What’s the difference between good and great training?

How do you measure your training? Here’s a question I came across recently.

What’s the difference between good and great training?

We all know the difference between good and bad training, but it’s harder to tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’ training.

Perhaps it’s not as hard as all that.

The results matter

Ultimately, the real test is: did it work? What are people doing differently as a result of the training?

Even if a trainer is using all the best techniques and tools, the training is only any good if it works. It’s the same with anything.

A clear objective

That’s why it’s so useful to have a really clear objective for your training. So often I’ve been asked for ‘a presentation skills course’. When I’ve asked the client what they want people to be able to do differently by the end of the training they have often had no clear idea.

Here’s how to structure a training objective:

All delegates are able to present the safety information so that the members of their team know how to use the new equipment safely by the end of the day.

If, after your delegates have been out and presented to their teams, everyone is using the equipment safely, then your training has been successful.

For more help with training, see our workshop on Training Skills

Your memory – how reliable is it?

How’s your memory? Do think it’s accurate? Can you rely on it? Have you tested it?

Memory is not a video

It’s easy to imagine that the way we remember things is like viewing an old film or video. But that’s not really the case. Your brain doesn’t work like that.

Memory is about making sense of things

Here’s an interesting experiment carried out by Elizabeth Loftus, one of the top researchers in the field.

A group of people were shown a film of a car crash. They were then asked questions about it. One question was:

“How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”

Others were asked:
“How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?”

Those asked the second question said the car was going a lot faster than those asked the first question. Even more interestingly, when they were asked later if they had seen any broken glass, those who were asked the second question were more likely to say there was broken glass.

There was no broken glass at all. They constructed it in their memories.

Your memory is not reliable – you just think it is

It’s important to know this, so that when you are convinced you remember word for word what a person said, it’s probably extremely unlikely that you do. If you need to remember information like that, write it down.

And be aware that the way you ask others about what they ‘remember’ has a big impact on what they think they remember.

And yes, I did check the recording of the interview to make sure I got the details for this blog correct, just in case you are wondering.

To find out how you can improve your memory, check out our teleseminar on memory. To look after your brain, get our booklet "Boost Your Brain in Your Spare Time"

Nepotism

Why it’s bound to exist in your company

You think you treat people fairly and that you make decisions objectively. We all do. But the trouble is that in reality, no one does.

Here’s a simple experiment. A group of people were asked to identify the best candidate for a job:

A woman who was intelligent.

Or:

A man who was streetwise.

Another group was asked to identify the best candidate for the same job:

A woman who was streetwise.

Or:

A man who was intelligent.

In both groups more people chose the man, indicating that the group overall was biased towards the man.

Why you can’t be objective

This is because we are all subject to influences that we are completely unaware of. We can spot them in others – sometimes they are blindingly obvious and you wonder how people can be so unaware.

If everyone in the two groups choosing between the man and woman had been completely objective then the proportions of ‘streetwise’ and ‘intelligent’ would have been the same for each group.

Clear criteria and standards

This is why it’s so important to have really clear criteria, measures and standards for making decisions.

When you delegate decision-making the most important thing to do is make the criteria clear. To do that, ask yourself:

What’s important about ________?

For example:
“What’s important about this equipment?’

or

“What’s important about the way this new process is implemented?”

Then make sure that the people you are delegating to are really clear about the criteria.

Managing your manager

If your manager is poor at delegating these things, just ask him or her the same question. Then, when you have made the decision, show how you have met the criteria.

For more help managing people get our Management Essentials booklet set

Should you have mystery candidates?

Have you checked the quality of interviews in your company recently? I’ve been working with some clients who have been for interviews in a range of different companies and organisations.

Hearing their experiences has been quite depressing. It's made me ask myself it we should have mystery candidates, in the same way that shops employ mystery shoppers.

Bad interviews

These are just a few. How do you know that your standards are better than this? We have ‘mystery shoppers’ perhaps it’s time to have ‘mystery candidates’.

One candidate was sat aghast while her interviewers argued amongst themselves about the position. They hadn’t even agreed what it was, and this was the second interview.

They were over a week late getting back to her.

Poor skills

Another candidate was told he would be asked competence-based questions and was asked questions that didn’t really apply to the job, and weren’t competence-based questions.

He did his best to build some rapport with the people interviewing him as they walked to the room, but the interviewer seemed to be lacking in any social skills.

Poor administration

A third candidate was told that the final decision would be made in a meeting of all the assessors at the end of the day. Yet, before that meeting took place, she was told she hadn’t got the post. We discovered they had appointed the internal candidate.

Another organisation, ‘did not have time’ to update the job descriptions and person specifications so ended up recruiting people into senior posts who did not have the required skills.

These are just a few recent examples.

Bad questions

As part of my training in how to be interviewed I have a section on how to answer really bad interview questions. They are the ones that people who have not been trained properly on how to interview tend to ask. Things like:

“Why should we give you this job?”

“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff acting in a way that is against our diversity policy, what would you do?”

I keep hoping I will be able to leave this section out, but unfortunately it’s still necessary to prepare candidates.

Why these questions are so bad
Just in case you are wondering why these questions are so bad, here’s an outline:

“Why should we give you this job?”
Your objective in an interview is to find out if the individual has the skills and behaviours to do the job. You have only a limited time to do that. You need to spend that time gathering useful information that will enable you to make a decision.

This question is perfect for those with the “gift of the gab”. They will be able to impress you with their clever answers. However, these are often not the people who do a good job. There are lots of other questions that will give you much more reliable information.

“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff making racist comments, what would you do?”

This is a hypothetical question, so the reliability of the answer is very low. If you want to know whether someone could handle a situation like this, ask

“Have you ever seen a member of staff making racist comments? “

If they say they have, then:

“What did you do?”

If they have not been in this position, you could ask them what they would do, but remember, this is just what they think they would do (or what they think you would like to hear). It’s not reliable.

These examples are all real and give a very bad impression to candidates. Make sure it’s not happening in your organisation. For more help with questions, see our booklet "Questions Made Easy"

You can get some help in recruitment here in our booklet "How to Interview Successfully"

Strategy – the right one for the right situation

Are your strategies up to date?

We all have strategies that we use in particular situations. If you want to be successful you need to make sure you are using the right strategy in the right situation.

Do you remember your parents making you finish all the food on your plate when you were young? They may have even said you could not have your pudding till you had finished your vegetables.

That was probably a useful strategy to get you to eat the healthy food with all the vitamins in.

Out of date strategies

Now you are older, are you using the same strategy? This strategy is not a very good one for maintaining a healthy weight. You need a different strategy, because your objective is different.

But we tend to get comfortable with strategies that we grew up with.

Do not interrupt

When you were young, were you told not to interrupt others? Not to speak till you were spoken to? Many people were.

Others grew up with a strategy of interrupting when they wanted to speak.

If you are from the first group in a meeting with people from the second group, you will have trouble being heard.

The right strategy

Neither strategy is wrong, you just need to know which to use when.

The strategy you choose depends on your objective and your situation. But many people don’t consciously make a decision to use a particular strategy; they just carry on doing what they have always done, even though the situation has changed.

It is time to review your strategies and see which are working and which need to be updated.

Start with checking your objectives and what you are doing to achieve them. Is it working? If not, it might be you need to change your strategy.

How to increase creativity

I think creativity is natural in many people but what happens is you find systems that seem almost deliberately designed to stifle creativity and innovation.

Here’s a common one and how to avoid it.

Consistency

You often hear people saying that they want everything to be consistent. This is very often the case when you are talking about training courses and workshops.

I’ve even had clients draft out objectives like:
Ensure all the modules that are run are consistent.

The trouble is – which you will immediately know if you have been reading any of my material on objectives – you could achieve this by running consistently bad workshops.

As long as they were all as bad as each other, you would have achieved this objective.

Making everyone do everything in the same way means that no one has any room to be creative.  There is a place for this. We don’t want people doing ‘creative accountancy’ or being creative when they are supposed to be running procedures in nuclear power plants.

But there are many situations where we do want people to be creative and to innovate.

Standards of achievement

The way to do this is to have an objective around the standards. What you usually want in these situations is for everyone to at least meet a certain set of standards.

Having an objective about standards means that people are then free to exceed the standards and come up with innovative ways to improve.

When that happens you can find out what they are doing and repeat it in other areas. Then you raise your standards.

Creativity and innovation

In this way you will ensure that you get constant improvement from creativity and innovation and your minimum standards are met, which is probably what people wanted in the first place when they were talking about “consistency”.

5Big Change Mistakes - 5 Not Learning from Past Changes

There can’t be many organisations that have not had to implement changes in the past. Unfortunately from the way some of them implement each new change, you would imagine that they have never done it before.

One reason for this is that many of the people who like and enjoy change are the kinds of people who don’t like planning and detailed careful work.

So they just go ahead with a change and, before the dust has settled and they have checked if it has had the desired effect, they are onto the next change.

Bad managers

There are some managers who are brought into a department purely to implement changes. You have probably seen them yourself.

I came across a particularly bad one recently. She had been rotated into a department to ‘gain experience’. She made a complete mess of it and left the members of the department not only to implement the changes but also to sort out all the extra problems she had caused.

The results of your work

If you don’t have to stick around to see the impact of your work, you can be left thinking that it’s all gone very well. So it’s really easy to make the same mistakes time and time again.

If you have to live with your mistakes you are likely at least to be motivated to do it better the next time.

Learn from your experience

Ideally you need to set out clear goals and objectives. Then make sure you have all the tools in place to ensure you can measure your results.

Yes, it does take time, but it means that, next time, you can do it a lot better.

What should you measure?

Identify what is important to you in this situation. When I was a production manager, the most important things were getting the output and keeping the quality up.

When we had to make a big change, these were the things we checked. By focussing on these, you can plan your change more effectively.

A difficult change

One of the most difficult changes I had to handle was when a very popular supervisor who worked for me retired. It was hard to imagine that anyone could fill Anne’s shoes. She was one of those ‘larger than life’ characters.

I had noticed that output was often reduced when the department lost motivation and suspected that people would be very de-motivated after Anne had left.

I was a very young and inexperience manager when I worked with her, and she taught me a lot. Even now, as I write this, I still feel tremendous sadness at losing her. Not only was she extremely skilled in her job, she was a great friend and fun to work with.

I remember her telling me that she bought her Christmas cards in the January sales every year. That probably gives you an idea of how much planning she did.

My plans

We organised a surprise party and all kinds of other events to celebrate her retirement.

But on top of this, I put a huge amount of effort into planning how we would keep up the output after her final day and keep up the motivation in the team. It paid off. In fact, the output was higher the week after she left than it was the previous week.

Out of respect for Anne, I never mentioned it. But I did learn that you can implement changes effectively if you learn from your past experience and build on it.

Christmas cards

Every year, as regular as clockwork, on 1st December I received a card from Anne. Then, about ten years ago now, I had a card from her husband saying she had passed away, a change I wasn’t quite as well prepared for.

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article


5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change