It’s 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday and 12 trainers are near the end of a certification session on a new program they’ll deliver to 3,000 employees before the end of the year. The trainers feel confident and excited. It’s a great program full of useful skills, entertaining videos, and engaging activities.
Before the session ends, the master trainer asks the group to engage in one final activity. He pulls out a flipchart, grabs a marker, and says, “Let’s imagine you want this program to fail.” The trainers look at one another with raised eyebrows, silently asking if they’ve heard the question correctly. “Come on now,” the instructor says. “What would you do to make sure that participants don’t use the skills they’ll learn in this workshop?” After a long awkward silence, the ideas start to pour out . . .
- “I’d ensure the managers know nothing about the program.”
- “I’d make it a ‘one and done,’ with no refreshers or reinforcement.”
- “I wouldn’t give learners tools they can use back on the job.”
- “I wouldn’t let participants know why they are there or how it relates to them.”
After several minutes, the instructor puts down his marker, looks at the group, and says, “How much of this is actually about to happen when you roll out this program?” The stricken group of trainers realizes that they were about to make exactly these mistakes.
Would it surprise you to know this is a real story? In fact, we’ve repeated this exercise dozens of times with seasoned, talented learning professionals and the outcome is almost always the same. Despite the fact that we know better, it is easy to get caught up in the pressure to push out programs quickly and neglect the factors that will dictate whether the learning will improve performance.
Training initiatives that originate from business strategy become a priority for everyone in the organization. These initiatives capture and hold the attention of executives, managers, and the learning audience. A powerful link to business strategy helps learners and managers understand the importance of the initiative. If the link is missing, business as usual takes over and executive attention wanes, managers manage the way they already manage, and learners have little motivation to try new behaviors.
Active sponsorship from the top of the organization and/or the business unit has a direct impact on participation, commitment, and application of learning to the job. When “the boss is driving the bus,” others quickly jump on board and the likelihood of sustained behavior change increases significantly. Without ongoing executive sponsorship, learners and managers perceive training as a distraction from their immediate work objectives.
The most successful learning leaders make sure that everyone affected knows what’s coming, how it supports the strategy, what’s in it for them, and exactly what role they are expected to play—both before and after the core learning takes place. When linkages and expectations are consistently communicated, learner motivation and manager commitment to coaching and reinforcement dramatically increase. Without communication, people show up for programs and passively participate without knowing what’s at stake.
For learning to translate to real-world application, the concepts, skills, and behaviors must be integrated into day-to-day work processes. Let learners know they will be coached, supported, and managed as they try new behaviors when they go back to the job. Build job aids, checklists, and other tools. Don’t leave it up to each learner to figure out what to do differently back on the job. Form a pilot group or team of high performers to create and beta test plans and processes for ensuring new skills become part of the workflow. Skipping this best practice guarantees learners will revert to old habits and patterns.
Manager involvement has a greater impact on ensuring the application of learning than any other factor. In order to recognize, reinforce, and/or redirect behaviors, managers must know how to coach on the specific skills their people will learn. Sidestepping manager preparation means that managers won’t be equipped for their role—a huge loss when you consider what research shows about the power of manager coaching.
Many programs include reinforcement components and coaching tools. While these tools are a great start, be clear about when and how these tools get used. Coach the coaches. Develop concrete coaching plans and accountabilities and ensure managers and/or champions are following through with coaching, conducting best practice sharing meetings, and leading application sessions. Without this step, new skills won’t get used and new behaviors won’t be sustained–and you won’t see the business impact you need.
None of these best practices are trade secrets. Most training professionals can generate a similar list from their own experiences. So why do we so often avoid doing what we know we should do? The reasons for not using these practices are as familiar as the practices themselves: “It’s too hard . . . I don’t have the budget . . . I don’t have time.” Maybe a more productive question is to ask, “When do we take a stand for including the best practices?”
These six best practices remind us what to do. There are many different ways to accomplish the how.