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 down our noses at executives who make appearances only because it is expected of them, who may work in ways, within their own functions, day to day, that are inconsistent with what they say in public.

That may be getting the cart before the horse. Get the executives in front of your audience, with the right message, and worry about their personal commitment to the cause later. You are likely to find that as time goes on repeated utterances in favor of a policy or best practice will evolve into supporting it with actions.

A recent article in The Economist (Aug. 30) focused on turnaround specialist Greg Brenneman, most recently credited with bringing the fast-food chain Quiznos back from the brink. One of his practices was to send out a voicemail to all franchise holders every Friday morning, updating them on what was happening in the business.

Naturally, the primary purpose was to improve communications with franchisees, as relations had been rather toxic (including lawsuits) before he took over. But he pointed out another benefit to this practice.

Brenneman said, “If someone gets on a voicemail and promises something to thousands of people, that person will do it.” In other words, whatever his level of commitment to follow through on a given behavior before the massive public statement, afterwards he pretty much had to live up to his words.

And I’ve worked the same “trick” among my own clients. In one instance, what was then a large regional bank (now grown into one of the largest banks in the country) had some core training to spread the best practices they wanted applied consistently in every state where they did business. The regional managers in those states, on the other hand, liked to do things their own ways.

That presented the usual problem all trainers have encountered: The official message delivered at training got undermined went employees when back to their desks in their own locations. In their own states and regions, the senior managers were willing to deliver the approved message to employees, perhaps knowing that it wouldn’t matter what they said, since they could greatly influence how employees worked afterwards.

The solution? Company-wide conferences, where all the state-by-state managers appeared together to deliver the training message. Having publicly supported the corporate best practices in front of their peers (and their own bosses), they found it much more difficult to veer away from those practices in their own operations.

In other words, don’t wait for corporate leaders to believe what they are saying before you engage them in your training events. Get them on the broadest, most public platform you can devise. The more publicly they say the right things, the more likely they are to do the right things privately, in their own fiefdoms.

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.