A Spoonful of Sugar Can Make People Grumpy

December 16, 2008 – 11:31 am
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices With the economy in the condition it is, and the endless drumbeat of bad news we are all exposed to these days, you are no doubt delivering training and employee communications to people who are afraid, angry and suspicious. You may be teaching staff how to do their jobs better, while they are worrying about whether they will have jobs. You may be guiding employees in practices and procedures that benefit the company, but your participants are wondering what the company is going to do for—or to—them. Sometimes the connection between the economic downturn and the training function is fairly explicit. People may be learning new duties (with new processes and procedures) because layoffs leave fewer people to carry out all the company's business operations. Others are receiving communications about practices that they once carried out with larger budgets and more staff. Even in the best of ...

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Does Your “Sales Force” Know Your Business Plan?

November 18, 2008 – 12:11 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices Last time I wrote about the need for a true business plan approach to running your internal training function. Since training departments rely on funds from the rest of the company, almost a form of external financing, I suggested that most departments could benefit from crafting business plans similar to the ones small, independent training companies take to their creditors and investors. Here's one more lesson from small training companies: In a successful small business, everyone in the company knows the business plan. Every employee is aware of the goals, the target market, the key strategies that drive the company. Why? Because the "sales force" in a small company is everybody. Every time someone inside the company interacts with someone outside the company, that is an opportunity to promote the business, to build relationships that help them reach their goals. Your training department doesn't have a dedicated band ...

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You Need a Business Plan for your Corporate Training Department

November 10, 2008 – 5:12 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices As we all know, there are many small companies offering various kinds of training services. They may deliver standard seminars or provide coaching. They may offer content development, step in to facilitate internal discussions of various kinds or create delivery tools such as online courses. They may be one-person shops or small organizations with several employees. And almost every one of these small training consultancies has something that is rare in the departments of their corporate counterparts—a business plan. They have formal business plans for both philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, a business plan helps focus efforts on the opportunities, resources, and practices that lead to success. Practically, a business plan is required to get a loan or raise any other form of financing. These business plans don't have to be very elaborate. Simple answers to a few key questions will do most of the work: Who is ...

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Stretching Your Training “Meals” With Wraps

October 27, 2008 – 4:29 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices Go to just about any kind of restaurant these days and you'll find a "wrap" on the menu. Much less common even a decade ago, all kinds of entrees are rolled into a tortilla now (or sometimes, in my part of the country, into lefse!). The ingredients—what is packed into the wrap—are often the same as they were before wraps became popular—a stir fry, perhaps, that might have already been on the menu. But the simple addition of that wrap changes how you eat something you have had many times before. It changes the experience. For the restaurant, since wraps are so popular now, a very inexpensive addition to an existing dish, the tortilla, may make it possible to charge more for the same entree (or even for a smaller portion of the original entree). They can get a better outcome from the same, or perhaps reduced, ...

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Hire Complements, Not Clones

October 16, 2008 – 2:42 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices With the current downturn in the economy, many training functions will be looking to outside help to complete essential projects. When crucial training has to get done, or key employee communications must be developed, contracting the work with outsiders who require no benefits, payroll taxes, etc. can be quite cost effective. At the same time, some departments will still manage to fill staff positions where the need is recognized by the company. It's harder to do in these times, but it will happen. And whether it is outside help or new staff, many of those people will be selected to work on projects mainly for one reason, although no one will ever say this is the reason: because they are similar to the people making the hiring decision, making for easy conversations on both sides. In other words, there is a natural tendency to clone ourselves when hiring, ...

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The Cart and the Horse: Engaging Leadership Support

October 8, 2008 – 9:41 am
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices To promote key messages and crucial best practices that ensure success for your company, you are probably working to get the management visibly involved in your training activities, whether through some kind of public endorsement or by actually participating in the delivery of information. This can be a powerful boost to the impact of your employee communication and training efforts, but not just because of how statements from top management affect employees and how they do their jobs. Public statements about "how we do things around here" can have an equally powerful impact on the managers making the statements, and how they do their jobs! The common practice is to build support with management, to work on them until you are confident they are committed to the training message and then have them come in and display that commitment in front of the employees. We tend to look ...

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Economic Meltdown Points to Power of Training

September 30, 2008 – 10:52 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices Sometimes companies treat training and employee communications as a "nice to have," as a luxury. Oh, they don't come out and say that, but the eagerness with which they cut budgets for these functions in a downturn reveals much about their perceived value to the organization. Ironically, the current economic crisis gives powerful testimony to the impact of training and employee communications! Think about all that you have read and heard about this economic downturn, including the practices in the mortgage industry and other financial services. Some of what you have seen recently probably has you asking, "Why in the world did they behave that way?" On the level of the individual employee, they behaved that way because that is how they were told to behave! Remember, the news has not been filled with reports of rogue employees. From time to time, in financial services, somehow an individual manages ...

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Goldilocks Teaches Us About SeatS At TableS

September 26, 2008 – 4:27 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices You all remember our old friend Goldilocks, who, like so many of the chief learning officers and training directors I have encountered, was looking for "a seat at the table". Now, we are all inclined to think that Goldilocks was a bit fussy about things, such as the temperature of her porridge, but she did find a seat that was "just right" along the way. Goldilocks, of course, was an individual, while the Three Bears were more like an organization. They had different seats suited to different "levels" of the organization, namely, the Papa, Mama and Baby Bear levels. And that organization was happiest, no doubt, when all the seats were in use, along with all the bowls of porridge, each seat the right size for the bear sitting in it, each bowl of porridge the preferred temperature. If you are engaged in training or employee ...

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Training Tradeoffs III: Experts—What They Know, What They Can Do

September 16, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices One of the most valuable contributions you can make to your company (or to a client) as a training professional is managing your experts! Whether you are rolling out a new procedure or introducing a new product or service, there's a good chance that you will be working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), either from within your organization, or from outside. These individuals are naturally respected for their in-depth command of the facts and figures, their mastery of the details of your topic. Problems arise when "experts" are revered as "EXPERTS," if you will, when you step back and give them roles in the project that exceed their capabilities. The role of the SME is to provide an accurate body of knowledge on a given topic. The role of the expert communicator is to take that knowledge and process it into a message that will have ...

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All Aboard! (II): Go Granular!

September 9, 2008 – 4:46 pm
Will Kenny, Best Training Practices Is your "onboarding" content a giant block of granite, a monument to "the way we have always done it"? Even if you are just now developing your message to new employees, providing basic orientation and explaining essential values and processes of your organization to new hires, it is all too easy to stay at the "big picture" level when a more granular or modular approach—working in smaller bits and pieces—could dramatically increase your impact. Your company wants to run as lean as possible, which means getting new employees up to speed quickly. And efficiency means avoiding the most costly approach of all—having to redo training and communications around topics that don't "stick" the first time. Take that massive pile of information for new hires and cut it down into modules, along these lines: Break the content into the smallest units possible, each one ...

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