Where would your business go if your employees didn’t improve their performance?

In most businesses, the limiting factor is the performance of your people. To grow the business, your people will need to be either doing new tasks or similar tasks in a better way.

I am not saying that developing people’s skills is the only way that a business can grow. There are ways that people savvier than me grow businesses all of the time, but without people’s performance improving, you are selling your business strategy short.

To compare, having the best car on the Formula One track is not much use with a mediocre driver. Ideally, you will have both the best car (business strategy) and driver (people), but without one or the other, you are missing half of the puzzle. (I may or may not have started writing this after watching a race on TV).

Learning is not even close to being the only way for performance to get better. That list is pretty long. Improving processes, better remuneration packages, clearer performance goals, rolling out a new bit of technology or simply putting the right people in the right role can make a huge difference.

People are also pretty resourceful. They will quite regularly come up with ways to do things better without having to be told exactly what to do. Empowering your employees is one of the most rewarding things that can be done for them. Not only can it ease your burden of responsibility by allowing them to make decisions, it sends the message that their work and opinions are valued and meaningful. Sometimes, the best thing a business leader can do is get out of the way of smart people.

Having said all of that, learning is a very effective way for individuals and organisations to get better, especially mid to long-term. If it’s a question of adapt or die, learning is what helps you adapt and move beyond what you have always done.

As obvious as it seems, aligning your business goals with the learning and development strategy is a really good way to make sure that both of those objectives are achieved, but yet plenty of organisations don’t do it.

This is because it’s sometimes hard to match what your staff wants to get better at with what your business needs them to be better at. It’s possible if your learning strategy is too flexible, that you have lots of offerings that are hard to match with business strategy. It’s also possible your strategy is too inflexible to be delivered in a way that engages your people. It’s definitely possible if you don’t really have a learning and development strategy apart from showing the new guy around the office.

The right learning strategy is something that is unique to each organisation’s context. It changes as your workforce expands, contracts, matures and as your competitive landscape changes. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that a learning strategy needs to be able to allow customization, to be unique for each individual (using combinations of the offerings you have available). It sounds like a lot of work, and there is some work involved, but the payoff can be significant on a whole bunch of measures.

Daniel Pink cites lots of research in his great book, Drive, that supports the notion that people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose, not always more cash. A good learning strategy can tick these boxes and help you have a more engaged workforce that increases discretionary effort, reduces financial and morale sucking turnover, and attracts high performers into the organization. All without increasing your payroll.

Could your business benefit from better aligning a performance development strategy with your business strategy?

A great learning and development strategy alone won’t change your business. Neither will marketing, product development, sales, financial management or strategic direction. The right combination of those things are necessary to optimise your success, but it’s also wise to take time to consider where people and their performance sits in that mix.

One thing that is often cited by learning and development types is the importance of providing context. If your people know the ‘why’, they will understand the ‘what’.

And having employees that are working for more than just a paycheck will benefit everyone involved.