What Is the Right Question?
- Debashish Roy
- 16 hours ago
- 2 min read
Rethinking How Organizations View Development
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Have you ever been left wondering, “Are we asking the right question?” As an HR professional, I have often been asked by business leaders about the ROI of a training programme or any developmental input. Business leaders tend to view any expenditure on any part of the business as either a cost or an investment—so if you can't come up with an ROI, the amount quickly moves to a cost item, which is then best avoided or reduced. But is that the right question that leaders should be asking?
What then is the right question? This question has perplexed me for years—what's the ROI of a training programme or any developmental input? But is that the right question to ask… if not, what then is the right question? The ultimate objective of developing people in an Organisation is to impact Organisation performance. Performance is not just a factor of an individual and capabilities, but is shaped and influenced by the ecosystem of the Organisation, i.e., systems, processes, culture, and capabilities all working in tandem. So investing in developing employee capabilities alone does not guarantee Organisation performance if the rest of the ecosystem remains the same.
So asking the ROI question may perhaps lead to the wrong answer. Instead, shouldn't we be asking, “Having developed the capability of individual(s), what changes are we affecting in our ecosystem, i.e., systems, processes, and culture to enable and empower the individual(s) to perform?” Posing the question where the Organisation examines its ecosystem to enable the application of newly developed capabilities of the individual(s) leads to a positive impact on Organisation performance. Shouldn’t we, as HR leaders, ignite thinking by asking this question rather than answering the ROI question?
I started off by asking, “What is the right question?” How does one come up with the right question? Let me leave you with an approach—in order to identify the key objective when faced with a challenge, pose the question “What’s the question the Organisation is seeking to answer?” I have found this to be a very powerful and insightful approach—it helps bring clarity to the context, simplifies the challenge, resulting in a clear definition of the key question. If we get this right, we can then design the appropriate KPIs and answers.
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