NEEDS[horizontal ellipsis]WANTS[horizontal ellipsis]DEMANDS: PART 1

One of the most frustrating things that can happen to staff development educators is to have someone come up and say, "You need to teach the entire staff how to [insert your least favorite request here]." Sometimes these statements involve equipment inservice classes, sometimes a new policy (or an old one that people are ignoring), and sometimes it's something more nebulous (for example, teach people to "be nice"). For those of you who started snickering at that last one, let me assure you that it is a direct quote from an administrator to a director of staff development.

How do you deal with education needs/requests? Is it ever all right to refuse? Can you redirect the person to look at the issue in a different way? These are tough questions, especially if the request/demand comes from your boss or the Chief Executive Officer. Too many people see education as a "quick fix," the cure-all that will get an ongoing problem off their desks and onto yours. What makes it trickier is that, often, educators also believe that education is the answer to all problems. When we act as enablers to this myth, we cannot be surprised when others try to misuse our services.

One of the most helpful ways to deal with requests is to employ Dr. Robert Mager's Performance Analysis Flow Diagram (Mager, Robert and Piper, Peter, Analyzing Performance Problems, 3rd Edition, The Center for Effective Performance at http://www.cepworldwide.com). If you have not used this, let me recommend it as an effective method of discovering what intervention will actually address the root causes of a staff development problem. The most important question in the entire analysis is: "Could they do it if their lives depended on it?" If the answer is yes, then they already know how to do it, and education will probably not help. You are dealing with a compliance problem, which requires manager intervention, not classes or self-studies. Throwing education at the problem will not only not solve it, it will actually distract from the solutions that need to be put into place.

Once this analysis is complete, you have the unenviable task of convincing a manager (or more likely, many managers) that the fault lies not with the staff, but with themselves. Something (or things) that should be happening is not. Perhaps job expectations are unclear, or there are no consequences for bad performance versus good performance. Perhaps staff members lack the resources to perform as desired (not enough staff, equipment, supplies, support personnel, etc.). You will need to walk through the problem with managers and administrators to discover the root causes and ways to address those causes. Hopefully, performance/quality improvement activities in the organization have made everyone familiar with this kind of problem analysis.

A whole different can of worms opens up when you perform a formal educational needs assessment for the organization. Whether done in a series of focus groups and manager interviews or with the more usual needs assessment questionnaire (written or computerized), it is not easy to differentiate between important need-to-know and unnecessary want-to-know. And is there anything more frustrating than putting together a class that "everyone" said they wanted, only to have four people enroll?

In the next column, we'll look at the whole process of organizational education needs assessment. If you have found a great way of doing this, please let me know at [email protected] and I will include it in the column. Together we can do this!