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Why go into OBM?
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Kevin Munson
M.A. and Ph.D. in Behavior Analysis from West Virginia University Director of Learning & Development for the Home Services division at Sears Holdings Corporation My first exposure to the profession of OBM came during my undergraduate work at Western Michigan University, where I learned that there was a better way to influence behavior in organizations. During my graduate studies, I also did internships with two world-class OBM consulting firms, the Continuous Learning Group and Aubrey Daniels International. I had fantastic mentors during those experiences. They exposed me to a variety of clients who were using OBM to improve their business performance in meaningful ways. I got to see a number of professional OBM'ers in action, which convinced me that the application of behavioral science in organizations called "OBM" was a field in which I would find professional fulfillment. Throughout most of my career I have had a job title that is traditionally associated with training (e.g., instructional designer, leadership development, etc.), but I have always used OBM as the true backbone of what I actually do. Sure, training might be one element of an overall performance improvement intervention that my clients need, but it's really only necessary to get new behavior going in the first place. The value of OBM in what I do is that it provides the framework for sustaining performance over the long term. Lots of business leaders say that employees only retain a small amount of the information they learn during training, but what they mean is that the new behaviors gained in training don't stick around long enough to be useful to an organization. OBM closes that loop by providing an environment that sustains higher levels of productivity, which is what every leader wants. I have the privilege of leading a large group of learning and development professionals in Sears Home Services. Our mission is to provide meaningful technical training, learning, and performance improvement solutions that maximize value to our customers, producing measurable results that are aligned with business goals - continuously upgrading the capabilities of our workforce. What that looks like on a "typical" day is that I spend a lot of time and energy discovering the behavioral and performance-related drivers for business results that customers care about. Once I know what those key behaviors are, then I work with leaders to help them engineer a work environment that will enable them to get the business results they want by bringing out the best performance of their employees. This may include providing solutions like working with subject matter experts in the business to create training, developing the capabilities of leaders so they can maximize productivity, or implementing structured feedback systems so that employees know how well they're doing and how much customers appreciate it. |