00:04

Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today, Dr. Carl Binder is joining me to discuss the webinar he presented,

00:30

Enabling HR Business Partners to drive continuous performance improvement. So, welcome, Dr. Binder. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Sarah. It’s nice to be here. And so to kick things off, can you let our audience know a little bit about who you are, what you do, how you got to where you’re at today? Well, yeah, I have to be careful because I go on and on about this. But, you know, I’ve had probably three or four different careers for all practical purposes because I was a I was a philosophy major in college.

00:59

I wrote a fan letter to Dr. B.F. Skinner at Harvard and shockingly, he responded to me and I wound up being his student at Harvard in basically research, uh behavior psychology for some years. And I ran a laboratory, both basic research and classroom for people with disabilities in the 70s. And then toward the end of the 70s, we’d learned a lot about what we call behavioral fluency. And so one of my mentors said, you should take that into business.

01:29

So I didn’t really know much about business, but I got involved with sales training and we developed what we call fluency-based sales knowledge training. And I actually had a company in the 90s devoted to that called Product Knowledge Systems. And we worked with uh very large companies on major product launches, companies like Genentech and Microsoft and Oracle and so forth. And we built fluent sales knowledge through efficient practice. uh

01:57

It basically knocked the tops off of previous training. We had people saying, I’ve been selling this stuff for five years and these kids know more than I do. And that led me into performance improvement because what we realized was that you can do fantastic training, but if you don’t also look at how expectations are set and feedback is provided and what tools people have and so forth, you’re not going to get the ROI that you need.

02:24

And so we took that and I became a protege of Tom Gilbert, who was one of the pioneers in human performance improvement and adopted his uh approach, which is focused on accomplishments and not just behavior. And also we adopted his behavior engineering model. And so I became a performance improvement guy who looked at more than just skills and knowledge. And we also made a big impact in customer service environments. And then about 20 years ago,

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we realized we developed this methodology that was plain English, that was easy to communicate with people about. And so we started developing folks, both leaders and managers, as well as performance consultants using our methodology. So for the last probably 20 years, I’ve been certifying people in our programs and helping others to deliver our programs as well. So I don’t know if that’s a long answer, but that’s kind of my journey, if you will. Wow. Well, it sounds like that your career

03:22

Not only have you, I’m sure, learned a lot yourself, but also have made a really great significant impact in the work that you do. Well, I hope so. You know, it’s funny because I’ve gotten a bunch of awards from different organizations. You you get old and you know, because I’m 74 now, you you get far along and people start giving you awards. But to me, the importance of that is it indicates that you probably made a difference.

03:51

And so I’ve, you for me, it’s most fun, most engaging to have protegees or people that I can pass stuff onto. And they then do things that I probably never could have done. And so there’ve been a lot of people like that over the last 50 years, confess. Wow. That’s amazing. I can only imagine how great that must feel. and, and so that’ll lead me up to my next question here with everything that you’ve seen and you’ve done. What changes do you see happening right now in the L and D space as

04:19

You know, there is so much change happening and it’s happening so fast. There is and it’s almost like a storm with a bunch of things going on, you know, because COVID, at least from where I sit, had a big impact. It pretty much it from a business point of view, it close to shut down my business because companies quit delivering training to their people to a large extent. So some of our largest certification licensing uh

04:46

clients just stopped in 2020. And what I’ve observed is, and I don’t know if this is generally true, but a lot of my colleagues in big companies and elsewhere have said companies are not spending as much money to develop their people as they used to. So that’s one factor. And what I’m not sure about is whether as we come out of the pandemic, whether that’s changing or not. And I think it might be, but I’m not sure. Parallel with that, there’s been a movement

05:16

First of all, of course, there’s always gizmos. There’s always new technology and everybody gets all excited about it. And I get frustrated about it because sometimes it looks like a hammer in search of a nail. But there have been some things like kind of the evolution that started out years ago with performance support systems becoming sort of what people refer to as micro learning and learning in the flow. many ways, I think that’s a really good trend that continues because it’s enabling people when they need it.

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when they need to do a job to learn some sort of small bit that helps them. So I think that’s a really cool direction. uh The other change that I think is happening, or at least I hope it’s happening, is the field of performance improvement, first really given birth really in the International Society for Performance Improvement, and then adopted by Association for Talent Development in their human performance improvement model, is something that of course I’ve been involved with now for decades.

06:15

While it’s not sweeping the world, we’re finding more and more large companies who are getting it that training alone outside of the context of the other things that affect performance doesn’t get you the payoff you need. And so I think there’s a movement and maybe it’s even driven by economics, by, you know, lower budgets and everything. I’m not sure, but there seems to be a movement, at least in organizations that I contact, toward a more performance-based approach in many cases.

06:43

And so I think that’s a really good direction. ah And there’s a ton of other stuff going on too, but those are some of the things I notice. And with this shift away from the traditional training that you’re seeing and more so kind of going towards learning into work processes or the learning in the flow, how do you envision these developments shaping the future of employee development strategies? Well, it’s a cool, that’s a good question. There’s another couple of things that I think, one I didn’t mention and one that

07:13

answers directly your question. One of them is that these fads that happen often are fads. So for some years, e-learning was everything and everybody was just doing e-learning. Well, that’s tapered off a little bit because people have learned that that’s not always the solution. It may seem cheaper, but it doesn’t always get people up to speed. And so one of the things that I’m also noticing is actually it seems like there’s a re-emergence of in-person learning, whether it’s virtual.

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like we’re on the web, which is what we do mostly, or in the room. And I think that’s important in a lot of ways. But to answer your question more directly, uh I think what’s exciting about oh learning in the flow and micro learning and so forth is that uh organizations are paying more attention to the results. They may not be measuring much better than they used to.

08:07

But they’re not just assuming in all cases that training is the solution. They’re starting to say, wait a minute, ah is this really making a difference or not? Now, the problem is there’s a lot of training that doesn’t make much of a difference. So a possible not so good outcome of that is people just say, well, we don’t have to spend money on training because it doesn’t work. Or to say, wait a minute, let’s look more carefully at how training and employee development

08:34

works and what makes it work and what doesn’t. And one other thing that I think is quite exciting is in the last few years, coaching you see everywhere. If you’re on LinkedIn, if you’re on any place, coaching is a thing, right? You see Harvard Business Review articles and all that. Now, coaching is a great thing, but we have a different approach to coaching that we call accomplishment-based, so that instead of focusing just on addressing people’s behavior, essentially,

09:02

We say, what is it that you need to accomplish in your job next? Decisions, relationships, better widgets, good proposals, whatever it is, let’s focus on helping you to do a better job of producing those valuable things. So what I think is that in principle, a good cadence of coaching that becomes proactive and not just responsive to people having problems can in a way become the center of talent development. Because if you train

09:31

managers and supervisors to effectively problem solve and coach with their people, then they can call in, you should go to this training program or you should go, you could show Shadow Jack over there because he’s really good at it, or you should read this book or whatever it is. But the person who’s supervising or managing as a coach, the individual employee, can become kind of the quarterback of development. And I think if that’s supported effectively,

09:58

it’s a huge thing because it’s very close to the work. It’s not an abstraction at that point. So that’s one of the things that excites me. Great. And so now before we dive deeper into the content of the webinar, what exciting things are you up to next? Well, one of the things that we’ve, um as I say, we shifted, it’s been almost 20 years now to where we realized over the course of

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couple of decades before that, we developed this thing we call performance thinking. And we always say it’s two pictures and 21 plain English words. It’s accomplishment based performance improvement, which has its roots in the, in the pioneers of performance improvement, like Tom Gilbert and Gary Rumler and Don Tosti and those people, but it is not nerdy. And so anybody can learn about it. And what we’re excited about and what we realized some years ago is we can teach managers, leaders, supervisors,

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training professionals, performance consultants, how to apply this in an effective way. So I’ve been doing that for years and we have these certification programs which are not cheap, but they certify people based on their actually completing projects or completing real work. The challenge with that is that it takes a budget and it’s expensive and uh it takes time, et cetera, et cetera. So the exciting thing in our business is during COVID, we developed a fairly robust YouTube channel.

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We’ve got something like, I think, 34 monthly webinar recordings and some short playlists. But what I realized in designing that is we can take specific applications of what we teach, like creating an employee engagement plan for your people, doing a better job of managing the processes in your department, et cetera, executing strategic plans more effectively. And we can turn those into what we’re now calling application kits.

11:51

So the exciting new development for my business, and we’re just at the beginnings of the design and piloting stage of this, is we’re going to have these very inexpensive digital products, which will basically be PDF documents with worksheets and such, but links to short instructional videos that people can buy for insanely low prices, like $59.95 or something. So it’s almost an impulse buy. And then they can do something useful with it.

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And so what we think is we can get to a lot more people, cost effectively for them, profitably for us, and really drive this into a lot of different parts of organizations that we’ve not been able to through our certification program. So I’m excited about that. Wow, that does sound like something really exciting in your pipeline that you have to look forward to, that you and the audience and customers have to look forward to.

12:45

It’s a great idea. see how it plays out. I think we can make it success of it. And so now kind of getting back to the webinar. you recently presented this webinar with HRDQU, enabling HR business partners to drive continuous performance improvement. Can you let us know what the key takeaways were for registrants at that event for maybe folks that didn’t have the chance to watch the webinar yet or those that are just looking for a refresher?

13:12

Well, to give you a little bit of background on that, webinar and some work we’ve done in that area is a result of probably six or seven years of evolution because we used to have, we have this performance thinking practitioner program, we call it, and it’s essentially certification for performance consultants. And it teaches people to do fairly substantial projects in their organizations to improve performance, whether it’s making processes work, implementing, know, implementation planning, change management, process work, and so forth. uh

13:41

And we would begin to, we had organizations coming to us and say, can we put our HR business partners through this program? And I think this is kind of where the webinar started because we said, well, HR business partners tend to be spread thin across a bunch of different stakeholders doing all kinds of recommendations and bits, but they don’t usually have the bandwidth to do big, all consuming projects. So I tended to push back on those folks. And at one point, this is about three or four years ago, before COVID actually,

14:11

A couple of large financial institutions came to us and asked the same question and we said, I don’t think this is a fit. Can we do an analysis of your HR business partners and see what they actually do and produce? So we did that. And the first thing we saw, and it didn’t help much, was that they provide recommendations to all kinds of people. Well, that’s okay, but it didn’t give us anything to really hold onto. And then we thought about it and we recognized that

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HR business partners tend to be contributing to, managing, or in some ways, sort of, I say, bird dogging processes, whether those are hiring, onboarding, succession planning, uh strategic planning. And so they’re engaged with their senior leader, typical stakeholders, in making these processes happen. And so…

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what we built and what that webinar was about, we recognized we could create a of a modular curriculum for HR business partners. Because what’s cool about them, what’s great about HR business partners is potentially they have the organization wired. That is, work with the senior executives and senior managers and have the potential to effecting almost everybody in the organization from the top down. And so what we wanted to do was integrate into the things that they do.

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a uh framework for actual performance improvement. So when they’re working with their executives and their senior managers, they can help those people drive improved performance, continuous performance improvement in their organizations. And so we built a design, a modular design, that’s highly customizable for an organization, depending on what your HR business partners do. And we’re excited about that. The trouble is we were ready to pilot it and then COVID hit.

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So we’re now looking for a few big companies or not so big that want to pilot this program. But we’re pretty excited about it what we think is that there’s much like our application kits really, that we can help uh HR business partners learn to do specific things that will be very helpful to their executive and senior manager stakeholders. And what is it about HR business partners that makes you think they could become

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agents of continuous performance improvement within their organization? Well, if you think about it, part of this was confirmed by the interviews we did when we did our analysis work because a lot of organizations have at least two levels of HR business partners. They have what I might call their regular HR business partners and those people tend to be kind of like customer service representatives for HR. So they’re out just being sure people’s benefits are in place and stuff like that.

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But the ones that are often called senior HR business partners, or maybe they have some other name like strategic HR business partners, they’re working with senior leaders, typically, you know, C level, vice president level, maybe, maybe director level depends on the organization. And they’re doing really important stuff with those people. They’re helping them. They’re not only being there, there’s two things that they bring together. What I noticed was a lot of the senior HR business partners.

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there’s no really defined profile for them. I think they tend to be people who are unusually, who have some operational business experience. So they’re not just, you know, HR folks. They know they’ve run a business unit or they’ve had management experience and they know about HR and they like people typically. And so what you have is people that are functionally management consultants, as far as I can tell. And so some of the function they serve is the

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classic management consultant, sort of rent a friend, somebody as a senior leader, can, you know, it’s lonely at the top that I can bounce things off of that, you know, can really help me move forward. But also they are, in many cases, functionally management consultants, say, well, let’s help clean up this process, or how are we going to do a succession plan for you? Or what are we going to do about really executing your strategy, etc. And that’s, to me, it’s the intersection between business acumen,

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and sort of the business issues and experience and the HR or human performance dimension of it where I think there’s an opportunity. So does that make sense as a kind of a point? That’s why I’m excited about it. think there’s some people that we can empower even more than they’re already empowered to make a difference. And in the simplest terms, what are the elements of your performance thinking approach and how is it different from, say, other methodologies?

18:55

Well, the first thing that’s different about it is it’s what we call accomplishment based. Tom Gilbert, who was pretty famous iconoclastic contributor back in the 70s, really wrote a famous book called Human Competence. It was published in 1978. It’s been republished a few times. It’s still taught in some graduate programs. And he, there were more ideas in that book than probably anybody could apply. But one of the key things he said was,

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we should focus on the valuable products of behavior accomplishments rather than just on behavior. And most people don’t do that. Most of us, whether we’re training professionals or performance improvement people or coaches or almost anybody, leaders, we focus on behavior, behavioral objectives, what people are doing. And the problem is what Gilbert pointed out is behavior is costly. What we care about is what the behavior produces. So it produces sometimes

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concrete things like widgets or documents, but a lot of times it produces relationships, decisions, uh strategies, things that we can define as things that are valuable. So the first thing is that our approach is explicitly accomplishment based. So when we analyze performance, we use this thing called the performance chain. say, we want to know what’s at stake for the organization. What are the organization’s business results?

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know, profit, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, market share, safety, whatever. Once we’re clear on that in the conversation, then we say, okay, let’s look at this hunk of performance and see what the accomplishments or what we call work outputs are. And we list those. And then it’s very easy to tell what the behavior is because you can interview people, you can observe performers, you can do task analysis.

20:43

but you have a very concrete and specific way to get to exactly the behavior that needs to be in place. So that’s the first part. And that’s different. I just, in fact, got off a zoom meeting with a colleague of mine who was frustrated because her training colleagues start with skills and knowledge. And it’s like, yeah, but what are the skills and knowledge supposed, what behavior are they supposed to support and what outputs is the behavior supposed to produce? So we start with the way I just described. And then the second piece is most folks

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do not have a systemic way to look at all the factors that influence performance. And so we use our plain English version of Tom Gilbert’s behavior engineering model, we call it the six boxes model, which as a footnote was voted at the International Society of Performance Improvement a few years ago as the best performance model in the world, even though it was only a small group of people. But anyway, I always like to say that. But it defines not just skills and knowledge, but it says if we’re going to get performance,

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We have the behavior we need to produce the outputs that contribute to organizational results. We need to know how expectations are being set and what they are and are they consistent? And is there feedback happening about how well people are doing? And is it more positive than critical? And what tools, resources, environmental factors do people use as they actually perform? Is that working for them or they have really lousy processes and problematic software and stuff like that? What consequences are there?

22:09

Is there at least a thank you? Is there recognition? Are there compensation plans at work? If those things aren’t in place, you can train people and it’s probably not going to be much of an ROI. But if you do take those things into account and if you partner with the business people, which HR business partners already are doing, then you should be able to create an environment where if training is part of the solution, it actually gets implemented. And so

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What I think differentiates our approach is first, it’s accomplishment based. Secondly, it’s plain English. We have these 21 plain English words that I developed in the late 80s and user tested until we came up with a vocabulary that people don’t misunderstand. They don’t make many errors with it. And then it has the six boxes model, which is a systemic, to use a kind of a slightly fancy word, but it’s a systemic way of looking at all the factors that affect performance.

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So you’re not just stuck in one little category. Well, we should give them more money or we should train them or we should do whatever. You’re looking at all the factors and you’re trying to optimize those. So that’s kind of a long answer. we think that this approach is accomplishment based performance improvement for the masses, if you will, because of the language, the simple language. That’s great. think learning in layman’s terms just makes it so much easier to comprehend and understand what you’re trying to achieve.

23:35

When is performance thinking a good solution to a problem? two things. First of all, we think always almost if there’s and just to pinpoint the word problem, one of the things that we try to encourage is a proactive what we call design engineering approach to performance, because one of the things that’s happened in things like coaching and even management consulting and certainly in an awful lot of uh sort of

24:04

performance improvement is that people are trying to solve problems. say, oh, there’s a gap here. There’s a problem. And then they do the equivalent of a root cause analysis and a gap analysis. And they try to figure out what the problem solution is. And they try to fix it. It’s not an issue with that. But I think we, my kind of silly metaphor is always, I don’t want to just plug the hole in the dyke. I want to build a better dyke. And so if we teach

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If we teach managers and supervisors and HR business partners and training professionals and all those kind of folks in an organization to have a proactive continuous improvement approach, then there’s almost nothing where human performance is involved, where performance thinking is not relevant. The applications may vary, but it’s still the same thought process. You’re still analyzing performance, starting with business results and outputs.

24:57

Identifying behavior, figuring out what’s not working and what could be better, and optimizing the system. So everything from making training stick to making process improvement work a little bit better to doing implementation planning and change management where you actually sustain the results rather than just do a change to uh coaching, you name it. We’ve got a whole long list of applications and types of users. And of course, our big idea

25:25

We haven’t really gotten this in place that well in too many companies, although one of our largest, longest clients is a global biotech company. And they’ve developed something like 350 certified performance practitioners using our methodology over the last dozen years. And it gets to an almost cultural level. What we’d like is to have a shared perspective using this language in these models so that everybody’s kind of rowing in the same direction, so that everybody

25:55

has a shared understanding of performance instead of different vocabulary. And they can continuously see opportunities to improve stuff. So I know it’s probably a pretty silly answer to say it’s good for everything, but that’s kind of my answer. Hey, I like it. And so how do you envision HR business partners integrating performance improvement into the work that they do with stakeholders? And what kind of results would you expect? Well, I should… uh

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you know, I should pull up our curriculum because it’s not in front of me right now. But the first thing you can do is define jobs better, because one of the things we teach people, we teach everybody, is to define jobs by the accomplishments that they produce. So instead of having competencies or the usual descriptions you see in job descriptions, we can go through a thing we call individual performance mapping and actually define what your contributions are, who your customers are and who you deliver those things to.

26:52

I even have colleagues who’ve picked up on that and have productized it. So I have some colleagues in Ohio who work with their clients to define better job profiles using accomplishments. So we teach HR business partners to do that. Once you have that, you can do things like better onboarding of people because you know what accomplishments they need to be up to speed on first and in the next few weeks and the first months. You can similarly do succession planning because you can…

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identify what the strategic role is you’re trying to replace, what their accomplishments are, their recommendations, their decisions, their plans, their budgets, whatever it is. And then you can look at your candidate and you can see what they’re currently good at producing. And you can figure out what the delta is and plan succession planning. You can also do much better job of ongoing performance management. So we’ve had department heads

27:48

say, you know, I’d like to define the jobs of my people better so that I can coach them more clearly and crisply. So just that is one thing that HR business partners can introduce to their stakeholders. But then they can also do things like look at processes. Many, many business leaders and heads of business units and managers have a lot of processes going on in their departments or their business units, but they might not even be named. And if they’re named,

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Unless they’ve been a problem in the past and they called in the process wizards, they probably aren’t very well defined. And so we can help HR business partners say, you know, if you’re looking at the processes in your organization, don’t just look at the steps, the behavior, look at what each step produces, and then be sure that if there’s any errors or sloppiness in it, you take the six boxes model and sort of optimize uh how effective that process is. So you can do process improvement. uh

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You can do change management, which is a big, um a lot of times people, senior leaders want to change. They introduce a new policy or a new system or some other new thing. And there’s of course, change management methodologies out there, which are really good at things like communication planning and identifying change agents and champions, but they aren’t always that good at identifying the variables to sustain the change. And so we can help that six boxes helps.

29:17

So those are just some of the applications. um To me, the notion is if you’re working with senior leaders who have a lot of leverage and a lot of control over things, first of all, to turn them on to this way of thinking will help them. I’ve had like one of my, actually he works for me now, he’s with me. He’s a director, well, you know him, John Skang. And he used to be senior vice president of sales at Dunn-Bradstreet. He was my client 30 years ago. He’s a very experienced senior executive.

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He said to me years ago, said, the thing that’s cool about this framework you have is it gives me a way to put all the things I already know into a framework that’s more cohesive and more systemic. And so just getting executives to think that way is a starting place. But then applying this way of thinking to different issues that leaders and managers have with their people, with their teams, with their organizations, I think we can bring a lot of value through HR business partners to that.

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And that’ll lead me here to my next question. Who are the best candidates among HR business partners for this approach that advances performance improvement within the organization? It’s a good question. You know, I haven’t because I have not worked with a ton of organizations, HR business partner groups. I’m not super well informed on that right now. I don’t know what the whole scope of people who do this work is. What I do know is that there are some

30:45

who probably are not the greatest candidates because they mostly are sort of transactional. They serve managers, they do a great job at being sure people get their benefits and dealing with problems that come up and so forth. But the ones that actually serve uh senior managers, especially vice president and maybe director level and C level people, and who really do function.

31:12

As advisors in a a in a more than just sort of transactional way I think most of the stuff they advise on Somehow touches human performance. Mm-hmm. So for me the ideal group to work with would be a team of HR business partners Who have got their hands into the business who are working with the senior leaders to make a difference and they have some business acumen and If we teach them this framework, it will it will at least sharpen

31:40

their understanding of performance in a way that they can communicate with their stakeholders or their clients and then move stuff forward. So I think the best candidates are those that who actually, at least next to their clients, kind of have their hand on the throttle and the steering wheel, who can actually influence directions of things at a fairly senior level. before we conclude our discussion today, where can listeners go to learn more about your work?

32:08

Well, there’s two places. One is our YouTube channel, which is at performancethinking.tv. And there’s about 30, I think as of the other day, there’s about 34 recorded webinars there. And what’s good about them is they touch on a lot of the different applications and topics. And there is one on this that we did with them. And of course, go to HRDQ-U because you’ve got the thing we did for you guys. And then our website, which is performancethinking.com, has a lot of stuff on it. It needs some

32:38

It could use some editing at this point, but you can look at all of our programs. You can get a lot of information that we have a blog, a pretty good list of blog posts there. So there’s probably more information between those two things than anybody, any one person would ever want to get to. Although I, I must say with the YouTube channel, a lot of folks have given us feedback that they really appreciate it. Cause there’s a lot of sort of free stuff there, much like you guys are doing with HRDQ-U. Great. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Binder for your time today.

33:08

Thank you, I appreciate it. And if you have yet to check out the webinar that we did with Dr. Binder, make sure that you click the link below. There’s some really great information in there where he elaborates more on the content that he spoke of today, um as well as check out the links that are in there. There’s some really great offerings from

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a doctor binder there that you can check out. And we hope that you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, please leave us a review, share this with your colleagues. It really helps us out to continue to provide this free content to you, and I will see you all next week. Thanks.