A business leader once asked me to train around 300 people in a particular skill. The request was quite clear. The people needed to perform better, so they needed more training.
It would have been easy to accept the brief and start designing the programme. Instead, I decided to first understand what was actually happening on the ground.
I observed people at work. I spoke with randomly selected frontline employees and their supervisors and managers. I looked at the relevant performance measures and reward mechanisms. I also spoke with HR, compensation and business stakeholders.
What I found surprised all of us. The skill wasn't the problem. These people had already received comprehensive training in the skill less than a year earlier. They knew what to do and how to do it quite well.
The problem was elsewhere. A new performance metric had been introduced, but people weren't incentivised to achieve it. More importantly, achieving the new metric meant compromising some of the existing metrics on which they were already measured. And rewarded.
So we had a perfectly understandable situation: The organisation was asking people to achieve something new while continuing to reward them for doing something else. More training wasn't going to solve that. The issue wasn't capability. It was alignment.
This experience reinforced something I have come to believe strongly. I don't believe every problem needs a workshop — or even an external consultant or intervention.
Most times the most useful thing a consultant can do is diagnose the problem before arriving at the solution.
And sometimes, the right intervention isn't training people to behave differently - it is changing the system that is telling them to behave the way they already do.
