Louder than words

My last couple of blog posts have argued in favour of extracting value out of organisational capabilities. Due to the nature of my role I have posited these arguments in terms of employee development.

However, I further advocate the use of organisational capabilities across all parts of the employee lifecycle.

Using the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle as my guide, I will share my thoughts on some of the ways in which your capability framework can add value to your organisation’s activities in terms of recruitment, onboarding, performance, and offboarding.

Recruitment

Everyone knows that change management is hard. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; an organisation’s culture doesn’t change over night; something about herding cats; the change curve; etc. etc.

We’ve heard it all before, and yes it’s probably true.

But there’s a big elephant in the room: the power of recruitment to accelerate cultural change. That is to say, bring in from the outside the people whose capabilities you desperately need on the inside.

Which begs the question… what capabilities? Well, organisations that focus like an eagle know precisely the capabilities to assess each candidate against, because they are the ones that align to their strategic imperatives.

If your organisation needs to become more collaborative, recruit collaborative people. If it needs to become more innovative, recruit innovative people. And if it needs to become more digitally literate, recruit digitally literate people.

This approach may seem too obvious to mention, yet I dare you to examine your organisation’s current recruitment practices.

Onboarding

Onboarding is one of those pies that everyone wants to stick their fingers into, but nobody wants to own. Yet it is crucial for setting up the new recruit for success.

From an organisational capability perspective, a gold-plated opportunity arises during this phase in the employee’s lifecycle to draw their attention to the capability framework and the riches therein. The new recruit is motivated, keen to prove themselves, and hungry to learn.

Highlight the resources that are available to them to develop their capabilities now. This is important because the first few weeks of their experience in the organisation colours their remaining tenure.

Ensure they start their journey the way you’d like them to continue it: productively.

Performance

Capability powers performance, so the capability framework is a tool you can use to improve all four subparts of Performance in the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

Performance Management

Effective performance management complements development planning to provide the employee with guidance on improving said performance.

When seen through the lens of the capability framework, an employee’s performance appraisal can identify meaningful development opportunities. Performance weak spots may be (at least partly) attributable to gaps in specific capabilities; while a strengths-based approach might also be adopted, whereby an already strong capability is enhanced to drive higher performance.

To inform these decisions with data, I’d be keen to correlate capability assessments against individual performances and observe the relationship between the variables over time.

Development

It’s all very well to have a poetic capability framework, but if learning opportunities aren’t mapped to it, then its value is inherently limited.

If the framework’s capabilities align to leadership stages, I suggest the following question be put to the user: Do you want to excel in your current role or prepare for your next role?

Not only does this question focus the user’s development goal, it also identifies the relevant leadership stage so the capabilities can be presented in the right context.

A follow-up question may then be posed: Would you like to browse all the capabilities – useful for those who want to explore, or already know which capability to develop – focus on our strategic imperatives – useful for those who are time poor – or assess your capabilities – useful for those who seek a personal diagnosis.

The answers to these questions lead to a selection of capabilities which, beyond the provision of clear descriptions, outline the opportunities for development.

Resist the urge to dump masses of resources into their respective buckets. Instead, curate them. I suggest the following approaches:

• Apply my framework for content curation to scaffold the learning process.
• Look through the 70:20:10 lens to leverage the gamut of experience, exposure and education.
• Cross-reference the KASAB framework to close the knowing-doing gap.

KASAB is an esoteric extension of the KSA heuristic in teaching circles, and I like it because it includes “B” for “Behaviour”.

For example, help your colleagues move beyond the consumption of teamwork videos, design thinking workshops, and moocs on digital business; by encouraging them to contribute to communities of practice, submit ideas to the enterprise idea management system, and participate in the company’s social media campaign.

Health & Wellbeing

I see organisational capabilities applying to health & wellbeing in two ways.

The first way concerns the impact of employee development on mental health. Given the satisfaction and pride of building mastery drives engagement, the capability framework presents opportunities to improve mental health across the enterprise.

The second way concerns the composition of the capability framework. Given a healthy employee is a productive employee, why isn’t Wellness itself an organisational capability?

Retention

I’ve seen with my own eyes the impact of employee development (or lack thereof) on retention.

Given the sense of support and growth that the investment in people’s learning brings, the capability framework presents opportunities to retain talent across the enterprise.

Offboarding

Capabilities that align to leadership stages are useful for succession planning. Not only do they identify the capabilities that someone needs to succeed in their current role, but also the capabilities they need to succeed in their next role. Assessment of the latter informs the readiness of the employee for promotion.

Conversely, when the employee leaves the team (or exits the organisation) the capability framework can be used to assess the skills gap that remains.

In 7 tips for custodians of capability frameworks I declared a capability framework that remains unused is merely a bunch of words. But it’s worse than that. It is unrealised value across the employee lifecycle.

So use your capability framework to improve the organisation’s recruitment, onboarding, performance, and offboarding.

Actions speak louder than words.

7 tips for custodians of capability frameworks

Wow, my previous blog post elicited some rich comments from my peers in the L&D profession.

Reframing the capability framework was my first foray into publishing my thoughts on the subject, in which I argued in favour of using the oft-ignored resource as a tool to be proactive and add value to the business.

To everyone who contributed a comment, not only via my blog but also on Twitter and LinkedIn… thank you. Your insights have helped me shape my subsequent thoughts about capability frameworks and their implementation in an organisation.

I will now articulate these thoughts in the tried and tested form of a listicle.

If you are building, launching or managing your organisation’s capabilities, I invite you to consider my 7 tips for custodians of capability frameworks…

1. Leverage like a banker.

At the organisational level, the capabilities that drive success are strikingly similar across companies, sectors and industries. Unless you have incredibly unique needs, you probably don’t need to build a bespoke capability framework from the ground up.

Instead, consider buying a box set of capabilities from the experts in this sort of thing, or draw inspiration *ahem* from someone else who has shared theirs. (Hint: Search for a “leadership” capability framework.)

2. Refine like a sculptor.

No framework will perfectly model your organisation’s needs from the get-go.

Tweak the capabilities to better match the nature of the business, its values and its goals.

3. Release the dove.

I’ve witnessed a capability framework go through literally years of wordsmithing prior to launch, in spite of rapidly diminishing returns.

Lexiconic squabbles are a poor substitute for action. So be agile: Launch the not-yet-finished-but-still-quite-useful framework (MVP) now.

Then continuously improve it.

4. Evolve or die.

Consider your capability framework an organic document. It is never finished.

As the needs of the business change, so too must your people’s capabilities to remain relevant.

5. Sing from the same song sheet.

Apply the same capabilities to everyone across the organisation.

While technical capabilities will necessarily be different for the myriad job roles throughout your business, the organisational capabilities should be representative of the whole organisation’s commitment to performance.

For example, while Customer Focus is obviously relevant to the contact centre operator, is it any less so for the CEO? Conversely, while Innovation is obviously relevant to the CEO, is it any less so for the contact centre operator?

Having said that, the nature of a capability will necessarily be different across levels or leadership stages. For example, while the Customer Focus I and Innovation I capabilities that apply to the contact centre operator will be thematically similar to Customer Focus V and Innovation V that apply to the CEO, their pitches will differ in relation to their respective contexts.

6. Focus like an eagle.

Frameworks that comprise dozens of capabilities are unwieldy, overwhelming, and ultimately useless.

Not only do I suggest your framework comprise fewer rather than extra capabilities, but also that one or two are earmarked for special attention. These should align to the strategic imperatives of the business.

7. Use it or lose it.

A capability framework that remains unused is merely a bunch of words.

In my next blog post I will examine ways in which it can be used to add value at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

Reframing the capability framework

There once was a time when I didn’t respect the capability framework. I saw it as yet another example of HR fluff.

You want me to be innovative? No kidding. And collaborative? What a great idea! And you want me to focus on our customers? Crikey, why didn’t I think of that?!

But that was then, and this is now.

Now I realise that I severely underestimated the level of support that my colleagues seek in relation to their learning and development. As a digitally savvy L&D professional, I’ve had the temperament to recognise the capabilities I need – nay, want – to develop, the knowledge of how and where to develop them, and crucially the motivation to go ahead and do it.

But our target audience is not like us. While we live and breathe learning, they don’t. Far too many imho wait to be trained, and our boring, time-guzzling and ultimately useless offerings haven’t helped change their minds.

Yet even those who are motivated to learn struggle to do so effectively.

Sure, we’ve read about those intrepid millennials who circumnavigate the languid L&D department to develop their own skills via YouTube, MOOCs, user forums, meet-ups and the like; but for every one wunderkind is several hundred others scratching their heads once a year while they ponder what to put in their Individual Development Plan, before finally settling on “presentation skills”.

This is unacceptable!

While it’s admirable for L&D to be responsive to the business’s relentless requests for training, it’s time for us to break out of the cycle of reactivity. I put it to you that a capability framework can help us do that. It’s a tool we can use to be proactive.

If we inform the organisation of the capabilities that will improve our performance, enable individuals to assess these capabilities to identify those that are most relevant for their own development, and map meaningful learning opportunities against each one, we add value to the business.

In an era in which the ROI of the L&D department is being put under ever-increasing scrutiny, I suggest a value-added approach is long overdue.

The good life

In a previous role I had cause to draw up an employee lifecycle. Despite my years in HR up until that point, it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to me to do.

The driving force was an idea to support managers through the various people-related matters to which they needed to attend. The employee lifecycle would provide the structure for a platform containing information and resources that our managers could draw upon on demand.

After a bit of googlising, it struck me that there is no one standard model of the employee lifecycle. I found this surprising as the basics of the employee experience – and the HR functions that correspond to them – are arguably similar across jobs, organisations and industries.

Moreover, some of the models I found were either overly complicated (in my opinion) or they were presented in an illogical manner. In any case they didn’t quite suit my needs, so I decided to draw up my own.

After much thinking and reflection, I realised the employee lifecycle can be distilled into just four main parts: (1) Recruitment; (2) Onboarding; (3) Performance; and (4) Offboarding. Of course the employee experience is more complex than that, but it is within these four parts that the complexities reside.

I call this model the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

While some other models of the employee lifecycle start with “Attraction”, I consider this a subset of recruitment, along with other activities such as interviewing and selection. Diversity may also reside in this part.

Onboarding concerns the bringing up to speed of the new recruit, and it may include a combination of pre-boarding, orientation and/or induction.

Performance is the raison d’etre of recruitment and onboarding. It is the productivity of the employee. In other words, are they doing what they are paid to do, and how well are they doing it?

Offboarding is probably the most under-leveraged of all the employee experiences. While exiting resides here – voluntary or otherwise – so too does succession planning and promotion. An organisation that neglects this part of the lifecycle shoots itself in the proverbial foot.

While the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle is purposefully simple, for many it may be a little too simple in terms of “Performance”. So I propose the subdivision of this part into its own four subparts: (1) Performance Management; (2) Development; (3) Health & Wellbeing; and (4) Retention.

Hence I call this model the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

Performance management would include probation, along with goal setting – KPI’s and behavioural markers – and the dreaded performance appraisal. While performance management has attracted a lot of heat in recent years, my view is that rather than dispensing with it altogether (to the organisation’s detriment), change its nature. For example, I suggest performance appraisals be frequent, short, and feedback rich. There should be no nasty surprises at the end of the year!

Development is complex in its own right; indeed this blog is almost entirely devoted to it. Suffice it to say that in this context, it’s probably best to think of an employee’s development as the totality of their formal development – including training, development planning, leadership programs, career development and talent management – and their informal development – comprising learning (as opposed to training) and performance support.

Health & wellbeing enjoys ever-increasing interest among HR folks, and rightly so as beyond the ethical imperative, an employee who is healthy in body and mind is also productive. I see the usual suspects – inclusion, bullying & harassment, WH&S – in this space, along with personal health initiatives such as pedometer challenges and flu jabs.

And finally, retention concerns the obvious – remuneration and benefits – and the less obvious such as opportunities for growth and career prospects. Engagement may also reside here.

A smart man once declared all models are wrong, but some are useful; and I find the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle useful because it identifies key parts of the employee experience which we HR folks need to support.

If we look at the model through the lens of L&D, for example, it prompts us to ask questions that are critical to the success of the business:

• Recruitment – What capabilities do we need to buy into the organisation? Which attitudes do we need to inject to shift our culture? Who can we develop into a future leader or SME?
• Onboarding – What do we need our new recruits to know and do as soon as possible? How do we support this process?
• Performance Management – Where are the performance gaps? Why do these gaps exist? Are they due to deficiencies in capability?
• Development – Which capabilities do our people need to develop? What training should we push? How do we enable our people to drive their own learning? How do we support their performance on the job?
• Health & Wellbeing – Are our people in tune with their physical and mental health? Are our managers capable of supporting them in this space? How do we shift our culture from one of rules and regulation to one of care and collaboration?
• Retention – Are our people aware of the wonderful benefits that are available to them? What kinds of work experiences do they seek? Do they have a career development plan?
• Offboarding – What capabilities do our people need to equip them for the future?

In a similar manner we can look at the model through other lenses, such as technology, process improvement, innovation, or analytics, to ensure they add value across the gamut of HR functions.

Does L&D belong in HR?

That was the topic of last week’s Learning Cafe in Sydney.

In short, my esteemed peers and I agreed on “yes”, but that’s not the end of the story. Allow me to explain…

According to one school of thought, L&D belongs in HR because that’s how you achieve scale. The fundamental learning and development needs in the organisation (eg leadership, culture and change) are enterprise-wide. So it makes sense to centralise their management.

According to another school of thought, however, the needs of the business are so diverse and unique that a central L&D team could never hope to keep abreast of them all – let alone address them effectively. So it makes sense to embed L&D professionals into the teams to manage the learning in its context.

Of course, both POVs are right. Whether L&D should be centralised in HR or distributed throughout the business is not a binary proposition. A true learning organisation needs both.

Having said that, how the organisation implements the two is important. There’s no point having an ivory tower bestowing empty training interventions upon the masses; and conversely, there’s no point having an army of hermits toiling away in isolation.

What’s required is a partnership: L&D people across the organisation consulting and collaborating with each other – and with the business – to generate the right solutions for everyone.