http://engagingexpert.com Showing non-trainers how to create powerful training experiences Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:45:00 +0000 http://snappages.com en http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/07/25/3-skills-that-make-you-look-like-a-facilitation-pro http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/07/25/3-skills-that-make-you-look-like-a-facilitation-pro Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:45:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/07/25/3-skills-that-make-you-look-like-a-facilitation-pro The Engaging Expert: A Fieldbook for Occasional Presenters and Accidental Trainers. The book walks you through all the steps from the moment you are asked to share your expertise with a group through proving it had an impact afterward.

Below is a quick [...]]]> The Engaging Expert: A Fieldbook for Occasional Presenters and Accidental Trainers. The book walks you through all the steps from the moment you are asked to share your expertise with a group through proving it had an impact afterward.

Below is a quick excerpt from the chapter called “Wow Your Audience.”

These techniques add more than just polishing touches to your presentation. They recapture audience attention, which must be re-won regularly throughout your session.

“Better attention always equals better learning,” explains John Medina, director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University . “We have known for a long time that ‘interest’ or ‘importance’ is inextricably linked to attention. … [Marketing professionals] have known for years that novel stimuli – the unusual, unpredictable or distinctive – are powerful ways to harness attention in the service of interest.”

Excerpt: Wow Your Audience

Establishing Groups

You can squander an awful lot of time having participants group themselves with no guidance from you. Speed it up, make it genuinely random, and add an element of the unexpected by using categories like these.

• “If you have been in this industry less than one year, go to this corner. If you have been in it for two to five years, go to that corner. If you have been around longer than five years, come to this corner.”


• “Look at the playing card you drew when you came into the room. Form a group with the people who are holding the same suit as you are.”
• “If you listened to the radio on your way here this morning, raise your hand. You are the ______ group.”


• “Look at the amount of green, yellow and/or black you are wearing. If you have more green than the other colors, go to this corner of the room; if you are wearing more yellow than the other colors, go to that corner of the room …."


• “If your birthday is in the first half of the year, go to this side of the room; if your birthday is in the second half of the room, go to that side of the room.”


• “You can also divide groups by which quarter of the year their birthday falls in, or even which month to get lots of groups. You will probably need to adjust the group sizes after the fact with these options, but it’s plenty easy to do.”


• “Who is your favorite James Bond? If you prefer Sean Connery in the role … Roger Moore …” etc.


• “Everyone choose a [candy bar] from the pile on your table.” (Wait for everyone to select an item from a pre-defined variety.) “All the people who chose [Milky Way], gather over here. [Salted Nut Rolls] gather over there, …” etc.

Choosing Individuals for Specific Roles

Often in small-group activities you need someone to serve as the leader or table spokesperson or as the recorder taking notes or writing answers.

Randomizing how you choose an individual within a small group relieves some anxiety, often induces laughter and maintains interest. Here are a few ways to identify specific people quickly and efficiently, with a dollop of humor that adds interest.

“Find the person in your group ….

• who has done [your topic] before”
• who most recently delivered a presentation of some kind.”
• whose birthday falls closest to today.”
• who is the tallest.”
• who is wearing the most red.”
• with the most change in his or her pocket or purse.”
• with the biggest face … on your watch!”
• who traveled the greatest distance to get here today.”
• who most recently fed a pet.”
• who has the most siblings.”
• who has the most anatomical legs in their home.”
• who most recently bought a book.”

Tip: To add humor and an element of surprise, once you identify a specific person in a small group, indicate that the leader will be the person to his or her left, for example, or someone else in the group that the person you identified chooses.


Raising or Lowering the Energy in the Room

To raise the energy in a quiet group,

• If you don’t get any answers when you ask the large group a question, say, “Take 30 seconds at your tables and brainstorm the answer.”


• Do a pairs activity. Having lots of people talking at the same time raises the level of energy in a room.


• Use high-energy music to set the tone during breaks and to cue the beginning and end of group activities.


• Introduce movement. For example, ask participants to answer a poll question by standing or moving to one side of the room or the other to “cast their vote.”


• To reduce the energy of a boisterous group,


• Do a small groups activity using groups of at least 4-8. Having fewer people talking at the same time lowers the energy in a room.


• Do an individual reading or writing activity -- possibly with calm music to cue the beginning and end of the time for individuals to work.


• Suggest a short break, during which you might put on soothing music.

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/03/25/if-youre-going-to-make-rabbit-stew-first-you-have-to-catch-the-rabbit http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/03/25/if-youre-going-to-make-rabbit-stew-first-you-have-to-catch-the-rabbit Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:19:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/03/25/if-youre-going-to-make-rabbit-stew-first-you-have-to-catch-the-rabbit
As they say, if you’re going to make rabbit stew, first [...]]]>
As they say, if you’re going to make rabbit stew, first you have to catch the rabbit!

Our rebranding efforts for Accidental Trainer have us thinking about the importance of titles for the people we serve too. After all the effort participants in our workshops put into reworking their content and delivery, it would be more than a little discouraging to discover the title of the session failed to attract an audience to appreciate it.

So what makes a title effective at catching the interest of the people you want in your workshops? Or, if they have no choice but to come, how could your title signal that your offering is considerably better than business as usual?

Well, if the title of this blog post caught your attention, then our intent of provoking curiosity was successful. What do rabbits have to do with Accidental Trainer’s mission of helping experts get what they know out of their head so others can apply it?

If the focus of this post were slightly different, we could have used a specific number (“Six ways to write titles that draw an audience”), since people seem to like learning a defined number of things.

We could have used a “how to” (“How to write presentation titles that change the world”) or tips and tricks (“Tips and tricks to attract a huge audience with your workshop title alone”). Promising specific solutions to specific challenges faced by your audience is far more enticing than merely stating your topic (“Writing Effective Titles”).

Another method could have been to frame the title as a question (“Why does it matter what I call my presentation?”). Or make it a warning (“Why your workshop title might send your audience screaming in the opposite direction”).

These techniques all start with the target audience’s perspective rather than the presenter’s. They speak to specific challenges, promise specific benefits or, at the very least, evoke specific ideas that your target audience is not expecting in connection with their interests.

Starting by thinking from the perspective of the people you want to influence should sound familiar, of course. To paraphrase something you just might have heard a time or two in one of our workshops, what do you want your people to DO when they see your title?

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/25/challenge-from-the-real-world-adding-%e2%80%9cpractice%e2%80%9d-to-orientation-training http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/25/challenge-from-the-real-world-adding-%e2%80%9cpractice%e2%80%9d-to-orientation-training Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:16:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/25/challenge-from-the-real-world-adding-%e2%80%9cpractice%e2%80%9d-to-orientation-training
But seriously, how in the world would you add a “practice” component to new-member orientation? What’s there to practice?

We decided that the [...]]]>
But seriously, how in the world would you add a “practice” component to new-member orientation? What’s there to practice?

We decided that the biggest difference between someone who had taken orientation and someone who hadn’t was probably the way they would select which participation opportunities to use. There was too much for anyone to do everything offered.

So one of the key actions we wanted from orientation graduates was to pick out the activities and events that most interested them from a more-or-less continuous, seemingly random stream of information from the organization.

Here’s one of the ways we created for participants to practice:

• We invented profiles of several imaginary members -- complete with pictures to make them more “real” -- with dramatically different professional needs and constraints.
• We created job-aid-style descriptions of all the ways to get involved in the association, grouping them in ways that were easy to search.
• During orientation we distributed the profiles of our imaginary new members to small groups of participants.
• We set out the involvement “job aids” and gave groups 10 minutes to identify what they would recommend to each of their imaginary people, given their particular imaginary circumstances.

After about 10 minutes for exploring the options and discussing the best matches for each profile, participants reported their recommendations to the group.

The result was dramatically different from what happened with the same content in the previous version of orientation. No droning presenter, no shifting quietly in chairs, no glazed eyes. Instead there was energy and laughter and plenty of discussion of what the real people in the session were going to choose for their own participation.

And that, of course, was exactly what everyone wanted.

Who knew such dry lecture could become such animated practice?



]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/10/but-they-really-need-to-know-this http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/10/but-they-really-need-to-know-this Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:32:32 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2011/01/10/but-they-really-need-to-know-this
How do you trim your content when so much of it is important?

Change your question. In fact, change just one word of your question.

Presenters almost always start by [...]]]>
How do you trim your content when so much of it is important?

Change your question. In fact, change just one word of your question.

Presenters almost always start by asking themselves, “What do I want them to know?”

But something powerful happens when you change it to, “What do I want them to do?”

The impact of using this approach is a detailed part of Accidental Trainer workshops, but the gist of it comes back to this idea: Imagine you are a fly on the wall watching two people go about their work. One of them took the required workshop, and one of them did not. Now, from your position as a fly on the wall, how can you tell which is which?

What do you see? How can you tell from watching their behavior that one of them knows what you need them to know?

What does the “trained” person need to know in order to be able to do what she is doing? And if push came to shove, could she still do it if she didn’t know this bit of content? Or that bit of content? Could she get by and still be effective if she simply knew where to find the information she needs?

Presenters who have the discipline to be ruthlessly honest with themselves as they examine these sorts of questions find that the “nice to know” content begins to fall away naturally, and even the “need to know” starts to shrink. You’ll know it’s time to stop when there is nothing left to strip away.

Now that limited presentation times seems a bit less daunting. And you are probably in for a pleasant surprise at the often dramatically improved impact.


For more about using this approach effectively, come learn how to do “action mapping” at an Accidental Trainer workshop.





]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/11/26/earning-the-attention-of-a-prehistoric-brain http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/11/26/earning-the-attention-of-a-prehistoric-brain Fri, 26 Nov 2010 17:31:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/11/26/earning-the-attention-of-a-prehistoric-brain
Dutifully the third graders focus on the task at hand … until someone walks by the window. Up go the little heads, eyes on the movement.

Are the kids “paying attention”? Sure they are.

From their brains’ perspective, with movement comes the [...]]]>
Dutifully the third graders focus on the task at hand … until someone walks by the window. Up go the little heads, eyes on the movement.

Are the kids “paying attention”? Sure they are.

From their brains’ perspective, with movement comes the possibility of threats. Is that a bird swooping by? or maybe a rock aimed at your head? Millennia of evolutionary experience make determining whether or not to duck an immediate, possibly life-and-death priority.

To the brain, attention is all about risk management.

To the trainer, teaching is all about repeatedly earning that attention.

Your Brain’s Alert System

In a sense, your brain is always paying attention, continually scanning the environment for anything unusual -- an “intrinsic alertness,” to use the jargon of neuroscience. Changes, novelty or contrast trigger what neuroscientist pioneer Michael Posner famously dubbed the “alerting” or “arousing” stage of attention.

An example familiar to parents everywhere would be the change from the sounds of raucous play to abrupt whispers and silence. To the manager, it might be the sudden drop in the volume when she enters a room full of employees.

With the parental or managerial brain alerted to an abrupt change in the noise level, it next seeks to identify the nature and source of that change. Posner called this “orienting.”

Finally the brain’s executive function kicks in and makes a decision about what to do about the sudden silence that set off the alert. (Unfortunately for the grammatical symmetry of the model, Posner does not appear to have a tidy “-ing” to label this focused attention.)

Earning Attention

What does all this have to do with training?

Your participants need to be paying attention in order to learn whatever it is you are trying to teach them. Obvious, right?

But their brains’ intrinsic alertness keeps right on scanning the environment; and after about 10 minutes or so, your content drops off the top of the priorities list, if only for a few moments.

In the words of authors Stolovitch and Keeps*, “Attention, like breathing, tends to be automatically controlled. You can take charge of both of them for a short time, but as soon as you cease consciously controlling them, they revert to automatic.”

So as you pass roughly the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, you need to give participants’ brains a good reason to keep paying attention.

That means introducing change, novelty or contrast.

Not just any old change, novelty or contrast, of course. It needs to be relevant to the flow of what you are teaching. Breaking out into song would certainly recapture your participants’ attention, but it wouldn’t do much to enhance your credibility in a class about, say, how to operate your new enterprise-wide software. (And it would probably do nothing to improve participants’ ability to use the system, would it?)

Even with less blatant tactics, punctuating your presentation irrelevant attention-getters will only make your talk seem disjointed, and you’ll still miss your objective of helping your participants learn.

What kind of change will set off the brain’s alert system and earn you another 10 minutes of focused attention?

Emotions Help Anchor Learning

Remember that the more parts of the brain that are involved in encoding new information, the better that information sticks. And the brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

So possibly the single most effective way to trigger an orienting response and recapture executive attention is to evoke an emotion --fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity, and on and on.

What might that look like? A quick anecdote to illustrate your point, for example. Or posing an interesting question about it. Or sharing a jarring statistic. Or asking participants to share their reaction with a partner or at their table groups. If it breaks the pattern or changes the pace of what you had been doing for the previous nine and a half minutes, it can re-arouse participants’ attention.

Once you earn their attention, you have another opportunity to help them learn. And you have spared the world from a round of well-intentioned dullness. Everybody wins.




*Harold D. Stolovich & Erika J. Keeps in their best-selling book Telling Ain’t Training


]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/10/15/t-t-t-temptation-why-your-mouth-is-often-not-the-best-way-to-get-knowledge-out-of-your-head http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/10/15/t-t-t-temptation-why-your-mouth-is-often-not-the-best-way-to-get-knowledge-out-of-your-head Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:55:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/10/15/t-t-t-temptation-why-your-mouth-is-often-not-the-best-way-to-get-knowledge-out-of-your-head
When you are an expert or a specialist tasked with teaching other people about what you know, the siren song of your own voice can be astonishingly seductive.

It’s nothing you intend, of course. You’re [...]]]>
When you are an expert or a specialist tasked with teaching other people about what you know, the siren song of your own voice can be astonishingly seductive.

It’s nothing you intend, of course. You’re passionate about your topic. After all, you invested quite a bit of time and energy to learn what you have. And naturally you want to help people avoid many of the mistakes you made along the way.

So you explain as much as you can in the time you have, trying to squeeze as much helpful information into the session as the clock allows. But the more you try to help, the less they seem to learn. How maddening!

It turns out that when you are trying to train others, the most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is not via your mouth or even via your written words.

The most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is to create experiences for the people you are training.

For one thing, you probably don’t even recognize all the stuff you know. Many of the nuances have long since become so automatic that you’re no longer aware of them; you take them for granted as an obvious given.

Skeptical? Imagine yourself in the passenger seat trying to teach a complete novice how to drive. Could you really describe all the subtle things you do as a matter of course when you drive? When you press on the accelerator or the brake, how much pressure is too much or too little? How do you convey the “feel” of the best moment to hit the clutch and change gears?

That gap between what you know how to do and what you can actually explain is the difference between “procedural knowledge” and “declarative knowledge.”

So what is an expert or specialist to do? You can’t dump your experiences into someone else’s head.

But you can create targeted experiences for your learners. When you isolate a key concept to convey, you can pour the richness of your procedural knowledge into creating ways for your learners to practice it -- preferably ways that mimic the real world where they will be applying what you teach them.

In the case of your novice driver, you might find an empty parking lot or little-used country road where he or she can safely practice accelerating and braking without simultaneously worrying about turn signals and cross traffic and the hundreds of other details demanding a driver’s attention.

In a case of training new convenience-store managers, you can provide simplified scenarios that help them practice making key choices. Then gradually add more and more of the variables at play in the Real World. As an experienced convenience-store manager, you know these variables and their significance better than anyone. You know which details will create that certain “feel” you get when you are in a given situation and need to take action.

It’s not easy, of course, to stand back and let people practice -- making mistakes and correcting them with minimal intervention from you. You want to help! And they want you to help them. “I’d like your opinion about ….”

But in training, only a portion of what you know can get out of your head with words. Let your expertise out by creating targeted experiences, where much more of the richness of what you don’t realize you know can be absorbed by the people you train.


]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/07/27/to-help-them-learn-make-them http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/07/27/to-help-them-learn-make-them Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:20:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/07/27/to-help-them-learn-make-them
People in all sorts of situations tend to remember incomplete tasks or issues much more readily than completed ones. The lack of closure that stems from an unfinished task promotes some continued task-related cognitive effort.

It’s [...]]]>
People in all sorts of situations tend to remember incomplete tasks or issues much more readily than completed ones. The lack of closure that stems from an unfinished task promotes some continued task-related cognitive effort.

It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect, after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. She noticed that wait staff seemed to remember individual orders surprisingly well … until after the order was served.

In her 1962 work "The Pathology of Thinking," Zeigarnik theorized that an incomplete task or unfinished business creates “psychic tension” within us. This tension acts as a motivator to drive us toward completing the task or finishing the business.

Good speakers will often use this effectively with an opening story or metaphor, stopping just short of finishing the idea. With the story left at maximum tension, the audience remains alert to clues to how it ends, which helps them absorb the rest of what they speaker is saying before resolving the tension.

In the context of helping people learn, you can use the Zeigarnik effect in a couple of ways.

When you are facilitating, stop small-group and partner discussions when you notice the volume in the room is just starting to drop after reaching its loudest. Then “finish” the idea as a large group.

When you are writing training, build in this delay. For example, open a new chunk of content with an unfinished story. Frame your subsequent content in terms of how the story might be resolved or the problem solved.

When you “close the loop” on that section of content, participants’ brains reward resolving the tension with a nice little dose of natural opiates. Now you have helped them to absorb the ideas you are trying to teach and to feel good about doing so. It’s a win-win all around.

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/06/07/your-brain-on-powerpoint http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/06/07/your-brain-on-powerpoint Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:22:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/06/07/your-brain-on-powerpoint
But your slide deck still seems so ... blah. And you suspect it's not pulling its weight [...]]]>
But your slide deck still seems so ... blah. And you suspect it's not pulling its weight in helping your audience to learn about your topic.

Well scientists and academics have been working on that very issue. And they have found some very useful things.

We'll focus on just one of them here: cognitive load.

The concept, developed by John Sweller, refers to the amount of work required to understand something. In a sense, it refers to a kind of "traffic jam" in your brain's processing of information.

If you can keep information "traffic" flowing smoothly with your slides, you are well on your way to becoming a PowerPoint superstar.

Lightening the Load

One of the simplest things you can do to reduce cognitive traffic jams for your audience is to simplify your slides. Yup. Just stripping away whatever is not absolutely essential helps reduce the number of distracting elements competing for attention.

As a rule there aren't any prizes for having the fewest slides. Can you spread your concept from one or two busy slides to several sparse ones?

Competing Pathways

If you have lots of words on your slide, and worse, if what you are saying follows those words really closely, your audience is already skimming ahead to the last few bullet points when you haven't even finished with the first one. The effect in your brain is a bit like a movie with the sound track slightly off. Their eyes and their ears are literally providing competing input about what should be a unified scene. Traffic jam.

You can show some mercy for your audience by slashing the number of words on any given slide. A few key words to help them remember your major concepts will go a long way.

Letters Are Pictures

But not the kind that get processed efficiently. The input from your eyes is broken down into dozens of different components -- diagonal lines, horizontal and vertical lines, curves, textures, colors, etc. Your visual cortex has highly specialized areas that process very specific features of what you see before all the components get reassembled and interpreted.

Granted, all this happens really, really fast. But it does take measurably longer for your brain to process a series of abstract little pictures, say, T-I-G-E-R, than it does for it to process an image of a certain striped feline.

Another Round of Processing

Letters are symbols, of course, representing aspects of language. So the symbols need another layer of specialized interpretation.

Your auditory cortex and the areas around it are the major players in processing language, both spoken and written. So during a bullet-point-heavy presentation, this area is already busy interpreting the spoken words being picked up by your ears.

Meanwhile, back at the visual cortex, there's no interesting new input to process, and that part of the brain starts getting a little bored.

What's a presenter to do? Pictures and other visuals are your friend. Whenever you can covey a concept visually -- with an image or a graph, etc. -- you'll help keep both the visual and auditory corteces happy, and you'll give your ideas extra sticking power.

Relieving Traffic Congestion

How you design your slides can make a big difference in whether your audience's cognitive "traffic" flows smoothly or gets snarled in congestion.

One of the easiest, most high-impact ways you can keep things moving is to simplify your PowerPoint slides. Limit the number of concepts on each slide, and strip away any elements that you can get by without.

Can you trim a few more words? And a few more? Can you convey at least part of the the idea visually instead?

Your audience will appreciate how much easier it is to absorb what they are trying to learn from you.

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/05/18/audience-participation-fail-and-how-to-avoid-it http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/05/18/audience-participation-fail-and-how-to-avoid-it Tue, 18 May 2010 08:08:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/05/18/audience-participation-fail-and-how-to-avoid-it
Silence.

You wince in sympathy, possibly remembering a time when it was you speaking to an unresponsive audience. It can be the stuff of nightmares.

So what went wrong? Odds are the facilitator did one or more of the [...]]]>
Sometimes it’s painful even to watch. The facilitator poses a question to the group.

Silence.

You wince in sympathy, possibly remembering a time when it was you speaking to an unresponsive audience. It can be the stuff of nightmares.

So what went wrong? Odds are the facilitator did one or more of the following:

Asked for participation before warming up the audience
Asked trite questions that didn’t add value or help people absorb the material
Asked people to answer out loud with no thinking or rehearsal time.

So what can you do to avoid the fate of the poor soul who just created that awkward moment?

Here are a few tactics that will help you get participants energized and talking:

30-second rehearsal: Next time you toss out a question that meets with dead air, say, “Take 30 seconds at your table and brainstorm some possible answers.”

Raise the volume with partners: Have participants share their answers with a partner, which maximizing the number people talking at the same time. This immediately raises the energy in the room. (Conversely, if you need to quiet a boisterous classroom, reduce the number of simultaneous voices by grouping them in larger numbers – like sets of four, six or eight.)

Cue the music: Having energetic music playing before a training session starts can make a surprising difference. And playing it in the background when you ask participants to do something in pairs or groups serves the double purpose of 1) raising the energy, and 2) acting as a signal for when to begin the discussion and when to end it.

Cut Discussions a Little Bit Short: Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. She theorized that an incomplete task or unfinished business creates “psychic tension” within us and this tension acts as a motivator to drive us toward completing the task or finishing the business. It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect. For facilitators this means stopping small-group discussions when you notice the volume in the room is just starting to drop after reaching its loudest. Then “finish” the idea as a large group.

True for You: Have participants stand at their seats. As they hear each statement they should sit down and immediately stand back up again if the statement is true for them. (If it’s not true for them, they simply remain standing.) It’s important to start from and return to a standing position; that’s what makes it such a powerful energizer. Statements you use are limited only by your imagination. Here are some examples:

Just for fun: “You remember exactly where you were when you heard Elvis had died”
Learning about the group: “You have been in this industry for less than three years.”
Reinforcing content: “You will have a chance to apply the _____ technique within a week.”

So what are your favorite tactics for energizing a quiet group? Share them in the comments!

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/03/18/so-what-are-you-really-after http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/03/18/so-what-are-you-really-after Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:23:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/03/18/so-what-are-you-really-after
Stop.

Resist that powerful temptation to respond, “Yes, sir, yes, ma’am, when do you need it?”

You have just been handed a beautiful opportunity to show your value, even if you are not an expert [...]]]>
Stop.

Resist that powerful temptation to respond, “Yes, sir, yes, ma’am, when do you need it?”

You have just been handed a beautiful opportunity to show your value, even if you are not an expert trainer.

“I’m happy to help you with that,” you say. “Let’s talk about what you are hoping this training will do for you.”

At the moment she thinks she needs training. And given her workload, she probably hasn’t had time to think much further than that. So the greatest service you can give is to help her dig down -- quickly and painlessly -- to real clarity on the end result she wants.

Achieving such clarity isn’t easy for most of us. And if you haven’t thought through the types of useful questions you should have ready for occasions like these, all the knowledge you have about formulating them will leak right out of your head when you need it most.

Your questions should keep coming back to two things:

1) What will the people in the class DO differently after the training? How would an observer be able to tell if someone was properly trained? (Remember the fly-on-the-wall analogy.)
2) How will this training (and resulting change in performance) help meet specific business objectives? How will the training help with the timeless business goals of IRACIS: Increase Revenue, Avoid Costs or Improve Service?

If training really is the right tool to address the issue, this discussion surfaces the information you need to design effective learning activities and make a real impact on performance.

Of course, it may turn out that training won’t be the answer to the problem at hand. If that is the case, good for you! You saved the organization time and other resources that would have been devoted to something that would not have solved the problem. Now the manager can focus on more effective measures instead.

Bonus points: Maybe you see right away that training won’t solve the manager’s problem. You don’t need to let on immediately. If you let the manager figure that out for herself as a result of your insightful questions, you look even smarter!

Download this checklist of useful questions, and in the comments below share the additional questions you like to use.

]]> http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/02/14/you-showed-them-what-to-do-now-can-you-see-the-difference http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/02/14/you-showed-them-what-to-do-now-can-you-see-the-difference Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:41:00 +0000 Terri http://engagingexpert.com/blog/2010/02/14/you-showed-them-what-to-do-now-can-you-see-the-difference
Naturally you want to do a good job. And you genuinely want to help your colleagues succeed.

Furthermore, you know [...]]]>
Naturally you want to do a good job. And you genuinely want to help your colleagues succeed.

Furthermore, you know that it takes very nearly the same amount of effort to create a dull, mediocre training as it does to create something powerful. So why not create something with real impact?

So you start at the end result -- when the participants are back on the job.

Imagine you are a fly on the wall watching two people going about their work. One of them took the training you created. The other did not.

From your perspective as a fly on the wall, how do you determine which is which?

Remember, a fly can’t read minds. The only way the fly can determine whether someone knows something is by observing their behavior.

What is the trained employee doing that the untrained one is not? What are the specific actions you see as this fly one the wall that lead you to conclude Jose took the training, and Jane did not?

Incidentally, while true-false questions and matching games are common in training, you may notice a conspicuous absence of these in the day-to-day work of Jose and Jane. “Proof” that they know something new shows up in their actions.

So what are the implications of these imagined observations for the training you are about to put together?

1) Start by thinking through what participants need to DO rather than what they need to know.
2) Create exercises or practice scenarios that imitate as closely as possible what participants should be doing back on the job.
3) NOW -- and only now -- you are ready to identify what participants will need to know in order to do the activities you designed.

Here's a list of questions to help you dig down to the specifics of what participants need to DO back on the job.

When they take your training, your participants will be impressed at the value of what you provided. But if your workplace is accustomed to lecture and “death by PowerPoint,” the manager requesting the training might not be so impressed by the early drafts.

Next time: How to negotiate with the manager so that everybody wins.

What do you think we were hoping you would do as a result of reading this post? What would a fly on the wall observe watching you? Let us know in the comments!

]]>