Participation

‘You can take a horse to the water- you can tell horse drinking water  is good for its health -but choice to drink or not to drink water lies with the horse'. This is a statement that I had formed early in my career when I was working on learning and development space.

Over last few months I have realized that this statement is applicable to situations/processes where the efforts and results are not linearly related in space and time and area spread out across time. Career Planning & Execution, and Development are 2 such processes – you make efforts today but results may not come in the same year.

My new tagline on careers is – ‘Performance is ensured over a year while a career direction is built at least over 2-3 years’.

We harp on relevance- we learn or we work towards a career goal if it is relevant for us. We say that the challenge for the resource provider or the manager is to create a space/opportunity for employee to find relevance for him/her.

Let’s say that as a resource provide you have done work on both fronts mentioned above-you and employee have figure out relevant aspects and you have provided required resources.

And then - employee resists turning up to utilize the resource! You are left perplexed! What happened?

Maybe it is relevant but other priorities are at play.

I had been working on creating for last few months a program – working along with intended audience to ensure relevance of resources. On day of session, we clocked around 50% attendance. I wondered whether we could have had at least 60% attendance – that’s what I had expected. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at this situation. Those who attended seemed vested and involved in day and shared that they found session very valuable.

I saw them taking notes and thinking of how they will make use of learning's back at work.

Leaves me thinking – should we work on participation?

Sometimes we need to drive participation - to ensure people prioritize A over B where both are relevant and where they may not have realized importance/power of A. This is especially the case when A is career/development and B is performance.

Low participation undermines power of an initiative. High participation does not guarantee effectiveness. Relevance is critical.

Hence both relevance and participation are necessary but not sufficient resources by themselves. They go hand in hand to ensure success.

If required participation can be driven. If people choose to stay on as day progresses, that's a possible indication that efforts were worth it.

-

Sourav