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

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 an impact on employees.

The most common mistake is equating vast content knowledge with the ability to share that knowledge effectively.

Now there are certainly experts who are also great communicators. But let’s face it, they are a delightful surprise.

Did you ever have a brilliant math teacher who did very little to help you understand mathematics? Or a language teacher who spoke fluently, but didn’t produce students who could speak the language? Have you ever met a doctor, an engineer, a programmer, or, for that matter, an insurance agent who knew what he or she was talking about, but couldn’t get it across to you? Do you find the guidelines to your medications, written by clinicians (and lawyers) helpful? Are the help files and manuals you get from your software vendors packed with clearly written explanations that are easy to find?

As an expert yourself, in reaching and influencing employees, you have to be willing to make some hard calls. You have to challenge the assumptions that the expert knows best what employees need to know, and that the expert is the best person to share that information.

Experts love their own subjects. They are fascinated by details that make a difference in product performance or efficient execution, and that is good for your company.

But one of the secrets of effective training is providing the optimal level of knowledge, in the most effective way, to influence how employees work. That is quite different from the maximum quantity of information, which is where the expert lives.

That means it is up to you to look at the volume of material available from your experts, and to make the tough decisions about what to leave out. Distilling a wealth of potential information into a core of useful information is the work of a true communication professional.

Besides not knowing what needs to be said, many experts are weak at knowing how to say it, especially when they are dealing with people who are not themselves experts. It isn’t that most experts have no communication skills: engineers can communicate very efficiently and effectively with other engineers, programmers with programmers.

But programmers may not be very good at explaining to clerical staff how to use the 20 percent of software features that produce 80 percent of the benefit. Designers of new products may have very little idea of how to talk to a sales representative about the benefits of their products bring to ordinary, real-world users.

That’s why the training professional has to be willing to work both firmly and creatively with SMEs when these experts actually play a role in delivering the training.

And that will be the subject of next week’s post.