EIDT - 6500 Performance Improvement

Wk7ProjectEdingerA

Evaluating Initial Results

After the first week of summer vacation, my wife, children and I held a family meeting. In it, we decided we have
a performance problem that we needed to address. Our children spend a lot of time inside the house and have shown
an inability to use summer vacation as an opportunity to improve their own athletic abilities. During this meeting we
discussed their prior athletic experiences, what their goals in athletics were, and what it would need to take in order to
meet those goals. We also discussed and shared ideas of what we could do, how much time we would need to spend
doing it and what might be some unforeseen problems or roadblocks that may interrupt the program. Andrew, my 10 year
old son, is starting flag football for the first time this year. He knows that he has a lot to learn and asks that we spend a
good amount of time doing drills, but as an experienced athlete, I know drills will get old fast if we dont make them fun,
meaning I would have to do more research on football drills. Camden, my 8 year old son, wants to be a pitcher on his
baseball team. Pitching is skill that needs to be repeated over and over again, meaning Camden needed to understand
the that we would have to spend a lot of time doing the same thing over and over again. By holding the discussion, we
were able to develop a plan that would help us meet the goals of my children and allow them to at least have a general
understanding of what we needed to do to meet it. Engineering effective performance is highly dependent on you
identifying and diagnosing performance gaps and then working with your clients to select the interventions that will work.
(Stolovitch).
The plan we developed was for our children to spend 1 hour a day with their father playing a sport outside. Since
the boys have different goals to meet, they were each given an hour to work on their skills or just play the sports that they
needed to work on. We agreed that there was no way we could play everyday because of a variety of different
circumstances, so we decided at the beginning of the week to create a schedule that would allow us play 5 hours a week,
if we are not able to do it one hour a day, then we would double up the experience on another day (for example play both
Saturday morning and Saturday night). We created the schedule so that they could play a variety of different sports, but
spending a significant amount of time on the sport that would meet their goals. To achieve performance success in
yourself and your team, you must create powerful partnerships. The key is collaboration with stakeholders. Performance
works best in a partnered arrangement where all have a stake in the results(Stolovitch). By taking part in the initial
discussion and helping create the performance interventions and the weekly schedules, the boys have greater buy in to
the project and will have a greater understanding of how they have grown over the summer.
We are now three weeks in to our intervention. The first two weeks went off without a hitch. Both boys used all of
their hours with dad. 4 of the ten hours resulted in the boys actually sharing their time, playing games together for two
hours, allowing the boys to continue learning while testing their new found skills during actual competition. Week 3 did not

EIDT - 6500 Performance Improvement

Wk7ProjectEdingerA

go quite as well. The weekly schedule included a trip across state for a family wedding. We scheduled the week with
play on Monday, Tuesday, Sunday, and a multiple play day on Wednesday, but instead of coming home on Sunday, like
originally scheduled, we came home on Monday, missing our time to play. One aspect of this project that I feared was the
chances that my boys would fight back or complain about spending this time with their dad. This did not happen, yes the
first couple of days I needed to remind them or pull them away from something else, but by the start of the third week,
both boys showed actual excitement and tried to get dad to play more than their scheduled time.
Usually, when determining the effectiveness of a Performance Improvement program, you must calculate its worth
and find its Return on Investment, allowing decision makers and stakeholders to decided whether to fund the program or
not(Stolovitch). When you think of ROI, you think about the amount of money the intervention has either saved or made
the company, but since my intervention program was with my family, it really cant be judged in financial terms (at least not
yet, it could all change with a college scholarship), and we must find another way to calculate success. Calculating worth
does not require math skills beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division(Stolovitch) So when calculating the
success of our program we look in a number of different areas.
Consistency:

93%

Well Rounded: 100%

Athletic Improvement

Dad and boys participated in all scheduled days and times, except one.
Dad and boys played all discussed sports.
Andrew

Camden

Endurance:

80%

85%

Free Throw

60% (Up 20%)

40% (Up 15%)

Catching

25

15

Pitching accuracy

65% (Up 15%)

50% (Up 20%)

Dad Time

Up

Up

Percentage of hour without break

Catches without Drop

As you can see from the data above, the boys have not only accomplished their goals of spending more time
playing sports, the time has actually proven to be beneficial in a variety of athletic areas. The boys have built up their
endurance and are not so tired when playing, they have improved the skills because of the time spent on them, and most
importantly they have had the opportunity to spend more quality time with their dad.

Stolovitch, H. D., & Keeps, E. J. (2004). Beyond training aint performance fieldbook: Strategies, tools, and
guidance for effective workplace performance. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press