Internal training is often done via presentations and companies often use an internal “expert” to deliver training to other members of staff. Slide after slide appears on the screen and by the end, there’s a handout with the most important points and perhaps a summary. The upside of this type of training is that the information is first hand from the expert. One of the downsides is that the trainer often doesn’t have experience in training. He/she doesn’t understand how to make learning stick, or that only 10% of learning happens through structured training. (Read more about the 70-20-10 model.)Here are a few ideas to make your presentation based training interactive.
A trainer always explains the objectives of the training session. The objectives need to be relevant to the audience – you need buy-in for learning to take place. Everything that happens in the training should link back to the objective. The participants have objectives too – but they might be different to yours and you need to align the two sets. This is often done through a warmer activity – who are you and why are you here? A warmer activity can be done as a group, in small groups or in pairs. At the end of the activity, everyone has shared their personal objectives (ideally they are visible for everyone to read). The trainer then paraphrases the personal objectives and links it in to the objectives of the session. If there are objectives that can’t be aligned, the trainer points them out: “Sorry, we won’t be covering that in detail today”, or “There might be time to do that at the end of the session.”
Get people up and moving
If participants don’t know each other very well, a few icebreakers are necessary. A game called ‘find someone who’ can be adapted easily to any audience and topic. Beyond that, you can bring discussion cards, or tasks that participants have to do between slides. Especially when people’s interests are fading, stop the presentation and get them up and moving around the room. Ask them to brainstorm in groups, to summarize in pairs, to troubleshoot, or ask them to pick a position in the room based on how strongly they feel about a company/work-related statement. Ask them to present some of the key learning points of the presentation back to you half-way through and use it as an opportunity to align participant knowledge.
Involve your audience
Closely related to the above, even when the training material is dry, full of facts and technical jargon, your training can be interactive. You can engage participants in almost a thousand different ways. Ask them for their experience or opinions, ask them to read out the information on the slides, or prepare a quiz or a competition (with a token prize). Open a debate, do a shout out round of questions or get them to walkabout the room to examine information on the topic at different stations. (Here are 25 ideas on making training active.)
Ask for commitment
When the participants leave the training room, what are they expected to do? They learned something but how will they transfer that to their job – that’s a good question to prepare yourself for. Before the training session finishes, take enough time to ask participants about their ideas, and also to give advice on making the learning stick. You may also consider a Personal Learning Plan.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Here are just a few posts for you to explore if you want to learn more on this topic. We also offer a range of Train the Trainer and Workshop Facilitation seminars.
In an ideal situation, one of your colleagues, an internal editor, or proofreader (or InCorporate Trainer) will help you perfect your written masterpiece before you unleash it onto the world. But let’s say you’re left to edit your own work and said work is a lengthy document, or one with sensitive information in places. For one reason or another, your document needs to a final check. I don’t mean a spellcheck. But definitely do one of those as well.
Writing and editing belong to two separate phases of the writing process. When the editing work begins, you are no longer the author. An editor is not emotionally attached to the words. He/she will mercilessly cut out the most poetic of phrases and well thought out sentences if they interfere with the readability (for example).
If you begin the editing process immediately after you finish writing, it can be difficult to catch errors, especially the very small ones. Have a coffee, take a walk around the block or, better yet, leave your writing for a day or two and then come back to it with a fresh perspective.
Edit your work in a different format
You might be surprised how helpful it can be to transfer your work to another format for proofreading. Some possible ideas: print your work on paper, view it on your tablet, project it on the wall or temporarily change the font of your entire document.
Start big
Rather than worrying about spelling, commas and full stops at the beginning of editing, start with a broad overview. Do you need to add or cut a section? Did you forget to include important information? After reading your work, did you realize that you need to re-write something? If yes, do it at this first stage of your edit. Otherwise, you might end up proofreading material that you cut later. Does your document still need:
Paragraph headers
A summary or a conclusion
Links to sources/resources
Graphics
Slice and dice
When you’re satisfied with the format and overall structure of your document, it still needs further fine-tuning. This is the time to reduce the number of words in your document and search for shorter, more concise ways to communicate what your audience needs to know. Look out for:
You could say “the fact of the matter is that editing is essential”, or you could say “editing is essential”. Readers have little patience for verbose writing. In addition to helping you spot errors with spelling and pronunciation, reading aloud will help you get a feel for the rhythm and tone of your document. Do you get tongue-tied trying to read one sentence? Re-write it so it flows more smoothly. Look out for:
Leonardo Da Vinci said that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned. Even if you don’t consider your document a work of art, you will probably never be 100% satisfied. However, after you’ve edited your document as much as possible, call it a day and congratulate yourself on a job well done.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/0011-e1476260677584.jpg8001200Martin Wheelerhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngMartin Wheeler2017-02-17 12:17:452018-06-06 12:29:19Quick tips on editing your own work
One of the drawbacks of being a trainer is that now and again you fail to realise that what is obvious for you is new to others. In a recent young managers program the “eureka” moment came when, following a young manager’s “Maybe I’m not cut out for this job” statement, I shared the “Conscious Competence model”. The model, developed by Noel Burch, has been around since the 1970s – and it’s a great way to prepare for and reflect on your development as a manager (or development in any other role). I assumed my participants knew the model already but they had never heard of it. This is a quick recap.
Ignorance is bliss, and you don’t even realize that you are performing poorly. As a new, young manager perhaps you don’t even realize you are making elementary mistakes. Instead of delegating you are dumping tasks on people and walk away convinced you are empowering them to find their own solutions. Perhaps your tasking is incomplete, or maybe you don’t have clear goals because you didn’t consider this your role. Are you delaying giving feedback because you don’t want to upset anybody and it will sort itself out anyway – or perhaps the way you give feedback is so clumsy you demotivate somebody. The list goes on and on. You assume you know what y0u’re doing – it’s more or less the same as before but with the better desk and more benefits. You’re not aware that you don’t have the necessary skill. Perhaps you don’t even realize that the skill is relevant. In the first stage, your confidence exceeds your management skills. Before you can move to the next step you need to know and accept that certain skills are relevant to the role of manager, and that mastering this skill will make you more effective.
Stage 2 – Conscious Incompetence
Someone helped you understand that you need to develop a new skill. Or, you have been sent on a management training programme and your eyes have been opened. Or perhaps confronted by poor results you’ve actually taken a step back and reflected on what’s been going on and the role you’ve played. You are aware of your lack of skills. You are consciously incompetent. This is a difficult phase as you are now aware of your weaknesses, or in today’s insipid jargon your “developmental areas”.
Nobody is born a manager, although some people may well have innate skills, making the transition to manager easier. Learning by feedback, learning by suffering, learning by doing and learning by failing – these things brought you to the second stage. Training can play a role as can learning from your peers and exposing yourself to opportunities to learn. By staying positive and embracing the small successes your confidence in your own management abilities grows.
Stage 3 – Conscious Competence
At this stage you have learnt some reliable management techniques and processes, but they have to be consciously implemented. It’s a bit like painting by numbers. You know how to facilitate a meeting well, but you still want to take time to reflect on the steps beforehand. You can make a great presentation and get your message across … and you know what you need to do in advance to get the success you need. You can provide feedback in an appropriate manner – but not without thinking it through beforehand. At this stage, your ability to be flexible and proactive in unexpected situations is limited – but you can do it. The task-oriented aspects of managing are becoming fine-tuned but it is still learning by doing, trial and error, or copying managerial role models. You are testing your limits.
Stage 4 – Unconscious Competence
Quite simply you have become what you wanted to be – a skilled manager. The task and relationship aspects of managing are now “part of you”. You know how to achieve the task, develop individuals and build a team – and can do it without too much thinking. Non-routine situations are challenging, yet do not faze you. You are like Beckenbauer in football, or Federer in tennis. You always appear to have enough time and space to make good decisions. But even masters can lose matches and need to learn and practise.
To summarize
The model can be universally applied as a model for learning. It suggests that you are initially unaware of how little you know – you simply don’t know what you don’t know. As you recognize your incompetence, you acquire a skill consciously, then learn to use that skill. Over time, the skill becomes a part of you. You can utilize it consciously thought through. When that happens you have acquired unconscious competence.
It will help you understand that stepping into a management role is a learning journey -and not an instant enlightenment.
It reinforces that rank does not automatically give you authority.
It reassures you that you can succeed as a manager. You just need space and time to find your feet.
Understanding this dynamic and learning basic management techniques will quickly help you overcome the early frustrations.
And finally you can manage your emotion as you develop. You are going through a well-known learning process. Nobody is born a manager!
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Read more about the model (this article suggests a fifth stage and has a matrix to clarify the four stages). And finally, a few blog posts you might be interested in:
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Fotolia_33008900_M-e1394114947106.jpg7961680Tony Normanhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngTony Norman2017-02-10 13:01:482018-06-06 12:29:19Stepping into management: the learning and development journey
‘Word your requirements precisely and ensure that you cover all categories of human-related requirements.’ That is one of the underlying principles of needs analysis. A needs analysis helps define what any system should look like, before it gets to the design stage. In other words, if you don’t know what you need, you might end up getting the wrong thing.
If you are ever in the situation of having to find “some training” for your team, department or company, start with a simple training needs analysis, which won’t take very long. It is important that you can clearly outline who should receive training and why. It means you will know what to ask for when you are ready to talk to a potential provider. A training provider who knows what they’re doing will have lot of experience with training program design and they will design the system for you/with you. The more insight you can give from the very start, the more effectively your training program (your system) can be designed and implemented.
People commonly start by thinking about the sort of training they want. Effective training must have realistic objectives for everyone involved. If you are familiar with our blog and online publications, you’ll have come across this sentence “Start with the end in mind.” Here are some questions to get you started:
What result(s) do we want to see?
What behaviour needs to change so that this result can be achieved?
What skills, knowledge or attitudes do people need to learn to change this behaviour?
What sort of training is most appropriate for learning these skills, knowledge or attitudes?
A good training provider should be able to help you to define the behaviours that support your objectives. They should be able to help you to decide what skills, knowledge and attitudes affect these behaviours. And, finally, they can suggest alternative ways for delivering training which will ensure that your people learn and can transfer the training to the workplace.
Finding the right trainer
There is a huge supply of trainers and training providers on the market. Finding the right trainer is not necessarily easy, even though it can be. It helps to clarify at this stage what type of trainer you’re looking for, because it will allow you to exclude a large section of what is on offer. Here are some things to consider:
What skills, knowledge and attitude are we looking for?
How much relevant training experience should they have?
How qualified should they be?
Determining investment
There are many factors and steps involved in getting to a well-designed, effective system. Consider for example how workload, deadlines, holidays and illness could affect the success of the training.
How much time can each individual invest (realistically) in the training?
How much additional resources can be spent on the training (administration, travel, etc)?
What determines success?
And leading from that, how will you measure success? If it’s enough that people put a tick under the smiley face on the feedback form after the training, that’s fine. But “happy sheets”, as we call them, measure only the reaction to training, not the actual results. Tests measure knowledge, is that what you want? That’s fine too. Whatever you’re looking for when you define success, these questions will be useful:
Which systems do we need to measure success, or progress?
What can we do to make sure that learning is transferred to the workplace?
Again, a good training provider will be able to support you with figuring out the details of measuring the training and overall success. A great training provider will already have systems in place and will be able to provide detailed reports.
The next step
Now you can start thinking in more detail about the design and share the requirements for your system with an expert. The systematics of that will all be explained in a future post.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Fotolia_56080435_M-e1391604116668.jpg8651683Guest Authorhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngGuest Author2017-02-02 16:25:012018-06-06 12:29:20Needs analysis questions for departments in need (of training)
Taking the time after the meeting to talk about how the meeting went means you can continually improve not just your skills, but the effectiveness and efficiency of your meetings too. Debriefing is all about identifying behaviours to maintain and things to do differently during the following meetings – and top performing teams take the time to reflect. You could integrate it into your agenda or agree upon reflection intervals. My own experience is that immediacy is better. When asked to think about the last e.g. 6 meetings, people too often tend to either focus on the last 1 or 2 events, or speak in broad and vague generalizations that are more difficult to act upon.
Sending out minutes – each time, every time, always, no excuses, better late than never
Whether they be formal or informal, an executive summary or agenda-based, action-oriented minutes or verbatim, it’s a good idea to write them and send them out! Great chair persons understand and commit to always having minutes. They don’t approach them with a “we have proof” mentality – but rather with a “building” and “commitment” mentality. And they also give people an opportunity to review and add to the minutes. But they have them.
Planning in “I should have said” time
People are wonderfully different – and this means that not everyone is going to contribute equally in your meetings. It could simply be shyness, or perhaps an issue of interpersonal dynamics or politics. More often than not it could be that an idea or opinion wasn’t fully formed and the person chose to think it through before speaking (especially if they have what the MBTI refers to as an “Introvert” preference). It’s too easy (and destructive) to take a “If you don’t say it in the meeting you lost your chance”. Plan time after the meeting is over so participants who need time to reflect can have a chance to share their insights. This also helps to build trust.
Taking the time for tête-à-têtes
Connected to the above, planning in time after the meeting for a tête-à-tête (literally a head to head discussion) also gives you an opportunity to
make apologies (or gives somebody an opportunity to make them)
reflect on behaviours
ask for a recommitment to ground rules
clarify confusion
resolve conflicts
ask for and receive feedback,
check resources
gauge true level of commitment to tasks
… plus a hundred other things which are best done on a one-to-one basis. It’s not politicking – it’s about building authentic relationships.
Planning in check-ins to review commitments and accountability
If people have had the chance to share their opinions and ideas and robustly discuss options in your meting then you can expect real commitment to the agreed action. And if people have committed then you can hold them accountable. Great chair persons explicitly review the commitments at the end of the meeting AND they follow up later on. When they follow up they have an “inquisitive” and “supportive” approach. They understand that things may have changed since the meeting, that priorities may have shifted and that resources may have been over-estimated or diverted. But they follow up.
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Plenty more meetings where that came from… And for even more information on how to make your meetings and your performance during meetings more successful, please contact us. We love to talk!
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fotolia_43862715_M.jpg11751617Scott Leveyhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngScott Levey2017-01-26 12:27:392018-06-06 12:29:20After the meeting ends – more practical ideas from great chair persons and facilitators we’ve worked with
One of the best things about being a trainer is that you get to meet a lot of people from diverse backgrounds. As trainers we get to listen to and learn from our clients – and we then get to share ideas, experiences and best practices with other clients. Below are some of the great ideas that top chairpersons and facilitators have identified over the last years during meeting facilitation seminars.
Do you know who needs to be in the meeting and what they’ll be bringing to the table?
Before the meeting starts make a list of the decision makers, subject matter experts and opinion leaders. Then take a few minutes to isolate and identify their interests in the outcome of the meeting. Why? By doing this you’ll…
Know who to address about which topic when. This is especially useful if you have meeting participants who are quieter or introspective.
Know who to ask specific technical questions.
Be better able to focus the flow of information and discussion on the decision makers’ interests
Do you invest time before the meeting to talk with the participants?
This idea is too often quickly mislabelled as “politics”, but all of the truly impressive chairpersons I’ve been lucky enough to work with have stood by the idea. Great chairpersons and facilitators make the time to talk with individuals who will participate in the meeting about the meeting before the meeting begins. They do this to uncover interests, hear concerns and objections, and win support. They are then better able to connect interests, help others save face and steer discussions down constructive avenues.
I specifically remember a young project manager passionately convincing her fellow IT engineers of the merits of this behaviour and that “talking about the meeting before the meeting makes the meeting work -and that’s why we always finish our meetings earlier than planned!”
Do you build your own ground rules – and review them at the start of every meeting?
Many organizations have established “meeting ground rules”. These may be unspoken, hidden away on the Intranet or printed on colourful posters and put in the meeting rooms. The advice is often solid and sensible.
But all the best chairpersons I’ve worked with have consistently supported the idea that ground rules work best when the team itself decides on their own ground rules and define acceptable meeting behaviour (for example phones on silent, poll opinions, always have an agenda, etc…). This is especially important when working in virtual teams. When challenged by their peers that this was a waste of time answers included …
“The team takes the time to focus on the process and not the results. And my experience is that it’s the process that causes the frustrations 9 out of 10 times”
“Because everyone and every team is different and the company rules can’t know this”
“If they are our rules, and we made them, then everybody shares the responsibility for making our meetings work well”
“It means I don’t need to be the bad guy – because we all agreed and committed to the process up front”
Top chair persons and facilitators also tend to review them very quickly at the start of every meeting. One extroverted investment fund manager I worked with sang them and, to keep things fresh, changed the tune at least every quarter. You won’t be surprised to hear that his peers had mixed reactions to this idea (“It is not a serious idea Fabio, we are a bank!”) – but apparently his team loved it, and meeting attendance was high.
Are you building trust through building relationships and enabling “rough discussions”?
Great chairpersons and facilitators take the time before the meeting to get to know team members personally – and understand the dynamics between the participants. This helps the chairperson;
understand people’ motivations and priorities (“what do they really care about?”)
adapt the dynamics and approach to respect he different personalities (e.g. not everybody wants to brainstorm as a group
adapt their own communication style e.g find the best metaphors and stories to illustrate key points,
But more importantly, as one German manager said “Rough discussions are important so we don’t keep having the same discussions again and again”. This ties in with Patrick Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions of a team idea that great chairpersons believe the more they know about the participants, the better they can facilitate open discussions. They’ll know when to push and when to stop, when to mine conflict in the meeting (force buried disagreements to light in order to work through them) and when to deal with issues in smaller groups. Building trust is a long-term investment, but as many meetings are chaired by the teams manager anyway it is an investment that pays off.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fotolia_54727958_M.jpg11671628Scott Leveyhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngScott Levey2017-01-18 12:45:182018-06-06 12:29:20Before the meeting begins – 4 added-value ideas from great chair persons and facilitators we’ve worked with
The idea of new year resolutions isn’t a modern invention. The Babylonians and Romans both made promises to their gods at the start of a new year. Whether or not you are making resolutions, the start of a new year does bring new opportunities for you to refocus on learning new skills and building knowledge. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but here are 10 proven and practical steps you can take to help get your learning off on the right track in 2017. And here’s the good news …. you don’t need to necessarily do them all! If you try just a couple, you’ll see the benefits by the end of the year.
1. Set realistic goals
Take half an hour to think about what you really want to learn, develop, improve, and why. Now write those goals down so you have something to refer back to reflect on. Whether it be improving your vocabulary in a foreign language, overcoming presentation stress or learning to play the drums: SMART GOALS HELP!
2. Find options for achieving these goals
If you want to improve your writing skills, how are you going to do that? Use an app, attend a course? Do your research and find options that are going to work for you – and try to get the ball rolling sooner than later. It’ll be summer before you know it.
3. Get social
Talk to people about their goals and what they’re doing to get there. How are they learning? And what can you learn from them? And share your goals too.
4. Eat small bites
Micro-learning is one of the learning & development trends for 2017. The great thing about this is that it acknowledges the time issue we all have. Training can now happen in bite-sized chunks that literally take no more than 5 minutes at a time – that means you can learn something very quickly without having to make major changes to your routines and schedules. There are micro-learning solutions for most areas, including business English.
5. Get organized
If you’re learning anything new, it helps to organize yourself. That could be organizing your notes, your time, and setting priorities. Take the time to consider what works for you.
6. Experiment
According to the 70-20-10 learning model 10% of learning happens in formal training situations, 20% happens through social interaction, and 70% happens on-the-job. On-the-job means in practical, real situations. So, if you’re learning something, you need to experiment in real situations. Look for opportunities to do this.
7. Learn from your mistakes
If you experiment, you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t worry about that, it’s part of the learning process. Just make sure you actually take the time to reflect on what went wrong and what needs to happen differently the next time round. And then do it differently.
8. Enjoy yourself
The best learning happens when it’s so much fun, you don’t even realize you’re learning. What do you enjoy doing in your free time? Choose learning options that fit in with how you would normally be spending your time. That could be watching a movie, listening to a podcast, reading a book, or playing a game on your tablet.
9. Notice your progress
If you write down your goals, and review them regularly, you’ll see the progress you’re making. It also helps if you can begin to notice the small events that show that learning is happening.
10. Celebrate your results
And when you notice those small events, celebrate and reward yourself. When we ask participants to build transfer plans at the end of a seminar we ask a number of questions, “What? How? By when? Who else needs to be involved? What does success look like?” AND “How will you reward yourself?”. It could be as simple as holding off on buying a new book or as grand as buying concert tickets and taking your daughter.
Overcoming the 4 core obstacles that prevent intentions turning into action
Whether they be new year resolutions or not, our plans and intentions often fail to materialize due to a lack of specificity, vision, accountability, and discipline. To overcome these 4 obstacles …
Define what you want to achieve as clearly as possible (see step 1 below)
Consider what success looks like – and then ask yourself if you are really doing all you can to make your vision come true
As well as holding yourself accountable, set up a “buddy system” in order to stick to your resolutions. Avoiding embarrassment can be a great motivator (see step 3) -although some research does argue that sharing goals actually widens the intention-behavior gap.
Stick to your goals and your plans, and don’t make excuses. The more you practice discipline, the more disciplined you become. When you do slip, rather than making excuses, think of ways to do it next time should you happen to come across a similar obstacle.
Good luck and have fun learning!
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Fotolia_81043493_M.jpg13851372Guest Authorhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngGuest Author2017-01-11 13:36:462018-02-07 10:44:3110 easy steps you can take to kick-start your learning in 2017
During my time working for a global IT helpdesk, I received more than fifty calls on an average day. We were the first point of contact for the client’s 110.000+ employees, who called us with questions about just about anything to do with IT. Our customers were experts in their field. Our SLAs (Service Level Agreements) were demanding – as customer service experts, we were expected to have an average CSAT score of 4.7 out of 5. It’s not a success story.
Not for lack of trying, to be clear. Everyone was happy to help, when the customers were friendly, or the problems easy to fix. Some of us, including me, didn’t mind the more challenging customers or problems. A lot of our customers phoned us in moments of frustration, with good reason. They were in the middle of something “important” and now the software wasn’t working, or the computer, or the printer, or whatever. Schedules were interrupted, money was being lost, bad impressions were being made on their clients, and so on. As customer service experts, we understood the three dimensions of service – there’s always something going on in the background. So whatever frustrations came at us, we knew that they weren’t personal.
At the same time, they didn’t help when it came to the all-important relationship building. (Who wants to do that with someone who’s always shouting down the phone?) Most of us quickly learned that frustrated people tend to want to vent and that somehow, venting is easy to a voice on the phone. We worked hard, but our CSAT was down due to a large number of factors, not all related to our ability to be nice to customers. Many other things influence customer satisfaction: long waiting times (another SLA), lack of expertise, etc. As customer service experts, we were expected to apologize, if our customers had experienced delays or when they were otherwise unhappy with something. Some of my colleagues balked at the idea. Apologize? What for, I didn’t do anything wrong. They actually refused.
I’m sorry, that’s not an apology
It’s also a difficult topic to raise in customer service training. I’ve learned that people are very passionate about the “to apologize or not to apologize” question. According to the dictionary an apology is a regretful acknowledgement of failure. Many people however, think that an apology is the same as admitting a mistake, or taking the blame. Like some of my colleagues did. Some of them couldn’t apologize, almost like the ability to apologize was missing from their DNA. Others felt they would betray their values by handing out an apology for something that wasn’t caused by their wrong-doing. The problems didn’t end there. A few of my colleagues were handing out apologies like they were the solution to everything. Back on the helpdesk, these were some of the phrases that shouldn’t have been circling:
It’s my job to apologize to you
Yeah, sorry about that
I guess I should say sorry about the delay
I’m not going to apologize for that, I’m just trying to do my job here
Emotional vs. Neutral cultures
And, consider for a moment the intercultural aspect of complaints. A complaining Brit (who says “I’m afraid I have a problem” with only a slight raise in pitch) will not sound like something is wrong, not to an Italian helpdesk agent. British people guard their emotions, language is polite, whenever possible. The Seven Dimensions of Culture tells us that the United Kingdom (as is Germany) is a neutral culture. In neutral cultures, reason influences action far more than feelings. Italy is an emotional culture, where people tend to want to find ways to express their emotions.
Apologists vs. Non-apologists
It’s simply so: some people find it extremely difficult to apologize. Approximately 50% of my helpdesk colleagues were non-apologists. Asking a non-apologist to apologize for something they did ‘wrong’ is asking a lot. Asking a non-apologist to apologize for something that they had no influence over is asking too much. As soon as we talk about the business of apologizing, someone in the training room will say exactly what some of my colleagues said: Me? Apologize? What for? I didn’t do anything wrong. A non-apologist. They’re everywhere.
The elements of effective apologies
According to a recent paper, called “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies”* the best-received apologies contains all six of the following elements (the researchers found that the most important, by far, was acknowledgement of responsibility):
Expression of regret
Explanation of what went wrong
Acknowledgement of responsibility
Declaration of repentance
Offer of repair
Request for forgiveness
In memory of my colleagues
This post is dedicated to all the apologists and non-apologists that I had the pleasure of working with. And here, to finish on a high note, are the few of the apologists’ apologies that also circled (and also deserve to be immortalized on the web). (Click here for more phrases to use in an apology.)
Sir, I cannot express in words how sorry I am about that.
On behalf of everyone on my team, I want to offer you an apology.
It’s absolutely our fault and for that I apologize. This should never have happened.
And our customers…
Almost all our customers were friendly professionals who appreciated our dedication, even when we couldn’t come up with the solution immediately. In no way do I want to imply otherwise. Unfortunately, those customers wouldn’t have made this post very interesting.
* The paper, called “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies,” was published in the May 2016 issue of Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. (You can read the abstract online.) The academics — lead author Roy Lewicki, professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business; Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; and Beth Polin, assistant professor of management at Eastern Kentucky University — presented fictional apologies to 755 people.
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Read more about the 3 dimensions of service and how you can use them in your business communication. In the video, Dr. Fons Trompenaars answers the question “How do intercultural skills connect to communication skills?” Please contact us for more information.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Fotolia_84568367_M.jpg11251688Brenda Vansetershttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngBrenda Vanseters2017-01-05 15:03:292018-06-06 12:29:20The business of apologizing
Do you ever feel that you can’t get any work done because of the countless emails, calls, updates and web-meetings? Do you feel that you spend all day “communicating” without getting things done properly? Then this hugely topical book is for you.
In Deep Work Cal Newport argues that one of the key skills for productivity and success in such a “connected age” is the ability to focus on demanding tasks. He then brings this to life with science, stories, anecdotes and examples. Finally he then shares 4 “rules” for building habits and transforming your approach-
Check out the author’s excellent and generous blog to get a quick overview of the ideas. Then put your smart phone in a drawer, turn off the TV, pour yourself a glass of wine and make the time to read it.
In contrast to the previous “21st century” recommendation, the core themes of this book are timeless and universally applicable regardless of your situation. Every manager needs to accept and work with ambiguity. Do you support your manager when you know the decision is terrible – and your team know it too? Do you promote a driven and successful team leader who has regularly rubs people up the wrong way?
This book offers five deceptively simple questions to help you navigate through “gray areas”.
The questions are …
What are the net, net consequences?
What are my core obligations?
What will work in the world as it is?
Who are we?
What can I live with?
These 5 questions provide an ethical compass. To quote the author “When you face a gray area problem at work, you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.”
Certainly worth your time, and it also provides an excellent framework for teams, talent programs and management training programs.
And finally, our third suggestion is perfect for December. As the year comes to an end. many of us will be reflecting on what we’ve achieved (or not), how we’ve achieved it, and what we should be doing more or less of. In How to Have a Good Day, Caroline Webb shares findings from behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience and then shows how you can build on big “scientific” ideas to transform the quality of your everyday life. The book is divided into seven areas
Priorities
Productivity
Relationships
Thinking
Influence
Resilience
Energy
And concludes with a transfer-oriented “Making it stick”.
Speaking openly, it can be a heavy read. There’s a lot of research and findings shared, BUT there’s a clear focus on your working life too. Don’t let the “self-help” moniker put you off reading this – the stories and examples avoid slipping into fantasy or “business book bullshit”.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Fotolia_93753614_M.jpg11251688Scott Leveyhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngScott Levey2016-12-22 15:03:122018-06-06 12:29:203 thought-provoking business books from 2016 that you may have missed
Considering the implementation of a Blended Learning (BL) program brings with it a set of questions and decisions that need to be made. Blended Learning has a huge number of benefits. We know through experience that it personalizes learning, it reduces training costs, it offers flexibility- to name a few. But where there are advantages, there are usually some disadvantages too. When technology is involved, people need to know how to use it effectively, and there are set up and maintenance costs involved – to name a few. When we help our clients set up a BL program, or when we train trainers on this topic, we advise them to plan and evaluate the outcome of the BL solution. The below questions will help you get started.
What successes are you looking for by implementing a BL program?
What are the benefits and challenges of implementing a BL program?
Find the perfect blend
There are face to face (seminars, 1-1 training, classes) and online elements (webinars, virtual classrooms, community learning) to consider. Chances are you won’t be using all of them. There’s no need. But you’re looking for the perfect blend, so you need to know which elements there are to choose from and how each of them are of benefit to you. If you don’t have access to an expert to ask, Wikipedia is always a good place to start.
Which components of available BL solutions are in your toolbox?
What are the benefits and challenges of these components?
How easily can these components be implemented?
How are you going to link content between the components?
Engage participants
Not everyone will jump at the chance of exploring a new online system, not even if the learning benefits are obvious. It’s possible that not everyone needs to engage with all the BL components that are available, or to different extents. If you’ve dealt with change in the workplace, you know it already, buy-in is necessary if you want your BL program to hit the ground runnning.
What does participant engagement look like?
How can you maximize participant engagement?
Which participants should use which components?
Train the trainer
The trainer is key to any successful training solution. You need their buy-in too. Their engagement with the training shouldn’t end when you move to the online component. And if your trainer is expected to deliver some of the online components, your success depends on their ability to utilize the tools available to them. Most trainers are keen to try out new things and will happily engage. Nevertheless, there is often a learning curve for the trainer.
What is the trainer’s level of engagement with each of the components?
Which skills does the trainer need to make the program successful?
How can we close gaps in knowledge?
How will we get trainer buy-in?
Measure success
What behaviours have changed at work as a result of the BL program?
How do training objectives relate to business objectives?
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Fotolia_75888099_S.jpg519925Guest Authorhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngGuest Author2016-12-14 14:50:552018-06-06 12:29:20Is Blended Learning the right solution for you?
The 70-20-10 model has been around for a few years already. It reflects the increasing awareness that people learn not just through “traditional” training. Research shows that we actually acquire most of the knowledge, skills and behaviours we need to perform our jobs through actual experience and working alongside others. The 70-20-10 model has its origins in the work of McCall, Eichinger and Lombardo from the Centre for Creative Leadership.
Their book, “The Career Architect” (1996), is based on empirical research and concluded that successful managers learned in 3 different ways:
70 percent of learning comes from real life on-the-job experiences, performing tasks and problem solving
20 percent of learning comes from feedback, working with and observing role models
10 percent from “traditional” training
Initially focussing on management and leadership development, this conclusion has since been extended to other types of professional learning and development. Today the 70-20-10 model is being used by Learning & Development departments in a wide-range of multinationals operating across a broad range of businesses. (e.g. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Maersk, L’Oréal, and Caterpillar)
Why implement the 70-20-10 model
Whether you are a learning & development specialist, a line manager, a trainer or training provider, or an employee, you should take time to reconsider and refocus your efforts. By doing this you can:
shift the focus and expectations towards more efficient and effective types of learning and development
ensure that time and money invested in learning and development makes a greater impact
support your business by keeping people in the workplace while they are learning
The model has an attractive simplicity, although the exact ratios are contended. As a trainer and manager of a training company I think it’s important to see the model as a philosophy and not a rigid recipe. The key is understanding and accepting that the majority of learning actually happens outside of the classroom, and that any learning and development program should take this into account and proactively support this. It doesn’t mean that traditional training is no longer relevant in the 21st century, but rather that this traditional training is just a part of learning and development strategies.
“Almost without exception, in my experience, organisations that have adopted 70-20-10 have achieved greater impact on performance at organisational and individual level at lower cost than was being achieved beforehand.”
Charles Jennings
How to implement the 70-20-10 model
The 70-20-10 model has proven to positively impact organisations in enhancing learning and development programs. Based on what we’ve seen our clients do, and what we’ve tried ourselves, here are some concrete and practical ways to begin implementing the 70-20-10 model in your organization.
Raise awareness and build commitment through conversation
Everyone involved needs to be brought on board with the idea that learning and development is not just about going on a course. My own experience as a manager is that it is relatively easy to get people to see 70-20-10 as “common sense”. These conversations are essential as the 70-20-10 model depends on L&D working closely with line managers, and on line managers communicating with their staff. Managers need to be aware of the pivotal hands-on role they play in developing their staff, and employees need to appreciate the context for new decisions.
Implementing the 70-20-10 model is not a cost-cutting exercise – replacing “training” by a loose learning-by-doing approach. It’s actually a quality driven initiative, aiming to make sure that the company is developing to meet future challenges.
Scott Levey
If, like Target Training, you’re a medium sized company, these conversations are reasonably manageable. If, like many of our clients, you’re part of a larger organization then start small. Find a business unit where managers are comfortable and confident wearing the “developing people” hat. Speaking with our clients, many of whom are multinationals, the general consensus has been that introducing the 70-20-10 model step by step has proved to be the most effective approach. By connecting with managers who have a genuine interest in developing their teams and the employees within them, the model organically spreads to other areas.
Enable experiential learning
This is key when we consider that 70% of learning comes from “doing”. Giving employees the opportunity to learn through challenging yet achievable experiences is one the most powerful and practical tools in a manager’s toolbox. Experiential learning can come through new roles and equally occur within existing roles. Three approaches we’ve seen clients benefit from are:
extending the scope of responsibility and control
enabling and increasing decision-making power
expecting staff to build new relationships (e.g. other business units, senior managers, virtual teams , suppliers, partners, clients…)
Be prepared to accept a compromise between optimal efficiency and developmental opportunities
You can expect to see specific requests upwards, where an employee is keen to get involved in a challenging project specifically to build their skills. Naturally they won’t be as effective or efficient as somebody who can already perform this role – so look at it as a learning and development initiative rather than just a question of resources.
Engage with internal and external trainers and training providers early on
Discuss how to connect the dots between on-the-job, social and formal learning. The goal is to identify critical skills and behaviours and then look at building and reinforcing these using all options.
Coaching and mentoring
These are great ways of integrating social learning into a traditional program. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, and both draw on a similar skill set I’d argue there are differences. For me mentoring is deliberately connecting an experienced person (the mentor) with a less experienced one (the mentee). The mentor could be a colleague, a manager, or the line manager. The mentor then tutors, shares experiences, models, counsels and offers feedback. Coaching does not necessarily imply directly related experience, tends to be less directive, and is aimed at improving performance in specific areas. Regardless of how you define them, both approaches have a lot to offer.
When it comes to traditional training the key is early and explicit management involvement
The single most powerful step a manager can take is to clearly explain to their staff why the training is relevant to the business and that there are clear expectations. This simple step drives motivation, participation and transfer. This transfer is crucial and I’d suggest that any traditional formal training has to integrate a transfer plan. In this simple document the employees are challenged to consider how they will actually transfer the learning into their workplace, when they’ll do this, who else needs to be involved and how will they know when they have achieved this.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fotolia_87899349_M.jpg10881746Scott Leveyhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngScott Levey2016-12-08 15:36:442019-02-06 13:03:38Practical advice on implementing the 70-20-10 model
We recently had the opportunity to ask a selection of managers what they think are the qualities of a great trainer. At the end of the session, they were pretty much in agreement. Their collated answers are summarized below.
Variety and flexibility
Have a wide range of activities to use flexibly in different training situations. These activities should accommodate different learning styles. The trainer also needs to vary the training approaches and the interaction patterns in the training room. They need to know how to make sure participants get the most from the training.
The more personalized and interactive the activities are, the more immediately transferable the results will be. A great trainer will feel the reward of delivering something that really adds value for the participants. Great trainers are passionate about what they do. They will want to experiment with new ideas and activities, each time reflecting on its success and development.
Know the audience
It’s not always possible to know every participant in advance. But a great trainer will have done the research. They’ll know about, for example, what the client does, what their challenges are, and how they expect the training will help them reach their goals.
Embrace change
With new training trends, new technologies, and the ongoing cycle of change in business, the trainer’s ability to adapt will make him/her/the training more effective. Great trainers drive change. They introduce new techniques and elements to the training – a blended learning or virtual learning element for example.
Focus on results
Great trainers work with the end in mind. Every activity should consider the goals of the participants and learning progress is measured. The trainer looks for immediate results (reaction to the session) and long-term results (behaviour on the job).
Approachable
Having a genuine, active interest in people is just one of the qualities of a great trainer. The trainer’s ability in building relationships is a major part in ensuring an effective outcome for all stakeholders.
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We offer a number of train the trainer programs in English and German. Not all the information is currently on our website. Here’s a good place to start.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Fotolia_101619411_M.jpg10421824Martin Wheelerhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngMartin Wheeler2016-12-01 11:29:562018-06-06 12:29:21What makes a great trainer?
What does Miles Davis have to do with managing high performers in business? Good question. Miles Davis is rightfully acclaimed as an icon of jazz, but he didn’t make music alone. Throughout his career as a bandleader, Miles worked with other iconic figures of jazz to create music that stands even today as among the highest forms of the genre. John Coltrane, Herbbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, “Philly” Joe Jones, Keith Jarrett, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and many others among the giants of jazz graduated from “Miles University”. Miles Davis, time and time again, brought together some of the most talented musicians in their own right to work with him in his musical exploration. How did he do it? This article will explore the lessons of Miles Davis in the art of leading the best to be their best.
Miles Davis was able, on many occasions, to put together bands of some of the most talented musicians of their time throughout his career. Miles’ reputation clearly preceded him. Receiving a call from Miles was seen as having achieved a high level of musicianship. But that wasn’t the only reason so many musicians with promising solo careers agreed to support Miles. They believed they would learn something based on Miles’ excellence as a musician and band leader. Miles greatness was easy to see through his performances, compositions and recordings.
How easy is it for high performers to recognize your excellence? There is a tendency among many leaders not to “toot their own horns” about their own performance and accomplishments. While a leader may not need to sing his own praises, it is important that someone does it for him. A leader’s excellence will attract others who want to achieve the same level of competence, while increasing the leader’s credibility and ability to guide, mentor and teach.
Lesson 2: Don’t hire a trumpet player
Miles’ great combos included players with different styles and tendencies. He hired players who would complement his playing and each other’s. He didn’t need anyone who sounded like him because he had that covered.
In business, it can be difficult to avoid the temptation to hire people who mirror our backgrounds, experiences, styles and tendencies. After all those competencies served us well in our careers. It is important to remember as a leader that our success is a reflection of the past while we are hiring for the future. The pace of change doesn’t only require different technological skills it also requires new communication and leadership skills from those current leaders needed at earlier stages of their careers. Hiring teams with complementary but different skills and areas of expertise broadens the set of problems they can solve and increases their impact on the organization.
“It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”
Miles Davis
Lesson 3: Play together and produce excellence
Miles’ bands grew into cohesive units through performances, not rehearsals. Each performance created a wealth of learning opportunities for Miles and his band mates. The urgency of the moment created a focus and intensity that would be very difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a rehearsal. By focusing on playing together and learning from the experience, Miles could correct on the spot, encourage and support his band to take risks, push themselves and reach new heights of excellence.
How often do you perform with your high performers? Finding opportunities to produce excellence together will give you more chances to learn from each other.
Lesson 4: Don’t tell them what to do, tell them what not to do
Related to lesson three, play together and produce excellence, is the style of debriefing and guidance Miles offered to his band mates following their performances. Miles didn’t put a group together hearing the music he hoped they would produce in his mind, then correcting them to come as close as possible to his vision. Miles believed in an experimental approach to developing new music. When reflecting about what took place in performances, Miles would say what his band mates shouldn’t do but he wouldn’t tell them what to do. He hired them for their expertise on their individual instruments. He wanted them to bring their ideas to the table so they could take ownership of their performances and the product of the group.
The high performers in your organization reached a level of success before becoming members of your team. When managing high performers, take advantage of their creativity and input by channelling, not directing their contributions to the organization.
“If you don’t know what to play, play nothing.”
Miles Davis
Lesson 5: Listen to save the day
Deep listening is the art of hearing not only what is said but also what isn’t said. On stage, Miles had the opportunity to lay out and listen to what his band mates were playing. There were times when while reaching for new forms of expression, the band lost its way. By listening to what wasn’t there, Miles could enter the fray at the right moment with the phrase that would bring the other players back together again, finding a groove that was satisfying to the musicians and the audience.
Look for your opportunities, especially in conflict, to find what isn’t being said and remind the participants in the argument that they are on the same team. Listen for agreement that the parties may be missing, summarize, and encourage them to listen deeply to each other when emotions run high. “What I am hearing is…” is a great way to interject.
“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning… Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
Miles Davis
Lesson 6: Talk about life, not music
With our busy lives it may be tempting to leave work at work and leave life at home. We can get through our workdays without sharing with others the experiences that shaped us outside of the work environment. Miles believed knowing the personal histories of his band mates was crucial to being able to know them musically. He invested time in learning about the backgrounds of his band mates and he shared his own. This sharing created an environment of trust that helped his musicians to work with each other more closely.
Be willing to be more open when you are managing high performers as it can lead to more effective, trusting relationships. A deeper bond of respect can increase loyalty to you, and commitment to your organization and its goals.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Fotolia_79324203_L.jpg16612227James Culverhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngJames Culver2016-11-24 12:57:412020-07-01 13:57:55Managing high performers – the Miles Davis way
This week’s post was meant to be about customer service skills. Once I had my initial ideas on virtual paper, I started searching online resources. Very quickly and inevitably I ended up on TED.com and almost an hour later, I was still watching videos, no longer anything to do with customer service. My post was about what customer service professionals can do to stay motivated, with an array of some not so nice customers contacting them. It was inspired by one of my not so very motivated participants. He said: I don’t care if they’re nice or not. I don’t care if they think I’m nice or not. I still get paid for taking the call. Being motivated to do a good job has very little to do with having ‘nice’ customers – ultimately. That was one of the points of my post. Perhaps I will finish the post, it was an interesting training session. This post is instead about everyday leadership, feeling good and staying motivated.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely starts his TED talk ‘What makes us feel good about our work‘ with a mountain climbing example. “…If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains,do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?No, they are full of misery.In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking,and difficulty breathing —cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy,the moment they would get to the top,they would say, “This was a terrible mistake.I’ll never do it again.”
Everyday leadership
This very personal TED talk from Drew Dudley is easily transferable to a business context. ‘Everyday leadership‘ starts with a clear message. “…I’ve come to realize that we have made leadershipinto something bigger than us; something beyond us.We’ve made it about changing the world.We’ve taken this title of “leader”and treat it as something that one day we’re going to deserve.But to give it to ourselves right nowmeans a level of arrogance or cockiness that we’re not comfortable with.And I worry sometimes that we spend so much timecelebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do,that we’ve convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating.We start to devalue the things we can do every day. We take moments where we truly are a leaderand we don’t let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it.”
The happy secret to better work
Shawn Achor’s very funny talk ‘The happy secret to better work‘ is definitely worth watching. “… One of the first things we teach peoplein economics, statistics, business and psychology coursesis how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos.How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit?Which is fantastic if I’m trying to find outhow many Advil the average person should be taking — two. But if I’m interested in your potential,or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity,we’re creating the cult of the average with science.If I asked a question like,“How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?”scientists change the answer to“How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?”and we tailor the class towards the average.If you fall below the average,then psychologists get thrilled,because that means you’re depressed or have a disorder,or hopefully both.”
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Fotolia_71554784_M.jpg9601979Brenda Vansetershttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngBrenda Vanseters2016-11-16 14:52:572020-07-01 13:57:56TED talks on motivation and leadership
The most fundamental aspects of negotiation strategy are Creating and Claiming Value. In a negotiation, all parties involved must decide to be competitive, cooperative, or a combination of both. David Lax and James Sebenius called it the Negotiator’s dilemma: Lax and Sebenius argue that negotiation necessarily includes both cooperative and competitive elements, and that these elements exist in tension with each other. Negotiators face a dilemma in deciding whether to pursue a cooperative or a competitive strategy.The best outcome for one person is not necessarily the best outcome for the other person. If all parties involved pursue their best option, they will often end up getting the worst outcome. Here they are, explained.
“Like it or not, you are a negotiator. Negotiation is a fact of life.” With those words, the world was introduced to, what is now arguably the most famous book about negotiations in the world: “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury.
Creating Value: Making the pie bigger
All negotiators face two basic questions: “How can we make the pie bigger?” and “How can I make sure that I get the biggest possible piece?” The pie is enlarged (value is created) through the cooperative process of interest-based bargaining. Good negotiators find ways to increase their mutual gain. They see themselves as problem solvers. When everyone involved in the negotiation profits, it’s a win/win negotiation. Inventing options for mutual gain is the essence of the win/win philosophy.
To create this mutual gain, the negotiator:
Finds shared interests
Focuses on the big picture
Shares information openly
Develops options
Avoids criticism
Builds principle agreements
“Negotiation is always part of the equation. As I entered adulthood I found out that life is not as simple as yes or no. Everything involves negotiation, give-and-take: If we see this film this Saturday, can we see that concert next Saturday? I can prepare the presentation, but could I get it to you on Thursday not Wednesday?”
Gary Anello
Claiming Value: Dividing the pie
At some point, the knife must come out with all parties wanting the biggest possible piece of the pie. The more one claims, the less the other gets. The competitive process of claiming value is also known as win/lose. Good negotiators use competitive tactics to make sure their piece stays as large as possible. He/she:
Might withhold information
Critically evaluates the demands of the other side
Applies (and resists) pressure
Exaggerates the value of own concessions / Minimizes value of other’s concessions
Takes a judicial approach
As is obvious, some of the cooperative strategies that create value directly oppose the competitive strategies used to claim value. As Fischer, Ury & Patton point out, “negotiators are not friends”; confrontation is sometimes unavoidable. The best deals are reached when both processes are allowed to operate. Only the most experienced of negotiators seem equally at ease with both phases. They accept that both processes are legitimate and necessary steps in getting the best results and understand that it is vital to “separate the invention process from the decision making process”.
Language that successful negotiators use
More negotiations language is available for you in my eBook: “The Big eBook of Negotiations Language”. Below are a few examples of language that you can use in each of the two stages that I discussed in this post.
Create value
Can we leave the costs to one side for a moment and just try to picture an ideal result?
Before we go into details, can we establish the kind of result we are both looking for?
We have discussed one option in some detail. What other options might be available?
Claim value
We seem to have an agreement in principle; it is probably time to ask who is responsible for what?
I think we agree on the broad picture, but who is going to pay for what?
We now have a concept that covers both of our interests; let’s get practical.
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The walk from no to yes
William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.
Change management is an integral, complex and necessary part of business. Companies most likely to be successful in making changes are the ones that see change as a constant opportunity to evolve. But the word ‘change’ means and implies a lot of things to the people involved: uncertainty, different, unknown, uncomfortable, etc. The truth is that (most) people don’t like change. We are, after all, creatures of habit. Sure, we have the ability to change and adapt to new situations – we wouldn’t have come so far as a species without change – but our brains naturally resist.
“Change has a bad reputation in our society. But it isn’t all bad – not by any means. In fact, change is necessary in life – to keep us moving … to keep us growing … to keep us interested … Imagine life without change. It would be static … boring … dull.”
The Satir Change Model is a five-stage model (see below) that describes the effects each stage of the change has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology. It was developed by Virginia Satir. Although the model was initially developed for families, it is equally relevant for organisations.
Stage 1: Late Status Quo
We are at a familiar place. Our performance pattern is consistent. We’re comfortable here because we know know what to expect, how to react, and how to behave.
Stage 2: Resistance
A foreign element threatens the stability of our familiar structures. We’re not sure that this is where we want to be. Most of us resist it by denying its validity, avoiding the issue, or placing blame.
Stage 3: Chaos
We have entered the unknown. Our former actions and knowledge are no longer valid/effective. We don’t want to be here. Losing the Late Status Quo triggers our anxiousness and vulnerability. We have no idea what to expect, how to react, or how to behave.
Stage 4: Integration
Through a transforming idea, we’ve discovered how the foreign element can benefit us. We’re excited. With practice, our performance has improved rapidly. We’ve made new relationships and learned new behaviours.
Stage 5: New Status Quo
Our performance has stabilized at a higher level than in the Late Status Quo. We feel safe and excited. We encourage each other. We don’t feel threatened by foreign elements any more.
“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”
James Belasco and Ralph Stayer
Psychologist and author Daniel Kahneman writes in his book “Thinking, fast and slow” that most of us would rather be wrong than uncertain. Just consider, how many individual uncertainties could arise in any of the above stages for each of the people involved? Right, and that’s only for one change.
Communicating change
Communicating change successfully doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll achieve change successfully, because ultimately, the organizational capacity for change relies heavily on the individual’s capacity for change. In other words, some people will reach the New Status Quo much faster than others, others not at all. Some will have few problems, others a lot. But there’s no doubt about it, you need a communication plan/strategy to accompany the change.
A ‘one size fits all’ approach is not recommended because it’s quite possible that not everyone needs to know the same things about the change. Managers need to get buy-in from different stakeholders, engineers need to know this, procurement needs to know that. When communicating change, we have the opportunity to amplify certain messages. On top of that, a well thought through communication plan will enable people to better deal with the emotions of each of the 5 stages – It can invoke positive emotions/reactions and gives you the chance to help employees imagine a post-change future.
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
Randy Pennington, author of “Make change work” says that there are 5 questions that employees are most interested in getting answers to when faced with change.
From what to what?
Explain the specifics of the change. What will be different in how we must think, act, and perform?
What does this change mean for what I do and how I operate?
A personal extension of the first question. Everyone involved in the change will ask themselves: What’s the impact of the change for me?
Will this make a difference?
How will the change help the business or the team, or is this change for compliance reasons?
How will success be measured?
How will you know that there has been a return on our effort and investment?
What is the support level for this change?
Is this change a mandate or do you truly believe in this change?
Repeat and reinforce
Use multiple message formats and repeat important concepts to drive and reinforce the change. At the beginning of the change process, it’s necessary to communicate to answer initial fears and concerns. As the change advances, people will have new questions, and new understandings of the intermediate and final stages will be developed. Throughout the stages of change, people have to be kept up-to-date with actual and future states, and answers given to their questions.
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“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the “end of history illusion,” where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we’ll be for the rest of time. Hint: that’s not the case.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fotolia_103886461_M.jpg11711622Brenda Vansetershttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngBrenda Vanseters2016-11-03 12:43:122018-06-06 12:29:21Dealing with change
Unproductive meetings are a waste of everyone’s time. There’s a lot of research on exactly how effective meetings really are – and regardless of country or industry it all leads to the same miserable conclusion. In a nutshell: There’s room for improvement. This might be a well-known fact by now, but it’s worth repeating: 47% of people consider too many meetings the biggest waste of time. According to Meeting King, an estimated $37 billion is lost per year due to unnecessary meetings. In a different post on this blog, my colleague asked “do you really need this meeting?” and his eBook makes further points on making your meetings effective.
Following my colleague’s input on effective meetings, once you’ve decided that your meeting is necessary to have, you want to have the most productive meeting possible, whether or not it is a one-off or a weekly meeting. Meetings are a part of business and something we all have to deal with. Face-to-face is after all the best way to communicate. But as we all know from experience, meeting every week to discuss the same agenda items (can) eventually become tedious and quite boring. And when this happens the commitment, contribution and output will inevitably suffer.
“In the past, I have found myself easily distracted in routine weekly meetings due to various factors. In one situation my department leader set a weekly meeting agenda, which seemed like a good idea at the time. An agenda means people know what’s coming and what’s expected. But after a while, we started to feel like we were we in a time loop, discussing the same topics in the same order, with the same words. We stopped paying attention.”
George Barse
Breathe some fresh air into the meeting
Go outside for a literal breath of fresh air. If that isn’t possible, change the view of the meeting room, or even where people sit. Meet over lunch every once in a while. Just because the agenda is mostly the same – the environment doesn’t have to be.
Keep the airflow (and the people) moving
You don’t have to discuss every agenda topic the same way every time. You can use use short breakout meetings, insert a Q&A, videos, questionnaires, or basically, whatever it is that keeps your meeting on track and the participants engaged. Instead of sitting and discussing around the table, hang your questions about each topic (What’s the status of project XYZ? Have you got an idea about how to deal with the delay in engineering? Who’s got capacity to work on…?) on the wall (on flip chart paper) and let the people write their answers. Meeting finished :-).
Use an ‘air-freshener’
A meeting break where everyone is checking their phone or emails is not a break. Neither is making notes about the meeting, or talking with the person next to you about what you were just talking about while you wait for the others to return. Leave the room, that’s an order. Don’t take a break, take a walk. Energize.
That’s all great, but…
Ultimately, your meetings will be most effective when they are structured. With an agenda, a set of ground rules, and/or ‘rules of engagement’ and/or allotted timeslots to avoid lengthy discussions. It is the people that make the meeting effective, obviously. The final part of this post is dedicated to your personal contribution.
Make time to prepare
Everybody should prepare. If they can’t/haven’t, move the topic to next time. Which leads to the next point.
Keep your contribution relevant
Don’t contribute unless you have something of relevance to say. There’s a time and a place for saying exactly what’s on your mind, for rambling, or for just ‘saying something’. Meetings are not the place.
Send/read the minutes before it’s too late
The minutes are a useful track record but they often sit in the folder of unread messages until shortly before the next meeting. Logically, the minutes are part of the preparation, but not always. You should first read the minutes when the discussion is fresh in your mind, not a week later. Give yourself a chance after the meeting to write down notes, questions and ideas. Or, they’ll make you remember to have a follow-up conversation with a colleague about what he said. Do it now, instead of next week in the meeting.
For a lot of us it’s a fact of life: you always think of the things you should have said after the conversation finishes or the moment passes. Why is it that when you need something brilliant to come out of your mouth, it doesn’t come out, or it comes out wrong? The name ‘elevator pitch’ is based on the ideathat it should be possible to deliver a summary of your conversation in the time span of an elevator ride (thirty seconds to two minutes). If two minutes are all you have, what will you say?
“A while ago I shared an elevator with a Board member of a major multinational. He had no idea who I was. But I knew exactly who he was and unfortunately, it was going to stay that way. Apart from a “Good morning” and a “Goodbye” we rode the elevator in silence. I literally had my moment to speak and I did nothing with it. Of course, afterwards I thought of about a million brilliant things I could have said, but didn’t. I fluffed it.”
The participant from the above quote didn’t think to prepare for such a moment. Perhaps she thought she would just “wing it” if the moment ever arrived. But it requires real forethought and planning to get your message across concisely and engagingly, especially when you only have two minutes to do it.
“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”
Mark Twain
How to get key points across in two minutes
A great elevator pitch has one aim. To appeal to someone you want something from somewhere in the future. When the doors open you want to be walking away with some kind of commitment. At the very least, you’re hoping for a business card. So, absolutely everything you’re going to say has to generate interest – there’s no space for fluff and waffle. That can be pretty tough, and that’s why it’s all about the preparation and thorough, personalized practice with tough and challenging sparring partners.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you prepare your elevator pitch, starting with the GOALS model that we use in our training sessions:
Goal – Know what your goal is from the outset
Opening – How will you open your elevator pitch and make it topical and relevant?
Attention – How will you keep their interest in what you’re saying?
Language – Don’t be tempted into using jargon and complex words.
Steps – What are the next steps?
An elevator pitch is (should be) a two-way conversation
Talking for a minute without interruption is a long time, have you tried it, or listen to someone do it? Say your elevator ride takes as much as two minutes. In that time you’re building rapport, you’re allowing the other person to answer and ask you a question or two, etc. It’s not a monologue. Brian Walters calls it verbal ping-pong. So in fact, you might only have the chance to say three or so “meaningful” things. Having an (important) elevator conversation with someone you don’t really know can go one of many ways in between going terribly wrong and going absolutely great.
Compare yourself/the situation to someone/something recognizable or a cross between things.
Create surprise.
Listen.
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Everybody understands that performance feedback should be constructive, focused and to the point. Effective feedback can resolve conflicts, overcome problems and improve individual and team morale. It doesn’t really need mentioning that ineffective feedback often accomplishes the opposite. Or that if you are skilled at giving effective feedback, your team will be more motivated, which leads to better performance.
“While feedback should focus on behaviour, performance feedback is still a personal conversation between people about people. Emotions always play a part in interpersonal communication. Effective feedback is as much about bringing the right message(s) across as it is about how your message is interpreted.”
Scott Levey
Some feedback facts*
98% of employees will fail to be engaged when managers give little or no feedback
69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized
78% of employees said being recognized motivates them in their job
No matter how skilled the feedback giver is, if the receiver isn’t interested in hearing or taking the feedback, nothing will get through. The more difficult the feedback, the more the giver needs to consider the the emotional impact of the feedback. Giving positive feedback is easy.
What is and isn’t feedback?
In an interpersonal environment, feedback is communication about a person’s performance and how their efforts contribute to reaching goals. Feedback is not criticism. Criticism is evaluative; feedback is descriptive. Effective feedback is goal-referenced and tangible, actionable, personalized, timely, ongoing and consistent. As a leader, giving feedback is a task you perform again and again, to let people know where they are and where to go next in terms of individual, team, and company goals.
Giving feedback is a touchy thing. Think back over feedback you have received in the past. Chances are you’ve been given feedback that helped you develop. And, unfortunately, chances are somewhere in your career you’ve been given feedback that made you feel defensive, resistant or unmotivated. By putting yourself back in your old shoes, and thinking about how they actually gave you the feedback, you can improve your own feedback skills.
Common mistakes people make when giving feedback
Avoiding giving feedback
Focusing on the person and not the performance
Giving feedback on what is going wrong, and never on what is going right
Coming across as judgmental
Doing all the talking, and none of the listening
Giving the feedback without any context
Making generalized, vague statements
Avoiding responsibility for what they are saying by referring to others
Getting defensive if they don’t understand you, or you don’t understand them
“We can’t let our own success, education and advancement ride on whether the person giving us feedback happens to be talented or caring. We have to learn to learn from everyone around us, including people who are lousy at giving feedback, or who don’t have the time to do it thoughtfully. Our individual success depends on it, and so does the collective success of the organization.“
The DESC model
In our skills-based Leadership training, we use the simple 4-step model DESC for structuring feedback. Participants in our “Practical Toolbox for Managers” seminars often highlight DESC as one of the most valuable tools they take away. This model is designed to help you to get your message clear and it can even take the stress out of the feedback conversation for those of us that weren’t born with effective feedback-giving skills.
DESCRIPTION
Give an objective and concrete description of what you have observed using “I” statements.
EFFECT
Explain the effect or impact it had on your business, the team or its members. If the effect was an emotion, name it. Your body language and tone of voice will already be showing your elation or frustration – putting them out in the open can help you move things forward.
SOLUTION
Build the solution through a directive (“What I would like you to do next time is …”) or a participative approach (“What do you think we can do to avoid this next time?”).
CONCLUSION
Build a “contract of commitment”. Check your understanding of what has been agreed, and get commitment for the future.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/0011-e1476260677584.jpg8001200Scott Leveyhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngScott Levey2016-10-12 13:20:052020-07-01 13:57:58Giving feedback using the DESC model
Have you ever tried teaching a child a new skill? Take learning to swim as an example. You could give a detailed description of the process and then expect them to remember and follow your instructions, or you could let them get on with it, learn in their own way. Learning in their own way will certainly result in some frustrations, but through this experience of trial and error they are more likely to remember for themselves the best way to get to the result.
We think that experiencing real situations and learning from what you experience is key to all learning. And so, clearly, do a lot of big thinkers before us. Benjamin Franklin said “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. Long before him, Aristotle said “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”.
James Culver
What is experiential training?
Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience – and more specifically the process of “learning through reflecting on what you’re doing / just did”. It’s been around for a very long time.
Why is experiential training so powerful in management and soft skills solutions?
The gentlemen I mentioned above were onto something. These observations still ring true today, especially when we want people to learn behaviors to apply in the workplace. Learning by doing is great for children, but as adults in the workplace we can really add the additional aspect of reflecting on how our behaviors affect outcomes. This is the experiential advantage.
How can experiential training help you retain information and embed behaviors?
Dr. Igor Kokcharov’s did some research into this and came up with this pretty useful pyramid. If you take a look at it, you can see how learning by doing with coach led reflection and practice gives participants the best chance to retain necessary information.
Who’s using the experiential training approach?
A lot of adult learning approaches in a broad range of fields from corporate to military, and from emergency services to care work, make use of this experiential advantage. Business schools use the approach with simulation exercises, and critical incident gaming can be found in government agencies and board rooms alike. At Target Training, our experience is that experiential training can do much more. It can increase awareness of behaviors, particularly those with negative consequences. It else has the power to challenge current approaches in a developmental, non-judgmental way. If experiential training is established, we can focus on the individual’s needs and deliver tangible change. This fits perfectly when developing soft and management skills.
What does experiential training look like in the training environment?
Put very, very simply, experiential training = do + debrief + do it again. You might be thinking that sounds pretty boring – why go to training to do the same thing a couple of times over? Think about the result you’re looking for though. You’re going to training not to learn a bunch of theory, but to be able to go back to your workplace and do something differently. Experiential training is all about working in the real world. Whether in a well-designed activity or on-the job, you behave the way you do. After observing you in action, the trainer/coach leads you through a consequence-based conversation, talking you through the behaviors he or she observed. They also link what they have seen with alternatives to help improve the outcome. You develop new skills and can then apply them to a new experience. You learn to recognize “triggering events” in your work environment and can choose to use the new behavior in training – and beyond.
How does it work?
Here are some of the elements which are key to successful experiential training:
Training environment
By creating a positive, encouraging environment in the training room. This help you to act as you normally do and feel comfortable with trying out new skills. The more you can share the behavior-consequence based feedback the trainer gives you, the easier it will be to identify and close any behavior gaps.
Debriefing
The debriefing stage is key. New information necessary to support new behaviors is introduced here.
Varied interaction and activities
Challenging, timed group and pair work problem solving activities to raise the stress level so participants communicate as themselves.
What can I expect from my trainer?
The trainer’s role is not to present you with lots of information. They act more as a coach and are responsible for creating a developmental, experiment-friendly environment in the training room.
What do I need to do to make experiential training a success?
Be open. To be effective, experiential soft skills training requires you to fully participate in experiences, as well as being willing to reflect and identify behavior gaps with others. None of us would feel comfortable about learning to swim through guided discussion or a PowerPoint presentation. Experiential soft skills training puts you in the deep water of communication situations. This allows you to see a need for new behaviors that will lead to better consequences on the job. You practice these behaviors through experiences in a safe, leaner-centered environment. And will then feel ready to dive back into your working environment to try out these new behaviors.
https://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Fotolia_14048519_M.jpg11431662James Culverhttps://www.targettraining.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/logoWP.pngJames Culver2016-10-05 12:45:532018-06-06 12:29:228 questions about experiential training answered
Train the trainer: Interactive presentations
/in Methods & Tools, Soft Skills /by Guest AuthorInternal training is often done via presentations and companies often use an internal “expert” to deliver training to other members of staff. Slide after slide appears on the screen and by the end, there’s a handout with the most important points and perhaps a summary. The upside of this type of training is that the information is first hand from the expert. One of the downsides is that the trainer often doesn’t have experience in training. He/she doesn’t understand how to make learning stick, or that only 10% of learning happens through structured training. (Read more about the 70-20-10 model.) Here are a few ideas to make your presentation based training interactive.
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Who are you and why are you here?
A trainer always explains the objectives of the training session. The objectives need to be relevant to the audience – you need buy-in for learning to take place. Everything that happens in the training should link back to the objective. The participants have objectives too – but they might be different to yours and you need to align the two sets. This is often done through a warmer activity – who are you and why are you here? A warmer activity can be done as a group, in small groups or in pairs. At the end of the activity, everyone has shared their personal objectives (ideally they are visible for everyone to read). The trainer then paraphrases the personal objectives and links it in to the objectives of the session. If there are objectives that can’t be aligned, the trainer points them out: “Sorry, we won’t be covering that in detail today”, or “There might be time to do that at the end of the session.”
Get people up and moving
If participants don’t know each other very well, a few icebreakers are necessary. A game called ‘find someone who’ can be adapted easily to any audience and topic. Beyond that, you can bring discussion cards, or tasks that participants have to do between slides. Especially when people’s interests are fading, stop the presentation and get them up and moving around the room. Ask them to brainstorm in groups, to summarize in pairs, to troubleshoot, or ask them to pick a position in the room based on how strongly they feel about a company/work-related statement. Ask them to present some of the key learning points of the presentation back to you half-way through and use it as an opportunity to align participant knowledge.
Involve your audience
Closely related to the above, even when the training material is dry, full of facts and technical jargon, your training can be interactive. You can engage participants in almost a thousand different ways. Ask them for their experience or opinions, ask them to read out the information on the slides, or prepare a quiz or a competition (with a token prize). Open a debate, do a shout out round of questions or get them to walkabout the room to examine information on the topic at different stations. (Here are 25 ideas on making training active.)
Ask for commitment
When the participants leave the training room, what are they expected to do? They learned something but how will they transfer that to their job – that’s a good question to prepare yourself for. Before the training session finishes, take enough time to ask participants about their ideas, and also to give advice on making the learning stick. You may also consider a Personal Learning Plan.
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Here are just a few posts for you to explore if you want to learn more on this topic. We also offer a range of Train the Trainer and Workshop Facilitation seminars.
Quick tips on editing your own work
/2 Comments/in Business English, Hybrid solutions, Soft Skills /by Martin WheelerIn an ideal situation, one of your colleagues, an internal editor, or proofreader (or InCorporate Trainer) will help you perfect your written masterpiece before you unleash it onto the world. But let’s say you’re left to edit your own work and said work is a lengthy document, or one with sensitive information in places. For one reason or another, your document needs to a final check. I don’t mean a spellcheck. But definitely do one of those as well.
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Edit your work after you’ve finished writing
Writing and editing belong to two separate phases of the writing process. When the editing work begins, you are no longer the author. An editor is not emotionally attached to the words. He/she will mercilessly cut out the most poetic of phrases and well thought out sentences if they interfere with the readability (for example).
More editing tips behind this link. Or if you’re editing an English document, here’s a good post with examples of wimpy words and feeble phrases, and much more.
Take a break first
If you begin the editing process immediately after you finish writing, it can be difficult to catch errors, especially the very small ones. Have a coffee, take a walk around the block or, better yet, leave your writing for a day or two and then come back to it with a fresh perspective.
Edit your work in a different format
You might be surprised how helpful it can be to transfer your work to another format for proofreading. Some possible ideas: print your work on paper, view it on your tablet, project it on the wall or temporarily change the font of your entire document.
Start big
Rather than worrying about spelling, commas and full stops at the beginning of editing, start with a broad overview. Do you need to add or cut a section? Did you forget to include important information? After reading your work, did you realize that you need to re-write something? If yes, do it at this first stage of your edit. Otherwise, you might end up proofreading material that you cut later. Does your document still need:
Slice and dice
When you’re satisfied with the format and overall structure of your document, it still needs further fine-tuning. This is the time to reduce the number of words in your document and search for shorter, more concise ways to communicate what your audience needs to know. Look out for:
Read your document aloud
You could say “the fact of the matter is that editing is essential”, or you could say “editing is essential”. Readers have little patience for verbose writing. In addition to helping you spot errors with spelling and pronunciation, reading aloud will help you get a feel for the rhythm and tone of your document. Do you get tongue-tied trying to read one sentence? Re-write it so it flows more smoothly. Look out for:
Tell yourself, “It’s finished.”
Leonardo Da Vinci said that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned. Even if you don’t consider your document a work of art, you will probably never be 100% satisfied. However, after you’ve edited your document as much as possible, call it a day and congratulate yourself on a job well done.
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We offer a variety of writing skills seminars:
Stepping into management: the learning and development journey
/in Methods & Tools, Soft Skills /by Tony NormanOne of the drawbacks of being a trainer is that now and again you fail to realise that what is obvious for you is new to others. In a recent young managers program the “eureka” moment came when, following a young manager’s “Maybe I’m not cut out for this job” statement, I shared the “Conscious Competence model”. The model, developed by Noel Burch, has been around since the 1970s – and it’s a great way to prepare for and reflect on your development as a manager (or development in any other role). I assumed my participants knew the model already but they had never heard of it. This is a quick recap.
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Stage 1 – Unconscious Incompetence
Ignorance is bliss, and you don’t even realize that you are performing poorly. As a new, young manager perhaps you don’t even realize you are making elementary mistakes. Instead of delegating you are dumping tasks on people and walk away convinced you are empowering them to find their own solutions. Perhaps your tasking is incomplete, or maybe you don’t have clear goals because you didn’t consider this your role. Are you delaying giving feedback because you don’t want to upset anybody and it will sort itself out anyway – or perhaps the way you give feedback is so clumsy you demotivate somebody. The list goes on and on. You assume you know what y0u’re doing – it’s more or less the same as before but with the better desk and more benefits. You’re not aware that you don’t have the necessary skill. Perhaps you don’t even realize that the skill is relevant. In the first stage, your confidence exceeds your management skills. Before you can move to the next step you need to know and accept that certain skills are relevant to the role of manager, and that mastering this skill will make you more effective.
Stage 2 – Conscious Incompetence
Someone helped you understand that you need to develop a new skill. Or, you have been sent on a management training programme and your eyes have been opened. Or perhaps confronted by poor results you’ve actually taken a step back and reflected on what’s been going on and the role you’ve played. You are aware of your lack of skills. You are consciously incompetent. This is a difficult phase as you are now aware of your weaknesses, or in today’s insipid jargon your “developmental areas”.
Nobody is born a manager, although some people may well have innate skills, making the transition to manager easier. Learning by feedback, learning by suffering, learning by doing and learning by failing – these things brought you to the second stage. Training can play a role as can learning from your peers and exposing yourself to opportunities to learn. By staying positive and embracing the small successes your confidence in your own management abilities grows.
Stage 3 – Conscious Competence
At this stage you have learnt some reliable management techniques and processes, but they have to be consciously implemented. It’s a bit like painting by numbers. You know how to facilitate a meeting well, but you still want to take time to reflect on the steps beforehand. You can make a great presentation and get your message across … and you know what you need to do in advance to get the success you need. You can provide feedback in an appropriate manner – but not without thinking it through beforehand. At this stage, your ability to be flexible and proactive in unexpected situations is limited – but you can do it. The task-oriented aspects of managing are becoming fine-tuned but it is still learning by doing, trial and error, or copying managerial role models. You are testing your limits.
Stage 4 – Unconscious Competence
Quite simply you have become what you wanted to be – a skilled manager. The task and relationship aspects of managing are now “part of you”. You know how to achieve the task, develop individuals and build a team – and can do it without too much thinking. Non-routine situations are challenging, yet do not faze you. You are like Beckenbauer in football, or Federer in tennis. You always appear to have enough time and space to make good decisions. But even masters can lose matches and need to learn and practise.
To summarize
The model can be universally applied as a model for learning. It suggests that you are initially unaware of how little you know – you simply don’t know what you don’t know. As you recognize your incompetence, you acquire a skill consciously, then learn to use that skill. Over time, the skill becomes a part of you. You can utilize it consciously thought through. When that happens you have acquired unconscious competence.
And finally you can manage your emotion as you develop. You are going through a well-known learning process. Nobody is born a manager!
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Read more about the model (this article suggests a fifth stage and has a matrix to clarify the four stages). And finally, a few blog posts you might be interested in:
Needs analysis questions for departments in need (of training)
/in Methods & Tools /by Guest Author‘Word your requirements precisely and ensure that you cover all categories of human-related requirements.’ That is one of the underlying principles of needs analysis. A needs analysis helps define what any system should look like, before it gets to the design stage. In other words, if you don’t know what you need, you might end up getting the wrong thing.
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How to get the right thing
If you are ever in the situation of having to find “some training” for your team, department or company, start with a simple training needs analysis, which won’t take very long. It is important that you can clearly outline who should receive training and why. It means you will know what to ask for when you are ready to talk to a potential provider. A training provider who knows what they’re doing will have lot of experience with training program design and they will design the system for you/with you. The more insight you can give from the very start, the more effectively your training program (your system) can be designed and implemented.
People commonly start by thinking about the sort of training they want. Effective training must have realistic objectives for everyone involved. If you are familiar with our blog and online publications, you’ll have come across this sentence “Start with the end in mind.” Here are some questions to get you started:
A good training provider should be able to help you to define the behaviours that support your objectives. They should be able to help you to decide what skills, knowledge and attitudes affect these behaviours. And, finally, they can suggest alternative ways for delivering training which will ensure that your people learn and can transfer the training to the workplace.
Finding the right trainer
There is a huge supply of trainers and training providers on the market. Finding the right trainer is not necessarily easy, even though it can be. It helps to clarify at this stage what type of trainer you’re looking for, because it will allow you to exclude a large section of what is on offer. Here are some things to consider:
Determining investment
There are many factors and steps involved in getting to a well-designed, effective system. Consider for example how workload, deadlines, holidays and illness could affect the success of the training.
What determines success?
And leading from that, how will you measure success? If it’s enough that people put a tick under the smiley face on the feedback form after the training, that’s fine. But “happy sheets”, as we call them, measure only the reaction to training, not the actual results. Tests measure knowledge, is that what you want? That’s fine too. Whatever you’re looking for when you define success, these questions will be useful:
Again, a good training provider will be able to support you with figuring out the details of measuring the training and overall success. A great training provider will already have systems in place and will be able to provide detailed reports.
The next step
Now you can start thinking in more detail about the design and share the requirements for your system with an expert. The systematics of that will all be explained in a future post.
After the meeting ends – more practical ideas from great chair persons and facilitators we’ve worked with
/in Soft Skills /by Scott LeveyIn last week’s post What to do before the meeting begins – 4 added-value ideas from great chair persons and facilitators we’ve worked with we shared 4 great techniques we’ve picked up from experienced chairpersons and facilitators during meeting facilitation seminars. This post keeps sharing the sharing. As trainers, we get to listen to and learn from our clients – and then you get to benefit from not only our knowledge and experience, but their’ s too! So here are 5 easy-to-implement ideas to make you an even better chair or facilitator AND make your meetings that much more effective.
Making the time to debrief the process
Taking the time after the meeting to talk about how the meeting went means you can continually improve not just your skills, but the effectiveness and efficiency of your meetings too. Debriefing is all about identifying behaviours to maintain and things to do differently during the following meetings – and top performing teams take the time to reflect. You could integrate it into your agenda or agree upon reflection intervals. My own experience is that immediacy is better. When asked to think about the last e.g. 6 meetings, people too often tend to either focus on the last 1 or 2 events, or speak in broad and vague generalizations that are more difficult to act upon.
Sending out minutes – each time, every time, always, no excuses, better late than never
Whether they be formal or informal, an executive summary or agenda-based, action-oriented minutes or verbatim, it’s a good idea to write them and send them out! Great chair persons understand and commit to always having minutes. They don’t approach them with a “we have proof” mentality – but rather with a “building” and “commitment” mentality. And they also give people an opportunity to review and add to the minutes. But they have them.
Planning in “I should have said” time
People are wonderfully different – and this means that not everyone is going to contribute equally in your meetings. It could simply be shyness, or perhaps an issue of interpersonal dynamics or politics. More often than not it could be that an idea or opinion wasn’t fully formed and the person chose to think it through before speaking (especially if they have what the MBTI refers to as an “Introvert” preference). It’s too easy (and destructive) to take a “If you don’t say it in the meeting you lost your chance”. Plan time after the meeting is over so participants who need time to reflect can have a chance to share their insights. This also helps to build trust.
Taking the time for tête-à-têtes
Connected to the above, planning in time after the meeting for a tête-à-tête (literally a head to head discussion) also gives you an opportunity to
… plus a hundred other things which are best done on a one-to-one basis. It’s not politicking – it’s about building authentic relationships.
Planning in check-ins to review commitments and accountability
If people have had the chance to share their opinions and ideas and robustly discuss options in your meting then you can expect real commitment to the agreed action. And if people have committed then you can hold them accountable. Great chair persons explicitly review the commitments at the end of the meeting AND they follow up later on. When they follow up they have an “inquisitive” and “supportive” approach. They understand that things may have changed since the meeting, that priorities may have shifted and that resources may have been over-estimated or diverted. But they follow up.
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Plenty more meetings where that came from… And for even more information on how to make your meetings and your performance during meetings more successful, please contact us. We love to talk!
Before the meeting begins – 4 added-value ideas from great chair persons and facilitators we’ve worked with
/in Soft Skills /by Scott LeveyOne of the best things about being a trainer is that you get to meet a lot of people from diverse backgrounds. As trainers we get to listen to and learn from our clients – and we then get to share ideas, experiences and best practices with other clients. Below are some of the great ideas that top chairpersons and facilitators have identified over the last years during meeting facilitation seminars.
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Do you know who needs to be in the meeting and what they’ll be bringing to the table?
Before the meeting starts make a list of the decision makers, subject matter experts and opinion leaders. Then take a few minutes to isolate and identify their interests in the outcome of the meeting. Why? By doing this you’ll…
Do you invest time before the meeting to talk with the participants?
This idea is too often quickly mislabelled as “politics”, but all of the truly impressive chairpersons I’ve been lucky enough to work with have stood by the idea. Great chairpersons and facilitators make the time to talk with individuals who will participate in the meeting about the meeting before the meeting begins. They do this to uncover interests, hear concerns and objections, and win support. They are then better able to connect interests, help others save face and steer discussions down constructive avenues.
I specifically remember a young project manager passionately convincing her fellow IT engineers of the merits of this behaviour and that “talking about the meeting before the meeting makes the meeting work -and that’s why we always finish our meetings earlier than planned!”
Do you build your own ground rules – and review them at the start of every meeting?
Many organizations have established “meeting ground rules”. These may be unspoken, hidden away on the Intranet or printed on colourful posters and put in the meeting rooms. The advice is often solid and sensible.
But all the best chairpersons I’ve worked with have consistently supported the idea that ground rules work best when the team itself decides on their own ground rules and define acceptable meeting behaviour (for example phones on silent, poll opinions, always have an agenda, etc…). This is especially important when working in virtual teams. When challenged by their peers that this was a waste of time answers included …
Top chair persons and facilitators also tend to review them very quickly at the start of every meeting. One extroverted investment fund manager I worked with sang them and, to keep things fresh, changed the tune at least every quarter. You won’t be surprised to hear that his peers had mixed reactions to this idea (“It is not a serious idea Fabio, we are a bank!”) – but apparently his team loved it, and meeting attendance was high.
Are you building trust through building relationships and enabling “rough discussions”?
Great chairpersons and facilitators take the time before the meeting to get to know team members personally – and understand the dynamics between the participants. This helps the chairperson;
But more importantly, as one German manager said “Rough discussions are important so we don’t keep having the same discussions again and again”. This ties in with Patrick Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions of a team idea that great chairpersons believe the more they know about the participants, the better they can facilitate open discussions. They’ll know when to push and when to stop, when to mine conflict in the meeting (force buried disagreements to light in order to work through them) and when to deal with issues in smaller groups. Building trust is a long-term investment, but as many meetings are chaired by the teams manager anyway it is an investment that pays off.
10 easy steps you can take to kick-start your learning in 2017
/in Methods & Tools /by Guest AuthorThe idea of new year resolutions isn’t a modern invention. The Babylonians and Romans both made promises to their gods at the start of a new year. Whether or not you are making resolutions, the start of a new year does bring new opportunities for you to refocus on learning new skills and building knowledge. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but here are 10 proven and practical steps you can take to help get your learning off on the right track in 2017. And here’s the good news …. you don’t need to necessarily do them all! If you try just a couple, you’ll see the benefits by the end of the year.


1. Set realistic goals
Take half an hour to think about what you really want to learn, develop, improve, and why. Now write those goals down so you have something to refer back to reflect on. Whether it be improving your vocabulary in a foreign language, overcoming presentation stress or learning to play the drums: SMART GOALS HELP!
2. Find options for achieving these goals
If you want to improve your writing skills, how are you going to do that? Use an app, attend a course? Do your research and find options that are going to work for you – and try to get the ball rolling sooner than later. It’ll be summer before you know it.
3. Get social
Talk to people about their goals and what they’re doing to get there. How are they learning? And what can you learn from them? And share your goals too.
4. Eat small bites
Micro-learning is one of the learning & development trends for 2017. The great thing about this is that it acknowledges the time issue we all have. Training can now happen in bite-sized chunks that literally take no more than 5 minutes at a time – that means you can learn something very quickly without having to make major changes to your routines and schedules. There are micro-learning solutions for most areas, including business English.
5. Get organized
If you’re learning anything new, it helps to organize yourself. That could be organizing your notes, your time, and setting priorities. Take the time to consider what works for you.
6. Experiment
According to the 70-20-10 learning model 10% of learning happens in formal training situations, 20% happens through social interaction, and 70% happens on-the-job. On-the-job means in practical, real situations. So, if you’re learning something, you need to experiment in real situations. Look for opportunities to do this.
7. Learn from your mistakes
If you experiment, you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t worry about that, it’s part of the learning process. Just make sure you actually take the time to reflect on what went wrong and what needs to happen differently the next time round. And then do it differently.
8. Enjoy yourself
The best learning happens when it’s so much fun, you don’t even realize you’re learning. What do you enjoy doing in your free time? Choose learning options that fit in with how you would normally be spending your time. That could be watching a movie, listening to a podcast, reading a book, or playing a game on your tablet.
9. Notice your progress
If you write down your goals, and review them regularly, you’ll see the progress you’re making. It also helps if you can begin to notice the small events that show that learning is happening.
10. Celebrate your results
And when you notice those small events, celebrate and reward yourself. When we ask participants to build transfer plans at the end of a seminar we ask a number of questions, “What? How? By when? Who else needs to be involved? What does success look like?” AND “How will you reward yourself?”. It could be as simple as holding off on buying a new book or as grand as buying concert tickets and taking your daughter.
Overcoming the 4 core obstacles that prevent intentions turning into action
Whether they be new year resolutions or not, our plans and intentions often fail to materialize due to a lack of specificity, vision, accountability, and discipline. To overcome these 4 obstacles …
Good luck and have fun learning!
The business of apologizing
/in Business English, Soft Skills /by Brenda VansetersDuring my time working for a global IT helpdesk, I received more than fifty calls on an average day. We were the first point of contact for the client’s 110.000+ employees, who called us with questions about just about anything to do with IT. Our customers were experts in their field. Our SLAs (Service Level Agreements) were demanding – as customer service experts, we were expected to have an average CSAT score of 4.7 out of 5. It’s not a success story.
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Not for lack of trying, to be clear. Everyone was happy to help, when the customers were friendly, or the problems easy to fix. Some of us, including me, didn’t mind the more challenging customers or problems. A lot of our customers phoned us in moments of frustration, with good reason. They were in the middle of something “important” and now the software wasn’t working, or the computer, or the printer, or whatever. Schedules were interrupted, money was being lost, bad impressions were being made on their clients, and so on. As customer service experts, we understood the three dimensions of service – there’s always something going on in the background. So whatever frustrations came at us, we knew that they weren’t personal.
At the same time, they didn’t help when it came to the all-important relationship building. (Who wants to do that with someone who’s always shouting down the phone?) Most of us quickly learned that frustrated people tend to want to vent and that somehow, venting is easy to a voice on the phone. We worked hard, but our CSAT was down due to a large number of factors, not all related to our ability to be nice to customers. Many other things influence customer satisfaction: long waiting times (another SLA), lack of expertise, etc. As customer service experts, we were expected to apologize, if our customers had experienced delays or when they were otherwise unhappy with something. Some of my colleagues balked at the idea. Apologize? What for, I didn’t do anything wrong. They actually refused.
I’m sorry, that’s not an apology
It’s also a difficult topic to raise in customer service training. I’ve learned that people are very passionate about the “to apologize or not to apologize” question. According to the dictionary an apology is a regretful acknowledgement of failure. Many people however, think that an apology is the same as admitting a mistake, or taking the blame. Like some of my colleagues did. Some of them couldn’t apologize, almost like the ability to apologize was missing from their DNA. Others felt they would betray their values by handing out an apology for something that wasn’t caused by their wrong-doing. The problems didn’t end there. A few of my colleagues were handing out apologies like they were the solution to everything. Back on the helpdesk, these were some of the phrases that shouldn’t have been circling:
Emotional vs. Neutral cultures
And, consider for a moment the intercultural aspect of complaints. A complaining Brit (who says “I’m afraid I have a problem” with only a slight raise in pitch) will not sound like something is wrong, not to an Italian helpdesk agent. British people guard their emotions, language is polite, whenever possible. The Seven Dimensions of Culture tells us that the United Kingdom (as is Germany) is a neutral culture. In neutral cultures, reason influences action far more than feelings. Italy is an emotional culture, where people tend to want to find ways to express their emotions.
Apologists vs. Non-apologists
It’s simply so: some people find it extremely difficult to apologize. Approximately 50% of my helpdesk colleagues were non-apologists. Asking a non-apologist to apologize for something they did ‘wrong’ is asking a lot. Asking a non-apologist to apologize for something that they had no influence over is asking too much. As soon as we talk about the business of apologizing, someone in the training room will say exactly what some of my colleagues said: Me? Apologize? What for? I didn’t do anything wrong. A non-apologist. They’re everywhere.
The elements of effective apologies
According to a recent paper, called “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies”* the best-received apologies contains all six of the following elements (the researchers found that the most important, by far, was acknowledgement of responsibility):
In memory of my colleagues
This post is dedicated to all the apologists and non-apologists that I had the pleasure of working with. And here, to finish on a high note, are the few of the apologists’ apologies that also circled (and also deserve to be immortalized on the web). (Click here for more phrases to use in an apology.)
And our customers…
Almost all our customers were friendly professionals who appreciated our dedication, even when we couldn’t come up with the solution immediately. In no way do I want to imply otherwise. Unfortunately, those customers wouldn’t have made this post very interesting.
* The paper, called “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies,” was published in the May 2016 issue of Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. (You can read the abstract online.) The academics — lead author Roy Lewicki, professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business; Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; and Beth Polin, assistant professor of management at Eastern Kentucky University — presented fictional apologies to 755 people.
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Read more about the 3 dimensions of service and how you can use them in your business communication. In the video, Dr. Fons Trompenaars answers the question “How do intercultural skills connect to communication skills?” Please contact us for more information.
3 thought-provoking business books from 2016 that you may have missed
/in Soft Skills /by Scott LeveyDeep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Cal Newport
Do you ever feel that you can’t get any work done because of the countless emails, calls, updates and web-meetings? Do you feel that you spend all day “communicating” without getting things done properly? Then this hugely topical book is for you.
In Deep Work Cal Newport argues that one of the key skills for productivity and success in such a “connected age” is the ability to focus on demanding tasks. He then brings this to life with science, stories, anecdotes and examples. Finally he then shares 4 “rules” for building habits and transforming your approach-
Check out the author’s excellent and generous blog to get a quick overview of the ideas. Then put your smart phone in a drawer, turn off the TV, pour yourself a glass of wine and make the time to read it.
Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work
Joseph L. Bardacco
In contrast to the previous “21st century” recommendation, the core themes of this book are timeless and universally applicable regardless of your situation. Every manager needs to accept and work with ambiguity. Do you support your manager when you know the decision is terrible – and your team know it too? Do you promote a driven and successful team leader who has regularly rubs people up the wrong way?
This book offers five deceptively simple questions to help you navigate through “gray areas”.
The questions are …
These 5 questions provide an ethical compass. To quote the author “When you face a gray area problem at work, you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.”
Certainly worth your time, and it also provides an excellent framework for teams, talent programs and management training programs.
How To Have A Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioural Science to Transform Your Working Life
Caroline Webb
And finally, our third suggestion is perfect for December. As the year comes to an end. many of us will be reflecting on what we’ve achieved (or not), how we’ve achieved it, and what we should be doing more or less of. In How to Have a Good Day, Caroline Webb shares findings from behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience and then shows how you can build on big “scientific” ideas to transform the quality of your everyday life. The book is divided into seven areas
And concludes with a transfer-oriented “Making it stick”.
Speaking openly, it can be a heavy read. There’s a lot of research and findings shared, BUT there’s a clear focus on your working life too. Don’t let the “self-help” moniker put you off reading this – the stories and examples avoid slipping into fantasy or “business book bullshit”.
The author’s excellent blog is also well worth your time.
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Finally, I know we’ve shared our 3, but its Christmas so check out “HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2017: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review”. The summary of “Collaborative Overload” by Cross, Rebele and Grant connects back with Cal Newport’s Deep Work and is hugely relevant to anyone working in virtual teams. Plus check out the excellent summary of Erin Meyer’s “Getting to Si, Ja, oui, Hai and Da” if you need to negotiate across cultures.
Is Blended Learning the right solution for you?
/in Methods & Tools /by Guest AuthorConsidering the implementation of a Blended Learning (BL) program brings with it a set of questions and decisions that need to be made. Blended Learning has a huge number of benefits. We know through experience that it personalizes learning, it reduces training costs, it offers flexibility- to name a few. But where there are advantages, there are usually some disadvantages too. When technology is involved, people need to know how to use it effectively, and there are set up and maintenance costs involved – to name a few. When we help our clients set up a BL program, or when we train trainers on this topic, we advise them to plan and evaluate the outcome of the BL solution. The below questions will help you get started.
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Visualize the big picture
If you think that Blended Learning is the right solution for you, great.
Find the perfect blend
There are face to face (seminars, 1-1 training, classes) and online elements (webinars, virtual classrooms, community learning) to consider. Chances are you won’t be using all of them. There’s no need. But you’re looking for the perfect blend, so you need to know which elements there are to choose from and how each of them are of benefit to you. If you don’t have access to an expert to ask, Wikipedia is always a good place to start.
Engage participants
Not everyone will jump at the chance of exploring a new online system, not even if the learning benefits are obvious. It’s possible that not everyone needs to engage with all the BL components that are available, or to different extents. If you’ve dealt with change in the workplace, you know it already, buy-in is necessary if you want your BL program to hit the ground runnning.
Train the trainer
The trainer is key to any successful training solution. You need their buy-in too. Their engagement with the training shouldn’t end when you move to the online component. And if your trainer is expected to deliver some of the online components, your success depends on their ability to utilize the tools available to them. Most trainers are keen to try out new things and will happily engage. Nevertheless, there is often a learning curve for the trainer.
Measure success
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Practical advice on implementing the 70-20-10 model
/in Methods & Tools /by Scott LeveyThe 70-20-10 model has been around for a few years already. It reflects the increasing awareness that people learn not just through “traditional” training. Research shows that we actually acquire most of the knowledge, skills and behaviours we need to perform our jobs through actual experience and working alongside others. The 70-20-10 model has its origins in the work of McCall, Eichinger and Lombardo from the Centre for Creative Leadership.
Their book, “The Career Architect” (1996), is based on empirical research and concluded that successful managers learned in 3 different ways:
Initially focussing on management and leadership development, this conclusion has since been extended to other types of professional learning and development. Today the 70-20-10 model is being used by Learning & Development departments in a wide-range of multinationals operating across a broad range of businesses. (e.g. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Maersk, L’Oréal, and Caterpillar)
Why implement the 70-20-10 model
Whether you are a learning & development specialist, a line manager, a trainer or training provider, or an employee, you should take time to reconsider and refocus your efforts. By doing this you can:
The model has an attractive simplicity, although the exact ratios are contended. As a trainer and manager of a training company I think it’s important to see the model as a philosophy and not a rigid recipe. The key is understanding and accepting that the majority of learning actually happens outside of the classroom, and that any learning and development program should take this into account and proactively support this. It doesn’t mean that traditional training is no longer relevant in the 21st century, but rather that this traditional training is just a part of learning and development strategies.
How to implement the 70-20-10 model
The 70-20-10 model has proven to positively impact organisations in enhancing learning and development programs. Based on what we’ve seen our clients do, and what we’ve tried ourselves, here are some concrete and practical ways to begin implementing the 70-20-10 model in your organization.
Raise awareness and build commitment through conversation
Everyone involved needs to be brought on board with the idea that learning and development is not just about going on a course. My own experience as a manager is that it is relatively easy to get people to see 70-20-10 as “common sense”. These conversations are essential as the 70-20-10 model depends on L&D working closely with line managers, and on line managers communicating with their staff. Managers need to be aware of the pivotal hands-on role they play in developing their staff, and employees need to appreciate the context for new decisions.
If, like Target Training, you’re a medium sized company, these conversations are reasonably manageable. If, like many of our clients, you’re part of a larger organization then start small. Find a business unit where managers are comfortable and confident wearing the “developing people” hat. Speaking with our clients, many of whom are multinationals, the general consensus has been that introducing the 70-20-10 model step by step has proved to be the most effective approach. By connecting with managers who have a genuine interest in developing their teams and the employees within them, the model organically spreads to other areas.
Enable experiential learning
This is key when we consider that 70% of learning comes from “doing”. Giving employees the opportunity to learn through challenging yet achievable experiences is one the most powerful and practical tools in a manager’s toolbox. Experiential learning can come through new roles and equally occur within existing roles. Three approaches we’ve seen clients benefit from are:
Be prepared to accept a compromise between optimal efficiency and developmental opportunities
You can expect to see specific requests upwards, where an employee is keen to get involved in a challenging project specifically to build their skills. Naturally they won’t be as effective or efficient as somebody who can already perform this role – so look at it as a learning and development initiative rather than just a question of resources.
Engage with internal and external trainers and training providers early on
Discuss how to connect the dots between on-the-job, social and formal learning. The goal is to identify critical skills and behaviours and then look at building and reinforcing these using all options.
Coaching and mentoring
These are great ways of integrating social learning into a traditional program. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, and both draw on a similar skill set I’d argue there are differences. For me mentoring is deliberately connecting an experienced person (the mentor) with a less experienced one (the mentee). The mentor could be a colleague, a manager, or the line manager. The mentor then tutors, shares experiences, models, counsels and offers feedback. Coaching does not necessarily imply directly related experience, tends to be less directive, and is aimed at improving performance in specific areas. Regardless of how you define them, both approaches have a lot to offer.
When it comes to traditional training the key is early and explicit management involvement
The single most powerful step a manager can take is to clearly explain to their staff why the training is relevant to the business and that there are clear expectations. This simple step drives motivation, participation and transfer. This transfer is crucial and I’d suggest that any traditional formal training has to integrate a transfer plan. In this simple document the employees are challenged to consider how they will actually transfer the learning into their workplace, when they’ll do this, who else needs to be involved and how will they know when they have achieved this.
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What makes a great trainer?
/in Business English, Soft Skills /by Martin WheelerWe recently had the opportunity to ask a selection of managers what they think are the qualities of a great trainer. At the end of the session, they were pretty much in agreement. Their collated answers are summarized below.
Variety and flexibility
Have a wide range of activities to use flexibly in different training situations. These activities should accommodate different learning styles. The trainer also needs to vary the training approaches and the interaction patterns in the training room. They need to know how to make sure participants get the most from the training.




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Creative and innovative
The more personalized and interactive the activities are, the more immediately transferable the results will be. A great trainer will feel the reward of delivering something that really adds value for the participants. Great trainers are passionate about what they do. They will want to experiment with new ideas and activities, each time reflecting on its success and development.
Know the audience
It’s not always possible to know every participant in advance. But a great trainer will have done the research. They’ll know about, for example, what the client does, what their challenges are, and how they expect the training will help them reach their goals.
Embrace change
With new training trends, new technologies, and the ongoing cycle of change in business, the trainer’s ability to adapt will make him/her/the training more effective. Great trainers drive change. They introduce new techniques and elements to the training – a blended learning or virtual learning element for example.
Focus on results
Great trainers work with the end in mind. Every activity should consider the goals of the participants and learning progress is measured. The trainer looks for immediate results (reaction to the session) and long-term results (behaviour on the job).
Approachable
Having a genuine, active interest in people is just one of the qualities of a great trainer. The trainer’s ability in building relationships is a major part in ensuring an effective outcome for all stakeholders.
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We offer a number of train the trainer programs in English and German. Not all the information is currently on our website. Here’s a good place to start.
Managing high performers – the Miles Davis way
/2 Comments/in Leadership, Soft Skills /by James CulverWhat does Miles Davis have to do with managing high performers in business? Good question. Miles Davis is rightfully acclaimed as an icon of jazz, but he didn’t make music alone. Throughout his career as a bandleader, Miles worked with other iconic figures of jazz to create music that stands even today as among the highest forms of the genre. John Coltrane, Herbbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, “Philly” Joe Jones, Keith Jarrett, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and many others among the giants of jazz graduated from “Miles University”. Miles Davis, time and time again, brought together some of the most talented musicians in their own right to work with him in his musical exploration. How did he do it? This article will explore the lessons of Miles Davis in the art of leading the best to be their best.


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Lesson 1: Be excellent, publicly
Miles Davis was able, on many occasions, to put together bands of some of the most talented musicians of their time throughout his career. Miles’ reputation clearly preceded him. Receiving a call from Miles was seen as having achieved a high level of musicianship. But that wasn’t the only reason so many musicians with promising solo careers agreed to support Miles. They believed they would learn something based on Miles’ excellence as a musician and band leader. Miles greatness was easy to see through his performances, compositions and recordings.
How easy is it for high performers to recognize your excellence? There is a tendency among many leaders not to “toot their own horns” about their own performance and accomplishments. While a leader may not need to sing his own praises, it is important that someone does it for him. A leader’s excellence will attract others who want to achieve the same level of competence, while increasing the leader’s credibility and ability to guide, mentor and teach.
Lesson 2: Don’t hire a trumpet player
Miles’ great combos included players with different styles and tendencies. He hired players who would complement his playing and each other’s. He didn’t need anyone who sounded like him because he had that covered.
In business, it can be difficult to avoid the temptation to hire people who mirror our backgrounds, experiences, styles and tendencies. After all those competencies served us well in our careers. It is important to remember as a leader that our success is a reflection of the past while we are hiring for the future. The pace of change doesn’t only require different technological skills it also requires new communication and leadership skills from those current leaders needed at earlier stages of their careers. Hiring teams with complementary but different skills and areas of expertise broadens the set of problems they can solve and increases their impact on the organization.
Lesson 3: Play together and produce excellence
Miles’ bands grew into cohesive units through performances, not rehearsals. Each performance created a wealth of learning opportunities for Miles and his band mates. The urgency of the moment created a focus and intensity that would be very difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a rehearsal. By focusing on playing together and learning from the experience, Miles could correct on the spot, encourage and support his band to take risks, push themselves and reach new heights of excellence.
How often do you perform with your high performers? Finding opportunities to produce excellence together will give you more chances to learn from each other.
Lesson 4: Don’t tell them what to do, tell them what not to do
Related to lesson three, play together and produce excellence, is the style of debriefing and guidance Miles offered to his band mates following their performances. Miles didn’t put a group together hearing the music he hoped they would produce in his mind, then correcting them to come as close as possible to his vision. Miles believed in an experimental approach to developing new music. When reflecting about what took place in performances, Miles would say what his band mates shouldn’t do but he wouldn’t tell them what to do. He hired them for their expertise on their individual instruments. He wanted them to bring their ideas to the table so they could take ownership of their performances and the product of the group.
The high performers in your organization reached a level of success before becoming members of your team. When managing high performers, take advantage of their creativity and input by channelling, not directing their contributions to the organization.
Lesson 5: Listen to save the day
Deep listening is the art of hearing not only what is said but also what isn’t said. On stage, Miles had the opportunity to lay out and listen to what his band mates were playing. There were times when while reaching for new forms of expression, the band lost its way. By listening to what wasn’t there, Miles could enter the fray at the right moment with the phrase that would bring the other players back together again, finding a groove that was satisfying to the musicians and the audience.
Look for your opportunities, especially in conflict, to find what isn’t being said and remind the participants in the argument that they are on the same team. Listen for agreement that the parties may be missing, summarize, and encourage them to listen deeply to each other when emotions run high. “What I am hearing is…” is a great way to interject.
Lesson 6: Talk about life, not music
With our busy lives it may be tempting to leave work at work and leave life at home. We can get through our workdays without sharing with others the experiences that shaped us outside of the work environment. Miles believed knowing the personal histories of his band mates was crucial to being able to know them musically. He invested time in learning about the backgrounds of his band mates and he shared his own. This sharing created an environment of trust that helped his musicians to work with each other more closely.
Be willing to be more open when you are managing high performers as it can lead to more effective, trusting relationships. A deeper bond of respect can increase loyalty to you, and commitment to your organization and its goals.
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On leadership: Here are a few blog posts on the topic. If you are interested to learn more about our leadership skills seminars, please contact us, or take a look at the very popular seminar “A practical toolbox for managers”.
TED talks on motivation and leadership
/in Hybrid solutions, Leadership, Soft Skills /by Brenda VansetersThis week’s post was meant to be about customer service skills. Once I had my initial ideas on virtual paper, I started searching online resources. Very quickly and inevitably I ended up on TED.com and almost an hour later, I was still watching videos, no longer anything to do with customer service. My post was about what customer service professionals can do to stay motivated, with an array of some not so nice customers contacting them. It was inspired by one of my not so very motivated participants. He said: I don’t care if they’re nice or not. I don’t care if they think I’m nice or not. I still get paid for taking the call. Being motivated to do a good job has very little to do with having ‘nice’ customers – ultimately. That was one of the points of my post. Perhaps I will finish the post, it was an interesting training session. This post is instead about everyday leadership, feeling good and staying motivated.


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What makes us feel good about our work
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely starts his TED talk ‘What makes us feel good about our work‘ with a mountain climbing example. “…If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
Everyday leadership
This very personal TED talk from Drew Dudley is easily transferable to a business context. ‘Everyday leadership‘ starts with a clear message. “…I’ve come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. We’ve made it about changing the world. We’ve taken this title of “leader” and treat it as something that one day we’re going to deserve. But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we’re not comfortable with. And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we’ve convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating. We start to devalue the things we can do every day. We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don’t let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it.”
The happy secret to better work
Shawn Achor’s very funny talk ‘The happy secret to better work‘ is definitely worth watching. “… One of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I’m trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking — two. But if I’m interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we’re creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, “How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?” scientists change the answer to “How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?” and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you’re depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both.”
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Not bored of videos yet? This playlist contains 7 talks on loving what you do. Also recommended, here are a few customer service posts from our blog. Our new and very much improved Boost your Business English blog is online.
The negotiator’s dilemma
/in Soft Skills /by Guest AuthorThe most fundamental aspects of negotiation strategy are Creating and Claiming Value. In a negotiation, all parties involved must decide to be competitive, cooperative, or a combination of both. David Lax and James Sebenius called it the Negotiator’s dilemma: Lax and Sebenius argue that negotiation necessarily includes both cooperative and competitive elements, and that these elements exist in tension with each other. Negotiators face a dilemma in deciding whether to pursue a cooperative or a competitive strategy.The best outcome for one person is not necessarily the best outcome for the other person. If all parties involved pursue their best option, they will often end up getting the worst outcome. Here they are, explained.
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Creating Value: Making the pie bigger
All negotiators face two basic questions: “How can we make the pie bigger?” and “How can I make sure that I get the biggest possible piece?” The pie is enlarged (value is created) through the cooperative process of interest-based bargaining. Good negotiators find ways to increase their mutual gain. They see themselves as problem solvers. When everyone involved in the negotiation profits, it’s a win/win negotiation. Inventing options for mutual gain is the essence of the win/win philosophy.
To create this mutual gain, the negotiator:
Claiming Value: Dividing the pie
At some point, the knife must come out with all parties wanting the biggest possible piece of the pie. The more one claims, the less the other gets. The competitive process of claiming value is also known as win/lose. Good negotiators use competitive tactics to make sure their piece stays as large as possible. He/she:
As is obvious, some of the cooperative strategies that create value directly oppose the competitive strategies used to claim value. As Fischer, Ury & Patton point out, “negotiators are not friends”; confrontation is sometimes unavoidable. The best deals are reached when both processes are allowed to operate. Only the most experienced of negotiators seem equally at ease with both phases. They accept that both processes are legitimate and necessary steps in getting the best results and understand that it is vital to “separate the invention process from the decision making process”.
Language that successful negotiators use
More negotiations language is available for you in my eBook: “The Big eBook of Negotiations Language”. Below are a few examples of language that you can use in each of the two stages that I discussed in this post.
Create value
Claim value
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The walk from no to yes
William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.
Our training solutions
Please contact us learn how you can improve your negotiating skills, or read more here: Effective negotiations in English
Dealing with change
/in Soft Skills /by Brenda VansetersChange management is an integral, complex and necessary part of business. Companies most likely to be successful in making changes are the ones that see change as a constant opportunity to evolve. But the word ‘change’ means and implies a lot of things to the people involved: uncertainty, different, unknown, uncomfortable, etc. The truth is that (most) people don’t like change. We are, after all, creatures of habit. Sure, we have the ability to change and adapt to new situations – we wouldn’t have come so far as a species without change – but our brains naturally resist.
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The Satir Change Model
The Satir Change Model is a five-stage model (see below) that describes the effects each stage of the change has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology. It was developed by Virginia Satir. Although the model was initially developed for families, it is equally relevant for organisations.
Stage 1: Late Status Quo
We are at a familiar place. Our performance pattern is consistent. We’re comfortable here because we know know what to expect, how to react, and how to behave.
Stage 2: Resistance
A foreign element threatens the stability of our familiar structures. We’re not sure that this is where we want to be. Most of us resist it by denying its validity, avoiding the issue, or placing blame.
Stage 3: Chaos
We have entered the unknown. Our former actions and knowledge are no longer valid/effective. We don’t want to be here. Losing the Late Status Quo triggers our anxiousness and vulnerability. We have no idea what to expect, how to react, or how to behave.
Stage 4: Integration
Through a transforming idea, we’ve discovered how the foreign element can benefit us. We’re excited. With practice, our performance has improved rapidly. We’ve made new relationships and learned new behaviours.
Stage 5: New Status Quo
Our performance has stabilized at a higher level than in the Late Status Quo. We feel safe and excited. We encourage each other. We don’t feel threatened by foreign elements any more.
Psychologist and author Daniel Kahneman writes in his book “Thinking, fast and slow” that most of us would rather be wrong than uncertain. Just consider, how many individual uncertainties could arise in any of the above stages for each of the people involved? Right, and that’s only for one change.
Communicating change
Communicating change successfully doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll achieve change successfully, because ultimately, the organizational capacity for change relies heavily on the individual’s capacity for change. In other words, some people will reach the New Status Quo much faster than others, others not at all. Some will have few problems, others a lot. But there’s no doubt about it, you need a communication plan/strategy to accompany the change.
A ‘one size fits all’ approach is not recommended because it’s quite possible that not everyone needs to know the same things about the change. Managers need to get buy-in from different stakeholders, engineers need to know this, procurement needs to know that. When communicating change, we have the opportunity to amplify certain messages. On top of that, a well thought through communication plan will enable people to better deal with the emotions of each of the 5 stages – It can invoke positive emotions/reactions and gives you the chance to help employees imagine a post-change future.
Randy Pennington, author of “Make change work” says that there are 5 questions that employees are most interested in getting answers to when faced with change.
From what to what?
Explain the specifics of the change. What will be different in how we must think, act, and perform?
What does this change mean for what I do and how I operate?
A personal extension of the first question. Everyone involved in the change will ask themselves: What’s the impact of the change for me?
Will this make a difference?
How will the change help the business or the team, or is this change for compliance reasons?
How will success be measured?
How will you know that there has been a return on our effort and investment?
What is the support level for this change?
Is this change a mandate or do you truly believe in this change?
Repeat and reinforce
Use multiple message formats and repeat important concepts to drive and reinforce the change. At the beginning of the change process, it’s necessary to communicate to answer initial fears and concerns. As the change advances, people will have new questions, and new understandings of the intermediate and final stages will be developed. Throughout the stages of change, people have to be kept up-to-date with actual and future states, and answers given to their questions.
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“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the “end of history illusion,” where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we’ll be for the rest of time. Hint: that’s not the case.
Keep your meetings alive
/in Soft Skills /by George BarseUnproductive meetings are a waste of everyone’s time. There’s a lot of research on exactly how effective meetings really are – and regardless of country or industry it all leads to the same miserable conclusion. In a nutshell: There’s room for improvement. This might be a well-known fact by now, but it’s worth repeating: 47% of people consider too many meetings the biggest waste of time. According to Meeting King, an estimated $37 billion is lost per year due to unnecessary meetings. In a different post on this blog, my colleague asked “do you really need this meeting?” and his eBook makes further points on making your meetings effective.



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3 simple ideas to keep your meetings alive
Following my colleague’s input on effective meetings, once you’ve decided that your meeting is necessary to have, you want to have the most productive meeting possible, whether or not it is a one-off or a weekly meeting. Meetings are a part of business and something we all have to deal with. Face-to-face is after all the best way to communicate. But as we all know from experience, meeting every week to discuss the same agenda items (can) eventually become tedious and quite boring. And when this happens the commitment, contribution and output will inevitably suffer.
Breathe some fresh air into the meeting
Go outside for a literal breath of fresh air. If that isn’t possible, change the view of the meeting room, or even where people sit. Meet over lunch every once in a while. Just because the agenda is mostly the same – the environment doesn’t have to be.
Keep the airflow (and the people) moving
You don’t have to discuss every agenda topic the same way every time. You can use use short breakout meetings, insert a Q&A, videos, questionnaires, or basically, whatever it is that keeps your meeting on track and the participants engaged. Instead of sitting and discussing around the table, hang your questions about each topic (What’s the status of project XYZ? Have you got an idea about how to deal with the delay in engineering? Who’s got capacity to work on…?) on the wall (on flip chart paper) and let the people write their answers. Meeting finished :-).
Use an ‘air-freshener’
A meeting break where everyone is checking their phone or emails is not a break. Neither is making notes about the meeting, or talking with the person next to you about what you were just talking about while you wait for the others to return. Leave the room, that’s an order. Don’t take a break, take a walk. Energize.
That’s all great, but…
Ultimately, your meetings will be most effective when they are structured. With an agenda, a set of ground rules, and/or ‘rules of engagement’ and/or allotted timeslots to avoid lengthy discussions. It is the people that make the meeting effective, obviously. The final part of this post is dedicated to your personal contribution.
Make time to prepare
Everybody should prepare. If they can’t/haven’t, move the topic to next time. Which leads to the next point.
Keep your contribution relevant
Don’t contribute unless you have something of relevance to say. There’s a time and a place for saying exactly what’s on your mind, for rambling, or for just ‘saying something’. Meetings are not the place.
Send/read the minutes before it’s too late
The minutes are a useful track record but they often sit in the folder of unread messages until shortly before the next meeting. Logically, the minutes are part of the preparation, but not always. You should first read the minutes when the discussion is fresh in your mind, not a week later. Give yourself a chance after the meeting to write down notes, questions and ideas. Or, they’ll make you remember to have a follow-up conversation with a colleague about what he said. Do it now, instead of next week in the meeting.
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The elevator pitch
/in Soft Skills /by Guest AuthorFor a lot of us it’s a fact of life: you always think of the things you should have said after the conversation finishes or the moment passes. Why is it that when you need something brilliant to come out of your mouth, it doesn’t come out, or it comes out wrong? The name ‘elevator pitch’ is based on the idea that it should be possible to deliver a summary of your conversation in the time span of an elevator ride (thirty seconds to two minutes). If two minutes are all you have, what will you say?
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Forethought and planning
The participant from the above quote didn’t think to prepare for such a moment. Perhaps she thought she would just “wing it” if the moment ever arrived. But it requires real forethought and planning to get your message across concisely and engagingly, especially when you only have two minutes to do it.
How to get key points across in two minutes
A great elevator pitch has one aim. To appeal to someone you want something from somewhere in the future. When the doors open you want to be walking away with some kind of commitment. At the very least, you’re hoping for a business card. So, absolutely everything you’re going to say has to generate interest – there’s no space for fluff and waffle. That can be pretty tough, and that’s why it’s all about the preparation and thorough, personalized practice with tough and challenging sparring partners.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you prepare your elevator pitch, starting with the GOALS model that we use in our training sessions:
Goal – Know what your goal is from the outset
Opening – How will you open your elevator pitch and make it topical and relevant?
Attention – How will you keep their interest in what you’re saying?
Language – Don’t be tempted into using jargon and complex words.
Steps – What are the next steps?
An elevator pitch is (should be) a two-way conversation
Talking for a minute without interruption is a long time, have you tried it, or listen to someone do it? Say your elevator ride takes as much as two minutes. In that time you’re building rapport, you’re allowing the other person to answer and ask you a question or two, etc. It’s not a monologue. Brian Walters calls it verbal ping-pong. So in fact, you might only have the chance to say three or so “meaningful” things. Having an (important) elevator conversation with someone you don’t really know can go one of many ways in between going terribly wrong and going absolutely great.
Final tips for your elevator pitch
Be interesting, whatever you say. When possible.
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We offer a range of free services aimed to help you succeed globally. Visit our website or get in touch if you haven’t yet found what you’re looking for.
Giving feedback using the DESC model
/in Leadership, Soft Skills /by Scott LeveyEverybody understands that performance feedback should be constructive, focused and to the point. Effective feedback can resolve conflicts, overcome problems and improve individual and team morale. It doesn’t really need mentioning that ineffective feedback often accomplishes the opposite. Or that if you are skilled at giving effective feedback, your team will be more motivated, which leads to better performance.
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Some feedback facts*
*(source)
Giving positive feedback is easy
No matter how skilled the feedback giver is, if the receiver isn’t interested in hearing or taking the feedback, nothing will get through. The more difficult the feedback, the more the giver needs to consider the the emotional impact of the feedback. Giving positive feedback is easy.
What is and isn’t feedback?
In an interpersonal environment, feedback is communication about a person’s performance and how their efforts contribute to reaching goals. Feedback is not criticism. Criticism is evaluative; feedback is descriptive. Effective feedback is goal-referenced and tangible, actionable, personalized, timely, ongoing and consistent. As a leader, giving feedback is a task you perform again and again, to let people know where they are and where to go next in terms of individual, team, and company goals.
Giving feedback is a touchy thing. Think back over feedback you have received in the past. Chances are you’ve been given feedback that helped you develop. And, unfortunately, chances are somewhere in your career you’ve been given feedback that made you feel defensive, resistant or unmotivated. By putting yourself back in your old shoes, and thinking about how they actually gave you the feedback, you can improve your own feedback skills.
Common mistakes people make when giving feedback
The DESC model
In our skills-based Leadership training, we use the simple 4-step model DESC for structuring feedback. Participants in our “Practical Toolbox for Managers” seminars often highlight DESC as one of the most valuable tools they take away. This model is designed to help you to get your message clear and it can even take the stress out of the feedback conversation for those of us that weren’t born with effective feedback-giving skills.
DESCRIPTION
Give an objective and concrete description of what you have observed using “I” statements.
EFFECT
Explain the effect or impact it had on your business, the team or its members. If the effect was an emotion, name it. Your body language and tone of voice will already be showing your elation or frustration – putting them out in the open can help you move things forward.
SOLUTION
Build the solution through a directive (“What I would like you to do next time is …”) or a participative approach (“What do you think we can do to avoid this next time?”).
CONCLUSION
Build a “contract of commitment”. Check your understanding of what has been agreed, and get commitment for the future.
Further Leadership resources:
8 questions about experiential training answered
/1 Comment/in Methods & Tools /by James CulverHave you ever tried teaching a child a new skill? Take learning to swim as an example. You could give a detailed description of the process and then expect them to remember and follow your instructions, or you could let them get on with it, learn in their own way. Learning in their own way will certainly result in some frustrations, but through this experience of trial and error they are more likely to remember for themselves the best way to get to the result.
What is experiential training?
Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience – and more specifically the process of “learning through reflecting on what you’re doing / just did”. It’s been around for a very long time.
Why is experiential training so powerful in management and soft skills solutions?
The gentlemen I mentioned above were onto something. These observations still ring true today, especially when we want people to learn behaviors to apply in the workplace. Learning by doing is great for children, but as adults in the workplace we can really add the additional aspect of reflecting on how our behaviors affect outcomes. This is the experiential advantage.
How can experiential training help you retain information and embed behaviors?
Dr. Igor Kokcharov’s did some research into this and came up with this pretty useful pyramid. If you take a look at it, you can see how learning by doing with coach led reflection and practice gives participants the best chance to retain necessary information.
Who’s using the experiential training approach?
A lot of adult learning approaches in a broad range of fields from corporate to military, and from emergency services to care work, make use of this experiential advantage. Business schools use the approach with simulation exercises, and critical incident gaming can be found in government agencies and board rooms alike. At Target Training, our experience is that experiential training can do much more. It can increase awareness of behaviors, particularly those with negative consequences. It else has the power to challenge current approaches in a developmental, non-judgmental way. If experiential training is established, we can focus on the individual’s needs and deliver tangible change. This fits perfectly when developing soft and management skills.
What does experiential training look like in the training environment?
Put very, very simply, experiential training = do + debrief + do it again. You might be thinking that sounds pretty boring – why go to training to do the same thing a couple of times over? Think about the result you’re looking for though. You’re going to training not to learn a bunch of theory, but to be able to go back to your workplace and do something differently. Experiential training is all about working in the real world. Whether in a well-designed activity or on-the job, you behave the way you do. After observing you in action, the trainer/coach leads you through a consequence-based conversation, talking you through the behaviors he or she observed. They also link what they have seen with alternatives to help improve the outcome. You develop new skills and can then apply them to a new experience. You learn to recognize “triggering events” in your work environment and can choose to use the new behavior in training – and beyond.
How does it work?
Here are some of the elements which are key to successful experiential training:
Training environment
By creating a positive, encouraging environment in the training room. This help you to act as you normally do and feel comfortable with trying out new skills. The more you can share the behavior-consequence based feedback the trainer gives you, the easier it will be to identify and close any behavior gaps.
Debriefing
The debriefing stage is key. New information necessary to support new behaviors is introduced here.
Varied interaction and activities
Challenging, timed group and pair work problem solving activities to raise the stress level so participants communicate as themselves.
What can I expect from my trainer?
The trainer’s role is not to present you with lots of information. They act more as a coach and are responsible for creating a developmental, experiment-friendly environment in the training room.
What do I need to do to make experiential training a success?
Be open. To be effective, experiential soft skills training requires you to fully participate in experiences, as well as being willing to reflect and identify behavior gaps with others. None of us would feel comfortable about learning to swim through guided discussion or a PowerPoint presentation. Experiential soft skills training puts you in the deep water of communication situations. This allows you to see a need for new behaviors that will lead to better consequences on the job. You practice these behaviors through experiences in a safe, leaner-centered environment. And will then feel ready to dive back into your working environment to try out these new behaviors.
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We work with the 70-20-10 model. My colleagues and I are available to tell you more about how we can implement the right training for your needs. To help you find a training provider, please download our eBook THE DEFINITIVE CHECKLIST FOR QUALIFYING TRAINING PROVIDERS.