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Learning and Performance Management Should Tango

Session Overview

Recent changes in the work environment have placed L&D on a collision course with performance management.

First, traditional performance reviews are failing. Managers spend more than 200 hours per year on performance review activities with the average company spending around $47 million a year on related activities and technologies. Despite this investment, 95% of managers are dissatisfied with the way their companies conduct reviews and nearly 90 per cent of HR leaders say the process doesn’t yield accurate information.

Secondly, employee engagement is declining sharply across almost every workforce segment with future career opportunity emerging as the top driver of employee attrition. Whilst only 30% of employees are satisfied with future career opportunities at their organisations, 6 out of 10 heads of HR are predicting an internal skills shortage in the next three to five years.

Unfortunately, only 26% of heads of L&D agree that learning experiences align with employees’ career goals and around 11% of employees’ time at work is wasted on learning activities that are redundant or misaligned with future capability requirements.

Facilitator’s Point of View

Our approaches to both learning and performance management are failing because they are disengaging to employees and not meeting current and future capability requirements. In a world of constant change and disruption, we cannot talk about performance if we are not also talking about learning. As L&D practitioners, we have a rare window of opportunity to place learning goals at the core of a reimagined approach to performance management. By doing so, we can prepare our organisations for the future and help our employees thrive in their careers.

LearningCafe Point of View

LearningCafe considers the boundaries between learning, performance and knowledge management to be artificial. Learning should exist to support performance.

Big Questions

  • Should learning goals be part of the performance conversation?
  • What role should L&D play in performance management?
  • How do we get better at delivering learning that meets future capability requirements?
  • What role (if any) should L&D have in helping employees achieve their career goals?

Disruptive Thoughts

  • L&D is facing an immediate threat to its relevance because it’s not keeping pace with future capability requirements.
  • In a world of constant disruption, we cannot have a conversation about performance without talking about learning.If we do not know where the performance gaps are, how can we connect employees to the learning experiences that will have them bridge those gaps?

Next Steps

Resources

Facilitator

Mathias Otte LearningCafe 100

Mathias Otte, Head of Learning Services at Bupa ANZ

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Leadership Development – Time to Experiment

Session Overview

Digital Disruption is truly upon us and is redefining the way we do business. There is debate whether the traditional view of a “leader” needs to change, as we move away from a “command and control” organisations.  Whether Leaders will get time and space to learn and embed new skills and mindsets is debatable.

Facilitator’sPoint of View

In this session, we explore to innovative approaches to Leadership Development. Some recent innovations focus on using real and urgent business and community challenges to develop leaders:

  • Manager exchange between companies in different industries. NAB and Microsoft are trying this approach
  • Action learning for business leaders enabled by better business tools and intelligence
  • Community building projects – Senior professionals invited to apply their expertise to indigenous communities in remote WA.
  • Use MOOCs and scalable virtual global content as part of Leadership Development programs.
  • Use method to activate leadership team performance and drive better results
  • Democratise leadership development through communities in the organisational ecosystem.

LearningCafe Point of View

While leaders and their development are important for the health of the organisations, Leadership development has been the “sacred cow” for L&D for too long. Leadership development design and delivery needs to target specific competencies, give personalized outcomes and utilise blended learning approaches. All this is possible if L&D professionals are willing to take the risk to move away from the formulaic approach and deliver more business value

Big Questions

  • Is there appetite in organisations to explore and experiment with new ways of Leadership Development?
  • What if these experiments don’t work out? Who will be held responsible? Or is there now an understanding that taking risks involves the possibility of failure?
  • What are some ideas you have for Leadership Development?

Disruptive Thoughts

  • Can we expect every manager to be a leader? With self-organising and virtual teams does the need for “leader” go away.
  • Globally, Australian managers are not rated very highly. Is there much L&D can do?

Next Steps

  • Do MOOCs such as Leadership in 21st Century Organisations – Coursera

Resources

  • Rewiring Leadership for 21st Century Workplace – HRCafe webinar recording. https://vimeo.com/130944019
  • LearningCafe Sydney UnConference 2016 – Time to Experiment with Leadership Development by Natalie Nunn from EY https://vimeo.com/157887075
  • Leadership Development Should Focus on Experiments by Harvard Business Review

Facilitator

Peter Hall, Head of Leadership and Learning – Aus& APAC at QBE

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Managing Capability – New Avatar of L&D?

Session Overview

A search on Seek.com.au on the term “capability” turned up over 8000 jobs in Australia including Learning and Capability Manager, Capability Development Lead, Capability and Culture Consultant and many more. Our research indicates that while “capability” is a popular term, it means different things and seems to encompass many different outcomes and job roles.

We discuss what “Capability Management” encompasses and how it manifests itself in organisations. We share what organisations are doing for “Capability Management”

Facilitator’s Point of View

Much like the idea that “If we do not know where the performance gaps are, how can we connect employees to the learning experiences that will have them bridge those gaps?”, if organisations do not seek to understand where capability gaps exist, how will they know that their employees need coaching, upskilling or retraining, or whether their entire workforce is underperforming?  Capability Management now falls in to such a grey area that it has become ineffective and underwhelming, when organisations bother doing it at all, and it seems to be harder and harder for organisations to realise that if done well, it can be a powerful tool.

LearningCafe Point of View

 

Big Questions

  • What is “Capability Management”? What kind of work is involved?
  • What role should L&D play in performance management?
  • Is “Capability Management” the evolution of L&D which is better aligned with business? Is it consulting based?
  • What is the future of “Capability Management”? Is it a profession in its own right? What are the required skills?
  • Why do organisations ask their employees to undertake Capability Assessment, then they are promptly forgotten about?  How have they become relegated to the “too hard basket”?

Disruptive Thoughts

  • If organisations simply cease to assess and managing their employees’ capabilities, what would be the impact, and on who, the individual or the organisations?

Next Steps

 

Resources

Facilitator

 Libby Lake, Management Consultant (Talent & Organisational Performance) at Accenture