The AntiSyphus Effect

I have seen the enemy; and it is us

We really can't talk about training without mentioning Sisyphus, because corporate training can be about as Sisyphean a career as it gets. I've lost count of the number of times I've climbed the mountain of educating peers and leaders about what training can and can't fix.

How many times have you been asked to train the management team on improved communication? How many times have you heard, "Sally over in Production shipped out the wrong size widget; she needs to be re-trained"? Or, my personal favorite: "Joe screwed up the contract on the Higgins account; when we talked to him, he said that he wasn't trained on the pricing matrix for our widgets. I know you've got his proficiency tests that show he passed the certification on pricing, but clearly, something was missed. Can you schedule a training session for the contract reps to get them back up to speed?"

It's enough to drive a trainer to distraction. The truth is that there are lots of reasons why people don't communicate effectively - and just as many reasons why people make mistakes - and lack of training is only one of 'em. Sure, it's easy to point to poor training as the problem (it sure is a convenient out for the employee whose feet are getting toasty from being held to the fire). And sure, sometimes poor training is the problem. But if you're going to be effective, you need to get your leadership team on board with one simple concept: training is not the answer to every performance problem.

So, how do you know whether training will fix the problem? There are all kinds of analyses you can perform to figure it out, but there is a quick and dirty method that works just as well as a full-on research project - in my experience, anyway. All you need to do is ask yourself a few simple questions (have you noticed I'm kinda big on that?):

1. Did the employee make the mistake because s/he legitimately doesn't know how to perform the task? By "legitimately doesn't know," I mean this: if I hold a gun to his head and tell him to do it right or die, will he do it right? If so, then you're not dealing with a training issue. Disclaimer: I am NOT suggesting that anyone should actually DO such a thing; it's used as a hypothetical.
2. Do you have one employee who makes this particular mistake regularly, or is it a group of employees having the same issue? If you've got only one person who keeps screwing up, that points more toward a personnel issue. If you've got two dozen employees who keep screwing up in the same way, then you need to dig a little deeper: you've got either a training opportunity or (more likely) some kind of systemic problem.
3. Is this task one that's performed frequently? Training a group of employees on a task that they'll do once a year is a waste of everyone's time; no matter how well-executed the training, no one will remember it a year from now. If that's the case, work on developing some job aids (signs, checklists, etc.) to help them when they need it.
4. Is your management team calling it a mistake, when it's really just an employee responding to the corporate culture? Sometimes people take shortcuts or work around the system because there's something bigger at play. Maybe you're engaging in performance punishing (that's when you load down the top performers, because you know that they'll get it done; eventually, they start to break down and make mistakes under the impossible load). Maybe you're engaging in rewarding the poor performers (by taking work away from them and giving it to your key players), which encourages them to continue to perform poorly. Maybe you just aren't paying much attention at all. Maybe the policy or procedure you're trying to enforce is stupid.

Look, there's an entire process (root cause analysis) designed to help businesses figure out why people make mistakes and why processes fail. And I'll definitely write about root cause analysis in the future, because it's a terrific tool in your performance management toolkit if the management team is willing to take a good look in the mirror and admit that they are contributing to many of the problems they've always blamed on the rank-and-file in the past.  But you can't execute a full-blown root cause analysis for every performance problem that comes up, so use the questions above as a starting point.

Don't be afraid to turn down the occasional request for training if you know that training isn't the solution. Training just for the sake of training is like putting a band-aid on a bruise: it might make things look better, but it doesn't fix a thing. Instead, save the day by figuring out what's really driving the performance problem, and recommending several ways to fix it.

No "ask yourself a few questions" at the end tonight, since I already did that a few paragraphs up. Tomorrow, I'll tackle communication in a politically-unstable office environment.

There are no mistakes; only happy accidents

Do you remember Bob Ross? If you never watched his "Joy of Painting" series on PBS, then you missed a real treat (FYI, you can still catch the show in some PBS markets). In thirty minutes, Bob would take a blank canvas and turn it into quite a lovely painting.

I was always fascinated by the process, in part because I have virtually no talent when it comes to visual arts. More than that, however, what I enjoyed about Bob was his attitude: if something doesn't work out quite the way you'd planned, that's okay. You can work with it and come out with something terrific. As he often said, "There are no mistakes; only happy accidents."

That's a great attitude to have when it comes to delivering training, and it's especially useful in classroom training. You see, classroom training is particularly challenging because your audience is seated (and therefore likely to get restless and/or tired), and you may not have an in-your-face task for your students to accomplish. This can result in no sense of relevance or urgency, which in turn leads to lack of retention.

Here's where we separate the trainers from the presenters. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with giving presentations; I often give presentations. But a presentation or speech, however enlightening, is not a training session by my definition. If the goal of training is to help your students gain competence in a particular skill, then you're going to need to do a lot more than simply talk. And the talk you do give needs to engage your learners and get them involved in the process.

At a high level, here's what you need to do in order to maximize the classroom time and make sure your learners get what they need:

1. Identify the discrete tasks that the learners should be able to perform at the close of the session. If you're training people, then there must be skills transferred to the learners; no matter how entertaining you are, if your learners don't gain the skills you're trying to teach them, then you didn't do your job. So your first step is to figure out precisely what those skills are. Go ahead and get as granular as you want here; you can filter later.
2. Figure out the components of each task. Are there new vocabulary words they'll have to learn? Foreign concepts that they'll need to grasp? New tools they'll have to know how to use? What are the procedures they'll need to perform?
3. Determine the most effective way to facilitate learning for each component of each task. It's at this point that many trainers head down the wrong path. In a corporate environment, where Time=Money, we're often convinced that we need to get training completed as quickly as possible. This hurry-up mentality sometimes leads us into doing the worst thing possible for our learners: spoon feeding.

Why Spoon Feeding is Eeeeeeeeevil

Spoon feeding - as I define it relative to training - is the act of the trainer walking his or her learners step by step through the task that s/he's teaching. Spoon feeding is quick, to be sure; if you tell the students everything that they need to know, and you do that the moment that they need to know it, well then... you're going to zip right through the material.

Here's one problem with spoon feeding: if you spoon feed information (or even provide a demonstration), the students never engage their brains; they don't have to make any cognitive leaps, and there's nothing to get past what Kathy Sierra refers to as the brain's crap filter.

Here's another problem with spoon feeding: if they do manage to learn anything, your students will learn only the right way to perform the task. What's wrong with that?, you ask. Well, how do you expect folks to be able to deal with a problem in the process when all they've learned is what to do when everything goes right?

Here's one last problem with spoon feeding: it requires that you, the trainer, must know every last detail about the task; it requires that you become a subject-matter expert rather than a facilitator. This means a lot more work for you. That's not to say that you shouldn't be knowledgeable about the task you're teaching - but you can do a great job of training without being an expert.

Here's What You Should Do Instead

When you design the method you're going to use to train your learners on a given task, start thinking creatively: you may have to introduce some of the concepts via a lecture (of sorts), but that doesn't mean that you don't have some tools at your disposal to help engage the students. I once rewrote the lyrics to the song "M-O-T-H-E-R" in order to help my students remember the characteristics of root cause for a root cause analysis class. Silly? You betcha - but they remembered it.

When it comes to performing (or simulating) the task in your training session, you should probably give a lot less direction than you think; provide a framework, and provide guidance, but make the students do the work. Yes, they're going to make mistakes, but that's the point: we learn best from the things that don't work right the first time. By giving the students the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe environment, you're going to help them figure out what to do in the real world when a mistake happens. You're going to be able to help them learn how to troubleshoot the process or procedure; you're going to teach them to fish, instead of giving them a fish. And you might learn something new, as well. And I promise you, it doesn't hurt your credibility if you occasionally say, "You know what? I'm not sure how to fix that; let's figure it out together."

At the end of a training session, what matters is whether or not your learners can perform the task or function independently. If they think you're terrific, that's great; but what's important is whether they learned how to do what you brought them there to do. Liking you is gravy.

Here are some questions to ask yourself the next time you develop a training course:

1. How can I creatively help my students understand this concept? Can I use music? Art work? A crossword puzzle? A game of charades?
2. What are the most common mistakes people make when they perform this function? How can I guide them to make those mistakes in training, so they learn how to deal with them in the real world?
3. Is the way that I'm building this training designed to make me look smart, or is it designed to make sure that they get it?

In tomorrow's post, I'll be talking about what to do when everyone else thinks that training is the answer, but you know it isn't.

This is your brain on training

Traditional classroom training is alive and well in corporations, despite all evidence that it's craptastic. Sure, if the trainer in question is a really dynamic speaker, and if the material is relevant to you, and if you can manage to pull the gems of wisdom out of the lecture, then you might come out of it with a few nuggets you can actually use back at Ye Olde Cubicle Farme.

But most of the time, and for most of us, a classroom training session is a great opportunity to catch up on e-mail (curse you, BlackBerry!), daydreaming, or some light doodling; for the record, none of the above is conducive to you leaving the room able to do something new (or better), which is what training is supposed to be about.

I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to get effective training in a classroom setting; I am saying that you can't get effective training in a traditional classroom lecture with a 3,000-slide PowerPoint presentation (and you just know that all 3,000 slides have line upon line of bulleted lists, don't you?). That training model is a push model: I know stuff that you don't, and I'm going to talk about it until I'm blue in the face and you're imagining me in a muzzle. I'm going to spoon feed you factoids and concepts, and by golly you're going to leave this room knowing everything I know.

Listen, there's a time and place for speeches and presentations, but a training session isn't it. Let me give you a few reasons why:

• If you're giving a speech in front of, say, your local Chamber of Commerce, you have a willing audience that wants to hear what you have to say. In a corporate training setting, you likely have a captive audience, and at least a few of those audience members have a list (as long as your 3,000 slide presentation) of things they'd rather be doing.
• In a speech or presentation, your goal is to enlighten and entertain; if you're training a group of people, the goal is get the audience to be able to do something they couldn't do before.
• In order to achieve the goal of helping people gain competency in a task or job function, they have to be engaged in using that competency or job function.

In tomorrow's entry, I'm going to talk about what you can do to make classroom training worthwhile to the students. In the interim, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

1. When you develop a training course, is your goal to help your students learn, or is it to help them do?
2. Do you want your students to think that you're knowledgeable and smart?
3. When was the last time you told the powers that be (hereafter known as TPTB) that training wouldn't fix their problem?
4. Before you develop training, how much research do you conduct in order to make sure that the skill you're teaching is the skill that's needed to deal with the performance gap?