I recently learned the term “mise en place.” Its direct translation from French is “everything in its place.”
It is, quite literally, the practice of setting everything up and completing the basic prep work for a recipe before beginning to cook. While not a necessary step, the practice of mise en place is used by many successful professional kitchen staff, as it can ensure optimal performance in the kitchen and can help to reduce the number of challenges along the way to completing a delicious dish.
According to the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, mise en place encompasses a few critical steps: Reading the whole recipe, collecting your tools and gathering and prepping your ingredients by getting any washing, chopping or measuring out of the way first.
When I cook meals nowadays, I spend some time doing a mise en place. Are my knives cleaned and sharpened? Am I going to run out of garlic? Did I shred all of my blocks of cheese before beginning my mac and cheese recipe? Because if I don’t, I know I will risk overcooking my noodles or my roux by leaving the cheese for later. Cooking is a breeze when I incorporate this step. Thank you for the tip, professional chefs.
You and your learning and development team probably kicked off the new year with renewed focus and fresh recipes for success on your journey to hitting your company’s 2024 business objectives.
Benchmarking, or the process of evaluating something against “external criteria,” is an additional step high-performing companies can take to ensure they are running at the most efficient level. It’s a regularly scheduled pulse check that companies of all sizes and across industries use to identify and measure areas of improvement and performance gaps, predict market trends and increase efficiency across areas of business.
Routine benchmarking for any business or institution is like a professional kitchen’s routine mise en place before beginning a recipe.
Many areas of business — such as learning and development — can benefit from regular benchmarking of its functions against an external source, such as a robust data set. Chief Learning Officer’s LearningElite Awards program offers L&D organizations the opportunity to benchmark their performance across its functions year after year based on a data set of L&D’s best practices compiled from the best organizations in the industry.
Launched in 2011, the LearningElite program is a benchmarking and peer-review program that honors the top organizations in L&D. The program uses a powerful and evidence-based evaluation process to recognize individual organizations for their efforts across five functional areas of corporate L&D: Learning strategy, leadership commitment, learning execution, learning impact and business performance results.
What makes the program so vigorous is its use of data. Here is how it works: The application requires organizations to provide demographic information and responses to questions about these five functional areas. These applications are then evaluated and scored by a team of judges (learning practitioners and executives who have about 10 years of experience in the industry). These scores are used to establish the organization’s ranking of LearningElite organizations.
Each applicant organization also receives an individualized scorecard, which shows the organization’s performance across the five LearningElite dimensions against the benchmark and pinnacle scores. The scorecard also includes any comments judges have left about their application.
Additionally, this data is anonymized, analyzed and compiled into an annual benchmarking report, which creates a powerful yearly snapshot of the L&D landscape.
The program historically sees many returning organizations. It’s a genius move (in my not-so-biased opinion). These organizations are getting a look at how they are performing across these functional areas every year they apply, allowing them to identify what sets them up for success and where there is room for improvement. Benchmark, for better or worse.
With everything in its place, you’ll be well on your way to successfully executing your learning objectives and overarching business goals — ahem, recipes.
We begin accepting applications at midnight on April 1. I encourage you to learn more about this program and consider sharing it with your executive leadership team.
And, best of luck to all who choose to participate!
This article has been updated to reflect the new LearningElite submission date.
