Building Core Bench Strength: Learning, Technology, Business

I’m participating in Harold Jarche’s (@hjarche) Workplace Learning Workshop (training>performance>social #T2P2S) and it’s almost eerie (but a good eerie) how relevant each topic is to where I’m at in terms of professional development and my current work focus.

One of the topics this week focuses on moving from a learning to a performance consulting based organization, which is at the heart of everything I’ve been working towards.

A short post I read this morning speaks to technology, learning and business strengths. These are essentially the core strengths needed for any learning professional to successfully transition to performance consulting.

This post is right on the mark. Current learning organizations and professionals who are missing those pieces struggle to find a seat at the table and end up finding themselves left out of those critical business conversations.

In my experience, it’s often not realistic for every individual to attain expertise in all three areas.This doesn’t mean, however, that the performance consulting organization is doomed to fail. Instead, I’ve found that as long as the organization as a whole values these three strengths, and that they exist in a variety of combinations across the team, success is still possible provided everyone has a respect for each strength and the desire to learn and grow with and from each other.

In this scenario, collaboration and cooperation are critical. There is no room for those who want to maintain their knowledge silos  (“expertise snobbery”) or for those who don’t want to decrease the gaps in their own expertise for the larger good of the goal.