Soft skills blog articles

The Secret L&D Manager: Building a learning culture in a global organization

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This week’s Secret L&D manager is Hungarian and is a Learning & Development Specialist for a global chemical company . In this post, he talks about the  journey and the challenges of building a learning culture in a large organization.

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When you joined the company, what kind of learning culture did you find?

I think it’s really easy to answer this question, because when I joined my company, I can say that there was no learning culture. If I can take a step back, people have different understandings and definitions of the term “learning culture” . For me “learning culture” means there are people who like learning, there are learning resources and opportunities that people are encouraged to access whenever they need something or expect to need something going forward, and managers enable and encourage learning . Here, in all cases, there was nothing, so people were not, really empowered to learn. The second thing is that there were not a lot of resources available for learning. One of my priorities, and it’s also one of the reasons I was hired, is to create this kind of learning environment and then along with this also create a learning culture.

How were managers and the leaders in your organization seeing learning before you arrived?

I think, and this is only my perspective, that the management was saying, “Learning is very much needed” but when it came to the point where they had to invest they said, “We don’t have the budget for that”. On the one hand they definitely like the idea of learning. They talk a lot about learning and do want to enhance, improve and develop their employees. But actually, when an employee comes to them and says “OK we agreed that I need negotiations training” and they say, “OK go, have fun”, the employee has to find the seminar or resources. Employees would just Google something and then went come back with a course they had found that cost €20,000. For me this was the first problem because nobody knew if  it was a good course quality-wise, who the provider was and if they were a fit, whether the investment was reasonable or if the training was needed.  And then usually 99% of the managers said “sorry but we don’t have the budget for that”.

So how have you gone about building a learning culture?

What I did first was convincing management that learning and development really matters to our success as an organization. I used storytelling approaches to help them see why it is good to invest in learning, and how a company actually benefits from having a learning culture.  Then I showed them that, even if they don’t want to spend a lot of money, using informal or on-the-job learning is still going to create a lot of benefits for the company. For example, using job rotation or on-the-job development does work and can make a tangible difference.  Approaches like mentoring and internal coaching can and should be done. The managers in my company really bought into this idea. The first 2 or 3 things that I managed to do were ideas which didn’t cost a lot of money but were still very beneficial.

Another example where I actually created value and showed the management why learning helps an organization is when we set up the first e-learnings. We built these internally using a tool called EdApp https://www.edapp.com/. It’s a very good and  intuitive tool and easy to use. There were a lot of templates that we could instantly just choose and work with. I worked with our technical experts and together we created e-learning activities on areas such as regulation, process management and . tendering, and product management. We then rolled the e-learnings out to 200 people and the feedback from the participants has been really great.  Because of this tool we’ve been able to gamify the learning too.

What else have you done to continue building a culture since?

Communication is key. Whenever we have a new product or new system (e.g recruiting, performance management) we  connect it to the learning. For example, in our performance management you have an annual meeting about your performance with your manager, and you have to talk about your development.  Of course most people consider meeting a mandatory step and find it boring. I have worked with the managers to help them individually use this moment to create a better dialog with their employees, be more confident when giving feedback, setting goals etc etc. This combination of  building a catalogue of recommended training providers and training courses, building e-learning, leveraging managers and looking for single moments where we can connect learning to the business process shows why learning is important in a company and is the first steps of building a learning culture.

More secret L&D Managers

Who is the secret L&D manager?

The “secret L&D manager” is actually a group of L&D managers. They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with their peers.

 

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Seven Exercises for Overcoming Loneliness and Isolation when Working from Home

In the 2020 State of Remote Work survey, respondents identified loneliness as their top struggle with working from home. Even among experienced home-workers, loneliness and isolation are challenges. This year, millions of workers are suddenly sent home to work, indefinitely and with no preparation. Only a select few will be able to thrive in perpetual solitude; the rest will probably need a little help. This post offers seven exercises you can do to overcome loneliness and isolation when you are working from home. Think of these as your ‘daily to-do list’. In fact, this list is a good practice for looking after your mental health in normal circumstances; in present circumstances it has become a lot more relevant.

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#1 Talk to someone

Loneliness is a cycle. The more alone we feel the more we think that other people don’t want to talk to us, and so we don’t reach out. Break the cycle by having at least one conversation a day, with anyone. Talking about how we feel can help see that other people are feeling exactly the same and that we are not alone.

#2 Talk to yourself

We are all doing this most of the time, but we don’t realise it. Psychologists call this our ‘inner dialogue’ made up of recurring thoughts and emotions whirling inside our heads. If we don’t listen to this dialogue, we won’t be able to control it. Luckily, there are some proven techniques to help us listen more intently to ourselves; daily journal writing, labelling the emotions we are feeling, writing a letter to our third person self. These techniques allow us to view ourselves as an outside observer in order to tackle negative thoughts and emotions before they become actions and behaviours.

#3 Keep fit

‘Healthy body – healthy mind’ is not just an expression. Science has shown that physical exercise has a positive effect on our mental state. Intense physical activity releases mood-lifting chemicals called endorphins into our blood stream. Even just going for a walk can make us feel better, due to the fresh air, change of scenery and being around people (at an appropriate distance!). If you can’t, or don’t want to go outside, there are lots of free videos on the internet offering live fitness routines!

#4 Tune out

News channels and social media are full of one story at the moment and while it is good to be informed and in touch with what’s happening on the outside, the noise this makes can be over-whelming and reinforce negative feelings. Tuning-out from news and media can help us to tune-in to ourselves, find some peace and quiet from the noise and focus on doing something that makes us feel good. This is an example of a term that has become highly popularised in recent years – ‘mindfulness’.

#5 Take charge

Get a piece of paper and draw a circle. On the outside of the circle write the things that worry or bother you. This could be anything from becoming ill to a noisy neighbour. Now work in the inside of the circle and write all the things in your life that you can directly control. For example, you can’t control your neighbour, but you can ignore the noise. You can’t control events, but you can definitely control your reactions to them. The area inside the circle is your zone of control. This is the area you should work on and put your energy into because being in control of things gives us positive feelings, compared to worrying about things we can’t control or influence. When you start using any of the exercises in this post you have actually started to take control already!

#6 Do something for someone

Human brains are reward-driven, which means our senses become heightened when we enjoy things. Recognition and gratitude from other people are among the most common types of reward which our brains seek. A good way of doing this is to offer a kind act to someone else. For example, giving a compliment, holding a door open, giving a nice smile. It makes no difference if these things are reciprocated or not; just the act of doing them makes us feel better about ourselves and more connected to others, lighting up those important reward centres in our brains.

#7 Do something for yourself

Acts of kindness also extend to yourself. Being isolated can be a struggle but it’s also a potential gift. Is there a book you’ve been meaning to read, a recipe you haven’t had time to try, a new hobby you’ve been interested in but not had the time? Doing something new can help take your mind away from feeling lonely and build purpose and self-esteem.

We hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you did, and it helped you, you could choose to ‘pay it forward’ by sharing it with someone else – a little act of kindness that could make a difference. You can also share your tips and advice for dealing with working at home, in the comments section below.If you would like to know more about our experience of helping teams with remote working, feel free to contact us. We also offer training on managing your focus, energy and impact when working from home and leading people when they are working from home.

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Three steps to adapt to working from home

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In March 2020 it is estimated that a quarter of the world’s population is confined to their homes in some form or other. For millions of workers this means having to adapt to working from home. In this post you will read about the 3-step approach to make that change a bit smoother and a little less painful. Even after this current crisis has ended, there may be times in the future where we need to make a radical and sudden shift in the way we work due to external circumstances. This could be anything ranging from unemployment or re-location, to geo-political events. So, we have put together the advice and approach in this post to be helpful in any situation where we need to change the way we work.

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Step 1 – Acknowledge

The first step to dealing with any big change is to acknowledge what is happening. If we don’t do this, we may get stuck in a little bit of denial, which will prevent us from dealing with the present situation effectively. Here are examples of what you can acknowledge in the current situation:

  1. For a lot of people right now, being asked to work at home full time is not voluntary. This is a decision made for us, not by us.
  2. This situation may last a long time. At the moment, authorities and businesses are talking about isolation as ‘indefinite’.
  3. ‘Working from home’ is not the same as ‘being at home’. There will be obstacles you will need to overcome, from dealing with family members to the state of your home internet connection.
  4. You will need to adapt by making changes to both home and work life. Put another way; you will need a new set of rules for both.

There will be other things you need to acknowledge – everybody’s situation is different. Spending a little time considering what is different or missing from your new home working situation is a good way to prepare to make some changes, which is our next step.

Remember that difficult periods can also be
personally rewarding. As someone once said, “the worst that
can happen is that you might learn something about yourself”.

Step 2 – Make Changes

Now that you have acknowledged the situation, you’re ready to make the changes you need in order to adapt to it. A good way to approach this is to make a list of difficulties/things you miss and then come up with counter-measures to each one. We did this exercise recently in our own team, and we discovered that although our team is made up of experienced remote/home workers, they still have challenges that they need to work on. Here are some of the things from their lists:

Difficulties I Face/Things I Miss:

  • Making a mental and physical separation of work and home life
  • Knowing how to organise my day
  • Being able to stop and tune-out from work
  • Seeing and socialising with colleagues
  • Little routines e.g. morning coffee with a croissant in the canteen!
  • Interruptions and distractions from family members
  • Feeling like I’m at work rather than at home
  • Team huddles and bouncing ideas off each other

Counter-Measures:

  • Find a dedicated space to work (can be anywhere) and put on work clothes in the morning
  • Start the day with a ‘stand up’ team meeting on Skype – hearing others’ priorities can help us shape our own priorities and organise our days
  • Set up rules for family members e.g. knock on your home office door if they want something, put a sign up ‘Can talk/In a meeting/Busy until 11.’ etc.
  • Stick to your old routines where you can e.g. schedule a coffee break to go grab a coffee somewhere local
  • Use technology to connect to colleagues and agree how to use them, e.g. WhatApp group for idea bouncing, Zoom for team meetings
  • Make time for fun with colleagues to relieve boredom and lift your mood (e.g. sharing internet memes, funny videos, doing online challenges)
  • Talk often to colleagues about feelings on working at home
  • Fix a daily schedule and stick to it (share it with family members and colleague so that they can help you)

Step 3 – Look After Yourself

Sudden changes to our lives can be traumatic. In Step 1 we advised spending time acknowledging the change. Step 3 is all about managing your mental and physical health through a period of sudden change. Here are some practical ways you can do this:

Get some exercise

Even if you don’t wear a fitness gadget on your wrist, you will soon realise that working from home means moving much less compared to being in the office. So, plan some exercise into your daily routine, even just a 30 minute walk at lunchtime can help. Research shows that lack of exercise and fresh air has a real impact on our mental capabilities.

Ask for help

From colleagues and especially your manager. This could be asking for solutions to technical problems, or for a bit of slack if the home/work balance is getting overwhelming. We are all in the same boat and asking for and giving help and support is what we need to do now. You can read our tips and advice for managers in the post How to Lead a Team that is Working from Home.

Be kind to yourself

You are not going to make this change successfully in one day or even one month. It’s ok to be frustrated, angry, impatient and it’s healthy to consider the emotions you are feeling and where they come from. It’s also important to understand the emotions of those around us – whether family or colleagues – and be kind and understanding of those people too. You can find tips and advice on dealing with the emotional side of home-working in the post Dealing with Loneliness and Isolation When Working from Home.

We hope you enjoyed reading this post and please share what works for you in the comments. If you would like to know more about our experience of helping teams with remote working, feel free to contact us. We also offer training on managing your focus, energy and impact when working from home.

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A practical guide to storytelling in business

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People have always told stories and they are a vital part of our communication. Today, storytelling has become accepted (and sometimes expected) in a professional context. We’ve seen a rapid demand for our practical storytelling in business training solutions. Whereas 8 years ago there was sometimes a need to convince people that a storytelling approach was valid, we rarely get any pushback today. This change in attitudes can be partly attributed to the power of the TED talk format, partly to our push back against death by PowerPoint and people speaking to us in bullets … and mainly because storytelling never went away. When done well, storytelling connects with people in a way no other communication approach can. This post outlines the essentials so you can get started.

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What is a story? And why should I use them?

Every story has …

  • a plot
  • a beginning, middle and end
  • often involves overcoming a problem, challenge, obstacle, dilemma
  • but above all …. a story connects on a human /emotional level

This last point is the key. A story is not a series of events or a case study. It should connect with people and create an emotional reaction.
This connecting makes stories easy to remember. When done well stories bring meaning to information and have the power to move people. Depending on the story and the skill of the storyteller our brains …

  • produce cortisol during the tense moments in a story, which allows us to focus
  • produce oxytocin, that promotes connection and empathy
  • release dopamine which makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic

If you are interested in the science behind these statements, these two HB articles explore the science behind storytelling and what makes storytelling so effective for learning.

This means you can choose to use a story in a wide range of situations. We often use stories when presenting, influencing, teaching, leading or just in day-to-day discussions. Consider using stories when you want to aid memory, celebrate, challenge assumptions, connect, convince, encourage, energize, entertain, explain, impress, inspire, motivate, persuade, reinforce values or beliefs, scare or shock, sell, support, teach or warn.

How do I build a story?

Learning to build a great story is a skill, and it can require practice. If you want to build a story you need to start with your audience. Your first question has to be “What do I want them to feel?”. Sometimes the emotion you arrive at may surprise you. Secondly ask yourself “What do I want them to understand? think? do?”. Then think back over the situations you’ve been part of, or have observed. It is far easier and far better to tell stories that mean something to you and are your stories. You can share other people’s stories but make sure you have the information and the understanding to bring it to life. Again, a story works because it connects on a human /emotional level.

This post goes behind the scenes with 2 of our staff, discussing the challenges some professionals have when building a story and how they approach this in a training environment.

If you are struggling to build a story, then try using the IDEAS approach:

  • Identify the emotion you are trying to create. Then identify what you want your listener to understand and do.
  • Decide which story would best accomplish this and connect with your listener
  • Expand your story. You have the bones, now put the flesh on them.
  • Anticipate their questions and reactions. Now choose to deal with these within your story or intentionally leave this out to provoke discussion once you’ve finished telling the story.
  • See the story as you tell it.

Finally, don’t assume you can just get up and tell it. You need to practice your story, if you want to make it matter.

How do I actually tell my story?

If the story means something to you, you will already have the content and the structure. Make things personal and tell tough stories. If your story is tough and personally matters to you, you will naturally find the pace, the tone and the body language you need to make your story captivating. When you are developing and practising your story, follow these 3 great pieces of advice:

  • Invest time in building it
  • Practice out loud
  • Make it personal to you

When you are delivering the story …

  • see the story as you tell it
  • use outer and inner language. Outer language is what physically happened, while inner language is how the person was feeling thinking. An advanced tip is to avoid eye contact when you are sharing the inner language.
  • use plenty of LOTS (language of the senses). This includes what you saw, heard, smelt, tasted, tough or felt
  • take your time. If your rush your story, you will rob it of its richness. You wouldn’t want to read a story structured into bullet points, would you?

And if you want to get really good …

  • use memory devices e.g. words, phrases or images repeated in different places
  • use a tangible object or image as a starting or closing point
  • when doing dialogues adopt a different voice/body/position for each person
  • consider your space – roam the room or sit on a chair – BUT actively think about it!

What should I not do when telling a story?

Telling a story is NOT the same as making a presentation. A lot of the techniques you’ve learned on presentation seminars are story-killers and using them will rob your story of its emotional content. For example:

  • Don’t put your key message up front
  • Don’t tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them
  • Don’t start with the structure, start with the emotion
  • We would also suggest you avoid the phrase “Let me tell you a story”

Storytelling is a learnable skill! It starts with identifying your goal and understanding your audience. You need to know the emotion you are looking for. From there you start hunting for the right story, which you then craft through practice. Don’t rush it, do not “present” it, and have the courage to just tell a story person to person. You’ll be surprised at the impact you can make.

And if you’d like support, whether it be coaching or training then do get in touch. We’d love to help you be even better at storytelling.

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Train the Trainer: Dealing with ‘difficult’ participants – part 1

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At Target Training we’ve been delivering “train-the-trainer” solutions for over 20 years to a broad range of clients across industries. Without fail, one of the most common personal training goals we see is “I want to learn to deal with difficult participants”.  No matter whether you are delivering on-boarding, technical, safety  or skills training, training starts and ends with your participants. As a trainer you want to deliver training which is engaging and useful … and as all experienced trainers know, a single difficult participant can impact this.  This blog post shares our advice and experience, so you are better prepared to deal with difficult participants in the training room.
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What do we mean by a “difficult participant” and how common are they really?

Training is about adding value to your participants and organization, by developing their knowledge, skills and behaviours.  You want your participants to have a rewarding learning experience – and you have designed your training to achieve this.  You’ve identified and considered the learning goals, you’ve considered the flow so it is smooth and ties together, and you’ve designed varied activities to keep the training engaging and rewarding. A “difficult participant, is a participant who hinders or prevents the above – intentionally or not. Difficult participants diminish the impact of the training for the other participants and reduce your organizations return on investment.

All participants have the potential of being difficult, and this depends upon a variety of factors – ranging from the context of the training to the training design, and from personalities to an individual’s situational circumstances.  We all have bad days. However, truly destructive participants are thankfully rare. I’ve been involved in delivering training for over 23 years, and looking back I can only think of a handful of “difficult” individuals.  Unfortunately, I remember them clearer than the rest. So, what can you do? Before the training starts, you can minimize the risk of participants becoming difficult before the training even starts, through some simple steps.

Know who the participants are

If you are delivering internally, then get a list of the participants in advance and make the time to speak with their line managers.  By doing this you can learn more about the “perceived” context for the training, and the participants knowledge, experience, needs and attitudes. If somebody is cynical, silent or a talker, then the line manager may flag this. Alternatively, just ask straight out “Are there any participants I should keep an eye on?”.  You can also encourage the manager to speak with her participants and reinforce that they value training and have expectations.  Line manager involvement is key to successful training (Clemmer 2008) and ensures your organization makes the most of its training investment.

If you have a chance to meet the participants before the session, you should take it. Give them an impression of who you are. Build rapport before they enter the training room. Introduce yourself, find out what they expect from the training and set their expectations (“yes, unfortunately, there will be some role-plays”), or just make small talk for a few minutes. For you, the trainer, it makes a huge difference to walk into a room with ten strangers (not knowing what they want), or to walk into a room with five strangers and five people you already know (whose expectations you’ve already set).

Design the training so it respects and engages everyone

Use what you’ve learned from speaking with the line managers to ensure your training content is appropriate, relevant and challenging. By doing this you can minimize the likelihood of a wide range of difficult or disruptive behaviours – from boredom to frustration to challenging. You also want to ensure that your training respects the range of personalities and learning styles. Give your participants the opportunity to reflect, consider and contribute both as individuals and in groups.  Plan “loud” and “quiet” times so both extroverts and introverts get what they need– not everyone enjoys brainstorming and discussions. Do consider the flow of energy within the training day and consciously design your training around this e.g. after lunch will you energize the group, or give them some reflection time to look back on the morning?

Anticipate tough questions, difficult learning points and likely areas of resistance

If this is a new training solution, then take the time to play “what if”.  Write down all the questions that you hope they will ask, know they will ask, don’t want them to ask, and dread they ask. Then think about your answers. Practice your responses out loud and ensure your answers are brief, to the point and authentic. As the trainer you have a lot of knowledge and experience – and synthesizing all this into a clear and brief response can be tough.

If you’ve delivered the training before than you’ve already spotted the areas which raise questions or provoke discussions.  Again, step back and consider what you want to say, how you want to say, and how much time you want to invest in which topics.

If there’s an elephant in your training room, then know how you want to tackle it

Keep your training human and keep it real. The circumstances surrounding the training can and will influence behaviours. If the organization is going through change, restructuring, laying off staff, or merging then you can expect this to impact attitudes and behaviours. You probably cannot influence these circumstances, but you can acknowledge them and prepare for possible resistance, push back or disassociation.

I remember delivering a 2-day leadership program to an automotive company where everyone knew that at the end of day 1 a major announcement would be made on the future of some plants.  The training content was fixed and “motivating and driving performance “was a major part of the first day. We spoke about the circumstances openly, acknowledged that the topic was awkwardly timed to say the least, and agreed to reframe the training as practical management skills for the future, wherever they may be. Keeping the pace fast, the energy high and the themes as “archetypical” helped the training make a personal impact.

Reframe how you see difficult participants

Embrace the challenge of difficult participants. At its heart, training is about people, and we learn more about working with people from difficult situations than from “everything going to plan”.  You want participants to be engaged and challenging you is actually a good thing.  You want your participants to let you know if something isn’t going right for them during the training and not afterwards. And you want your participants to be themselves.  I’ve only ever met one participant who I couldn’t work with at any level whatsoever, and even this was a learning moment – I learned that was ok, to accept the situation, and to focus on the other participants who clearly wanted to be there.

Always open the training in a way that sets out mutual expectations

Creating and agreeing on ground rules and shared expectations is essential. This then gives you and others the framework to hold each other accountable and have difficult conversations with difficult participants about difficult situations. Experienced trainers do this naturally and each trainer has their own style, but the core you need to agree on is

  • Timing (start, finish, breaks and length of breaks). Even the most experienced trainers can forget this, and participants want and need to know what to expect. You don’t need to lock yourself in to a schedule if you don’t want to but telling them you’ll break for lunch “around 12.30” helps.
  • Laptops open, closed, or even in bags. Phones are the bane of a trainer’s life, and when one person takes a call during the training everyone is impacted. Possible approaches could be
    • at the front on a desk
    • must be on silent
    • in bags and only check in breaks
    • take calls but leave the room before start speaking

Effective approaches to managing the pull of phone calls that I’ve seen/heard/ done have included:

  • make a joke of it e.g. “Is anybody expecting a child to be born they know about? No, well in that case do we really need our phones on?”
  • be direct e.g “Put your mobiles on silent and in your bags (not your pockets). You can check them during breaks, and if something is truly urgent your colleagues know where you are and how to find you.  And if they can’t be bothered to come to the training room it can’t be truly urgent!”
  • charity box “Everything you take your phone out you put X in the bowl up front”
  • choosing a venue with no phone reception

And if none of the above are acceptable, then at least get agreement that people respectfully leave the training room when on the phone.

  • Communication. If the training topic is likely to be contentious or difficult then it is worth taking time to agree on expected communication styles. e.g. try not to interrupt, ask question to learn and not to show what you know, ask if something isn’t clear, close the loop by asking clarifying questions back etc.

Agreeing on ground rules allows you as the trainer to refer back to the agreed expectations and have awkward conversations safely. And of course, all of the above approaches are much more powerful when the training participants build them themselves!  This allows the participants to hold each other accountable and take responsibility for ensuring the dynamics are healthy.  You can expect that colleagues can self-regulate behaviours to some extent!

Start the training by keeping it real and keeping things human

The final tip is that positioning yourself above your participants will create unnecessary resistance and provoke difficult behaviours as participants try to prove something wrong, reject messages because they reject your credibility, or fight to show they know more. You are the trainer and you are human. Use this to build authenticity, credibility and trust from the outset and reduce the risk of difficult behaviours derailing the training. Share your experience, build your credibility and also show that you know how it can be challenging at first to get to grips with the specifics (“ I remember when ..”).

If you are delivering soft skills, customer service or leadership training, then avoid presenting yourself as the example to be followed. Tap into meaningful stories, share experiences and connect with the participants on a human level. My own approach is to open our Practical toolbox for managers program with “ I strongly believe in the value of everything we’ll be covering in the next 2 days, and many of your colleagues have fed back that they found it practical. Saying that, as a manager, I do not do everything we’ll be covering myself. I’m human and I have my strengths and my weaknesses”.  I then see the participant’ physically relax and open up.

 

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17 practical ways senior managers and executives can support training and development inside their organization

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Recently one of our clients asked me to co-facilitate a workshop at an annual global event. The client is one of the largest building materials companies in the world, and their annual event is attended by plant managers, country directors and executives. Amongst the presentations and plenary sessions they wanted to run 2 challenging workshops which would then lead to concrete action plans. One of these workshops focused on the ambitious goal of quickly becoming carbon free, and the other on training. 

Our client wanted to further strengthen their learning culture and ensure top-level management were playing an active part in this journey. Rather than asking the senior leaders “What do you need?” the question they wanted to ask was “So. what can you do?” – and the participants loved it.  They were more than happy to share their experiences and opinions, and all were quite vocal when expressing that learning and development was their responsibility. As one Indonesian plant manager said  “You at headquarters support us and help us, we like the e-learning and the virtual delivery offers … but we are the important ones because we need to make it happen”.

Based upon their input, and expanded through interviews with other clients, here are 17 ways that senior managers and executives can actively support training and development within their organizations.

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  1. Ensure that the message of how training connects into your long-term health and strategy is lived by all levels. This means looking for opportunities to repeat this message and using concrete and relatable stories.
  2. Be clear to your L&D teams about where you see your future challenges. What will the critical skills be in 5 years time? What trends do you see in your market? Where do you see the skills gap? What are the core behaviours you want to see in your staff’s DNA? If you show them where you want to go they will help you get there.
  3. Support the building of a skills matrix for roles , then with a rolling 36-month focus, ensure training is connected directly to this skills matrix. This is an upfront investment that then provides a clear framework for deciding where training budgets go.
  4. Tap into “management by objectives“ behaviours and make learning a target for your management team.
  5. Encourage awareness that people learn through experience and exposure. Be an example and look into include and involve upcoming talents and high-performers.
  6. Expect your management teams to lead by example and actively join training sessions. This helps ensure that training is seen as strengthening for the future and not a sign of weakness or gaps.
  7. Be seen to be looking for training and development for yourself. This sends a clear message that training is about becoming stronger and not a sign of weakness.
  8. Insist that managers actively feed back to the central L&D team regarding their current and future needs, satisfaction levels, and ideas for the medium and long-term. Strive to make the internal customer surveys a formality.  Your L&D teams should know in advance what is working and what is not if they are benefiting from direct conversations with the regions.
  9. Ask to see that all training has a clear objective and that this is reinforced before, during, and after the training by line managers in person. This isn’t about checking quality, but rather showing the people involved in the before and after that you care, and these steps aren’t nice-to-have add-ons!
  10. Connected to above, insist that all training programs lead to follow up actions by team leaders and line managers. See #4.
  11. Ensue that clear and tangible training objectives are communicated at multiple touch points. Find stories and examples which connect the importance of learning and development to medium- and long-term goals. Yes, this similar to points 1 & 2 but we can’t emphasize it enough. If people understand the “why” then things happen.
  12. Whenever you visit a plant or site, take the time to meet the local training dept and ask what else you can do to support them. They’ll really appreciate this … and you are again sending a clear signal that training and development is strategically important to you.
  13. Get involved with your emerging talents programs. These people are your future. They’ll be energized by your involvement and they’ll energize you too!
  14. Commit to actively supporting a training session once a month by joining the first 15 minutes, explaining why this training is relevant, showing interest in the people in the room and being clear about what we want to see afterwards
  15. Show little tolerance for regions reinventing the wheel. Identify the core strategic programs needed by all regions– get these programs right through piloting them – and then make sure there is budget to adapt them to the local skill levels and languages.
  16. Get involved when budget ownership questions threaten the actual delivery of training. Help cut through the complexity of cost centers and encourage the company to work as one organization.
  17. When costs need cutting, defend training budgets and training availability. It’s too easy to cut it and the savings are often small compared to more painful options but the message is clear. Do you want your employees to see training and development opportunities as a bonus or as an expectation?

For more information

If you’d like to know more about how you can actively make the most from your training investment then download this simple and practical guide.

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Which topics are most suited for the live virtual training format

This week’s Secret L&D manager is German and has been working for one of the big management consulting firms for 13 years. She is part of a virtual L&D team responsible for internal training solutions for a global group of analysts, specialists, and managers across multiple time zones. In our previous interviews she has shared how and why her organization got started with live virtual training solutions, and what they have learned along the way. In this post she shares more of her experience and looks forward to the future of virtual delivery.

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Which topics have you learned work well virtually and which haven’t taken off?

As I mentioned earlier, we first used the live virtual delivery format for what we could call hard skills. This included technical skills and software training. Training on Excel, PowerPoint etc. We then used virtual delivery formats for training where there were a lot of tips, dos and don’ts. For example, how to build effective slides and engage your audience. If the training is about showing something directly and then facilitating a conversation about this, then virtual training actually works very well.

We have also had really good experiences with softer topics too. Many of our leadership programs are now delivered virtually. For example one of our management development programs has a kick-off webinar, two one-one-one coaching sessions and a wrap-up webinar —all facilitated virtual—as standard elements, plus during this journey the participants meet for a two-day residential workshop. The feedback from our managers is that this is one of our most popular and successful programs.  We also have a lot of softer topics where working virtually is part of the training goals. For example, “Presenting in a virtual environment” or “Leading virtual teams”.

One big challenge or obstacle in a virtual space is how to build up trust. You have so many things which are lacking in a virtual space which are usually vital to building up trust with someone, right? This could be the immediate reaction to the other’s physical presence – smiles, body language, eye contact, even smell – anything. We’re all humans and we react to one another’s presence. But what happens when there isn’t a physical presence? Tackling this kind of virtual training topic in a virtual training environment makes absolute sense.

Are there some topics that you’d never wanted to go virtual with?

That’s actually a good question. Some training concepts are not at first glance suitable, but over the years I have learned that it is really a question of design. The technology does have limitations, but this is continually improving. I would say the obvious ones that don’t transfer as easily to a virtual deliver format easily are those programs where there are a lot of role-plays required. It’s difficult when the softer expressions, body language etc. are important training elements. But even these can be approached in different ways.

It depends on the situation, the participants’ situations and our training goals. When I want to adapt communication, soft skills, leadership training, etc. for a virtual context I think it’s possible to do that training or program also in a virtual setting. In fact, I will say that it makes a lot of sense to do it virtually as this is the manager’s reality! Yes, it can be difficult with topics like assertiveness, difficult conversations, giving feedback etc.  On a tiny little screen, their body language is not really visible. I don’t know what their legs are doing, but I can see what their shoulders are doing, and maybe their arms, hands and face – and this is reality. If it’s leadership in a virtual environment or difficult conversations in a virtual environment, the virtual training setting works perfectly.

If you’re trying to practice something you only ever do face-to-face with people, then it’s not as strong but it still can work. I can only think of a couple of our programs which maybe aren’t so suitable for virtual delivery, but it’s really only a few.

Do you see a change in the way you’ll be using live virtual training in the future?

Yes and no. I think there’ll be a shift in L&D generally, and also inside our firm. On the one hand, we don’t want to fully give up on the residential trainings because it’s still a very different experience and people really do like them. You are spending maybe three days with each other, rather than three hours online. It is completely different – you get to know people, you have a different level of peer exchange, you establish defined accountability partners etc. If you are meeting in person you also talk more broadly about things which are happening in the business and topics which are very sensitive things. Often this is outside of the training, too. In these longer residential trainings, you often build friendships with colleagues that are important for the rest of their working life. It’s a different experience.

On the other hand, the internationalization of our people and company means we are finding that the people who require a certain skill and want to develop it are not actually based in the same location. Bringing people together for classical face-to-face training is certainly a cost question – but also a time and environmental one, too! I think virtual training will expand because of these factors. There is of course an additional benefit – it is also good that people from different countries, with different work styles and different backgrounds have more chances and opportunities to exchange ideas and approaches.

So, from the human side we certainly still want that people meet each other in person – but really it’s a question of the topic and taking everything into account. I expect virtual training will increase because of the benefits it offers when done well. It makes a lot of sense when you have a topic which can be actually broken down into modules, and where it doesn’t matter if you have a week in between modules (or maybe a week in between really helps!).

Today, virtual delivery is being integrated into all of our approaches. All stand-alone residential training events will also have maybe a virtual kick-off call, some exercises in between, virtual coaching calls afterwards, and virtual wrap-up meetings afterwards etc. This leads to a blended learning journey so people can integrate training into their work life and transfer what they have learned. It is easier to incorporate virtual delivery into our everyday work life.  I believe it will become more and more usual.

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Lessons learned: making live virtual training work for our business

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This week’s Secret L&D manager is German and has been working for one of the management consulting firms for 13 years. She is part of a virtual L&D team responsible for internal training solutions for a global group of analysts, specialists, and managers across multiple time zones. In our previous interview she shared how and why her organization got started with live virtual training solutions. In this post she shares more of her experience on how to deliver virtual training solutions well.

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Based on your experience over the last five years, what advice would you give a fellow L&D manager who hasn’t organized virtual delivery before and is planning on trying it?

If this is your very first move into live virtual training, I would suggest you start with a hard skill. Something which is more about skills than behaviours, for example software tools, processes etc. I would then search for a pilot group. For me a good pilot group is a group who will give you clear and balanced feedback. You should invest some time in preparing the pilot group. See it like setting the scene in terms of change management. People will probably be very sceptical and may even complain. You want to help them build an open mindset and help them understand why this move to virtual delivery is a good idea for them and the organization.

If this is the very first time you’re trying live virtual training then make the time to go and talk with people one-on-one and win them over. People don’t understand actually how “live”, interactive and fun, live virtual training can be. They might be thinking about e-learning or webinars where they just listen for half an hour. You want them to appreciate that this is live and that they will be expected to contribute in the same way as if they were in the same room as the facilitator. Tell them it’s not going to be a passive and boring experience, just pick up the phone and say “Hey John, you’re suggested for this training, we have this really cool format on WebEx, and it will be working like this and we’ll get you a really good headset and this will be really fun. You’ll meet people from Brazil and from Russia and ….”. Then see what you can do to help them be comfortable with the technology. Think about setting up a WebEx call with them beforehand and show them what WebEx looks like, how it works, how you’re going to use—and a few tips on making it a good experience, like finding a quiet place for the training session without people listening in, without background noise etc.

You want to light a fire in them. You want them to talk about the pilot session to other people and say at the very least, “Hey, actually that was not too bad!”

What advice can you share on designing and delivering live virtual training?

First of all, I would also invest in finding a fantastic and experienced virtual facilitator. You want the participants to connect with them and the training and leave with a positive experience. You can either look for an external vendor or learn-as-you go internally.

If you are going external you want to find an external partner who knows what they are doing and can guide you. If I use our example of working with you at Target Training, when we first spoke, and you asked me “Do you want a producer or not?” I knew that you knew what you were talking about.

Why do you feel a technical producer is so important in virtual training?

There are many people who don’t know what a producer is and what a producer’s role is. For me the technical producer is actually a key part of virtual facilitation and this is often forgotten.

The producer takes care of the technical part and if you use a producer, you can leverage all the functionality available in the virtual training tools, like breakout rooms, polls, whiteboards, combining whiteboards and summarizing them, letting people share output from the breakout rooms, managing technical glitches, etc. There are so many things that can be leveraged so easily. When this is covered by a producer then the facilitator can actually focus on facilitating – the human part of it!

Using a trainer and a producer works very well and everyone knows exactly know who is responsible for what when they have glitches. A producer means fewer distractions. It’s really a key thing for me to have a seamless experience and I wish that producers would be standard. I am a big fan of that.

What do you think makes an effective virtual trainer?

Being an effective trainer virtually requires different approaches. Let me share our first experiences. Prior to deciding to make this jump to virtual delivery, we had of course built up over the years a large pool of trainers and training companies who we worked with company-wide. This pool had a lot of experience with us and there were also a lot of alumni amongst them. We decided to invest in them and their development and help them learn to deliver live training virtually. They knew our company, they knew our people and they knew what our firm is all about. This key learning part was completely covered.

We decided to invest in them and their development in three ways – training them, learning by doing, and giving them constant feedback about really excelling in the virtual space. When we started with live virtual delivery, we said, “Just give it a try and let’s talk after 1 or 2 sessions about how they were delivered”. Our experience was that not every trainer can or wants to make the jump, and that is ok.

When I think about the better experiences I have had with facilitators, like your colleagues, what they all had in common was their ability to do a remarkable job in really building up trust quickly. They knew how to engage others and help people open up. I have also seen them play a lot with the pace which is so important. Generally, in the virtual training environment, people (myself included) tend to be talking much faster than they would in a classic residential training. Slowing the speed down really helps a lot, but if you are the facilitator it can at first feel kind of awkward and unnatural. The virtual facilitator can’t always see the other person and then there’s a delay and you feel as if you are talking into a black hole. But talking too fast is far worse as the participants feel they can’t contribute and are being pushed through the training as quickly as possible.  For me an effective virtual trainer can adapt their pace and play around with it. And the supreme discipline for me personally is when a facilitator can use humor in a virtual setting and makes participants laugh.

How much virtual training is delivered by your own trainers and how much by external partners?

I would today it is 60 – 70% by externals and the remainder by internal trainers. We have developed our own internal train-the-trainer programs for virtual delivery. This is delivered by those pioneers who were basically there at the beginning. We offer a “train the virtual trainer” program to our internal trainers. Our experts benefit from the experience, tips, tricks and advice the facilitators themselves learnt over time. They learn about designing and delivering virtual training.

Do you see a difference regarding training design in virtual training?

Yes, it’s absolutely different! Make sure you think carefully about the training set-up and format. For virtual training, the training design and the training materials need to be approached differently. In terms of training design, ask yourself what actually makes a face-to-face training successful and how can I apply this to the virtual training design? You certainly still want a lot of exercises, so the training is engaging. And, as the learners’ attention span is much shorter virtually, you might need to play more with timing and move fluidly between trainer inputting to discussions and then to exercises.

And a final question – how large would you recommend the groups should be for live virtual training?

It very much depends on the topic. For topics which require interchange of more sensitive things, for example soft skills or anything about teams or leadership, we say five to six people per group with seven being our absolute maximum. For what we call” technical trainings” I think we can accept a few more because the exchanges, discussions and conversations aren’t as important. For these kinds of topics our maximum is 15.

In the 3rd and final part of the interview the Secret L&D manager shares her views on which topics are best suited for virtual delivery and how she sees the future of virtual training.

 

 

 

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How and why we got started with live virtual training in our global firm

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This week’s Secret L&D manager is German and has been working for one of the big management consulting firms for 13 years. She is part of a virtual L&D team responsible for internal training solutions for a global group of analysts, specialists, and managers across multiple time zones.  In this post, she talks about the need for virtual delivery, the challenges, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
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When did your organization start delivering training virtually?

When I joined our L&D team four years ago, our department had already been offering live virtual training for about a year. Not everyone in the company was actively using it yet so we were kind of pioneers. The background behind our decision to introduce virtual delivery was that we had, and have, a big group of people who are spread across the world in different countries on different continents. There are people in hub locations, and these hubs are also spread across the world, and there are people who may belong to the same department but are located in some very remote locations.

The training challenge here was that if we used the classical way of offering what we call “residential” face-to-face training to all these people, we would have exceeded our budgets by far. And still we wanted to offer everyone a fair chance of having the same training options as their colleagues. We were actively looking at which trainings could be held in a virtual space and this is clearly linked to which trainings are actually most suited, or most easily converted, to virtual delivery.

We started with so-called hard skills like slide writing, using PowerPoint, Excel etc. but we then also quickly moved into other soft areas too. We were keen to make this move as the virtual approach allowed us to make a continuous learning journey out of a “one-off training” and enabled implementing learning into every-day life – this is clearly the biggest advantage.

So how quickly did you move into delivering live virtual training solutions for soft skills training, leadership development, etc.?

I think fairly quickly actually. Until about six years ago there weren’t any soft skills or leadership training programs for my global group at all because the group was just being established. The first training initiatives were the classical format – residential trainings of one to three days. However, within a year, a live virtual delivery format had been established and then it moved forwards fairly quickly. Nowadays we have a 50/50 split – half is virtual, and half is residential.

What have you learned along the way about organizing live virtual training?

We should split this question into the organizational part and the delivery and facilitating part — but we have learned a lot in both areas! Starting with the organizational side, as with residential training, too, we learned we need to block time with people, and in virtual training these time slots need to be convenient for multiple time zones. Then we needed to find a suitable and reliable tool of course. WebEx was rolled out globally in our company around this time, and we were very happy – it works well with only a few exceptions when people have a poor internet connection. Everyone has the same technology; everyone has the same starting point. This is actually a really big help.

We also learned that there is a difference between delivering the classic virtual training session and what we call a blended virtual format. Let me explain; we had training where everybody was in a different place behind their desks. What we also successfully tried is, for example, having ten people in Boston who wanted to do the slide writing training, and we also had four people in Munich, and three people in Madrid. In some locations we have dedicated video rooms—this means people are sitting on one table and in one corner of the room there is a TV screen and camera. The group in Boston sees the other groups in Munich and Madrid and the other way, too. The facilitator is live in Boston, so one of the locations does have the advantage of having a live facilitator in the same room – but the participants in the other locations have colleagues with them, too – and everyone can see everyone. So when it comes to exercises this “being in a room with colleagues” does have a really big advantage. Colleagues are motivating and challenging each other, and of course we shouldn’t ignore the benefit of group pressure when it comes to participation and focus. People are not checking emails or multi-tasking because there are other people sitting in the room in the same training. And we could offer training to locations where there were too few people to have a face-to-face training.

We did something similar for a “writing proposals” project with a sales team in the Far East. The trainer was in one room and everybody else was in another room. It can work really well.

Absolutely! If the room is set up properly, this comes close to recreating a live residential training. Of course, logistics-wise there can be some difficulties because you first of all have to have a certain number of learners in each office and then people of course change plans last minute etc. But this is similar to the challenges of classical residential training. We also had to book all those video rooms, so they were free at the same time etc. Then an important client meeting comes, and the team is thrown out; so logistics-wise that’s a little bit hard, but we found solutions. In general, the approach worked very well, and the learners said they had a really positive group learning experience.

When you made your first moves into live virtual delivery was there any resistance from people? For example, did you have people wanting to stick with the classic face-to-face training approach?

Of course – and to be quite honest there still is! Often people still frankly ask “Hey I’ve been invited to this virtual training. Is there a live residential training instead?” This is natural because many people prefer to go somewhere else to be really focused, meet people, limit interruptions etc. It’s a much more intense experience, let’s be honest. There was a lot of resistance at the beginning and we still get it sometimes. However, I would say it quickly became accepted – mainly because people have had very positive experiences with virtual training, and they have then shared their experience with others.

This is where we come to the absolute need for good virtual facilitation skills. When we started moving into live virtual delivery, we already had a strong pool of trusted facilitators. Many of them were external vendors who were brilliant in the residential live facilitation, but facilitating virtually is so different. I’m thinking back to a workshop I attended myself on “Virtual Facilitation” run by the American Talent Development Association. This trainer was a radio moderator and he gave tips and tricks on using your voice to make virtual training more engaging. One thing he said—that I have never forgotten—was that facilitating in a virtual environment feels completely awkward. It’s really like being a radio moderator. It feels like you are talking to yourself and you aren’t getting any feedback. He said you need to embrace this, and to accept the silence. You will feel super awkward at first. But people need you to act as a guide. When you ask a question, you have to wait until an answer comes, and you still have to smile into the camera—even if there is no one immediately responding. This is a big change and challenge for many facilitators. And just as with face-to-face training, space and time to think is important. It is just that the time feels longer and different in a virtual training world.

In the early days we invested in our internal facilitators. They got training on how to really adapt to this virtual training context because it requires very different tools and very different styles of facilitation. We also had to train long-term and trusted external vendors on what we needed.

Not every trainer can or wants to make that change – it’s a question of personal preferences. And of course, some trainers are much better delivering training face-to-face than virtually. It’s really a totally different skill.

 

 

In our next blog post this Secret L&D manager share more of her experience and advice on making virtual training a success

 

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The Manager’s Guide to Building Trust: Understanding Emotional Bank Accounts

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This post explores Stephen R. Covey’s Emotional Bank Account concept and how managers can use it to strengthen relationships, improve communication, and create higher-performing teams. It includes practical ways to make more positive deposits, repair trust when withdrawals happen, and a 10-minute reflection activity to help you assess your own team relationships.

  • Reading time
  • 8 Minutes
  • Target audience
  • Managers, team leaders, and anyone responsible for building trust, engagement, and performance within a team.

Whether you’re leading a team through change, managing a hybrid workforce, or trying to improve performance, the quality of your relationships has a direct impact on your success as a manager. When there is trust between people, they are more likely to share ideas, raise concerns, accept feedback, and work collaboratively. When trust is lacking, even routine conversations can become difficult.

One of the most useful ways to think about trust in the workplace comes from Stephen R. Covey’s concept of the Emotional Bank Account, from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Every interaction either makes a deposit or a withdrawal. In Covey’s own words:

 

“An emotional bank account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship.  It’s the feeling of safeness you have with another human being.  When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”

 

Deposits are made through positive actions—such as keeping promises, listening with empathy, recognising good work, and treating people with respect. Withdrawals are made through negative actions: dismissing concerns, breaking commitments, or failing to communicate openly.

For managers, this analogy is a practical leadership tool. Every conversation, decision, and action either strengthens or weakens the relationships that underpin team performance. Understanding how to make regular deposits into your team’s emotional bank accounts can help create an environment where people feel valued, supported, and motivated to do their best work.

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Why should managers care about emotional bank accounts?

Few managers would argue against the importance of trust. Most leaders want to build positive, productive relationships where people feel respected, valued, and motivated to do their best work. Leadership qualities such as authenticity, credibility, empathy, and trust continue to be recognised as essential for effective management.

Building strong relationships is about much more than being a “nice” manager. Trust has a measurable impact on performance. Meaningful and strong relationships in the workplace lead directly to tangible results. Teams with high levels of trust tend to experience better communication, stronger engagement, and higher levels of commitment.

As a manager, your success is closely linked to the success of your team. Every interaction—whether you’re delegating work, coaching, recognising achievements, resolving conflict, leading meetings, or having a difficult conversation—either strengthens or weakens the relationships that support high performance. These everyday moments are opportunities to make deposits into, or withdrawals from, your team’s emotional bank accounts.

Managers who consistently invest in relationships build the trust needed to navigate challenges, encourage innovation, and sustain performance over the long term. Conversely, when withdrawals outweigh deposits, trust begins to erode. Without that foundation, even the most capable teams can struggle with engagement, collaboration, and accountability.

How do you build a healthy emotional bank account with your team?

Trust is built through consistent, everyday behaviour. While every individual and team is different, Stephen Covey identified several practical ways managers can make regular “deposits” into their team’s emotional bank accounts.

Understand the individual

Everyone values different things. One employee may appreciate public recognition, while another would rather receive a quiet thank you. Taking time to understand what motivates each person, how they like to be recognised, and what matters to them allows you to build stronger, more meaningful relationships.

Keep your commitments

One of the quickest ways to build trust is to do what you say you’ll do. Keeping promises, following through on commitments, being reliable, and respecting deadlines all demonstrate that people can depend on you. Equally, broken promises and missed commitments quickly become withdrawals.

Clarify expectations

Misunderstandings often arise because people make different assumptions. Taking time to agree on priorities, responsibilities, deadlines, and expected outcomes helps prevent confusion and reduces unnecessary frustration—particularly when working remotely or across different locations.

Pay attention to the little things

Small actions can have a lasting impact. Saying thank you, checking in on someone’s wellbeing, remembering important milestones, listening without distractions, or simply making time for a conversation all help strengthen relationships. These everyday moments often matter more than grand gestures.

Demonstrate personal integrity

Trust grows when managers act consistently and fairly. Being honest, admitting mistakes, treating people with respect, and behaving in line with your values all reinforce your credibility. Integrity isn’t something you switch on when it’s convenient—it’s reflected in your actions every day.

When you make a withdrawal, apologise sincerely

Every manager makes mistakes, misses commitments, or says the wrong thing. What matters is how we respond.

A sincere apology can be one of the most powerful deposits you make after a withdrawal. Acknowledging your actions, taking responsibility, and making amends demonstrates humility, integrity, and respect. It also shows your team that accountability applies to everyone—not just them.

Managers who apologise when they’ve got it wrong don’t lose credibility—they often strengthen it. Admitting mistakes builds trust and creates a culture where people feel safe to learn, take responsibility, and support one another.

Putting emotional bank accounts into practice – A 10-minute activity for managers

Understanding the idea of emotional bank accounts is useful, but the real value comes from applying it to your own relationships. Every manager has relationships that are strong, relationships that need attention, and moments where they may have made more withdrawals than deposits.

The following activity is designed to help you reflect on your current relationships with your team and identify practical actions you can take to build more trust. It isn’t about judging yourself or creating a perfect balance sheet—it is about increasing your awareness and making intentional choices about how you lead.

Step 1: Choose five people

Write down the names of five team members who are critical to your team’s success.

Step 2: Review your recent interactions

Look back over the past two weeks. Use your calendar, emails, messages, and memory to identify moments that were likely to be deposits or withdrawals.

For each person, create two simple lists:

**Deposits**

  • Listened without interrupting
  • Recognised good work
  • Kept a commitment
  • Offered support or coaching
  • Showed appreciation

**Withdrawals**

  • Cancelled or rushed a meeting
  • Failed to follow through
  • Gave unclear expectations
  • Dismissed a contribution
  • Had a difficult conversation that didn’t go well

Don’t worry about making the list perfect—you’re looking for patterns rather than keeping score.

Step 3: Think about what matters to them

Now put your notes aside for a while. When you come back, write down what you know about each person.

  • What motivates them?
  • What gives them energy?
  • How do they prefer to receive recognition?
  • How do they like to communicate?
  • What behaviours from a manager help them feel trusted and valued?

Remember, deposits are personal. What builds trust with one employee may have little impact—or even feel like a withdrawal—to another.

Step 4: Make a plan

Looking at your notes, ask yourself:

  • Which relationships need more deposits?
  • What could I do differently over the next month?
  • What specific opportunities already exist in my calendar?

Rather than making a vague commitment to “be a better listener”, identify real moments where you can put it into practice. For example, use your next one-to-one meeting to ask more questions before offering solutions, or take time to recognise a recent achievement.

Small, consistent deposits build trust over time. Choose one or two actions and commit to making them part of your everyday leadership.

Key takeaways

Building healthy emotional bank accounts is not about occasional big gestures. It is about the small, consistent actions that shape how people experience working with you.

The key points to remember are:

  • Trust is built through everyday interactions. Every conversation, decision, and action can either strengthen or weaken a relationship.
  • Deposits are personal. What one person experiences as recognition or support may not have the same impact on someone else. Take time to understand the individuals in your team.
  • Reliability matters. Keeping commitments, clarifying expectations, and following through are some of the simplest ways to build trust.
  • Mistakes happen. Effective managers recognise when they have made a withdrawal, take responsibility, and work to rebuild trust.
  • Strong relationships enable performance. Emotional bank accounts are not separate from results—they are one of the foundations that allow teams to collaborate, adapt, and succeed.

Great managers don’t build trust through one big action. They build it through hundreds of small deposits made consistently over time.

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The secret L&D manager: What makes training effective?

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This month’s secret training manager is Italian and has worked in a variety of fields including public research organizations and service companies. Here she talks with Scott Levey about the basic elements that make training and trainers effective.

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What makes training effective?

To me an effective training is a training that uses most of the senses. Meaning: seeing, hearing, touching. The learners need to experience things and be actively engaged. Of course, the training needs to cover the thinking side, but adult learners need to learn by doing things. A good training event also has to be designed to have different activities and moments. For example, it needs moments to listen and get input and ideas, moments to pause and ponder on the theory that was just presented to you, moments to experiment, and moments to recap. I want the trainer to also plan in multiple moments where they cover again the main and salient points of the training.  For me this is essential.  I would also say that effective training sessions need to have a certain pace and this pace changes depending on the moment.  After lunch the trainer will increase the pace to get people moving again. Alternatively, the pace may slow down if the trainer sees that the participants aren’t following what the trainer is trying to do or trying to say.  So that’s what I think makes an effective training.

What makes the trainer effective? I mean you yourself have worked with many trainers and you have also trained yourself, haven’t you?

Well the most obvious answer would be that the trainer is the subject matter expert. She is an expert in her field and has real experience … but that isn’t enough. I’m going to give you a trivial example but I think everyone can relate to it. It’s about my daughter. She’s in high school right now and her math teacher is brilliant. He has a very brilliant mind … but he is not a pedagogue, so he is a teacher by definition but he is not a teacher through experience, and he is not patient with them. He knows his stuff, and is really smart, but he doesn’t know how to convey the salient points to my daughter or his class.  When I think back to the many companies I have worked in, I have also seen similar experiences with internal training sessions ran in various topics. It could be IT related, quality management, HR or technical skills.  Being a subject matter expert is the start but not the end.

Being an expert is not enough; you also need to be an expert in pedagogy, you need to be patient and you need to be attentive to the participants and allow them to ask questions. You need also to be able to shut down any conversation that strays from the topic because it can become difficult and you can waste time and not reach your training goals. This is not good because as we know training has an agenda and you need to stay on track.

Somehow a trainer also needs to be very confident and have some leadership behaviors, because she’s the leader of the group for the time of the training. Finally, I think an effective trainer has to have those storytelling skills where you put theory and experience into a nice little story that illustrates the point. And is easy to understand and remember

So, what I’m saying is an effective trainer is somebody who

  1. Is a subject matter expert
  2. Is a good communicator
  3. Is people-oriented
  4. Can lead a group
  5. Has the skills needed to design training so there are the right moments at the right times
  6. Has the skills to deliver the training in an engaging way and manage the pace
  7. Is focused and reaches the objective set for the training

Train-the-trainer courses can really help for both new and confident trainers … but it is my opinion that nothing really beats experience. So that’s what I think makes a trainer a good trainer.

Who is the secret L&D manager?

The “secret L&D manager” is actually a group of L&D managers. They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with their peers.

You can meet more of our secret L&D managers here …

 

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Practical rules and resources for writing quality emails

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This might be difficult to imagine if you are under 35, but when I started my career in finance there was no email. All written communication was by letter, and if something was really urgent you might send a telex or a fax. Written communication was an investment – an investment in time and in labour.  The process of sending a letter was a slow one; dictating it, the secretary/typist typing it, checking it, finally signing it, putting it in an envelope and posting it. There was no word processing software – if you wanted to make changes to the content, you returned it to the typist who would retype it.  Again, this may be difficult to imagine, but in some ways this wasn’t such a bad thing and there was a plus side to the writer and the reader. Exactly because it was so time consuming and labour intensive, you thought carefully about what you wanted to say and how you were going to say it. You invested in the quality of your written communication.

Writing emails that people read: Free eBook download

Today email communication, combined with documents being available online, has replaced the letter. Email beats snail mail letters. Approximately 280 billion emails are sent every day, and the average number of business emails sent each day is around 125 billion. In a recent workshop on Managing conflict in virtual teams one purchaser shared he had received 68 from a single person in one day!

Writing emails requires little effort and little thought– and obviously this is not always a good thing. Take a look at your inbox and ask yourself how many of these emails are unclear, unnecessary or simply unwanted. So why do we send so many? The simple answer is because we can. The process is simple, quick and easy. The challenge organizations face today is keeping the good stuff (quick, easy, simple) while eliminating the down sides.  This is made harder by our convictions that our writing is clear and understandable despite research showing we often overestimate this.

So if you want your mails to be clear, necessary and wanted then start with these 3 practical rules.

Write clear and understandable subject lines

It’s very likely that your reader is busy and that they have a lot of pulls on their time. Regardless of whether they are using a laptop, tablet or phone they will see your name/email address and your subject line. A clear and understandable subject line helps them prioritize your email, shows respect for their time, and builds trust. A clear subject line can also help catch your recipient’s attention and encourage them to deal with your mail quickly. Consider using BLUF (bottom line up front) in your subject line and also at the very start of your email.  Another simple tip that many virtual teams adopt is to  agree with your team members on a selection of limited key words (e.g Info, Action, Decision).  For more simple and practical advice plus a training activity on effective subject lines check out this post.
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Write it how you’d say it

Many of us (and I am guilty of this) use a different style when writing.  Some people opt for different words, more complicated expressions and generally take longer to say something in writing than we would face to face.

For example…. “It has been brought to my attention that the complexities of the user interface are making life difficult for some of our users. I’d like to suggest we discuss this together”. Flipping it around some people also write emails in note form, or an overly casual style e.g. “Heard user interface difficult 4 user. Talk?” Writing as you speak would give you  “Some of our users are finding the user interface difficult to use. Can we talk about this together?”

Writing in a clear and direct style definitely helps clarity.  Pay attention to tone, and as a reader try to give the writer the benefit of the doubt when you feel the tone is odd.

Take a moment before you hit send

In the days when we sent letters we took a lot of time to think about what we were writing. We planned and drafted and there were many opportunities to change what we wanted to say or how we wanted to say it. You could read your letter through before signing it and at that moment decide if you really wanted to send it.
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Today these inbuilt pauses don’t exist. You quickly read a mail, write the response and hit send. It is often done on the move and squeezed between other tasks, conversations etc.  That is generally OK for short, routine communications but for those that are longer, complicated or sensitive, type once but look twice is a good rule to follow.  Write your email, don’t add the address and put it in your drafts folder (or email it to yourself). Read it later and if it’s clear, understandable and unemotional – send it. For more help on writing emotionally neutral emails, see here.

 

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Training storytelling in business –behind the scenes with two trainers

What challenges do professionals have when they join a training session on storytelling in business?

Gary: Typically its people feeling that they aren’t creative enough and wish they were. They like the idea of using stories in a work context, and are interested in the training, but they feel that either they don’t have a story in them, or they don’t have a story that matters.  They’ve seen others use stories effectively and they’d like to learn how to do that – but they just don’t know where to start.

Scott: I completely agree. Most participants do see the value and in many ways we are working with the converted. Generally, participants are looking to use stories in a presentation or at an upcoming event, but the biggest challenge they face is where to start.  I often hear “I don’t have a story “or “I have a cool story but it’s not really for our regional sales teams”.  So how have you approached that from a training perspective? In the training, how do you get people to find their stories?

Gary: When we train storytelling skills my very first goal is to show them that they are surrounded by stories and that everyone can tell a story. One of the ways I start is by asking the participants to share something that has changed them or others.  This could be a simple business experience that made a difference to them or shaped them. It could also be something from their private life. I’ve found it is easier with participants who have stronger emotional intelligence, but everyone can find something.  The challenge then is getting them to slow down and see it as they tell it.  It’s not unusual to see people rushing through their story and speaking in bullet points.  This has a lot to do with nerves, but is also connected to wrongly believing that the others won’t be interested in listening to them. When we model the activity it always helps.

Stories are at their most powerful when they get inside people and either connect with an emotion or trigger an emotion.  This is the starting point – at the end of the story how will your audience feel? And what will they know and do?

Scott: I do something similar, “tell us about a moment you are proud of” or “tell us about a moment you regretted”. Anything that taps right into a feelings dimension rather than just narrating factual events.

Gary: When I first started training storytelling in business, I was concerned that when people talked about a moment that shaped them that they would be a little bit light emotionally.  I was expecting people would gloss over it or “present” it.  But I find that this isn’t true and that people tend to really dive in and quickly tap into their emotional memory. This then impacts the listeners.   They leave this activity with a few big wins – firstly that they can actually tell a story, secondly that they have stories to tell, thirdly that they can convey emotion without having to explicitly talk about it and finally,  and perhaps this motivates them the most,  that people want to listen and do quickly connect.

Scott: I think if the storyteller tries to obviously connect their story to the listeners experiences it doesn’t always work that well. The audience is often put off if you try to get too personal too soon. Pulling people into your story beats pushing a message.  Every time we train storytelling skills there is always one person who, in the first 30 minutes of the day, will share an experience that unexpectedly hooks the other participants.

Recently we were delivering training a ½ day session on “Storytelling skills for internal trainers”  in a European investment institution. The first warm-up task of the training was to share a story with your table about something that impacted you in a way you had never anticipated.  One French lady shared a story about her family going to lay a “stolperstein” at the weekend in front of the house where her great-grandparents had lived.  Obviously, the context of the story had everyone paying respectful attention, but it was the unexpected joy and warmth in her story, and the way she described her family reconnecting,  that had the room in silence and actually grinning. She pulled people into her story by telling it naturally, not over-structuring it, and tapping into her emotional memory. When we started looking at their organizations greatest learning moments and the managers practiced telling stories aimed at reinforcing their culture, we reinforced 3 key points from her first story – tell it naturally, tell it simply and see it as you tell.

Gary: Once we’ve shown participants that they do actually have stories, the next challenge is finding the right story for the situation.  There’s a simple and effective model we use with 3 concentric circles, and the key is to start with the emotion. The central point of this circle is “By the end of story what do you want them to feel, know or do?” Occasionally we need to help out by sharing a list of emotions to get people thinking. Feel comes first, and then comes what do you want them to know and what you want them to do. We train our clients to build stories from the inside out.

It’s worth highlighting that sometimes that feeling isn’t going to be a positive feeling … and that is okay. There is a place for warning, shocking, etc. as long as the intention is positive.  I remember a CFO wanting to shake his peers up and confront the arrogance he saw within his organization head on. He knew he wanted his listeners to leave with a sense of humility.  Once he had identified this, he quickly found his story. I still remember his presentation years later. He showed an actual cutting from a newspaper with the photo of a farmer saying, “If they’d asked us locals, we would have told them that this area floods heavily every few years. So why did they build a motorway here?”. Once he had got their attention, he could then talk more about how he wanted things to be going forward.

I often use this “farmer” story when training storytelling because it really does reinforce the importance of starting with the emotion, and being honest with yourself about which emotion you want, when you are choosing and building a story.

So what do you do if somebody can’t think of a story?  In every training group there’ll often be a few participants still struggling.

Gary: Yes, this can be tricky because there are some people who feel that they just don’t have it in them. If that’s the case, we have prepared training aids with “classic stories” that managers need in their pockets. For example, you need the story of when you overestimated yourself, when you failed to prepare, what you stand for, what is important to you when working with new hires, a story of vulnerability, a story  of learning from your mistakes etc etc.  There are similar “templates” for sales professionals, service desks, L&D managers etc.  I find that this “cookie-cutter” approach helps people get going, but I also find that very quickly they begin to leave the “template” and they make things real and personal.  The aid just gets them going.  Stories that follow a template are a safe place to start and then we push people to tap into their own experiences …. And everything becomes far more powerful.

Scott: Absolutely, “typical stories that you need in your pocket”  help get people past staring at a blank piece of paper. Even the process of just asking “What about this one? Have you got that one?” gets them thinking.  And then its all about delivery, and here is where we bring in LOTS, which means “language of the senses”. Using plenty of language of the senses such as “heard, saw, sensed, touched, felt” brings your listeners into your story. Speed and pace is important too. Getting them to slow down, speed up, use pauses for effect.  But the key is to live the story and see the story as you tell it. To tap into your emotional memory. We’ll expand on this in another blog post.

For more information: Storytelling in business

 

 

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The why, when, where, who, what and how of the meeting agenda

Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoons capture some of the worst meeting behaviours perfectly. No matter which industry you work in, you’ll run into poorly prepared and badly run meetings. There are a lot of factors which contribute to an effective (or ineffective) meeting and near the top of the list is the agenda. Having a purpose-built agenda for your meeting brings you and your team real benefits. Even just having an agenda sets the right tone. The agenda means that you know what’s happening, once you go to the meeting. Beyond that:

  • Agendas show you expect a productive meeting and not a rambling chat.
  • Time spent planning up front will increase your chances of delivering results by helping to keep everyone focused.
  • A well thought out and communicated agenda helps people better prepare their thoughts and gather any relevant information they’ll need before the meeting starts.

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So how do you build an effective agenda?

The purpose of the agenda is to explicitly tell participants what they need to prepare and be ready to discuss. An effective agenda needs to answer 5 questions. Starting off with the first and most important …

WHY are we meeting?

Who called the meeting and why? What is the context for the meeting? How does this meeting fit into your broader purpose? Once you’ve thought this through properly you should be able to crystallise this in 20 words or less.  “Team meeting to discuss the changed scope and plan available resources for project XYZ.” The sentence encourages focussed thinking from the very start. Insert the sentence into your agenda, and be ready to recap them when the meeting starts.

WHEN and WHERE are we meeting?

Sounds obvious, and I know many client’s we’ve worked with tend to overlook this under the defence “well the same as always, of course”.  I’d argue that it only costs you seconds to include the meeting place to avoid sarcasm and irony.

WHO needs to be there?

Meetings are only as effective as the people who join (or don’t join) the meeting. Your agenda needs clarity about who will lead, present, or facilitate each point. You’ll also want to be explicit about who needs to be involved or is affected by each point on the agenda. Responsibility assignment matrix system like ARCI can very easily be integrated into your agenda.

Related to this theme, a common question we receive when training meeting facilitation skills is “What if they don’t really need to be there for this item?”. This can lead to wide-ranging discussions and scenarios – and to cut this short here are a couple of ideas to consider…

  • Do you want to reorganise the order of items so that a group of people can leave early? Avoid the ‘join late option’ if possible as the first few minutes is where you’ll review the all-important why.
  • Do you want to give them the option of stepping out for this section? … yet make sure they are back in time for the next item? If yes, then make sure they are next door and not back upstairs or in another building.
  • Do you want to address it as a “development opportunity” directly in the meeting along the lines of “I understand the next point isn’t relevant for you, but I think might help you to build a broader understanding of the project if you stay and listen”?

WHAT are we meeting about?

Describe the “meeting items” so that they are simple and unambiguous… without being meaningless headings.  This is where so many agenda templates fail.  Roger Schwarz’s advice to “List agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer” is a great tip I found while I was writing this blog post.

This part of the agenda also contains information such as:

  • What is the desired outcome?  (make a decision, brief people, discussion, brainstorm)
  • How much time is planned for this point?
  • Who should do what in advance of the meeting?

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HOW can we improve our meetings?

This is a very important, often overlooked part of the agenda. The last building block for any successful meeting agenda should be: Make your meetings even better. Are your meetings too long, too short, too often, too big? Low energy meetings are far less productive, even if you have a great, well prepared agenda. It could be as simple as changing the environment of the meeting. Go outside, meet by the watercooler, meet over lunch, meet over breakfast, have a stand up meeting… Remember, it’s your meeting. Change it when something stops being effective. Regularly plan into your meeting agenda 5 minutes to do a simple review. Effective teams take the time to reflect and learn. Ask yourselves:

  • What did we do well today?
  • What can we improve on?
  • How exactly will we do this?
  • What actionable to dos can we take?

More on this topic

Watch this TED Talk “How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings”, by David Grady.

Further reading on our blog

 

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How to avoid your emails going viral

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“Worst email ever?”  was the headline that got my attention when I read my newspaper on a Saturday morning. The story was about an Australian manager who had sent an email which he later described himself as a “Gordon Ramsay meets Donald Trump-style email rant”.  His email went viral on Twitter (#bossoftheyear) and the story was an online sensation for a couple of days. 

Although, or maybe because, we send and receive countless emails every day it is sometimes easy to forget some of the golden rules of email etiquette. To give the manager his dues he later apologized to his staff (“It seems I am becoming an online sensation for how NOT to communicate – and in hindsight I agree!!”), but his story is a timely reminder to review some important dos and don’ts for emailing. Starting with the most important one, here are six tips for you to consider…

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Tip 1 – Don’t send emails when you are angry / frustrated/ tired etc

This is, and always will be, the first rule of email communication. In “Writing emails that people read”, our most downloaded ebook with 18,000 downloads to date, we suggest you write the whole email if it will make you feel better and help you to get some-thing out of your system – BUT only add the recipients and send it after you have had space and time to reflect and think about what you are sending and its potential impact. Rule #2 builds on this by emphasizing that email is great for giving information, sharing updates or making simple requests. However, use the phone if something could be a sensitive or emotional topic. When it comes to management communication, in our Practical Toolbox for Managers training we also suggest that emotional communication is done face-to-face, via Webex or over the phone. Email just doesn’t help … although you might feel better for a few minutes.

As the Australian manger himself later said, he sent it “in a moment of seeing red and it most definitely should not have happened”.

Tip 2 – Watch your tone, mind your language

Emails need to be respectful and clear. Body language, facial expressions and tone of voice cannot be communicated by email. How an email sounds and the message it sends are determined only by the words that we use. Read this blog post if you want to learn more about tone in emails. Make sure that your message is respectful and clear. In his viral email the manager knew he’d misjudged this and later wrote “Obviously some of you know me pretty well and know I shoot from the hip, but obviously others don’t”.

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Tip 3 – Get the person’s name right

This is a very personal tip for me. I get a lot of emails from French contacts and probably 20% start with Hi Taylor (my first name is Ian). When you type the recipient’s name in the “To” line or select them from your address book – make sure it’s the right person. (In 2000, a British schoolgirl was on the receiving end of inappropriate business emails after a US naval commander accidentally added her to his confidential mailing list.) Be sure that the name you use at the beginning of the mail is the name of the person in the address line and that you have spelt it correctly.

Tip 4 – KISS: Keep it short and simple

Everybody is busy and everybody gets a lot of emails.  The average number of emails received per day in 2018 is 97!  If each email takes just 2 minutes to read and deal with this is 3 hours of your day done already!

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Organizing management and leadership training programs – the secret L&D manager

This month’s Secret L&D manager is German, based in Germany and works for a global automotive supply company.  He/She has worked in training and development for over 7 years.

New Call-to-actionWhat is important to you when designing and rolling out a leadership program?

For me a successful leadership or senior manager program in our company can never be a “one size fits all” solution.  Leadership and people management is not like a manual. We don’t want a “that’s how you have to do it” approach and we are serious about offering an individualized approach. The programs we build with companies like Target give people a chance to identify whatever they need and benefit from support in applying this in their day-to-day tasks – or in their life as a whole. Individuals take different things from the program.

Who do you target when you set up management and leadership programs?

When I set up a leadership program we are typically involving managers and leaders from a broad range of different functions – from HR to finance, logistics to manufacturing etc.  This means I have to exclude functional topics from the training design because they won’t be relevant to the whole group.

What kind or development areas are you targeting when you set up management and leadership programs?

We’re working in a very fast-paced environment and there are always a lot of changes going on.  A lot of our managers and leaders are firefighting, and really involved in operational work. We want to focus on soft skills like strategic thinking, so that they can step out of the operational and build a broader view of everything.

It is really important for me that our managers have the chance to step back and have a look at the broader picture – this means looking especially at strategy and finance. The leadership program needs to tackle what finance means for our company and to ensure the leaders have a big picture of company decisions that are made based on our financial performance. This extends to them having a broader view on strategy.  Our programs support them in building a strategic view of the company, their area and their immediate objectives.

We also want them to develop a stronger understanding of the consequences their own behaviours have, for example, on an individual, team or another department. If they are stressed out and don’t recognise that somebody in their team is drifting away, that’s not good.  The programs develop them to focus on their people –  their team is what makes their life easier in the end. They need to see not only themselves, their own workload, their own fires that are burning but also to focus more on their people and our overall strategy and values.

Do to summarize, strategy, finance, self-awareness, leading teams, and managing and developing the people they are leading. We want them to just take a step back and have a look at this and to have also the chance to experiment with tools, models and ideas. Not every tool is suitable for every person so they should decide on their own what they want to apply in the day to day what’s useful for them.

What is important to you when designing the training interventions which make up such a program?

I want them to work in groups and have personal time with the trainer. We have a mixture of formats including 1-to-1 intakes, using a tool such as DISC or MBTI, face-to-face seminars, virtual workshops and individual coaching. As the participants in the program are coming from all over Europe we also look to reduce travel costs and time using webinars, e-learning, virtual training sessions. The intakes, accountability calls and transfer coaching are all normally done via phone calls or using Webex. Then there are 3 to 4 onsite events with the groups coming together and meeting each other. These could be at the headquarters, a nice seminar hotel or near a plant (so we can organize a plant visit). Cost- and time- wise it is just not possible that they are travelling every few weeks.

What are you looking for from the trainers?

The trainers, of course are a very important element. When we look for trainers it is important to us that they are flexible. Our audience is usually, during the day, under pressure and there can be last minute things coming up so they are not able to attend a the whole session or training. So we need the trainer to be timewise as flexible as possible so if somebody missed some content they don’t get lost in the program. The trainer needs to help them and give an insight into what has been done. They need to be supportive with the people through the whole process – that is really important. Then of course that they have to be able to handle different personalities, functions, nationalities and cultures.

You mentioned culture – what role does this play in delivering the training?

This is a huge challenge, I can tell you. It depends a little bit on which positions the people are coming from. If they are coming from central positions and travelling a lot, meeting a lot of people etc. then usually they are open to everything and it’s easier to work with them. People coming from the production sites somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere – then it’s sometimes hard for them to connect with the other leaders and the softer stuff. It’s also hard for the trainers to manage them in the right way because they are really stuck in their culture. They are not as open as the people who are already used to being in this international environment – but it’s really important to get them to the stage where they are more open to the other cultures and diverse people.

How do your managers and leader react to the programs you offer? And how do you assess the training ?

The reaction of the operational leaders to this approach is very very positive. There are people who are more willing to open up and to work on themselves than others but I must say that those people who opened up completely are the ones that benefited the most from the program in the end.

About assessment, after the training I usually do a post training assessment where it’s a questionnaire where I ask people different sort of questions.

Who is the Secret L&D manager?

The Secret L&D manager is actually many L&D managers.  They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with peers.

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Implementing the 70-20-10 model- insights from a secret L&D manager

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This month’s Secret L&D manager is German, based in Germany and works for a global automotive supply company. She has worked in training and development for over 7 years.

Why are you using 70-20-10?

We introduced the 70-20-10 model in 2016, mainly because too many people were thinking that “development” is just about training, and that if our company wasn’t providing “training” the company wasn’t developing people. The 70-20-10 model helped us show that learning and development is more than just training. Training is one tool, but you can develop yourself all the time. The 70-20-10 model is rolled out globally to our whole organisation. There are also individual initiatives that I have developed which are only rolled out in a specific business area in Europe and for specific development programs like our talent development program.

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How did people react?

I would say the majority of the people in our company did not really understand at first. Only those people who joined the sessions where we explained and showed what 70-20-10 is really about – they understood the sense behind it. Learning and development is not such a big topic in our company and is not the highest priority, so many people read about it and ignored it.

So how have you brought 70-20-10 to life in the organization?

I created an individual development plan, built around 70-20-10, specifically for participants in our training programmes.

Which kind of programmes?

A development programme for our most talented young professionals. First of all, I introduced the 70-20-10 model a little bit to them, and I explained what 70-20-10 is about – and what it is not about too. Mainly that 70% of everything they learn is learning by doing, 20% is learning from others and only 10% is learning by “training”. I must say people were quite surprised about this when I started talking to them about it, but they quickly related to it.  They saw it reflected how they had learned their technical skills, and also their softer skills.

I then introduced a new individual development plan, which I have here in front of me.  I structured it in different levels. First of all, people were asked to define an overall individual development goal. Strictly speaking they weren’t all SMART goals – some were closer to a vision for where do I want to be and by when. As most of the goals were very general, I asked them to explain a little bit about what they meant with this goal. Where they are now, where they want to be and what they think would change when they achieve this goal. These were the key questions we asked them to think about.

Then they had to define three key development areas that they need to work on in order to achieve that very goal. These areas had to be really, really specific. They have to be SMART.

Once they had defined key development areas, they had to define development actions. On the tool I gave them, these actions are actually structured using 70-20-10.  They need to define mostly “learning by doing” actions, then partly “learning through others” actions and the smallest part is the “learning in training” actions.

And then, last but not least, for the individual development areas they were asked to define key performance indicators where they can measure the success of their development. Using KPIs is very characteristic for our automotive supply company because everything is measured in KPIs here. This is a step they understand easily, and I didn’t have to explain to them what a KPI is. Everything they do is measured.

How do you get a KPI from a soft skill?

Well, that’s tricky. Let’s take the simple example of improving presentation skills. So development actions can be “I will present my project four times in front of my boss or my team, and one of these will need to be delivered virtually”. The KPI could be the number of presentations you have done.

So you are just tracking that it’s happening?

Yes. Another example for management training is if you give or receive positive feedback – yes or no – it can be measured. It just helps a little bit, like you said, to track it, to know that they have to document their status. It really helps them to be motivated or to stay motivated.

Have you integrated the 70-20-10 into your senior management programs?

We have.  I think the 70 is really covered by the business simulations we use. In these simulations people lead their own company, competing against each other and most of it is really learning by doing. They have to work with the numbers, they have to work with the reports, they have to make their own decisions. They have the chance to contact their trainers for example, or their colleagues, and ask them for advice, so that’s learning by others maybe, but mostly it’s the learning by doing.

How do senior managers respond to being asked to build KPIs for their own development?

I must say I only really push the KPIs with the young professionals. They need the orientation to have this measured and their development areas are way simpler than the ones from the very experienced senior leaders that we’re training. I don’t push measuring of the senior managers and leaders. I think at their level they should be capable of measuring themselves and knowing how far they have come with their development.

What advice would you give to another training manager who wants to try and introduce this 70-20-10 approach to their organisation?

Firstly, I would say it’s a very rational approach to learning and development. You have to look a little bit at your target training audience and at your people. I mean in our automotive world there are a lot of engineers, and a lot of very structured thinking. They need tools that fit into their rational world and I think 70-20-10 does this for them. Learning is quite abstract and 70-20-10 gives them a framework to put it into numbers. So if you would like to apply this in your company you should really look at what is your target group.

And I see that structure is reflected in the way you have built your tools. I mean you’ve got boxes that need filling in which fits with your target audience, tick boxes, % etc.

Exactly, I’ve got KPIs. As I mentioned, everything is measured here and that’s their way of working. It is what people are used to and comfortable with. I think if you are trying to implement this in a more “creative” or “service”  company you might see much more pushback to the way my tools are designed and the use of KPIs

Thanks for your time and for sharing!

You’re welcome!

Who is the Secret L&D manager?

The Secret L&D manager is actually many L&D managers.  They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with peers.

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When trainers become participants: 17 tips for getting the most from your training

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As a training company we invest in internal training with a passion. We can cover many of the soft skill and leadership topics internally, but when we are lacking the insider knowledge we carefully qualify and source external providers. One of the questions we ask a potential provider is their experience in training trainers. Training trainers can be daunting as you know that your participants are evaluating the training and you as the trainer with a insider’s eye (much like a chef cooking for another chef who is watching them work in their own kitchen!). When trainers become participants, they also go through an internal process which can be every bit as uncomfortable. We recently organized a seminar for a small group of our management team. Bringing in an external trainer changed the dynamics, and as experienced trainers we were now in the passenger seat. Over the 2 days we asked ourselves “what could we as participants do to get the very most from our training?”. Here are our tips for getting the very most from your training experience.

Engage with the training and trainer before you start

  1. Make sure you know why the training has been organized. What is the context for the training? And what does your organization / your manager hope you’ll take from the training? Ideally your manager will have shared this with you, but if not then seek it out.  And if for some reason you can’t get an answer before the training stats then get it during or after the training!  If you want to make the most of your training investment, understanding the what’s and why before the training starts is a must [Making most of your TI ebook]
  2. Build clear goals. What would you like to leave with? What questions do you have? What would you like to learn? practice? reflect on? And discuss these with your colleagues too!
  3. Is there anything you as the participants can do before the training to help the trainer/training really go to plan? Is there any information that you’d like to share? Or want them to be aware of?

Choose your attitude

  1. Suspend judgement. You, your manager or your organization has qualified and selected this training (and maybe this particular trainer) so trust that they know what they are doing and let them do it.
  2. Connected to this, the trainer and training is already paid, so adopt a “what can I take from this?” mentality and not a “prove yourself to me” Be curious and be open to learn what you expect and what you may not expect too!
  3. Share your thoughts and feedback with the trainer before it is too late. Don’t wait until the end to tell the trainer you would like them to have done something differently. Don’t adopt a “I don’t want to rock the boat” or “why bother approach”. It could be that the trainer or training can’t give you what you want – but wouldn’t you rather want to know sooner than later rather than sitting there thinking “when will we ..?”
  4. Reinforce the positive – feedback forms have a place, but like anyone trainers like to hear positive feedback as they work. If you find something useful, interesting or enjoyable then openly share this.

Help yourself during the training so you can help yourself later

  1. Organize and write your notes from the outset in a way that will help you make sense of them when you refer back afterwards.
  2. Find and use tools that will help you during the training. If something interests you proactively ask for suggestions for books, websites etc so you can go deeper later
  3. Be honest and open about your problems. Don’t hesitate to ask you trainer to repeat something, explain something again or share more examples.  If you are struggling there’s a good chance one of your colleagues is too!
  4. Look to bring in examples from your day to day life during the training. This helps to make the training more relevant and transferable. It will also help the other participants and the trainer to connect learning to reality.
  5. Ask all your questions. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
  6. Use your breaks to reset and recharge. Don’t try and work for 10 minutes, but instead stretch, get some fresh air, talk to the others.  Network, reflect or recharge.

See the training as the start of something

  1. Review your notes at the end of each day and in a few weeks, to help with transfer and long-term memory. Consider setting up a calendar reminder a month later to revisit the training
  2. Take one concrete action immediately after the training.
  3. Catch up with your colleagues back at the office. Maybe you want t0 schedule lunch with a colleague who was also in the training and review both content and actions since the training.
  4. Commit to one or two transfer steps you will do after the training. Make these concrete and share them with others.

So whether you have an internal or external trainer, you also have a big role to play in getting the very most from your training day.  Let us know if you have any other tips too!

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How experienced presenters do it

There are presenters out there who seem to have it all. They speak, the audience listens. They make a joke, the audience laughs. They don’t umm, they don’t ahhh, and they speak clearly, sharing their message and reinforcing it just enough throughout. By the end of the presentation, their audience is informed, educated and leaves the room with all their questions answered. How? This blog shares 4 simple tips and includes 4 extremely useful presentation eBooks.

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Know your whats and whys

This is incredibly obvious, perhaps even to inexperienced presenters – but it probably the most overlooked element during the design stage. When you ask them, experienced presenters tell you that the very first thing they do is crystallize what they want to achieve with the presentation.

These questions will help you get started:

  1. What do I want to achieve?
  2. Why should people listen to me?
  3. What do I want the audience to know after the presentation?

An excellent tip is to write down in a single sentence what your presentation is about and why you are presenting. If you can’t do it in 14 words or less, rewrite it – and one of the 14 words needs to be the powerful “so”. e.g.  “I’m sharing how experienced presenters do it, so you can improve your presentations.” That sentence then gives you a very simple framework and clear criteria for what I want to put in and take out.

“Designing your presentation well lays the foundations for your success.”

Scott Levey

Powerpoint doesn’t make the presentation

Perhaps the comedic writers Steve Lowe and Brendan McArthur[1] best summed it up – “PowerPoint: The Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like ********s.” You make the presentation. Powerpoint is a supporting tool. We’ve all done it. We find a set of existing slides and copy and paste our way to a new presentation. We think in slides and we build what we say around what’s on the slides. Experienced presenters build the presentation slides after they have planned the presentation, when they know what they are going to say and have a clear structure in mind. They use as few slides as possible because they want the focus on them and their message. This way, the presentation has a better chance of becoming a visual aid, rather than the main feature.

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Get comfortable

Have you noticed it? The best presenters are in control and entirely comfortable with what they’re doing. Wow. How do they do it? They practice. Out loud, probably. Practicing is not thinking to yourself what you will say – it’s actually saying it. Recording yourself and practicing in front of a mirror will tell you exactly what your audience will see and hear as you present your content. When you come across as unsure of yourself or uncertain of your content you are creating barriers to success. And don’t focus on “learning it by heart” – focus on the big messages and the important bridges.

“Practice your presentation a day before you hold it -if you start practising an hour before you run the risk of deciding to change things around which makes things harder.

James Culver

 

eBook: The definitive checklist for qualifying training providers

Don’t lose yourself, but if you do…

Your mind draws a blank. You’ve forgotten to make an important point. You just realized you’re babbling away. You don’t know the answer to the question. The audience looks at you like they don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say. Now what?

We all make mistakes and “owning your mistakes” helps build credibility . Smile. Don’t wind yourself up. Move forward. Say it later. Focus on the next point. Say that you’ll find out the answer but you don’t have it right now. Ask the audience – what have you understood so far? – and take it from there.

Moments when things go wrong happen – so remember they are only moments. Even the most experienced presenters draw a blank sometimes. If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have developed techniques that work for them (they take a sip of water while gathering their thoughts, they make a joke out of it, etc.). Experience taught them that.

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If you’d like to benefit from practical training then take a look at our training solutions for presenting across cultures, presenting in a virtual environment and our challenging Presenting with IMPACT

[1] Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: Insanely Annoying Modern Things – By Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur with Brendan Hay (Grand Central Publishing)

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Nobody likes giving negative feedback – but many of us want to hear it

If someone is unhappy with your performance at work, wouldn’t you want to know? At the very least, you’d like an opportunity to clear the air, or address the problem, or explain…or something. Yet when it comes to giving negative or difficult feedback, most of us feel reluctant to give it. We don’t want to hurt the other person or we are afraid of a conflict, so we end up avoiding it. No, giving negative feedback is not one of the enjoyable aspects of managing people. Doing it constructively is a challenge for the best of us, and even when we do it well – who’s to say that your feedback is taken on board and improvements are made?

The big (free) eBook of negotiations language

Here are 7 tips to get you started, and they are explained in more detail below:

  1. Be clear about what you want at the end before you begin
  2. Use language that focuses on the situation, not on the person
  3. Turn up to the conversation, stay there and speak out
  4. Be open, try to be objective, don’t judge
  5. Demonstrate understanding
  6. Give examples and share patterns – and the impact on you/others
  7. Believe in change

Be clear about what you want at the end before you begin

What is obvious to you is not always obvious to others. People cannot look into your head (or heart) and guess how you’d like things. You need to be able to explain, in simple and safe language, what you want from the conversation and why you are starting it. Think about it, picture it. Simply saying that you want something to improve is not enough, it means different things to different people. Be specific and focus on the future. A useful approach is to know if this is an A, B or C discussion.  Are you focusing on a specific Action, an ongoing Behaviour or possible Consequences ? Try not to mix them. Another approach my colleagues use in training is “feed forward not back”.

And finally, think about this: if you’re giving negative feedback because you want to ‘make a point’ – there really is no point.

Use language that focuses on the situation, not on the person

Giving negative feedback is always a very personal thing, for both parties. Keep this is in mind when the other person takes your feedback personal. There are no magic phrases to use when giving negative feedback but avoid language like “you did” and “you shouldn’t have”. Owning your sentence with “I” is a better place than judging or blaming with “you”. Try sentences that start with “I noticed” or “I saw”. Avoid using “I think” or “I heard” as this implies a personal feeling, gossip, and/or judgement. Do keep in mind though that the “I” isn’t magic. If you are blaming somebody, the “I” doesn’t change how they react. And if you are managing people consider sometimes using “our” or “we” as a replacement for “I”.

Given time to absorb and reflect, most of us are grown-up enough to move past the personal impact of what is being said. More often than not, once we look back on the situation, we’re glad that someone gave us the feedback and brought it to our attention so that we can try to change our behaviour, or take appropriate action.

Turn up to the conversation, stay there and speak out

If you are going to give difficult or negative feedback you need to be present in the moment. You are committed to the conversation because you believe both parties will benefit. Shut out unhelpful self-talk like “well it won’t make any difference” or “ I knew he would say that when I said this”.  You both need to focus on this conversation and the outcome. You owe it to both of you to say what you think and feel, taking responsibility for your words and the outcome.

Be open, try to be objective, don’t judge

Don’t be vague, don’t be ambiguous. If the situation is a big deal, don’t call it a minor issue. Be open to receiving feedback on your feedback. Listening is as important as talking. Effective feedback is always a two-way street. And remember, what is obvious to others is not always obvious to you.

It’s almost never a good idea to judge others by your standards. You would do this or that, if you were him or her in this situation? You’re not him or her, you’re you. Or, he or she should do this or that in this situation? Better yet, if you were him or her, you wouldn’t even be in this situation… None of that means anything, beyond that you are different people.

Demonstrate understanding

For feedback to lead to a positive outcome for both sides you need to demonstrate understanding.  You can do this by …

  • Actively looking to find truth and agreement in what they are saying and validating this.  If you disagree with everything they say, how likely is it that they will accept and embrace everything you are saying?
  • Keep calm, centred and actively side-step confrontation and escalation.
  • Summarize your understanding of the other persons feelings (and be open to them correcting you).
  • Summarize your understanding of what they have said (and again, they can correct you)
  •  Asking a straight question to build bridges

Give examples and share patterns – and the impact on you/others

Your vested interest and understanding of the situation are important and this should be clear early in the conversation. Models such as DESC build this in. If you are not clear about something, ask and listen. Stick to what was observed. And as mentioned earlier, know whether you want to focus on an action, a pattern of behaviours  or consequences.

Trainer tip

“When we talk about patterns of behaviour, people will typically ask for an example. You are obliged to give examples- but if somebody is behaving defensively be prepared for them to then pull the example apart (challenge facts, bring in new information that may or may not be relevant, argue it was a unique situation). Your task is to listen, learn AND keep the conversation focussed on the pattern, not on single events or actions.”

Believe in change, support change

The words you say, your thoughts, your body language – if you don’t believe this change can happen, it probably won’t. You are a part of this change. You are, in fact, one of the initiators. More often than not, you can do more than give negative feedback. For change to work, it can’t come at a cost of something else and it often isn’t the responsibility of only one person to make the change. Look to create a “safe” environment where change is made easier.

And finally, not every moment needs to be a feedback moment

Sometimes people are having a rough time, sometimes problems do correct themselves. Not everything needs to be addressed, not every situation is a feedback or learning moment. Sometimes choosing not to give negative feedback is okay too – unless avoiding it comes at a cost (e.g. your frustration, team spirit, the problem escalates). Not giving difficult or negative feedback doesn’t mean saying nothing and doing nothing. Try a different approach – the feed forward method focuses the discussion on common goals and what you need to see done differently going forward. Use the  CIA model (Control, Influence, Accept) to determine which parts apply to this situation – and finding techniques that will help you move past it, without giving negative feedback.

 

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