Performance Coaching: The Missing Link to Level 3 Impact

Jennifer Long - 2/2/04

Donald Kirkpatrick single-handedly delivered to the training and development community a way to formally evaluate an organization’s investment in learning way back in 1959. His four-level model has stood the test of time as being the cornerstone approach

In the post-Enron world of business, it’s more important not to just look at the numbers. Reducing training efforts to an ROI is, of course, very powerful from a marketing perspective, but from a cultural perspective, the meaning of measurement is all about being accepted, trusted, respected and needed. Those are very real conditions that must be in play if an organization expects to provide quality development, relevant programs, real growth, competitive advantage and strategic impact in terms of business goals.

Level 3: Just Do It
Level 3 learning impacts, simply put, are behavior changes. Behavior change is all about application and integration—“doing it.” Is the learner actually applying new skills, tools, methods and processes on the job? Is the learner now doing something differently? And if so, how well? These are simple questions that have proven very tough to answer. In addition, these questions have also proven to be giant resource-suckers in terms of gleaning any kind of meaningful answer. But what are Level 3 measurements, really? Jack J. Phillips, Ph.D., and the Jack Phillips Center for Research, building on Kirkpatrick, have boiled this down to a manageable and concise view. (See Figure 1.)

Keep your focus now on the gray circle—the performance infrastructure. This aspect of both learning and evaluation of learning is what I call the “black hole of success.” It is critical to successful Level 3 impacts. Alternatively, it is also the primary reason that training fails to deliver its intended outcome(s).

The performance infrastructure is a term for the environment or climate in which the change must occur. These are the external factors that influence a person’s ability to actually apply and integrate on the job. These are influences outside the control of the individual. For example, a manager may want a job done a certain way, regardless of what organizational training says. Or there may be reasons that act as demotivating factors for people when performing the job according to what they learned in the training.

In addition to environmental considerations, there are other conditions necessary in order for change to occur. All of these conditions have a direct relationship to the “gray area”—the performance infrastructure. That being the case, it begs the question, “How can you effectively address or create these conditions to achieve a significantly higher degree of training success?” To which I reply, “Performance coaching.”