What is “Performance Support for Managers”?

By Rob Cahill, CEO & Co-founder, Jhana

Our clients who are experienced Learning & Development practitioners refer to Jhana as “Performance Support for Managers” (or People Leaders if they don’t like the term Manager).

What does that mean? Performance for Support for Managers is in-the-moment-of-need resources and tools for managers to handle common challenges in their day-to-day work. Performance Support has been around for decades, focused initially on support for IT resources; Jhana is the first to create a Performance Support product focused on managers.

Here are a few example challenges a manager might face:

• A remote direct report feels left out. How can I better include him/her?
• I have an interview coming up with a promising candidate. What are the kinds of questions I should be asking?
• My organization is going through a lot of change, and my team is resisting. How can I help my team get behind the change?

Performance Support tools (like Jhana’s) can help a manager get quick advice on a specific problem, in just a few minutes, and then immediately apply what they learned. It’s fast, saves time and avoids “winging it”. Further, the learning is more likely to stick.

Conrad Gottfredson, a learning visionary, calls Performance Support “learning in the moment of apply”, as opposed to traditional training classes and eLearning. Further, he writes:

It simply isn’t acceptable to throw learners over the classroom and/or eLearning wall into the workflow and then hope that what we did during the online or class event will magically transfer to successful job performance. It doesn’t. We know full well that learning doesn’t stick unless you put in place provisions that support performance in the workflow, that the success that does occur isn’t all that could occur if we attended to the principles and practices of performance support.

Performance Support can — and should — supplement the foundational skills and training found in classes and eLearning for Managers.

Google search can also be performance support. However, the quality level for manager-related content is mixed, and can be inappropriate or even misleading within an organizational context.

Interestingly, the corporate learning world is moving towards more bite-sized content (sometimes called micro-learning). This is a promising development. At the same time, shorter content isn’t Performance Support if it’s not solving a problem in the moment of need.

Do managers at your organization have Performance Support?

Sources: www.masie.com, www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/949

*Originally published on https://medium.com/@rob_cahill