The Power of Personas

Have you ever heard of a "persona?" In acting terms, a "persona" is a role a person plays. But for you as an HR or L&D professional, they mean much more.

All our research shows that organizations are becoming flatter and more specialized, with individual contributors and leaders taking on more and more focused jobs. What this means to you, as an HR or L&D leader, is that you have to do a much better job of "audience analysis" in order to figure out what learning, talent or leadership program will best drive value.

In a large organization this is difficult, because there are so many varied roles and people demographics to deal with.

The way to deal with this is to borrow a strategy used by marketers: create "personas." A "persona" is a defined person (with a name, family, job, demographics, etc.) who represents an archetypal role in your company.  So "Bill Jones" the "large account sales exec" is a persona, for example.

(Altus USA Image from the game Persona 3)

What you do is define Bill's age, family status, demographics, job experience, interests, skills, and personality based on all the "Bill Jones's" in your company. You clearly define "Bill" and create a picture of him, (some companies even create baseball cards), and then use him as a sounding board for any new program.

When building a new leadership program, you may ask "What would Bill think?" When creating a new social networking tool you may ask "Does Bill know how to use this?" 

These are tools used widely by smart marketing firms (all consumer packaged goods companies have personas that define us), which are now becoming vital to HR and L&D.

Here is a factoid to consider.  In our most recent High-Impact Learning Organization research, (published last month), we found that one of the biggest drivers of business outcome is an L&D organization's deep understanding of its audience. And only 14% of companies felt they had such understanding.

Personas are a tool you can use to solve this problem. Persona's become real people you can use for design and implementation strategy, and they force you to get a detailed understanding of the employees you serve.

Shell uses them to define the 8 most "important" roles in their business, so you can too.