Guest Editorial Volume 5, Issue 1

Matthew Peters, CPT
Vice Deputy Director for
Human Capital
Defense Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C.

One of the biggest challenges we have in the human performance technology (HPT) field is staying abreast with all the great ideas and perspectives from across our multidisciplinary profession. This is especially true today, as the workplace has changed dramatically over the past decade. Technological advances have created a global environment, and the work itself is more virtual, collaborative, and project-based. The composition and priorities of the workers has also changed as gender, generations, ethnicity, culture, family values, concepts of success, etc., have all evolved.

Our ability to improve performance in this complex environment is becoming more challenging as we need to continually examine insights and best practices from across our broad, multidisciplinary field to remain effective. I think you will find this edition of Proven: Beyond the Process provides some of those varied perspectives.

Lynne Andia highlights the need for the human resources community to take a more proactive role in managing organizational change. She emphasizes that organizational change is far more complex than just moving boxes around an organizational diagram. It’s all about conversations and ensuring everyone understands exactly why the change is being made and how they can participate in the process. She emphasizes that our human resources teams already have strong personal relationships across the organization that should be leveraged during those efforts.

Jay Familant shares insights and lessons learned from the job hunting arena, and how both potential employees and employers should approach this “job dating” dance. He highlights how the workplace has changed and how new approaches and different social etiquette have evolved to match this new environment. Jay emphasizes the need to use new approaches such as social media; however, attention to detail and hard work still rule the day.

Jay Sherman highlights the personal element of staffing positions, including recent research on the importance of job fit in individual satisfaction and organizational performance. He provides relevant research examples from Gallup, Bersin, and others as he challenges us to consider whether or not human performance technology HPT models and efforts appropriately consider job fit.

Fred Nichols emphasizes the key and challenging role that managers play in today’s workplace. He asserts that managers must consistently achieve stable results under varying conditions and function akin to conductors controlling a living control system. He introduces the Target Model of Human Behavior and Performance as a tool to objectively map out, evaluate, and improve managerial behavior and performance.

Finally, Guy Wallace tempts us with the first of four consecutive articles from his 2011 book, The Curriculum Manager’s Handbook. Guy provides techniques and approaches that can be used to assess key processes in our learning and development systems, and to determine a rough return on investment for any problems that may be corrected. This first article focuses on the three areas of performance in the “Core” portion of Guy’s model.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Proven as much as I did. Our HPT field is a broad, multidisciplinary profession that is continuously looking at new perspectives, tools, approaches, and opportunities, and this issue provides a rich summary of some of those diverse ideas and best practices.