My name is Kile Dyer, and I am the Director of Organizational Development and Training at Fox Entertainment Group. One of my interests is pursuing the “holy grail” of the development field, demonstrating the ROI. I’ll be sharing a couple of successful practices and great resources that can help you build a scorecard framework for reporting to key stakeholders.
Hot Tip: Tell Them What They Want to Hear, Not Everything You Know: Not being heard? Providing too much information could be costing you buy-in. In my experience, business executives tend not to care about methodology or detailed variable views. They tend to want “dashboards” with aggregate scores on key impact areas.
We experienced the most success and greatest buy-in when using a tiered approach to evaluating and reporting. Providing executives with an overall score on key impact areas and holding the details for other stakeholders. For an overview on dashboards, read “Creating Effective Learning Measurement Dashboards” in Training Industry Quarterly, Fall 2009. Without advocating any one company’s services, sample designs and reports can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/evaldashboards
Rad Resource: An essential read for practitioners seeking to demonstrate ROI on training and development programs. The concepts and frameworks presented helped me translate my formal knowledge of evaluation into practical application that resonated with business leaders in my presentations and reports. The Training Measurement Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Practical Approaches, Josh Bersin (Pfeiffer, 2008)
This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.
Hi Kile,
Your hot tip regarding buy-in reminds me of a piece of advice Dave Munz (one of the founders of our I/O Psych program) advocates: “Dance with the girl that brought you”. What this essentially means is that even if you may know what the “root cause” of an issue is, you must first get your foot in the door by completing the intervention they contracted for you to complete. After doing so, you can then work in your other recommendations.
Thanks for the great advice and resources!
Marcus
Hi Kyle,
I really appreciated your hot tip: Tell Them What They Want to Hear, Not Everything You Know: Not being heard?
They keys pieces of this for me are:
* Not everything you know – which assumes you have a plethora of options from which to choose in order to tell your storm. Thus you have to do some homework.
* What they want to hear – know your audience.This includes not just knowing what they want they find intersting or meaningful but also the way in which that information/story can be best communicated.
I may add your phrasing to my song book if that is ok. Promise to attribute.