Create Self-Sustaining Performance Groups

Daniel DiGriz

While essential, trainers, coaches, and managers are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. Responsibility for performance is a cooperative effort, emphasizing individual responsibility for learning and strong feedback on what works, while maintaining trainer responsibility for facilitating an effective learning environment and effective learning opportunities.

While originally joining an organization as new hire classes, strong performance groups withstand scattering. They survive disbursement among multiple teams, differing shifts, etc.

One of the first things we can encourage a new hire class to do with their corporate e-mail accounts is build a distribution list, shared by all, for just that class of people. It?s essential that communication on the list is felt to be safe, free from any embarrassment of speaking to an entire company or sales floor or under the scrutiny of managers, trainers, and coaches. In short, the group must have independent lines of communication which supplement the water cooler, lunch, the smoking area, etc. ? lines of communication that withstand can scattering.

Trainees should be encouraged to use such a list for exchanging sales tips or other performance techniques and performance success stories. And this is key: They should especially be encouraged to continue using the list once training is officially complete. The list also needs to be voluntary, or there will be almost no buy-in.

When the class graduates, and is scattered among different shifts, schedules, managers, etc., it should maintain the communication between original class members. In this way, each member of the original group continues to contribute to the success of the groups to which each other member now belongs. At the same time, the useful discussion he receives should be used to seed his own team, shift, friends, etc. with perspectives and skills enriched by that communication.

To be self-managing, the members of the group must have a solid theoretical understanding of their performance model, the reasons for its selection, the goals of the company, and the outlook for the future. Instead of ?do as you?re told?, the focus is ?we do this, because??, and the reasons are not lightweight. So equipped, performance groups are able to withstand misinformation and competing ideas from the outside culture. They are able to choose from reasons that can govern the myriad of individual decisions made by any member of the group, and thinking that contributes to the formation of group consensus and consensual vision.

As already observed, this means safe, free and highly informed discussion. The informed side of this is key in self-management. Self-sustaining performance groups need access to the data and the rationale for their organization?s choices and for comparing these to the choices of other organizations. We may be talking about the choice of a sales process, that of a competitive stance, or the choice of competing performance measures. It means that performance groups have the tools for discussing the implications and results for retention, growth, morale, turnover, etc. of various models. In this way, self-managing groups become microcosms of the company as a whole.

These tools, and this discussion, help create a culture of expectation with regard to training, coaching, and management. And, it offers the potential of maximum buy-in to the company?s paradigm, so that little corrective direction is needed later. Rather, the group is self-correcting. Some groups may decide to provide the company feedback, if they feel that the doors are truly open to safely do that, and this in turn enriches the organization. In either case, it is access to the data and rationale for company ?policy? that allows performance groups to be self-sustaining.

Classes designed to bring about particular behaviors or changes in behavior are strong on repeated role-play ? on constructive opportunities for creating meaning through controlled experience on a practice model. One way to structure an effective model is to imitate the roles of each "real-world" interested party in the desired behavior. For instance, for a call center sales floor, one might divide classes internally into three-member teams, consisting of the rotating positions of Representative, Customer, and Coach.

The Customer has the responsibility of role-playing as realistically as possible, with real situations, problems, and purposes, while exaggerating some aspects of the situation in order to provide cues and clues that can lead to the success of the Representative. The Representative has the responsibility of following the model for desired behavior. The Coach is responsible for evaluation and feedback ? for performance management.

After an interaction between Customer and Representative, the Coach gives feedback to the Customer on how well he provided learning opportunities to the Representative, and provides feedback to the Representative on how closely he followed the performance model or the learning model version of it. The Coach has the responsibility of providing honest quantitative and qualitative feedback, with more regard for compliance that for feelings. The Coach will generally use the same role-play (or other behavior) certification form that is used for final examination and during the process assigns a quantitative score to each of the Representatives? behaviors, while providing final feedback at the end on how to achieve the maximum. This also prepares trainees for final certification/testing in the desired behavior.

After learning a skill, each three-person group completes a rotation (each member playing each role once). Each group notifies the instructor of completion of its rotation, and then continues role-play until all groups have checked in. Then:

1. The instructor teaches/adds a new skill
2. Each group trades a member with another group
3. Each group does another (slightly longer) rotation, incorporating the new skill.

And so on. In this way, each member of each group gets to play Coach, Representative, and Customer numerous times, lending maximum experience, least embarrassment (since groups are working simultaneously), and maximum opportunity for the facilitator to move in and out of groups and observe successes and areas of improvement. Skills are also repeated many times, and linked to other skills, in a progressive, practical, and conversational format.

More importantly, this process creates self-sustaining study groups capable of preparing themselves for success in the course and after graduation, and for communication with other performance groups. These groups, and their members, have now developed independent skills and means of informal coaching, with independent reference persons that possess expertise and serve as informal partners and consultants. The result is fewer burdens on coaching and management teams, and extended performance improvement opportunities through self-coaching.

In the article, "Would training have saved Willy Loman?" William Powell points out that self-education forms, such as computer-based training are here to stay as secondary tools. They don?t do well at replacing primary sales training, but they are excellent ways to enhance that training.

Recently, I was given short notice to attend two required meetings that coincided with the first day of a new hire class. They would receive about 90-minutes of instructor-led training, and then I would be absent for an indefinite period of time. I needed self-directed activities that would support the training and foment class progress.

The topic of the morning was personality types. I assigned the class a series of web sites that dealt with differing systems of typing personalities, the history of personality typing, personality tests, and essays on specific personality types. Each class member would do research, bring it to the discussion table, and share findings with peers, all in an unsupervised environment.

By being able to intelligently consult and discuss independent sources of information, the trainees felt enormous empowerment in training and buy-in to the material and, because of that, became self-sustaining in regard to their education. Far from replacing the trainer, or the benefit of classroom training, the instant e-learning, helped the class own its own learning process. What followed, on my return, was one of the smoothest training experiences ever.

Self-sustaining groups are cooperative groups. They need:

• Independent lines of communication
• Independent buy-in or empowerment in overall goals
• Independent performance management and feedback skills and reference persons
• Independent access to information and education

The courage to not only allow, but foster and encourage self-sustaining groups, is inherent to the role of trainer as facilitator. Constructivism, now a hallmark of Adult Learning theory, has taught us that learners construct their own meaning, that all learning is, in fact, socially constructed. We can guide and contribute, but we contribute best as learning facilitators and co-learners.

Sponsoring success in performance through training requires extending the role of the trainer far beyond what any one individual can do. The truth is, we cannot be all things to all people or be in all places at once. At least, we cannot do it without creating self-sustaining groups of learners that self-manage, self-coach, self-educate, and self-communicate. The benefit of these groups for the production/sales floor or field is that they do not require additional resources to sustain. Instead, they maximize the talent-base of resources already in place.

Entire Contents Copyright ? 2005, Daniel DiGriz.