TRI principles: closing the performance gap

You hired the right people. So why is performance still a problem?

I was recently invited by Easygenerator* to put this question to a room of learning and talent professionals from around the globe, and the chat lit up before I had finished asking it!

Nobody argued that building performance wasn’t a problem. Pretty much everyone recognised the ache involved in trying to achieve it. People professionals recruit well, design with intent, and create programmes and experiences. Yet, year on year, we find ourselves reporting the same skills gap and the same stubborn distance between what people know and what they actually do.

The performance paradox we keep living

Someone in the room named it perfectly. Senior leaders will tell you they cannot get the right skills in the right place, while quietly deciding they cannot spare the time to build them. That is the paradox. The demand to perform and close the skills gap is loud. The permission needed to close the gap is lacking…

Our normal response is to produce more, faster, more personalised. One participant described the pattern of the past ten or fifteen years as making stuff, when perhaps our job now is to help people find the right thing at the point they need it. The half-life of a skill is no longer measured in years. Relevance goes off by the hour. And when we respond to that speed with more content, we are often solving the wrong problem more efficiently.

More production and providing access to more resources has not closed the gap. In fifteen years of benchmarking, I watched teams gain bigger budgets, better tools and richer content libraries. Only around one in ten made the shift that actually mattered. That shift is not about what we produce. It is about whether we have enabled the conditions in which people can perform.

What the high performers were actually doing

I used to think the answer to closing the performance gap lived in a model. I had built one myself – a detailed maturity model based on 15 years of data provided by 10,000 L&D leaders showing how organisations were closing the performance gap and driving better business impact as a result. People would nod at it warmly and change nothing. Agreeing with an approach does not close a gap.

So I went back to my data and asked a different question. Not which tools or models the high performing teams chose, but what principles sat underneath their thinking, whatever their context, budget or size. Because the teams getting real business results were not the best resourced. They were the ones constantly working through a continuous loop. Tuning in to what was happening, responding with intent, and improving as they went. Then doing it again.

I have come to call these principles TRI: Tuning in, Responding, Improving. They are not new. You will recognise them from the best work you have ever done. They are drawn from great practice, which is precisely why they feel familiar. The catch is that familiar is not the same as common. What the room proved to me last week is that the profession already feels the shape of these principles. We just do not yet practise them consistently.

Tuning in: is this even a learning problem?

Tuning in starts with uncovering a shared business destination. Compared to those organisations with a transactional model of learning, I’ve consistently found that high performers were three to four times more likely to agree, up front, what the business actually needed to achieve from a piece of work.

It also means understanding where individuals genuinely struggle and being willing to ask whether the thing in front of you is a learning problem at all. Derek Bruce, Easygenerator’s CLO, who joined me for the conversation, offered one of the cleanest tests I have heard. If someone had the skill, and applied it, and nothing changed, then the issue is environmental, not educational. No course fixes a broken environment. Tuning in is how we understand the context and the outcomes before we build anything.

This does not require a research department. It can be as small as turning a request into a question. One participant told us how a simple ask for a handout became a targeted campaign once she paused to ask what it was really for.

Responding: choose practice over content

Responding is shaped by the choices we make. Learning and behaviour science shows us how behaviour actually shifts, it’s often different from what the bosses asked for!

It also means designing for doing, not just knowing. The most useful responses are small, spaced and built into the flow of real work. And it involves bringing in the people who make application possible. Managers, peers, whoever shares the problem. The high performing teams were seven to eight times more likely to equip line managers to help their teams apply learning. Not by asking managers to become an extension of L&D, but by finding ways to make their own job easier.

Improving: measure what matters, then be willing to adapt

Improving is where most of us stop too soon. We prove something worked at the end of a programme and move on.

The teams closing the performance loop do the opposite. They keep monitoring what matters to the business, not what is easy to pull from a system. Derek called the easy numbers what they are: vanity metrics. Seats, clicks, completions. What deserves tracking is the impact. The engagement and retention of the people who went through a programme and their teams. Whether the environment is holding.

And when the signals say so, they change course. Sometimes that means letting a successful programme go, because it has become part of how work is done and no longer needs to stand alone.

Where the McKinsey story fits

We shared the story from our book The L&D Leader, of McKinsey rebuilding its feedback culture after hybrid working broke the informal moments that used to sustain it. As a result of tuning in beyond the obvious, they found the barrier was emotional, not a skills gap. Responding involved a simple four-week campaign led by local leaders, not a central initiative.  Improving involved tracking the data that mattered, adapting the process until it was integrated into wider initiatives and absorbed into everyday practice. It is a lovely illustration of how one organisation used the TRI principles to close the loop. But you do not need McKinsey’s budget to work through principles. And the truth is, the people at the webinar taught me as much as any case study. The insight is already in our profession.

What you can try this week

Here are some of the practical ideas that surfaced from the session. You do not need permission or a new system to begin. Pick one:

• Take a live request and, before you build anything, ask what performance outcome the business is really after.
• Choose one initiative and apply Derek’s test: If people had the skill and used it, would anything change? If not, name it as an environment problem and say so.
• Swap one piece of content for one piece of practice, small and built into real work.
• Look at your current dashboard and ask what on it is a vanity metric, and what genuinely tells you the business is better off.
• Take one thing you can measure that matters, agree it with a stakeholder, and commit to reviewing it together rather than reporting it once.

The right people are almost certainly already in your organisation. The question worth sitting with is whether we have built the conditions for them to perform. What is the one condition you could start to change this week?

*I love to partner with organisations who want to stretch their thinking beyond their product to help their communities find new ways to be more impactful. I’m an independent researcher and do not do endorsements, but I can say that it was great working with Easygenerator and their community. If you don’t know them, they are an e-learning authoring platform used by over 2,000 companies that let subject-matter experts create courses without instructional design support. On this project, they were also great thinking partners and fun to work with!

References

Original webinar and summary article

Background to Laura’s fifteen year research
the-evolution-of-the-ld-maturity-benchmark

Interview with McKinsey
learninguncut.global/podcast/163/

The L&D Leader: Principles and Practice for Delivering Business Value (discount codes available)
learningchangemakers.com/resources/the-ld-leader/