Stop Teaching So Much! Learn to Chunk.
frustrated-with-computer
We recently reviewed a day-long course on coaching which was actually an excellent class, the only thing it suffered from was the typical: Too much content!
The course taught 4 different coaching techniques and their best-use given a particular type of workplace situation or a particular type of worker, and then participants were given some time to choose one of their own workers with whom they thought the technique might work. Finally, they were divided in to trios to practice the technique.
This learn-and-practice process was repeated four times for each of the four techniques. The problem with this course was that the learning outcomes were just not going to be that great. It is impossible to learn four different techniques, and remember when they apply, and the nuances of usage, when you get back on the job when you've been taught them all in one-fell-swoop.The expected learning outcomes for this class just weren't being achieved, despite excellent content and a "reasonable enough" teaching strategy.
While it certainly takes longer to teach in chunks, and allow participants real-world practice and application, it does lead to better learning outcomes.The next time you are designing a course - especially one that requires practice in order to master - ask yourself: Will people really be able to do Skill #1 when they are back on the job if that information and technique has been "over written" by additional knowledge and skills by the end of the day?
Chances are, you can achieve much better learning outcomes by chunking the content and the periods of teaching, and allowing your participants to have time to not only reflect on what they learned, but also put it in to practice, and then reflecting on how effective that practice and its outcomes really were.
What is most important in solving this problem - Quality, Speed or Cost?
Most of us know the 3-points of any project: quality, speed, and cost, and the fact that it is impossible to have all three.
Given the reality of today's training environment in which budgets are slashed and time allowed for training has been reduced, the question: What is most important in solving this problem, quality speed or cost, is critical to ensure success with any training endeavor.
If quality is most important, then your project will take time and undoubtedly will cost "more" money than a project that doesn't have quality as its most important factor.
If time (project due by the end of this month) is the most important factor, then quality will take a back seat and higher costs will probably prevail in order to get more people or services involved in the creation of the training.
When designing and developing new training for your orginization, this is a very useful question to ask because it helps you to know where to assign your resources and/or it helps you to know what resources to ask for.
So, if time is the most important factor, you may want to request an extra pair of hands such as a consultant or a temporary service. If quality is the most important factor, you may want to price the project and then request an extra 25% in funding.
What is most important to solving this problem: quality, speed or cost is a critical business question which will help you to create a better training product and outcome.
Teaching Thinking through Changing Perspective
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One of the ways you can help people to improve their thinking skills is to ask them to change their perspective on a topic. To think about it from another point of view. This is very easy to do in a training situation - since we have folks captive and can ask them to try an activity in a way they are not naturally inclined to.
Unfortunately, we often miss this opportunity in training and instead ask our participants to answer a question based on their own perspective or opinion. For example, how often does your training program ask something along the lines of: Now that you have read the case study, what are the three main factors affecting the situation? Since people respond with their own opinion, we never tell them that they are wrong, of course (nor are they wrong), but do we ever conduct "round 2" of the questioning / debrief and ask the learners, What if you were the banker, contractor, pilot in the situation? THEN what would you say are the three most important factors?
Here are two techniques for getting people to change their perspective on a topic:
1. Collaboration - Having learners work in groups is an easy and natural way to hear more than one perspective. Some care needs to be given to structuring the collaborative activity so that "minority viewpoints" aren't ignored. Perhaps rewarding the group with the most perspectives? Or the most unique perspective?
2. Suggest the other viewpoint - Credit here goes to MindGym and Sebastian Bailey for this simple exercise presented at a conference in 2015. In this type of activity you'll tell the learner exactly the perspective you want them to take. Bailey's exercise went like this: Close your eyes and picture your living room for 30 seconds. Now, picture it again, from the perspective of an interior designer. Again, think of your living room, from this perspective, for 30 seconds. Once more, think of your living room, and this time from the perspective of a robber. What are your insights? What do you see differently? What “Ah-ha” moments have you had? What did you "see" as the interior decorator that you didn't see before? What about from the perspective of the robber?
Interestingly, asking people to change the way they view a situation is something that develops with maturity. It is almost impossible to ask anyone under the age of 18 to change their perspective on a situation. Once someone IS able to look at things from various points of view however, it is wise to continually build that muscle and it will expand their thinking abilities in all areas of their life.
Where were you in 1991?
Twenty-five years ago The Training Doctor was born!
Here's a look back at what else was going on at that time. Where were you?
The Persian Gulf war ended with a cease fire
Boris Yeltsin was the first elected president of Russia
George Bush (#1) was president of the United States
The median US household income was $30,000
Unemployment was approximately 7%
A first-class stamp cost 25 cents
The NY Giants won the Super Bowl by one point (the cost of an ad was $800,000 compared to $5 million+ today)
Nirvana (the band) becomes an American icon
Dances with Wolves won an Oscar for best picture
Tim Berners-Lee created the internet! (thank you, thank you)
Richard Branson completed the first transatlantic hot air balloon flight
Dr. Seuss died
Interview with Connie Malamed: Visual Design Solutions
Malamed
What motivated you to write this book?
There are many wonderful graphic design books in the world, but none that teach visual design to learning professionals. I see many instructional materials that fail visually simply because most learning professionals are not trained in this area.
A little known secret is that trainers, instructional designers and educators can become competent in visual design by learning the foundation principles of design and applying them through practice. Since I have degrees in art education and instructional design, I wanted to write a book that closes this gap. I wanted to clearly explain the basics of design and demystify what professional designers do and how they solve visual problems.
If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?
The message I want to broadcast to all learning professionals is that aesthetically pleasing instructional materials can enhance learning and improve motivation. People make instant judgments as to the credibility and value of a learning experience. Well-designed materials are one critical signal that a learning experience is worthwhile and that the creators care about the learners.
How can training use this book to assist them in the work that they do?
Visual Design Solutions can be read in its entirety as a course in visual design with a learning context. Or it can be used as a reference for design advice and inspiring ideas. The book is divided into four sections and it's easy to start at any point:
The first section will help readers learn to think and work like designers.
The second section explains how to use the three basic elements of design: visuals, text and graphic space.
In the third section, readers will learn how to apply the power principles that will most impact their work (color harmonies, visual hierarchy, unity, etc.)
The final section provides solutions and inspiration to common visual design problems, such as how to transform bullet points into visuals or how to tell a story in visuals.
Do you have a personal motto that you live by (related to the book or your area of expertise)?
The audience is the most important factor in the work we do. When we care about the audience, we will find creative and innovative ways to solve problems and support learning in ways that are well designed and aesthetically pleasing.
Connie Malamed, Learning Strategy Consultant and publisher of The eLearning Coach.
Teaching Thinking Through Debate
man at podium
Remember the debate club in high school? It was an excellent tool to help young people think critically about various issues and honing their communication skills to be able to intelligently articulate issues. With debate season upon us in the United States, this is an excellent time to point out the thinking skills that are developed through using debate.
Debate requires someone to construct an argument. That argument can be pro or against, but it must incorporate research, analysis, reasoning, and sometimes synthesis and evaluation in order to establish and substantiate one's position. Debate also requires the debater to master their content, to practice both listening and speaking skills in order to counter the opposing side, and to not only be able to verbalize but also to speak persuasively about their position.
These skills are known on Bloom's Taxonomy (here is a quick and easy definition) as higher order thinking skills. Debate takes one beyond the ability to research and "know" information to the ability to construct something and do something with that information.
An additional benefit of using debate in a learning curriculum is that it helps people to understand how to deal with conflict in a constructive and measured way. Countering an opposing argument does not mean name calling, introducing distracting or off-topic issues, or simply blustering louder than one's opponent.
In a previous blog post, we discussed the importance of using questions to help think. In the context of debate however, questioning skills are more musings: What is my position on this topic? What do others say? How do they substantiate their positions? Am I in agreement or disagreement with others? If I am in disagreement with others, how can I substantiate my own position? These types of questions require the skills of research, analysis, synthesis, reasoning, clarifying ... in other words, thinking skills!
Debate as a thinking skill can be used with any topic and in any industry and is best taught in teams (at least 2 individuals) which helps to expand one's thinking as well. Working with one or more teammates requires collaboration skills in order to create a premise, rationale, and presentation.
All in all, debate is one of the best learning strategies you can employ, in order to boost your employee's thinking skills.
Where Have All The Corporate Universities Gone?
The simultaneous impact of several major forces contributed to the decline of Corporate Universities.
Organizations began to adopt a bottom-line approach focused on cost cutting to improve efficiency during the global economic meltdown of 2008. Investments in learning and development initiatives declined, which impacted leadership commitment towards sustaining CUs.
Second, professional associations, consultants, and leading organizations shifted their attention towards talent management. Organizations became inwardly focused on improving and developing their existing human resources..
Third, the changing demographics exacerbated socio-cultural pressures on traditional universities and questioned their legitimacy and value in society.
Because corporate universities were established to closely approximate traditional universities in terms of developing cutting edge knowledge and innovation, they were affected by these contextual factors, and suffered from decreasing interest. A shrinking global market, privatization of education and a spurt in the private online education providers, and the increasing demands for complex skill sets demanded individualized approaches for developing the full potential of human resources.
What happened to the "L" in L+D?
L
L+D stands for Learning and Development. In years past it was referred to as T+D which stood for Training and Development. We guess at some point there was a shift towards sounding as though we were doing more for our constituents than simply training them.
Unfortunately, the truth is, we are still T+D. Where is the L in L+D?
In the last decade-plus, training budgets have been cut, time allowed for training has been drastically reduced, coaching has been all but wiped out, and "learning strategies" have become self-service, self-directed, eLearning in many organizations (choose from this menu of management classes).
But true learning requires a long tail. It requires interaction with others in order to vet multiple ideas and arrive at the best one, or perhaps a hybrid-NEW-best idea. It requires coaching. It requires experience that informs future experiences and what one "knows to be true." Learning and development is a misnomer and perhaps a sad relic of what we thought this profession would become during the rise of corporate universities (see Where Have All the Corporate Universities Gone? below).
Organizations are consistently announcing that their businesses are suffering from a lack of skilled employees and a lack of bench strength for management, and yet there is little being done to ensure that our role in L+D is actually focused on the L. This truly requires the L+D department to have a seat at the table, to help organizations strategically plan their future through their people, but that vision is, sadly, far from reality in many organizations.
Interview with Will Thalheimer, PhD
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What motivated you to write this book?
I've worried about my own smile sheets (aka response forms, reaction forms, level 1's) for years! I know they're not completely worthless because I got useful feedback when I was a mediocre leadership trainer-feedback that helped me get better.
But I've also seen the research (two meta-analyses covering over 150 scientific studies) showing that smile sheets are NOT correlated with learning results-that is, smile sheets don't tell us anything about learning! I also saw clients-chief learning officers and other learning executives-completely paralyzed by their organizations' smile-sheet results. They knew their training was largely ineffective, but they couldn't get any impetus for change because the smile-sheet results seemed fine.
So I asked myself, should we throw out our smile sheets or is it possible to improve them? I concluded that organizations would use smile sheets anyway, so we had to try to improve them. I wrote the book after figuring out how smile sheets could be improved.
If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?
Smile sheets should (1) draw from the wisdom distilled from the science-of-learning findings, and (2) smile-sheet questions ought to be designed to (2a) support learners in making more precise smile-sheet decisions and (2b) should produce results that are clear and actionable. Too often we use smile sheets to produce a singular score for our courses. "My course is a 4.1!" But these sorts of numerical averages leave everyone wondering what to do.
How can trainers use this book to assist them in the work that they do?
Organizations, and learning-and-development professionals in particular, can use my book to gain wisdom about the limitations of their current evaluation approaches. They can review almost 30 candidate questions to consider utilizing in their own smile sheets. They can learn how to persuade others in using this radical new approach to smile-sheet design. Finally, they can use the book to give them the confidence and impetus to finally make improvements in their smile-sheet designs-improvements that will enable them to create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement in terms of their learning designs.
Getting valid feedback is the key to any improvement. My book is designed to help organizations get better feedback on their learning results.
Do you have a personal motto that you live by?
Be open to improvement. Look for the best sources of information-look to scientific research in particular to enable practical improvements. Be careful. Don't take the research at face value. Instead, understand it in relation to other research sources and, most importantly, utilize the research from a practical perspective.
Will Thalheimer, PhD, PresidentWork-Learning Research, Inc.
Teaching Thinking through Analogous Associations
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Analogous: Comparable in certain respects.
The story goes that James Dyson - the founder of Dyson vacuums - hit upon his innovative vacuum design by observing how a grain processor got rid of the "dust" (answer: through a funnel / vortex).
One of the deficiencies in our society is that even when we bring the smartest people together to solve a problem, they are often the smartest people on the same topic. Thinking capability can be greatly expanded by looking to analogous fields. Possibilities abound when we contemplate "similar but different" perspectives..
When considering community planning, include sports managers, biologists, and airport general managers for their insights into shared and coordinated spaces..
When tackling photography, include astronomers, glass blowers, and forensic scientists, who all understand how light and shapes are intertwined.
For newer, better ways to "crunch numbers" look to national security intelligence, proficient gamblers, and infographic artists who all see numbers as a representation of something else.
In our experience, expanding your thinking through including analogous fields suddenly makes you the "smartest person in the room."
Just In Time Training Has Run Out of Time
Many organizations today are facing a skills shortage. They simply cannot find people with the appropriate skills to run their businesses. As a result, they are forced to hire those that they can and then apply skills-training to make them a worthwhile hire for the organization.
This process can be thought of as a just-in-time skills training program in which the training isn't applied until it is needed (although in 2015 / 2016, skills training is in constant demand).The future-cast for this lack of prepared workers is that in another 10-15 years, the crisis will be a lack of prepared leaders.
In order to prevent businesses (all of society, really!) from bouncing from crisis to crisis like a ball in a pin-ball machine, it's time to address the root cause. It's not that younger generations have suddenly lost entry-level skills - it's a result of never having learned those skills to begin with. You cannot be expected to perform something you never learned to do.
What training professionals can do today to mitigate the current skills deficiency, as well as to thwart the void of leadership in 2025 and beyond, is to rethink the idea of just-in-time training. Rather than applying skills-only-training at the time of need, develop a broader approach to preparing all individuals in the organization by teaching thinking skills.
Is it possible the mortgage meltdown could have been avoided if thoughtful people had contemplated "what could go wrong with giving people 100% financing?" in addition to knowing how to fill out a mortgage application? We think so.
Is it possible that the automobile manufacturers would not have needed a bail out if some thought had been given to the "downside" of leases (massive churning of new cars) rather than simply teaching selling skills? We think so.
It's relatively easy to overlay thinking skills on top of job-specific training. For instance, when teaching how to prepare financial reports, a discussion can be had around the topics of ethics and erroneous reporting (intentional or not), and the ramifications to the organization of inaccurate financial reports (underestimating income, miscalculating forecast, personnel balancing). When teaching business writing, there might be a research project associated with the implications of having a paper-trail or the importance of choosing words that are unambiguous.
It is important to teach not only "how to," but "what if." Asking learners to think deeper and wider about the skills they are learning will help them to contribute more to the organization now and in the future.
Reading for Fun - and Comprehension
reading on tablet
Do you prefer reading from a printed page or a digital screen? Do you comprehend more when reading from paper than from a screen (or vice versa)? Does your age play a role in your preference? What about your attitude? These are all questions which have been studied in the last 20 years or so - in other words - in the "digital age." While definitive results elude us, here are some of the more common findings:
People approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than they approach reading from paper
E-readers prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way
People report that when they are trying to locate a particular piece of information, they can recall where it appears in a text - not so with digital displays of the same content
These navigation difficulties subtly inhibit reading comprehension
Reading digitally leads to more difficulty in comprehension because it is more physically and mentally taxing
When reading from a screen, people spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for key words
When people really like an e-book they go out and buy the paper version! According to research by Microsoft, people see e-books as something to use, but not own
Makes you re-think the delivery modality of your training materials, no? Learn more about the research in this area by reading this Scientific American article (on line, of course).
What is the Business Goal for this Training?
It is surprising how much training exists that doesn't have a real connection to the goals of the business. Perhaps these are legacy courses left over from a time when there was a need and organizations are still offering them. But these days you want to ensure that any training that you are asked to develop anew has a clear business goal.
In discussions with the business process owner who is requesting the training, be sure that they can articulate what the expected business outcomes are for the training. Not only does this assure you that they have truly thought through the need for the training that they are requesting, but it also establishes an ROI point for you (which is something else that is seldom targeted in training design).
If a sales manager requests training in negotiations or cross-selling - you can be relatively sure that there is a business outcome expected from that training. If a sales manager instead asks for team building or training on a particular software - dig a little deeper to find out what they believe that training would accomplish for the business / their business unit.
If an operations manager for a manufacturing facility asks for a course in quality control or machine calibration - there is probably a link to the output of that department. If, however s/he asks for forklift safety you may want to investigate how that will positively benefit the department and its deliverables to the organization.
Not only will asking "How does this training link to the business goals of the company / department?" save you time and money by not developing courses that have no real relevance for the business, but you'll be seen as a thoughtful contributor to the business overall rather than an order-taker of training requests.
Train People BEFORE You Hire Them
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Latin America and the Caribbean will need about 1.2 million software developers within the next decade, according to growth projections, and yet "official educational institutions" only graduate 1000 coders a year. What to do?
How about starting a training division to train people you'll need in the future? A start-up in Lima Peru did just that. Called Laboratoria, the company began training coders because it could not find qualified personnel for its growing web design business. Last year 1,200 people applied; the company trained and graduated 150. This year they hope to graduate 300 .The training is 9-5 daily, over 5 months. Training is free and 60% of graduates landed entry level jobs upon graduation. (Although Laboriatoria was created from one company's need, graduates are not obligated to go to work for the parent company; what they ARE obligated to do is give back 10% of their earnings for the first three years following graduation, to help continue to fund the free training for others.)
Similarly, Code Camp was started in Charleston, SC because of the growing "Silicon Harbor" of technology companies in the area. Two such company owners grew frustrated with not being able to find the right talent and decided to "grow their own." Classes are now offered Saturdays and in the evenings so working professionals can get the training they need to change or further their careers. There is even a 4-session Kids Camp for kids aged 10 - 14 years - why not get them in the pipeline early?
The next time your Talent or HR department is lamenting the lack of qualified candidates - consider growing your own!
Visuals Enhance Learning
"Pictures are understood on many levels. The most literal level is what the picture depicts. When you see a line drawing of an airplane, you recognize the shape and features of the object and identify it as an airplane.
“On another level, the context of the picture provides meaning. The same picture of an airplane on a freeway sign means that an upcoming exit will take you to the airport. This is a different context than a photograph of an airplane you may see in an airline advertisement, which suggests that is is persuasive rather than an informational purpose.
“Understanding the meaning of the picture depends on the context of where the picture exists. Another level of meaning is based on the style of the graphic. This is expressed in many ways, such as through symbols, spatial layout, and accepted conventions. For example, certain attributes of an illustration indicate when a drawing is an architectural blueprint and when it is a scientific illustration.
“There are also metaphoric meanings in some graphic. Metaphors convey meaning beyond a simple depiction and provide another layer of meaning."
Excerpted from Connie Malamed's Visual Design Solutions - a fantastic text for understanding the power of using visuals in learning.
Teaching Thinking Through Self Assessments and Inventories
Thinking
We all learned Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the fact that the pinnacle is self actualization - but what does that actually mean?
Self actualization: the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities...
Unfortunately most people don't reach the pinnacle of self actualization because they have not been taught a way to achieve it. Using self assessments such as Gregorc, Myers-Briggs or Glenn Parker's Teams and Team Players, can greatly assist individuals in thinking introspectively.
Myers-Briggs helps you realize that not everyone sees the world the same as you or reacts to things in the same way as you do. It helps one to contemplate whether there are alternate forms of response to certain situations. It also helps in understanding that a response which is different from yours is not in any way incorrect.
The Gregorc inventory helps an individual understand their working style preference which can assist in playing to one's strengths as well as helping an individual understand reasons why they might be getting stuck. For instance, an individual who is concrete-sequential may be an excellent worker but may appear as though they cannot manage multiple priorities due to their need for completion of activities in sequence.
Sparking an individual's ability to think introspectively, to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses - as well as others, enables individuals to think in a more broad manner about their actions and those that they work with in order to achieve the best workplace outcomes. Understanding and appreciating that we are not working at odds but rather have complimentary skills is a huge breakthrough in thinking for many individuals.
Is Your Organization Playing a Role in Employee's Poor Performance?
Stressed Out And In Pain
Very often, poor performers are the "victims" of organizational factors which they are forced to cope with in some way. At first glance it appears that employee performance is poor, but in reality, they are doing their best to be successful.
Organizational factors can present themselves in many ways, such as new management or revolving door management which results in frequently changing expectations; an impending layoff or merger which can spur individuals to take their eye off their current responsibilities in order to look toward their future employment; or a completed merger which contributes to folk's not knowing their role anymore.
Other organizational stressors can be found in global organizations which have to "translate" communications, operating procedures, and goals across time zones and functions. Even centralized or decentralized training can impact successful performance on the job.
Example: A charitable organization created its own CRM in-house and transitioned away from the commercial product they had previous used (which provided training and support). After going-live with their home-grown system, the programmers stayed in the call center area for one week to provide training and answer questions. At the end of that one week the programmers - who had all been contractors - were let go. In six month's time no one was using the software correctly, records were incomplete and erroneous, and both donors and managers were irate.
When the organization sought training help, the request came in the form of "they need training. They need to know how to use the software the way it is intended to be used and not the way they are using it now," (through trail and error, work-arounds, and best guesses).
Despite the organizational factors working against them, the workers did a fantastic job of completing their jobs with a limited amount of knowledge, training and skill. This was a company that did not understand the importance of documentation, training or support.
Before fulfilling a training request, step back and consider what organizational factors might be playing a role. Very often the workers are doing the best that they can given the circumstances under which they have to perform.
When Millenials Take Over: An Interview with Maddie Grant
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What compelled you to write this book?
My co-author Jamie Notter and I have been writing and speaking for many years about how social media has been changing how we lead and manage our organizations, not just how we communicate and market to customers - which led to our 2011 book, Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World.
In that book, we spelled out how this was happening - social media pushing organizations to become more decentralized, more authentic, more trustworthy, more collaborative, more generative... And four years later, in 2015, we started to see how the advent of the Millennial generation entering the workforce was going to be a HUGE catalyst for these changes. The oldest Millennials are in their early 30s and are starting to fill management roles - and when that happens, they will not wait around to change organizations in ways that make more sense to them, having grown up in a digital world.
So our new book, When Millennials Take Over, helps companies understand this huge generation--which will be the dominant generation in the workforce for decades to come--and the impact it will have. We specifically explain this disruption in ways that are positive and forward thinking, to combat the current misguided discourse of complaining and negativity around the Millennial generation.
If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?
All generations need to understand each other better and work together to bring our traditional organizations into today's reality, in order to be more successful in the future.
How can business use this book to assist them in the work that they do?
The book is designed for executives at all levels to better understand Millennials and how to attract, retain and learn from them. The four main chapters are divided into four big themes - Digital, Clear, Fluid and Fast, explains why Millennials care about these capacities, and shows examples of how to build these capacities for your company.
Many of the specific examples in the book lead directly to HR processes and structures - recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and of course anything related to culture are things that can hugely impact the success of an organization and we believe HR has a much bigger and more strategic role to play than we are seeing currently. There are huge opportunities here and the book points to many ways to start.
Do you have a personal motto that you live by?
Our motto is "proceed until apprehended", coined by Florence Nightingale. The secret about our book is that it was EASY to find many examples of companies doing amazing things - because there are actually many companies experimenting with different ways of working, which are NOT "how we've always done it." We are asked by hundreds of people at middle or lower levels of organizations how they might get started changing things, and we always say just try experiments and show small successes. Nobody can argue with data that shows that small experiments are working.
The more of us that try new things, the more data we can show that proves that positive change is needed--and working.
Maddie Grant, Founding Partner, WorkXOmgrant@workxo.comwww.workxo.com @maddiegrant
The Disconnect Between Training and Thinking
In the last few decades (since the 1990's) the timbre of training has taken a distinct turn away from thinking skills (such as Why? and What if?) and toward how-to skills. This has been precipitated by the rampant growth of e-Learning, which is essentially self study, and therefore doesn't encourage people to ask questions or be introspective about what they are learning.
E-Learning also has required instructional designers to parse content down to the very basic blocks of what and how. For instance: An e-Learning class on feedback skills might present a comparison of poorly worded feedback and well-worded feedback; a list of instances when you might want to give feedback; and the protocol for corrective action for the company if the feedback is of that nature. (More on this in a moment.)
Another phenomenon which has affected thinking skills is the contraction of time that is allowed for training. We recall a client years ago who requested management development training for a large group of managers scattered across Canada. The original request was for a series of four-hour classes and about nine months and two project managers later, the time allotted for training had been whittled down to 90 minutes. The final project manager asked, "Can you really teach management skills in 90 minutes?" To which we replied "Nope!" And the project was cancelled.
When faced with a limited amount of time for a training class there is no other option but to choose only the most essential, on-the-job, skills to transmit to the audience. Thinking skills, by comparison, require time and discussion and collaboration with others.
To continue our earlier feedback example: In order to teach the thinking skills needed to give appropriate feedback, learners might read profiles of a typical employee and then decide what type of feedback should be given, how it should be phrased, and then practice giving the feedback with another learner (role play).The "manager" who had just practiced would then be given an opportunity to reflect on (and vocalize) their choices:
How did you choose what to address?
What did you consider when determining how to phrase the feedback?
What were your expectations for response from the "employee?"
What have you learned from this experience?
Who, of your direct reports, could benefit from feedback at this time?
Write a synopsis (similar to the profile you just used, which tells the story of the situation) and then plan the feedback conversation.
True behavioral change is rooted in changing one's thinking: So give your learners the time and opportunity to think.
Could they do *it* in the past?
Here are two questions that should be asked during a needs assessments to help ensure that you are not designing and developing training unnecessarily, and also to ensure that the training you ARE creating is appropriate for the "gap" that needs to be augmented.
Question #1: Have the learners been able to do ____ in the past?
Question #2: Have the learners had training on ____ in the past?
Let's look at why each of these questions is important to ask.
Have they been able to do ________ in the past?
Typically, if an individual or group has been able to successfully complete a task in the past, and suddenly are not able to, it is not because they forgot how to do it. It's more likely that conditions within the work environment have changed. Look at factors such as:
Have new metrics been put in to place? (causing people to do their work in a less thorough manner?)
Has a new process been added which conflicts with the standard operating procedure?
Are people incentivized to do the job differently / poorly?
For instance: In a call center environment, CSRs can be incentivized to solve a consumer's problem on the first call or they can be incentivized to complete as many calls per hours as possible. Typically, those are two competing end goals. So, if you have workers who have been able to do a process or task in the past, and suddenly they are not - the last thing you should assume is that the fault lies with the workers.
Have they had training on this topic in the past?
If the answer to this is "yes," then the next question is: Why didn't that training stick? Or... did the company forget they had a training program already in place?
Any new skill will fritter away if it is not used. Often people go through training but then get back on the job and have to catch up on a backlog of work. In order to catch up quickly, they will resort to their "old way" of doing things. This aligns with the bullet points above - are trainees incentivized to "keep up the pace," or to do things in the "new and improved" way? If the latter, they will need time to practice and become proficient.
In other instances the newly trained individual simply isn't given the opportunity to put in to practice what they have learned. Example: One of our clients put learners through a 12-week, job-specific training program but then assigned them to a starter-job for 6 months before they were allowed to do the job they were just trained to do. It was "efficient" for the company to give people the 12-weeks of training right after they were newly hired, rather than take them off the job later on. But the newly trained individuals weren't allowed to actually put their skills in to practice until they had "paid their dues" by being on the job for 6 months or more.
It's tempting to jump right in and solve the problem - but first step back and ask "why does this problem exist?"
*Credit to Bob Mager for the basis of these questions.