When performance falls short, training is often the first prescription.
Someone is not delivering. A team is struggling. A new capability is required. The instinctive organisational response is to identify a programme, put people through it and hope performance improves.
But what if the problem was never training in the first place?
That is the question Amit Sharma, CHRO, Gokaldas Exports, raises in the second episode of The CHRO Playbook, HRKatha’s video podcast series on how organisations build capabilities that translate into measurable performance.
In conversation with Prajjal Saha, Founder & Editor, HRKatha, and John Cherian, Founder & CEO, enParadigm, Sharma argues that capability building needs to begin much earlier than the learning intervention itself. It begins with correctly diagnosing what is preventing people from performing.
Diagnose before you prescribe
Sharma draws on an experience from an organisation he worked with earlier in his career.
A project team was struggling. Performance was suffering and the initial assumption was familiar: the people involved needed training and counselling.
But a closer examination revealed that the problem was considerably more complicated.
Leadership behaviour was part of it. So was the composition of the team. Expectations and timelines also needed to be reconsidered. What initially appeared to be a capability gap was, in reality, a combination of organisational and managerial issues.
The lesson is an important one for HR and L&D teams.
Training can address a capability problem. It cannot compensate for every problem that manifests itself as poor performance.
Sharma likens the tendency to prescribe training for every performance gap to prescribing the same medicine for every fever without first understanding what caused it.
The distinction changes the role of L&D. Instead of beginning with the question, ‘What programme should we run?’, organisations need to begin with, ‘What is preventing the performance we need?’
Capability building cannot remain an HR agenda
There is another assumption Sharma challenges: that capability building belongs primarily to HR.
If an organisation wants learning to translate into performance, managers cannot simply nominate employees for programmes and hand responsibility to the learning function. They have to become capability builders themselves.
That means identifying what their teams need to do differently, creating opportunities to practise those behaviours, reinforcing them at work and taking responsibility for whether performance actually improves.
The shift sounds subtle, but it changes the economics of capability building. Learning stops being an HR activity delivered alongside the business and becomes part of how the business executes its strategy.
For Sharma, the objective is not simply to increase what employees know. It is to reduce the variability between what the organisation expects and what people consistently deliver.
From generic learning to real workplace situations
Cherian takes the argument a step further.
One reason capability programmes struggle to change behaviour, he suggests, is that learning is often removed from the situations in which employees are actually expected to perform.
The more closely an intervention reflects those situations, the greater the possibility that employees will be able to transfer what they have learnt into their work.
Technology, and increasingly AI, is making that contextualisation possible at a much greater scale. Instead of giving large groups of employees essentially the same learning experience, organisations can create experiences that reflect different roles, decisions and workplace situations.
But technology does not remove the need for diagnosis. If anything, the ability to personalise learning makes it even more important to understand precisely what behaviour needs to change in the first place.
Are you managing the capability gap or closing it?
Perhaps the most useful distinction Sharma makes during the conversation is between managing a capability gap and actually closing it.
Organisations can keep running programmes, identifying gaps and developing employees indefinitely. But activity itself does not demonstrate that capability has improved.
A more revealing test is what happens to the organisation afterwards.
Does performance still depend disproportionately on a few individuals? Does the business struggle whenever a key employee moves to another role? Are there people ready to step into critical positions? Can teams continue performing when responsibilities change?
For Sharma, genuine capability building should create enough bench strength that movement does not destabilise performance.
That is a considerably harder measure than course completion, participation or satisfaction scores. But it is also much closer to what the business ultimately needs from capability building.
The question, therefore, is not how much learning an organisation delivered.
It is whether the organisation became more capable because of it.
Watch the full episode of The CHRO Playbook featuring Amit Sharma, CHRO, Gokaldas Exports, and John Cherian, Founder & CEO, enParadigm, hosted by Prajjal Saha, Founder & Editor, HRKatha.