The traps of performance consulting – E-Learning Provocateur

As a panellist at this year’s L&D Symposium in the Hunter Valley, I was asked:

Should L&D practitioners be recast as performance consultants?

It’s one of those questions that does the rounds every so often – at least over the decade since I wrote The caveat of the performance centre – and my answer since then has remained constant:

A conditional yes.

I consider the purpose of learning and development being to improve performance, so it’s only natural for us to want to recast ourselves in that light.

But therein lies a trap: we claim a fancier title while still looking through the lens of capability. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

However we know that performance is more complex than that. Yes it involves capability, but it also involves processes, systems, management, motivation, psychological safety… the list goes on.

So if you expand your portfolio to include those factors, then I’m comfortable with you recasting yourself as a Performance Consultant. But if you seek the title merely for its optics and remain focused only on capability, then I think it’s disingenuous.

An alternative (or potentially a precursor) to becoming a Performance Consultant is to become an L&D practitioner with a performance mindset. In practice this means going beyond Levels 1 and 2 of Kirkpatrick to include the application of learning and its impact on the business.

It also means conducting a broader Performance Needs Analysis instead of a relatively narrow Training Needs Analysis.

However, herein lies another trap, and it’s the opposite of the one whereby you focus only on capability. That is, you lose your focus on capability.

For example, you could step into any organisation today and spend all your time improving processes – which is admirable work. But if the business truly values learning and development as a strategic imperative, someone needs to own it. Otherwise it probably won’t get done.

So we need to resist the temptation to be all things to all people, and remain mindful that our primary role is to uplift capability. That’s what the business expects from us, and if we remove that link from the value chain, we can no longer join the dots to performance.

I’m not suggesting we shy away from collaborating on other activities that benefit the business. What I am saying is that as the custodians of L&D, the very least we should be doing is measuring capability uplift and linking that to performance improvement.

That’s the core of our value proposition. Anything else we do, while it might be valuable, is value-add.