6Ds 2.0 Webinar Q & A
Wednesday September 8: Fort Hill Company held its first of two 6Ds 2.0 Webinars. It was a huge success! Unfortunately we ran out of time to answer all the questions. Listed below are the questions and their answers. For those that weren’t able to attend the first webinar, we are holding a second one on September 23 at 1PM ET. Register here.
Q: How do you deal with a low commitment culture?
A: If by low commitment culture you mean one that does not value learning and development and is resistant to making the changes needed to be successful, then there are some steps that can be taken to begin to change the culture. Start eating the elephant in small bites. Pick a program where you can apply the 6Ds to get great results and then use those results as a lever to show the value of changing to a culture that supports and values learning. A great example of this in action is in the second edition on pages 324 and 325 in the discussion of the fine work done by Chris Jenkins at Securian Financial Group to achieve a cultural shift from old ideals and training methods to new and more effective ones.
Q: How do you design effective and not complex tools to check whether transfer is done? We are still looking for ways for measuring level 3 that are simple and practical. Do you have any suggestion for this more than observation and 180o/360° reports?
A: There are many approaches to evaluation. A key question in the Outcomes Planning Wheel is “What or who could confirm these changes? Ultimately, behavior change (Level 3) has to be observed by somebody – a customer, manager, direct report, self, etc. The question is whether behavior change is the most relevant outcome. For some programs it is, for others, you might consider skipping up to Level 4 and measuring directly whether or not you achieved the results that the program was designed to improve.
While there is value in having an understanding of what is happening at each of the Kirkpatrick levels, there is weak correlation between the levels. If you are achieving the (Level 4) results, then it is pretty clear that people learned and transferred their learning. A fairly non-complicated approach would be to have participants report out their achievement story after their learning transfer period. Have them describe how they applied the new learning on the job, and then get independent verification from their manager.
Q: There is a whole cultural issue behind the way managers provide performance support, but basically how they connect with the learning endeavor… how to change their minds in order to take learning in their hands and be responsible for what they want?
A: Gaining manager support for the training process is a critical success factor in achieving great results. A significant portion of D5, Deploy Performance Support, is geared toward making sure that managers are engaged with their direct reports and that they support learning before and after the instructional period. We felt so strongly about the importance of this issue that we wrote the book Getting Your Money’s Worth from Training and Development and created an e-learning program to address this specific issue. Some quick steps you can take to help managers with the process is to provide them with a job aid that contains information about the subject matter of the training and some coaching questions they can ask in support of their direct reports.
It needs to be simple and concise. We found that if you give managers the support they need to act as coaches for their direct reports they are much more likely to engage in the process and achieve superior return on the training investment.
Q: D6: I find it important to consider my metrics for success back in the D1 stage, in other words, I want to gear my entire program toward gathering data and making my case. Do you endorse this?
A: Yes! We absolutely agree that you need to begin the process of preparing for evaluation in D1. It is precisely for this reason that we encourage use of the Outcomes Planning Wheel™ in D1 to ensure that the business needs are well understood, and that the sponsor of the learning is able, in advance, to define what success looks like and agree in general on how success will be evaluated.
Q: What is a recommended time frame for checking on the “achieve” level.
A: Great question. Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends.” For some types of specific skills training, you can assess achievement 3 weeks after the instruction. For others, such as leadership or strategic thinking, it may take a year for the impact to be manifest. The big “ah ha” we had with “achieve” is that there needs to be some concrete point in time when we expect our participants to have achieved the improvement goal we set out for the program. Equally important, is that the participants in our programs have an end point in mind when they will have achieved mastery of the new skill and are doing great things.
Q: Is 6Ds 2.0 content being utilized in upcoming Fort Hill training courses and will/has the Toolkit been updated to incorporate these changes?
A: We are in the process of revising our workshop to incorporate the new material. Some 2.0 material has already been added into our teaching materials, and more is on the way. The tool kit will be among the items that are revised to reflect the new material.
Thank you for the great questions!
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