Don’t fix ‘em; encourage ‘em

Parents know that the best way to stimulate desirable behavior is to catch their children doing something good and heap on the praise. Teachers have discovered that doling out healthy doses of encouragement to students who appear to be making progress usually results in better performance and happier classrooms.

Why is it, then, that so many businesses forget these life lessons when they create and field in-house training programs?

Instead of building from what’s working now, these training programs often seek a quick fix to a problem identified by management. The phone rings too many times before it’s answered...people don’t return customer calls soon enough...we’ve got a bunch of individuals, and what we need is a team...these and many other “symptoms” of a business not performing at its maximum potential often result in a training program designed to hopefully “cure” the employees – and, in turn, the company itself – of their diagnosed ills.

Such training programs rarely produce the hoped-for results, because the programs are structured around fixing these specific behavior maladies, and trainees come in with their defenses up. The mood? Here’s something else management expects us to do on top of everything else. Any positive bounce in performance from such training programs is short-lived, and usually fear-based.

On the other hand, in-house programs that make a meaningful difference are those that build new and different skills from the foundation that already exists. These are the kinds of programs that...

• Reframe the picture. Rather than trying to fix a behavior, show employees the benefits of a new approach to the same task. For example, show – with real-life examples – how anticipating customer needs will result in fewer customer calls and more control over the pace of work. Show employees how a new approach will benefit them first, and let them discover how it will benefit the company.
• Give them an active role. Don’t lecture exclusively; get them involved. Small group exercises with actual challenges...group discussion with flip charts...role play where the trainer is the “employee” and the employee is the “customer”...anything to make the process engaging.
• Don’t embarrass them. Nothing is a worse motivator for training than dressing down a group of trainees (right before you seek to “fix” them, of course...) or putting someone on the spot (such as in role playing) to pinpoint a behavior challenge that is specific to that employee.
• Make it fun. Perform a skit...show Hollywood movie clips depicting scenes of bad customer service...create a game that gets people up and moving...do something that makes people laugh along the way and your audience will be more willing to listen to the substantive content you have to offer.

Above all, realize that conducting just one training program is like giving a single multi-vitamin to a child at age three, and thinking that will take care of his or her needs until adulthood. Like a daily vitamin dose, it takes a steady diet of formal and informal training to give your employees (and your company), the best chance to grow up “big and strong.”