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The CBAM: A Model of the People Development Process
© 2003, Barry Sweeny

INDEX:

• Read Me First
• What is the CBAM Stages of Concern Model?
• Linking the Stages of Concern and the "Bridge"
• What Happens When a Person's Individual Learning Needs Are NOT Met?
• The Main Obstacle to Development
• The Primary Goal of All Professional Development Activities
• Using the CBAM Stages of Concern to Structure Needs Assessment & Program Evaluation
• Predicted CBAM Results You Can Expect to Achieve
• Using the CBAM & Data to Plan & Provide Program Level Staff Development & Individual Mentoring
• MORE Cautions - The Assessment of Perceived Needs is Tricky.

Read Me First

The information you are about to read is somewhat complex and lengthy. Do not allow any impatience on your part to effect your openness to learning and using this information. It can be the most powerful tool you will ever learn for achieving success in your mentoring or any other professional growth programming effort. I promise!

If you asked me, "What is the one most important thing to know in planning professional growth programs, I would answer, "The CBAM Stages of Concern"! This is so because the Stages of Concern model is the best tool I ever ever used for planning professional development activity to address the individual needs of people. If your mentoring or other professional growth activity is designed to help people develop, you need to design the activity based on a model of development. Here is the one I'd recommend.

The CONCERNS-BASED ADOPTION MODEL (CBAM) is a very well-researched model which describes how people develop as they learn about an innovation and the stages of that process. Actually, the CBAM is a complex, multi-part system, of which the "Stages of Concern" is but one part. However, it is the one part which the author most prefers and with which he has the most successful experiences.

In fact, the author has used the Stages of Concern hundreds of times for planning mentoring and other staff development programs and activities of every imaginable kind since 1986 when he first was trained on the CBAM model. He can state with confidence that you will be very successful if you base professional development needs assessment and program and mentor activity planning on the CBAM stages of concern.

The CBAM was developed at the University of Texas - Austin. If you would like to read about the CBAM and learn how to use the whole model, consider obtaining the book ñTaking Charge of Changeî, which was published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) at www.ascd.org and written by Shirley Hord, Gene Hall, et. al. (1987)

Reference to the adjacent figure shows that the Stages of Concern defines human learning and development as going through 7 stages, during which a person's focus or concern shifts in rather predictable ways. To understand this process, start at the bottom of the image with "awareness" and read up each step plus the statement(s) next to each step. Those statements are similar to what people may say when they are concerned about an innovation at that level of development.

As you read about these 7 stages, note that:

• The lower three stages are focused on oneself, a clue of which might be the use of "I" and "me", as in "I am frustrated".
• The middle stage (management) is focused on mastery of tasks to the point they become routines and are easier to do, a clue of which might be the use of "it" or a reference to the activity, not the self. An example that a person is struggling at the management level could be a statement like, "Prioritizing my use of time and the management of paper work is killing me!"
• The upper Stages of Concern are focused on the results and impact of the activity, a clue of which might be the use of pronouns which refer to clients, protégés, or participants who receive the benefits of the activity. Examples might include, "The students are really learning better since I started using that strategy." Or, "Customers seem to appreciate the personal attention and are buying more products."

Remember the graphic on the left from another web page?

The "Bridge" describes the sequence necessary for people to implement in practice what they have learned in training, and the role of mentoring in that process. It is a critical foundation concept on which all developmental support efforts should be based.

When we compare the Stages of Concern model to the "Bridge", notice what we learn:

• The lower Stages of Concern occur at the training side of the "Bridge":
  • awareness (what is the innovation?)
  • information (how does the innovation work?)
  • personal (developing a plan to use it)
• Also occurring at the training side of the "Bridge" are any skill development aspects of the training, which are the beginning of the management Stage of Concern, such as:
  • demonstrations
  • participant practice during the training, and...
  • corrective feed back on the practice the trainer may give participants.
• When the participant is in their own setting, trying to independently implement their training and build their mastery to a routine level of task management (Stage of Concern), THAT is when the power of mentoring becomes so critical for participant success.
• If mentoring is provided at this point, participants CAN progress and continue to grow.
• If participants are NOT supported:
  • they can NOT continue to grow
  • implementation problems will often overwhelm them, and..
  • the innovative practices will be discarded
  • coping strategies which are often poor practice will be adopted.

• If a person's needs are addressed at the stage they are at, then they can move to new levels of practice. When they are open and ready to learn, they will ask questions like those on the right side of the stages.
• When people are overwhelmed or feeling unsuccessful, they are not ready to grow. In that case they will NOT state responses such as those listed at the level we might expect. They will be focused at a lower level where they still have concerns.
• If their professional development needs remain unmet, they can easily become stuck at some lower level of development, perhaps even for the rest of their career!

Learning to hear what people say, and interpreting it as a level on this model can help us learn to hear their level of need for support and ensure that our assistance is always ñon targetî. Further, it ensures that employees won't get ñstuckî and will continue to develop over time, eventually reaching the collaboration level, which is the highest level of practice, the level we want them to reach.

• It maintains the current disposition toward isolated ñfigure it out on your ownî practice.
• It prevents employees from effectively functioning like a team in which the diverse strengths of the team members can be used to increase the impact of that team on the desired results.
• It denies employees the means of refining their work strategies and practices from a level of ñcompetenceî at which the focus is primarily on activity and completing tasks, to a level of ñexcellenceî where the focus is on the results and effectiveness of doing those tasks.

The goal of all professional development programs should be to help people reach the collaboration level of practice, such as illustrated on the Stages of Concern.

This is especially critical for a mentoring program which targets new employees because the beginning of a career is the very best opportunity we have to change the culture of the organization and our professional relationships to those of the learning community we know our organizations need to become. Proactive, powerful mentoring programs intentionally make use of this incredible opportunity. Therefore, the real goal of every mentoring program is not establishment of mentoring relationships. It is that those relationships help people to learn to work together better in collaboration, and through that, improve their own performance and that of the students.

• The levels of professional development and practice attained by unsupported new employees
• The levels of professional practice and development attained by the employees who have been supported by a strong mentoring program.

This is terrific evidence that your program is effective.

• Experienced but new employees hired by your organization from other settings will need about a year to move through the stages to the consequence level of the CBAM.
• Without support, those new but experienced employees will not move beyond the consequence level.
• With strong mentoring support, new but experienced employees can move to the collaborative level in about two years.
• Unsupported beginning employees (with a year or less experience) who you manage to retain, will require at least three years to reach the consequence level, and they will not progress beyond it.
• Unsupported employees who are NOT retained during the first three years do so because they have only attained the management level of the CBAM and feel their work has little impact and value. They leave because they feel unsuccessful as employees.
• With strong orientation, training, mentoring, AND other such program support, beginning employees can move beyond the consequence level to the collaborative level in about three years. Notice that this is a level of practice that many experienced employees never reach at all!
• Once employees attain the collaboration level and work at that level for two years or more, they know its value and, given the opportunities and time to maintain and live out that disposition, will continue to seek and give collaborative support among their colleagues.
• However, WHEN the expectation and collaboration of a formal mentoring relationship is eventually withdrawn, and IF there are no formal expectations and programs in place to continually sanction and structure collaboration, the daily press of the work will easily overcome the desire to reflect and grow. The reflection and growth will decrease due to three factors:
  • A lack of collaborative activities and the inherent discipline they provide to make the time for reflection, goal setting, and action planning to attain the goals
  • The overwhelming needs of the customer/client which the person feels called to serve
  • The inherently selfish feelings that attend meeting one's own needs for professional growth, rather than serving client/customer needs.

Of course, if no formal collaboration program exists after mentoring, there will probably be no CBAM-based data to show you this latter pattern. Since you probably must demonstrate the need to support a solution which keeps the collaboration going after formal mentoring is concluded, you will need to collect data that demonstrate reduced collaboration and the attendant drop off in reflective activities.

A smart organization will not risk losing the employee leadership, reflective dispositions, collaborative skills and improved productivity and results that mentoring will have developed. That is why, in addition to training and mentoring, smart organizations provide time and expectations for peer coaching and mentoring for experienced employees, teaming, and many other collaborative opportunities for employees to work together to improve their own learning, role effectiveness, and results.

Using the Stages of Concern part of the CBAM for needs assessment and/or program evaluation are not the only application for this powerful model. Once you have the assessment data, you can also use the data and the model to plan the staff development as well as to guide the mentoring of each protégé, AND to monitor the learning results, levels of growth, and implementation of those innovations. (Think ñAdoptionî as in CBAM)

The trick in using the CBAM for planning of mentoring and staff development programs, such as training, is that you need experience from having used the CBAM before to be able to predict how long it will take people to move through the stages to the levels you want them to achieve. Therefore, it will be difficult for you to predict and plan for the duration and kind of support these efforts will require. Here are some of the variables:

1. Prior experience with the innovation - Collecting CBAM data on this is essentially done to establish the starting point for the mentoring and/or staff development program. If folks have had exposure to an innovation, or even tried to apply prior learning about it in their work, that will greatly impact what they need to learn from your program and mentoring, and where you should start.

To determine this starting point your program needs to design and implement a needs assessment regarding the innovations in question and any related topics. The assessment needs to use questions that specifically are framed by reference to the Stages of Concern. You want to be able to code their responses to these specific levels so that program content can be targeted to where the learners are.

2. Organizational agendas or "needs" - Staff development and mentoring should not be built solely on participant perceived needs, but must also be designed with organizational needs in mind too. When organizations decide to sponsor a specific innovation, they do so because of needs they perceive at the individual, group, site, and organizational levels. In one sense, identifying and responding to these needs is, in a practical sense, almost more important than responding to individual needs, since organizational support must be maintained to be able to sustain the individual level of staff development.

The trick here is that organizations cannot be placed on the Stages of Concern model unless you have a profile of where the people in the organization are. What your needs assessment should tell you is the range of where people are on the Stages of Concern and the number of people at each level. That will allow you to plan appropriate staff development for the whole staff and for sub groups or individuals. If the work is within a mentoring program, this is much easier for mentors to accomplish, as it is only one person in most cases for which this information is needed.

3. Creating Readiness to Learn At the Planned Level - For example, if you find that very few people are at the awareness level, you will plan to start the program at the next level (informational). However, you will still need to provide some kind of support for those few who are identified to be at the awareness level. Such a step might include a small group advance meeting for those so identified to introduce them to the innovation, an informal chat session, access to a web site or handout which presents the information needed, to expose these few folks to the innovation and prepare them for the start of the program at the next level of the CBAM with everyone else. Creating the readiness for learning at the level where the group is, is what you are trying to do. Again, if the work is within a mentoring program, each mentor will simply adjust their plans to fit the level of need of their individual protégés.

4. Defining the Goal for a Level to Achieve - There also needs to be some (perhaps executive) decision about the level on the Stages of Concern model you want participants to attain as a result of the staff development or mentoring program. That decision should be clearly discussed and a true consensus attained which is more than just some "OK, OK That's fine" kind of agreement. Attaining that consensus would require that decision makers first understand the CBAM Stages of Concern.

• Although it may take a year or more of experience to do so, ideally the staff development plan or mentoring process should attempt to describe the steps you will go through without linking the progress to specific dates, and should include:
• The predicted amount time it will take to go through each of the steps
• The points at which you will be able to decide when it is appropriate to change the content and skills taught in training or mentoring, etc. to focus on the next levels.
• I suggest that you can plan a multiple year sequence, and as you follow the process through, to increase your ability to accurately predict how many people will attain what level on the model and how long it normally takes.
• Further, I suggest that you ascertain additional factors, such as the extent of the experience of mentors, to determine their impact on participant progress toward the desired levels on the Stages of Concern.

Simply stated, you should design and implement a developmentally appropriate support sequence and let peoples' readiness and stage of concern drive when the program or mentoring shifts its focus, not a calendar or the plan.

• They don't know what they don't know. - Some people do NOT know some of what they need to know to be able to answer your questions accurately. That is, your data will contain error, so your mentoring or program must account for that and be prepared to address the needs of those who will be misplaced in the CBAM planned system. In that case, you may only discover that the plan based on the needs assessment is not working after you get into the program.
  
  
• They know what they need but they won't tell you. - Some will answer your questions giving you what they think you want to hear, not what they really feel. Try to reduce this by clearly explaining in advance the need for candor and accurate data so planning addresses their real needs. However, unless there is trust, this pattern will happen to some extent anyway.

Therefore, when you develop plans, assume these factors are at work and that they will effect what you want to happen. Plan an alternative track, a make up session, or an information meeting in advance of the training. Then during the training or mentoring, specifically ask, "How many are (or are you) feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this information?" Those who answer ñYesî are advised into the alternative session or receive some form of additional support so that, by the time the whole group is ready for the next class or meeting, so are most of these "overwhelmed" individuals.

Allow for the fact that people learn at different speeds and in different ways. If you provide too much info in a verbally focused mode those who need examples, visuals etc. will not end the meeting at the same place as those whose learning needs were met. In other words, you must plan the BEST staff development you can that addresses all learner needs IF you expect to be able to move people along through the program at somewhat near the same pace (which sure helps in planning and implementing).

Never-the-less, some folks will want to drop out because they feel they can not succeed at the group's pace. In that case, you can plan program alternatives or one-on-one mentoring to keep them involved and growing at their own pace.