Why Your Employees Fear Training
by Adrian Miller
It really doesn’t get sadder – or more ironic -- for training professionals than this. Here you are investing in someone, spending time to develop their skills and increase their capacity, and there they are, playing hangman on the handouts, mentally crafting the opening lines of their next cover letter, and popping red-striped mints every 15 minutes to maintain a sugar sustained semi-wakeful state that will invariably lead to collapse by about 2:15pm.
So how do you actually create the most effective training experience? Here’s how.
The 4 Most Important Factors in a Successful Training Experience
1. You must enable trainee buy-in.
Psychiatrists have been telling us for years (er…or they’ve been telling a good friend of ours…yeah…a friend…) that a patient has to want help before help can be provided. Fair enough. The same axiom holds true in the training world. You must provide your trainees with the right training framework. And what is the right training framework? Easy: they must want to be trained.
If it’s going to help them increase sales, convince them of how wonderful this will be. If it’s going to increase their capacity to earn more commission, tell them. Work with your outsourced trainer before the actual training event and promote these benefits.
Remember, please: negative expectations from trainees will pollute even the most well designed training, just as the world’s best psychiatrist can’t help our… friend…overcome his fear of circus clowns.
2. You must know what the problem is, and what the solution will be.
This one sounds too simple to be true. But you’d be amazed to see how often this factor is overlooked. Do you know what needs to be fixed? Is it deal-closing, or relationship building? Do you want to improve ROI? Motivate? Cut down on process redundancy? Align communication from different units, functions; heck, even cubicles and floors? If you don’t know what’s wrong, you won’t know how to solve it.
Or worse (and yes, there is a worse here), you might actually create problems by trying to solve the wrong thing. Scary, yes, but it happens. If you’re trying to solve a team-building problem by promoting individual accomplishment in your training, then you’re actually making things worse. And on top of that: you’re paying for it! AHHHHH!
3. Measure and monitor your sales metrics.
All of the training in our solar system isregrettably not going to improve your sales metrics if you don’t know what those metrics are, what they should be, and whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. You want to measure before and after the training to gauge effectiveness.
4. Who’ll own post-training?
One of the greatest advancements in the language of business is that people are now told that they own certain tasks. So who in your company will own the essential task of post-training?
What?
Post-training. You may have successfully taken care of #1, #2, and #3 above, but what happens a week, a month, or a year after the training ends? Who will ensure that its legacy lives beyond the actual training experience? Memories fade, and enthusiasm wanes. You must elect someone capable of this ownership task, and empower her/him to do what is necessary to ensure that post-training gains are achieved over the long-term.
Training is not a 4-Letter Word
Please remember: as a decision-maker and training change agent, the problems that we’re solving here aren’t your fault. The perception of training has changed dramatically in the last decade; and it’s something that more and more people – especially skilled/knowledge workers – are disliking; even resenting.
Yet what hasn’t changed, and what will never change regardless of how dramatic things get, is that training is an essential part of a successful enterprise. The strategy is therefore not to fly the white flag of human resource surrender, but to approach training with total success in mind. Implementing the four steps noted above will firmly put you on the right track, and head you in the right long-term direction.
Adrian Miller is President of Adrian Miller Sales Training, a sales training and business development consultancy. She can be reached at 516-767-9288 or amiller@adrianmiller.com.
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Copyright 2008 Adrian Miller Sales Training. All rights reserved. While you may copy this publication, its content may not be modified. You may, and are encouraged to, share the publication with others who may benefit from receiving it.
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