Working in my corporate career I was fortunate enough to take part in inspiring, engaging, rewarding and hugely successful training programmes as a delegate. I was also unfortunate experience training that was simply "done to me".
It’s key that if you want your team to grow, progress and get better at what they do then you need a training and development programme that works and keeps working.
At New Results we focus on avoiding “Amnesia Alley”. This is the journey that exists between training and being back at your desk doing your job. This sinkhole of learning appears to come into existence for a number of reasons: too little time, not enough engagement, not relevant to the role, not stretching enough, too stretching, and so on.
What can you do to stop this happening for you and your team?
Here are some of the things we have learned and here is how you can approach this to make sure your training has a long-lasting effect. We think about the three key stages of the training and development programme: before it takes place, during the training itself and after the final training delivery. Here is what we do at each of those stages:
Before – We ask lots of questions, what do you want, and can you deliver it? What level, language and approach will work best for you? Who are your clients and what do they want from you? We make sure we fully understand your world and what you are trying to achieve. We interview teams before we train them so we can capture their language and approach. These interviews allow us to understand individuals and teams overall strengths and development areas. The other subtle thing these interviews do is introduce trainer and individuals being trained much earlier, meaning that they know us, and we know them just a little before any training takes place. People who take part in these interviews know that they have had a voice and input to the training content and delivery style. This is critical because it means we have their buy in to the training before we start the first session.
During – Firstly at every session we check and ask “What are you looking to achieve?” We spend time flexing our style and approach in each training session, so everyone gets as much as possible. We make it a two-way discussion, so anyone on our training feels involved and engaged (not just talked at!). Our sessions are often a mix of new skills and recap of foundations. There is some gold dust in doing the basics and doing them extraordinarily well. We do a lot of group and individual work to mix up the medium and method to keep engagement as high as possible and to make sure everyone is getting their own specific questions answered.
After – We focus on effective follow up by looking at actions and feedback on when they have been done. We support leaders on following up on actions as a group and with individual members of their team. Lastly, and most importantly we either provide coaching or coaching training to help organisations take the new skills and approaches learned in training and embed them into people’s day to day roles. We always have a mindset that focuses on making training memorable, engaging and thought provoking. We carry this through to every part of our three-stage approach (before, during and after delivery), and we ask ourselves two really effective reflective questions at each part of the process: 1. What worked well and how do we repeat it? 2. What didn’t work well and how do we improve it? This simple piece of reflective practice means we are always looking to improve, develop and polish our development programmes. That way we get beyond the training that doesn’t stick. We start programmes that people want to be on. We know they will take key learning back to their desks now and will have opportunities to use the learning immediately, and for a period of time after the training.
Training on its own doesn’t work as well as you might hope. Having a real development programme that takes account of the before, during and after effects of training are key. Let’s end the approach of training done to you and lets have lots of training that is engaging, stretching and impactful for today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year and beyond.
