Training Material, Training, and Behavior Modification: Part 2 of 3 - Training
(This is part two of a three part series. Part one is here and part three will be posted on Friday.)
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” - Mark Twain
My guess is that, on any given day, thousands in the world-wide work force attend some form of corporate training. It could be software governance training for the pointy-haired bosses, how to use a juicer for department store workers, or keeping fingers away from the business end of a chainsaw for lumberjacks, but it’s training nonetheless.
The training might be delivered in the form of a short video, some eLearning module, or a class led by an instructor. It may have an integrated quiz, or require you to go do some additional exercises, or be taught one day per week for some period of time, or whatever. The possibilities aren’t endless, but there are a fair number of them.
Beyond the training requirements discussed previously, you also need to figure out what training styles works for your people in your environment. Having said that, I think there are a few rules that are fairly universal:
- Be as formal in your presentation method as you need to and then just a touch more. I find that too little formality in training is far worse than too much. Too little formality is often perceived by students as “We had to do this training to check the box, so let’s get through it.”
- Stick to your schedule. If it says “Start at 9am,” then start at 9am. If you’re breaking for 10 minutes, get started in 10 minutes. To some degree, we all want to wait for that last straggler. Don’t do it; you’re just penalizing everyone else who had the professionalism to be punctual. Class management is always hard. You may in fact be the tech dweeb presenting to a room full of executives. On that day and at that time, however, you are in charge of that class; act like it. Professionally. Doing it unprofessionally is definitely a career-limiting move.
- Use eLearning (or computer-based training or whatever you call it) for awareness and to give basic skills to the masses. It’s very important, however, to use instructor-led training (ILT) for teaching important execution skills to your practitioners. It doesn’t matter how many times you watch the video of the expert performing the trick, even in slow motion with arrows and explanations, most people still won’t learn a new skill that way.
- Make sure you can actually teach the material in the time allotted. That usually means you must ban the typical distractions. That includes Blackberries, laptops, various PDAs, and so on. Yes, even for the executives. Stop the side conversations, keep everyone on topic, and tell people who have long, rambling, just-don’t-get-it questions that you’ll get back to them after class. When you rush through the last 20% of the material to stay on schedule, students feel cheated. On the other hand, if you scheduled two hours for a thirty minute class, that’s a completely different screw up and your students will likely be just as irritated.
- Give people sufficient breaks so that they don’t have to violate your other rules. I find that most people, including the instructor, can concentrate only for about 90 minutes at a time. For really dense stuff, that time might be reduced significantly so partition your material appropriately. Also, ensure you provide what people typically want during breaks: snacks, beverages, easy access to a restroom, and a network connection. I imagine millions of person-minutes of training are lost every year just because someone didn’t think of spending $20 to set out some mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks.
I argue with myself, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, over whether the material or the instructor is the most important part of technical training. Today, I believe that it’s far more likely that a good instructor can save truly awful material than it is likely that a bad instructor will successfully deliver even the best of material. If you’re good at getting a class excited about a topic and you can talk about the topic authoritatively, you’ll rise above the material.
Let me emphasize that more. If you’re the instructor, you must know more than what’s in the training materials. If you can’t go off-script even a little, you’re the wrong person for the job. Excuse yourself graciously rather than wasting everyone’s time. The amount by which you need to go off-script will depend on the skill level of your students, but you certainly should be able to answer questions about rationale, goals, why another way isn’t the right answer, and how it would be done in a scenario somewhat different from the one presented.
When going off-script, it would be great if you can do so in three ways:
- Visual stuff, for the people who learn from what they see. For these people, you must be able to provide visual aids. Draw a picture on a white board, or make a hand-out, or have an exercise where people draw out the process, or whatever. Always give the visual people something to imprint on.
- Auditory stuff, for the people who learn from what they hear. For these people, it’s not just what you say, but it’s also how you say it. They’ll pick up on subtle clues in your delivery that can sabotage your purpose. In other words, be able to be excited about digging deeper. If you think Section 4 is boring, you’ll present it that way, and they’ll believe it. Be interested, not just interesting, and give the auditory people something to pick up on.
- Kinesthetic stuff, for the people who learn from what they feel, physically or emotionally. For these people, you have to get them involved in the problem and the solution. For some, that will be an emotional connection and for others that will be some manner of hands-on demo. Whenever possible, let the kinesthetic folks touch something.
Good speakers always have good notes from which to speak. Don’t be afraid to have a cheat sheet of important points. And don’t be afraid to lecture. Just don’t do it the whole time. Give people the motive, the rationale, the philosophy, or whatever it takes to get them involved in the problem. Then switch to some practical visual, auditory, or kinesthetic stuff to show them how to execute the solution.
Now, I’m not talking about any of those group hug things, because there are also introverts and extroverts in the world. Making an introverted, visually-oriented person do role playing as part of training is just torture. They’ll hate you forever. On the other hand, not only are the extroverted kinesthetic folks excited at the prospect, they’ll show up with streamers and brownies and hold annual reunions. Sigh.
When you’re presenting technical training material, whether as part of ILT or an eLearning quiz, make sure you ask some open-ended questions. This is a great opportunity to let the students use their own words to tell you what they’re thinking. By listening carefully, you’ll be able to tell who really gets it and who struggling to keep up. That will help out a lot in an ILT setting when you’re making teams for group exercises. (Hint: Don’t let all those struggling students end up in one group.)
Training creators and instructors must remember that there will be students with whom you have no shared experiences. They don’t know Babe Ruth, don’t get your Simpson’s references, and are quite alarmed at your claims that sometimes you just need to “kick some ass,” “gore some oxen,” or “kill some sacred cows” to get what you want. This is not my soapbox for political correctness; this is just my experience telling you that teaching via analogy, colloquialism, and local cultural reference often results in a lot of blank stares (like with my upcoming G.I. Joe reference). Life may be like “a box of chocolates” for millions of people, but there may be billions who’ve never even seen a box of chocolates, much less a Tom Hanks movie.
Take the time to tell students what you want them to do when they leave the class. Don’t just talk around it. Really lay out the activities they should undertake and the changes that should occur when they do. Think of it like writing a software requirement. You can write “The system shall…” all day long, but until you actually show the person who has to do it a use case or a scenario or a drawing or something, there’s virtually no chance of getting the behavior (or code or process or whatever) you intended.
Remember, our brain is likely to simply reject any message that it can’t process. Why might that processing not happen? In my experience, the top causes are:
- For new skills, you’ve provided no frame of reference for the student. There no place to latch onto and say “Oh, this is like that other thing I know how to do, only different.”
- For extensions to existing skills, there’s too big a gap between the student’s skill and what you’re teaching, and you’re not providing enough framework for the student to make it over. Either you jumped right into the guts of the material without adequate preamble or someone did a poor job of choosing the students.
- One or more of the material, the presentation method, or the instructor is simply lousy. If the materials seem good and the method is well thought-out and constructed, then it’s probably the instructor. It’s impossible to describe all the ways training material can be lousy, but one of the most prevalent is that it’s just stale. Teaching the same old stuff year after year without ever updating it is just silly. As for the instructor, not everyone is cut out for teaching. I’ve seen some real world-class technical experts do indescribably horrible jobs in front of a class, just as I’ve seen non-practitioners (never actually did this work for money in their lives, but truly understand the topic) teach wonderful classes.
By the way, don’t send the wrong subliminal message with your training. If you’re having a session on the importance of corporate intellectual property, ethics, and how file sharing is wrong, you probably shouldn’t sprinkle some “borrowed” Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes, and Far Side cartoons in your presentation, while playing a downloaded Van Halen soundtrack in the background. Duh.
Trust me, if you really care about the training you’re giving, as well as the behavior you’re trying to encourage, it will show in the material and in your delivery. This energy is contagious. Chances are that you want these students to stretch themselves in ways that are new and possibly even undesired. Give them every opportunity to succeed. If the training appeals to their senses, they’ll be more engaged and they’ll retain more. If the training appeals to their sensibilities, they’ll be more engaged and they’ll actually follow through.
