Greek Mythology has always intrigued me. Their stories are lively, interesting and filled with wisdom. So goes the story of Sisyphus, a Greek king who angered the gods. They punished him by making him push a boulder up a hill only to watch it come right back down again. One wonders if we are achieving similar results with our training. If we aren’t doing what Dana and Jim Robinson call the five factors in their book Performance Consulting, we might be getting a Sisyphean result. Here are the questions, you have to answer satisfactorily in order to avoid having the rock come back down the hill:
1. Is there clarity of the roles and expectations of personnel?
2. Are
coaching and
reinforcement available to individuals as they go about their work?
3. Do people get
rewarded for the desired performance?
4. Are the
work systems and processes contributing to performance or hindering it?
5. Will people have
access to the information they need?
If we haven’t done these five things, we are probably a part of the 10 billion dollars wasted on training every year.
It’s kind of a fascinating, isn’t it?