings in North America to a minimum of 96 percent within two years.

It is essential to make a clear distinction between outcome-oriented objectives that reflect the long-term results you want to accomplish; output-oriented objectives that reflect the immediate deliverables of activities, processes, or projects; and process-oriented objectives that reflect how you want to achieve them. For example, launching the new customer information program may be important, but it is important because you want to improve customer satisfaction ratings. Process-oriented objectives can trigger ideas about other comparable alternatives, but only results objectives can help you assess a wider range of appropriate process-oriented objectives.

How do you separate results objectives from process objectives? The most important question is “why?” (or some variation that does not annoy your client while at the same time helps you better understand what they are trying to accomplish). Consider a manager who wants everyone in her sales team to be retrained on proper product usage. Let us say that our L&D specialist simply asked her, “why is that important?” and created a type of cause-and-effect chain with the manager that looks something like this:

•   Manager: We need to have everyone in our sales team take a refresher training course on proper product usage as soon as possible.

•   L&D Specialist: Could you help me understand why that is important?

•   Manager: Because our sales team needs to be able to properly demonstrate to the customer how to use the products.

•   L&D Specialist: Yes, that certainly makes sense. Can you give me a bit more detail about why the request is being made now?

•   Manager: Because we have received customer complaints about the products not working well.

•   L&D Specialist: I see the urgency behind your request. Customer satisfaction is central to our business success. This sounds like it could affect a number of other important business issues and requires our full attention.

•   Manager: Yes, exactly! Our returns are up and sales are down. And at this point, we can expect to get lower customer satisfaction scores.

•   L&D Specialist: Count on our support to help. By the way, would you mind if we reviewed those customer complaints to get a better understanding of their specific concerns? There might be some useful information to help us fine-tune our solutions.

•   Manager: Sure, it sounds as though you understand what we’re trying to do here. It would be great to get your input if you see anything important that we may have missed. I’ll have the customer reports sent to you as soon as possible.

Notice how the L&D specialist’s line of questioning comes from a “Help me understand; I want to help” perspective that enables them both to make the connection between the request for training and the business needs. In this case, the L&D specialist used this opportunity to request further information that might help solve the problem by fine-tuning the solution. With additional documented data, the L&D specialist will be better positioned to potentially come back to the manager with reasonably compelling information that would warrant a bit more energy in better defining the problem, and putting the predetermined solution on hold.

Needs

Distinguishing means from ends can be challenging due to our overuse of the word need. Just listen to everyday conversation. Common use of need often suggests a solution—you need more money, you need more time, you need more people, you need to outsource, you need to reorganize—and this always leads to selecting and applying the solution (more money, more time, and so on) before you know what results should be delivered. Thus, by overusing need, people unthinkingly or unknowingly jump into solutions before defining and justifying the problem they want to solve.

Roger Kaufman, often referred to as the father of needs assessment in the performance improvement field, defines needs as a gap between the results you want and the current results you are accomplishing. He further defines the tool or process for identifying needs a needs assessment. A needs assessment may reveal a number of gaps, and the gaps that are pursued for resolution are what he refers to as the problems we want to solve.

In his view, many so-called needs assessments are not needs assessments, but rather a survey of wants. For example, picking training as a solution, and then asking your employees to come up with five areas in which they think they need training and how they prefer the training to be delivered is not a needs assessment. Rather, this would be an example of how to justify preferred or familiar solutions through incomplete data without first collecting evidence about real work output gaps, actual contributing factors, and a range of relevant options that may be more effective and consume fewer resources.

This chapter identifies gaps in relevant results similar to that proposed by Kaufman. You will learn how to identify relevant results and targets, identify the current level of results, and estimate gaps between desired and current results. Figure 4-1 illustrates the three key steps in this phase.

Identifying Relevant Results

In the first phase, your stakeholders provided you with their expectations of success, or what success should look like. With this information, you have the knowledge to successfully meet your stakeholders’ perceptions of success. Now, you can identify the measurable indicators (or metrics) of success, or what marker will tell you that you are making progress toward your goals or objectives for the chosen level of alignment.

Value-Add Results

This level is focused on identifying and resolving results gaps between the desired and actual accomplishments of an organization, as measured by the usefulness and value of those accomplishments to the organization’s external clients and society (Kaufman 1998, 2000). Relevant results at this level may relate to security, public health, safety, environmental impact, quality of life, and survival of customers, staff, and communities affected by the organization in their course of business.

While these results may seem far removed from the work of employees, the work of employees has the most influence at this level. The work processes, protocols, training, feedback, and supervision have a direct affect on what customers ultimately receive in the way of products and services. Consumers now have the ability to influence a brand’s reputation (positively or negatively) with one comment shared on social media for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in their networks to see. With globalization and the Internet, consumers have unlimited choices, so the key dimension of differentiation has become the customer experience. When customers are asked how organizations can better engage with consumers to create loyalty and continue to earn their business, well more than half of those asked indicate that improving the overall customer experience is critical. A study of consumers conducted by Oracle (2011) found:

•   86 percent will pay more for a better customer experience

•   79 percent who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored

•   89 percent began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.

Improving the customer experience to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction can directly influence organizational performance measures, such as an increase in sales, loyal customers, and referrals. Yet, while critical to success, this value-add level of results is not usually addressed by L&D solutions.

This level embodies system thinking perhaps better than the other levels. While it is relevant for moving you toward a more proactive approach to organizational change and long-term sustainability, it is particularly important when the organization is engaged in a strategic planning process or faced with a significant organizational change, threat, or opportunity from the external environment.

Results at this level can be found as strategic aims in the form of the organizational vision and strategic objectives. Consequently, strategic plans are a primary source of information in determining concrete results to be delivered at this level. Strategic implementation plans, if available, are another great source of information because they provide more detail on the various organizational actions related to supporting specific strategic objectives. However, it should be noted that not all organizations follow through on their strategic plan with a clear implementation plan. Also helpful are strategic measurement frameworks. For example, if your organization is using a strategic planning and management system, such as the Balanced Score Card (Kaplan and Norton 2004), there should be—in theory—clear results and metrics related to customer satisfaction and impact. The Balanced Scorecard was originated by Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic nonfinancial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more “balanced” view of organizational performance.

Organizational Results

This level is focused on identifying and resolving results gaps between the desired and actual accomplishments of the typical organization’s bottom line, regardless of the value it may provide to external clients and society. Relevant results at this level may relate to market share, revenue, sales, profits, and customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction could actually appear both here at the organizational level and the value-add results level, depending on the indicators used to measure it. At the value-add results level, the focus is on long-term satisfaction trends because it indicates a continuous focus and satisfaction on customer needs. On the other hand, this organizational level may focus on one point in time, rather than a trend.

For a healthcare system, organizational results might be patients successfully discharged, expense per episode of care, shared savings, or financial gains or risks from performance-based contracts. For an educational organization, it might be graduation rates, performance on national and state standardized tests, enrollment rates, retention rates, or perhaps secured funding, if it is tied to performance.

This level of result will help you ensure that your L&D solutions contribute to the bottom line, at least in the short run, because there may not be a clear relationship to long-term sustainability, which is most closely related to the value-add results described previously.

Here too, the strategic plan, implementation plan, annual action plans, and strategic measurement frameworks and systems will provide a wealth of information. Mission statements often include the specific accomplishments an organization commits to achieve, although some do not use specific or measurable terms. In this case, your task is to translate “being the best” or “trying hard” into measurable results. Therefore, you must also consult any internal reports that show valued results, based on what is measured to track the organization’s progress toward bottom-line targets. These may include annual and quarterly reports that are presented to senior leadership to give them an overview of the organization’s performance.

Operational Results

This level is focused on identifying and resolving results gaps at the individual, group, or functional performance level. Essentially, these results are the building-block objectives that when taken together help the organization reach its bottom-line objectives and add value to its customers and society.

Relevant accomplishments at this level tend to relate to specific performer deliverables: successfully completed service call, successfully repaired automobile, sales transaction executed. For a healthcare organization, this might include registrations or admissions errors, average length of stay, maintained bed occupancy, and other operational effectiveness and efficiency measures. For an educational institution, this might include mastery of specific subject areas, successful course completion, instructor effectiveness, and student attendance.

It is important to note that there may be various layers of operational results that work together to deliver a higher level of organizational results. Be sure to carefully identify these value chains so that you understand relevant relationships and interactions.

Likewise, you should carefully consider the alignment of performance results at this level to the two higher-order results discussed previously. Even if you did not gain consensus from stakeholders to estimate gaps in results at the value-add or organizational level, you still want to, at a minimum, confirm strategic connections of performance gaps to strategic objectives.

For example, your key stakeholders may have asked you to focus on resolving employee performance issues that are affecting the error rate in the southeastern plant, but that you do not have to collect data on how these errors affect customers or how these defects affect the community where the plant is located. In this case, at the very least, you want to establish or map out the connection between the errors and broader organizational objectives as it relates to quality, customer satisfaction, and market share objectives. You may not spend much time measuring specific gaps between specific quality, customer satisfaction, and market share targets and “actuals,” but at least make clear the strategic value of reducing those error rates and staying solution neutral until you have the facts. Whatever solutions you come up with later will also have to conform to quality standards, policies, and protocols of the organization.

The primary sources of information for establishing relevant performance results include job descriptions, performance plans and evaluations, and performance management frameworks, documentation, and systems.

Learning Level

The learning level focuses specifically on knowledge, skills, and behaviors. While these three terms are often used interchangeably, they are different and should be clearly defined before they can be measured. Knowledge is the theoretical or practical understanding of a particular topic or subject. Possessing an understanding of a concept does not mean the individual knows how to apply the concept. You may have an understanding of the Balanced Scorecard, but it doesn’t mean you can, or have ever, used it. The transfer or application of that knowledge is the actual skill. Skill development requires practice, not necessarily more knowledge. Skills define specific learned activities, which can range widely in terms of complexity. Knowing which skills an employee possesses can help you determine whether their training and experience is appropriate for the work activities required for the job. In turn, the specific ways in which one can apply a skill can vary depending on specific behaviors. In other words, differences in skill level might be observed through specific behaviors. What specific behaviors does the individual apply to achieve desired results?

The distinction between knowledge, skills, and behaviors and performance can be vague because performance is commonly described as consisting of employee outputs and activities. It’s important to make a clear distinction between employee work outputs (what we describe in the operational level) and employee activities. Activities are how people go about producing work outputs, which requires relevant knowledge, skills, and behaviors.

It is also important to highlight the distinctions between what people know and what they can do, because this helps you keep your estimation of learning gaps anchored to specific, clear, and measurable skills and behaviors required to perform the job. Research indicates that training and other knowledge solutions that are focused on relevant work tasks are more successfully transferred to the job than training that is based exclusively on thematic areas or topics (Burke and Hutchins 2008). This distinction helps us begin to design transferability of both knowledge learned and skills practiced in training because it provides the basis for specific behavioral objectives, strategies, activities, and content that are aligned to help the employee successfully perform on-the-job tasks. It also provides the foundation for detailed, corrective, and timely feedback for employees on the job. As research tells us, it is corrections to the specific ways in which work activities get done that produce changes in the work outputs (Kluger and DeNisi 1996). Work output data does not always tell us where the process went wrong and how to correct it. So, we must also look at how people produce or deliver work outputs.

Performance criteria, organizational and industry quality standards, operational procedures and policies, and other organizational policies, norms, regulations, and rules can be useful sources of information for determining what people should be doing to deliver expected results. Job description formats vary, but most may not offer a sufficient level of detail, making it necessary to check various sources.

Metrics

Not all results are directly and easily observable or measurable. Sometimes you must identify metrics: the specific and observable variables that when tracked systematically over time indicate progress (or lack thereof) toward an objective (Guerra-López 2015; Guerra-López and Norris-Thomas 2011). Metrics be used to measure the:

•   presence of something

•   degree of something

•   type of access to something

•   level of use

•   extent of an occurrence of something

•   relevance of something

•   quality of something

•   effort required to achieve something.

The metrics you select must be directly related to what’s being indicated, and you may need more than one metric to measure something. For example, customer satisfaction can be measured in various ways; depending on what metric you select, the data may paint a different picture. One of the most common metrics for measuring customer satisfaction is customer satisfaction scores obtained through customer surveys. Yet what these surveys tell you can vary from what they actually do. Your company may have fairly good customer service scores, yet your customer referrals could be relatively low, your product returns high, and repeat business low.

This is not to suggest that you have to collect and compare data on every single metric of an objective. There are cost-benefit considerations to selecting which metrics will be used as the basis for your data. What’s important is that the metrics you use to measure results can affect your understanding of the facts and your interpretation of reality. This, in turn, can influence the solutions that are recommended.

Many performance indicator frameworks have been proposed over the last decades, including Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (2004); Lynch and Cross’s Performance Pyramid (1991); the results and determinants framework proposed by Fitzgerald, Johnston, Brignall and Sivestro (1991); and Neely, Adams, and Kennerly’s Performance Prism (2002). Your organization may use any or none of these. Your task is to identify the results and metrics that are particularly relevant to the performance issues you are attempting to address, and determine which would best evaluate the effectiveness of your solutions. Table 4-3 offers some examples of metrics you can use.

With a preliminary list of results and metrics for the chosen alignment levels, you are ready to share with the stakeholder group to gain agreement about their relevant and strategic alignment value. This can be either in a formal or casual meeting, depending on what is appropriate in your context. In either case, it should not come as a complete surprise to the stakeholder groups, because you should be keeping in close contact and collaborating as you continue through each step and stage of the strategic alignment process.

*Sales could be seen as an organizational or performance result, depending on whether you are viewing the organizational aggregate sales or specific individuals or sales teams.

Targets

With a firm agreement on the results of interest, you want to also ensure you have targets for each metric. Targets are specific planned levels of accomplishment for a specific metric within a specific timeframe. Targets motivate people to achieve because they give them something concrete to pursue. They also help you interpret progress as either at, below, or above expectations, with “expectations” in this sense representing the specific target. Therefore, they help us detect gaps and trigger corrective action.

For example, if the objective was to increase the sales closing ratio of the northeast sales team to 30 percent by the end of this year, your indicator is “sales closing ratio” and your target is 30 percent. When you collect data about the current closing ratio of the sales team and find that their closing ratio as a group is actually 17 percent, you are able to interpret that this is a gap, which signals that an analysis of this gap is warranted to understand why the gap exists, and in turn take the appropriate corrective actions.

You may find targets in the documents you review and in the management information systems the organization uses. Many organizations use automated scorecards or dashboards that electronically track relevant organizational data and offer gauges to signal the extent to which current performance levels meet target numbers. In other cases, those targets may not be clear yet, and you and your stakeholders will want to work together to set appropriate targets based on past performance, performance from top performers, industry standards, or expert judgment. The point is that you must have specified targets against which to compare and interpret the actual level of performance.

Discovering the Current Level of Results

In the previous step you spent time looking through organizational records, reports, and systems, as well as communicating and confirming with your stakeholders what measures of success should be used to direct and demonstrate valued results. At the same time, you should have been looking for specific targets that indicated the level of expected accomplishment for that objective. This is the ideal or “what should be” side of the equation.

In this step, you collect data about the current level of performance. Document reviews—records, information systems, reports, and many of the other secondary sources you used in the previous step—are a common method for identifying the current levels of accomplishment for a given indicator.

Other data may not be available, so you will have to collect it. For example, you have already identified through sales reports that there is a substantial gap in the closing sales ratio. Now you want to identify whether there is a gap between the organization’s sales process and what the northeast sales team is actually doing. Observation may be the most appropriate way to determine this. You might even set up two different groups to observe. One could include salespeople who have closing ratios that are meeting targets; and the other group would be composed of individuals who are consistently missing their ratio targets. Here, you would be observing the sales process they use, and how it compares to steps from the organization’s process, for which they received extensive training and practice prior to going into the field. You may also want to observe what other differences exist between the two groups that might explain the gaps in performance. (The next chapter will explore the process for identifying root causes of performance gaps in more detail. The point to note here is that you will not always find the data about current levels of accomplishments neatly listed on a report or computer screen.)

There are many options for collecting data about current level of performance, including surveys, focus groups, knowledge tests, and various others. Here are some of the considerations to keep in mind when planning data collection:

Consider the type of data you are seeking, and whether the methods and tools you are considering are appropriate for those types of data. For example, if you are looking for a sales team’s sales volume, you would not want to conduct a survey or focus group to find out what people “think” the sales volume is. You would want to go directly to organizational records. Conversely, if you are looking to measure the satisfaction of the sales team with the sales incentive package, you probably won’t find it in organizational records; you would want to ask the sales team directly how satisfied they are.

There are a number of ways of collecting data about people’s perceptions, attitudes, and opinions, including surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. Choosing them in part depends on the size of your group, how dispersed they are geographically, the resources you have available (including time and money), and even whether you or someone in the L&D team has the expertise to design and deploy those methods.

Estimating Gaps in Results in the Chosen Alignment Level

Once you have chosen specific targets for each of your indicators, and gathered the data about the current level of performance, you want to define gaps between the two in a clear and concise way. This is a critical step because you want to have a precise number that helps all involved understand the specific distance to be traveled between where they are now and where they want or should be. For example, if your sales team’s closing ratio target is 40 percent, and they are actually closing 25 percent, they are off target by 15 percentage points. Because you need to close this 15-point gap, the overarching objective of the solution you select is to help the team increase their closing ratio by a minimum of 15 percentage points.

In the next phase, when you conduct a causal analysis, you will be able to pair potential solutions to specific causal factors. Notice the difference between this approach to identifying needs and a request from a client that begins with “I need….” What they really mean to say is “I want” or “I think I want.” There will likely be more than one solution required, in part because an organizations is a system, and as discussed throughout this book, there are multiple interactions and recurring patterns that reinforce one another to drive the problems we are in the process of defining.

You may find it helpful to illustrate this comparison in a gap chart, similar to the example shown in Table 4-4.

Keep in mind that the level of alignment you agreed to ensure with your stakeholders in the previous phase will influence the scope of work for this phase, and you may not have data for all four levels. Your scope may have been for the learning and performance levels, but perhaps did not gain consensus to assess result gaps at the organizational or value-add levels. To strategically align your solutions, you want to link all the way up to organizational results and value-add. Otherwise, you may gain operational alignment, but cannot be certain you have strategic alignment.

With a clear list of business needs, you are now ready to begin the process of aligning solutions. The bridge between needs (or problems) and solutions is causal analysis. The prescription should treat the root causes, not just the symptoms.

Align Results Checklist

Use this checklist to ensure you have covered all elements necessary for successful demonstration of aligning results.