2: Refining Your Goal

Your response to the first question from the previous section – What are people not doing that we want them to be doing? – will help you formulate your goal, which is the performance change you want to bring about to meet your organization’s needs.

Here are some possible responses to this question:

• Our leadership team is not motivating employees effectively.
• Our sales team isn’t following company procedures.

If your response was along these lines, you have a good start, but you need to break it down further so you can start to understand the actual performance change you want to achieve, why it’s important to your organization right now, and ways to bring it about.

Let’s take the first example above: Our leadership team is not motivating employees effectively.

A more effective goal would specify:

• A measurable performance change.
• The specific group that needs to make the change.
• What the performance change would mean for the organization.

Here’s one way the first example might be edited to include the specific information noted above:

Our line managers are not motivating customer service representatives to use upselling language each time they interact with a customer. We want them to do this because we’ve found that representatives who use upselling language generate 30 percent more revenue than those who don’t, and increasing revenue is a key objective for our organization right now.

Data gathering tactics

If you're not at a place where you can add details like those in the example above, congratulations! You get to become a detective and gather the information you need to refine your training goal.  You can do this by interviewing the team that's requesting the training.  Here are some questions to ask, adapted from Julie Dirksen's Design for How People Learn:

• What bad thing will happen if people don’t know/do this?
• What are people actually going to do with this information/skill?
• How will you know if the people are doing it right?
• What does it look like if people get it wrong?

On the topic of asking questions, the video below is a great explanation of why it’s important to ask questions that dig into the purpose of any request to design a training:

Reflection

Can you edit your response to the first question from the previous section – What are people not doing that we want them to be doing? – so that it specifies a measurable performance change, the specific group that needs to make the change, and what the performance change would mean for the organization?