The first question you should ask as an L&D practitioner

The first question you should ask when you work with an organization on their talent development strategy is: “how do you measure performance?”

You’d be hard pressed to find a business leader who isn’t concerned about their employee performance outcomes, and YET, many organizations lack coherent, sustainable, consistent, and accurate methods for measuring employee performance. It is up to the talent development professionals in the room to underscore the essential importance of employee performance measurement frameworks, and it requires a strong partnership between people strategists and business leaders to create and implement these measurement frameworks.?

By focusing on performance outcomes, L&D and people strategists can assert themselves as essential leaders within the business. If you’re working in-house or as a consultant to design L&D interventions, start by reviewing how leaders measure progress and performance -- even if it’s fractured across functions and teams. From there, codify your recommendations on how to utilize quick performance feedback cycles to inform L&D interventions, articulating how they'll lead to improved outcomes. The pathway from L&D to business success must take a direct route through performance management.?

In my work as an L&D leader, I’ve worked with organizations that have hyper-detailed, data-driven performance management metrics that consistently measure quantitative and qualitative performance data across teams. I’ve also worked with organizations that simply lean on annual performance reviews with competency-based frameworks, and have no standardized performance metrics to measure employee performance along the way. You can guess which organization leveraged L&D in highly impactful ways.?

In Mind Tools’ report “Unlocking Excellence: The Strategic Business Alignment Blueprint for L&D” the authors rightfully call out that L&D diminishes its relevance and impact when we highlight metrics that do not resonate with critical business priorities. Often, our L&D leaders measure impact behind metrics around attendance, completion, employee satisfaction with the content. But the good ol’ “measure what matters” tagline serves as an important north star for L&D leaders.?

The organizations that operate without robust performance measurement tools leave a massive gap that hinders the organization’s own understanding of itself, its people, its performance, its effectiveness. As L&D partners (and innovators), we have a responsibility to highlight the necessity of implementing functional performance measurement tools to understand employee performance and unlock business growth.