“Training”? Watch Your Language!

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Training is a key tool in spreading best practices throughout your organization. But if you don’t think about how you throw the word “training” around in your company, it could become a dirty word.

Now, I don’t mean that people will gasp at your impropriety in saying “training” out loud. I mean that it is “dirty” when it works against you, when it leads key audiences—managers who approve your projects, colleagues who support your efforts and participants who apply what you tell them—to undervalue your services and your messages. The simple word “training” carries a lot of baggage that can weigh you down on the way to achieving better business results for your company.

What & Why

Training is what you do to achieve business results, to apply strategies to reach the organization’s goals. Too often, conversations about “training” focus on activities and events, and we just assume that everyone understands how those activities will produce desired results and achieve objectives.

Assumptions can kill you. Do not let the conversation go on without explicitly reinforcing the connection between what you will do and why you are doing it.

Think of the “personal trainer” who you can hire at your local fitness club. You don’t invest money and time to go to multiple workout sessions because those training sessions are intensely rewarding in themselves. You make this repeated investment because of the returns you get outside of the training sessions: feeling better, looking better, being more successful in sports, whatever your personal objectives may be.

That’s why the smart personal trainers position themselves as lifestyle change consultants. They sell the new you, the new life you will have, rather than a series of individual training sessions. They use the activity of a workout to advance you toward your personal objectives.

Similarly, there is a big difference in what your managers or colleagues envision when you propose “to provide training” versus “to change employee behavior using such-and-such tools.”

When you talk about “training” without emphasizing (and I mean constantly) the objective the training serves, people automatically conjure up visions of typical training activities from their own past experience. Unfortunately, that past experience always has at least a small negative component, from boring lectures, poorly designed online courses, dreadful presentations and nonsensical role-plays they have endured themselves. And most managers associate “training” with “cost” rather than “investment,” with an isolated event rather than with a component in a broad organizational effort to change employee behavior.

Always Say “Training” in Context

If you let your discussions about training efforts and employee communications sink to the activity level, you squander opportunities for your company to instill best practices that can enhance efficiency, control costs, boost revenues and deliver better products and services.

Good sales people understand how to talk about ends rather than means. What kind of figures do you project for a sales rep who calls prospects and says, “I’d like to get an hour of your time to discuss our new product”? Commissions will be much higher for the one who says, “I’d like to get an hour of your time to show you how we can help you do X better.”

• Commit yourself to a vision of training that always includes the objective that training serves.
• Monitor your use of language around “training” to ensure you really are changing the way you talk about it.
• Know your company’s strategic plans and key objectives so you know where your activities fit and what themes you can leverage to produce lasting change in employee practices.

Unless you can get beyond the “activity level” of discussion, you will never get others to truly support your training efforts. Without that support, you are unlikely to deliver the return on investment you promised the company.