Making Training Stick

one of the biggest problems that people have with training is that the value fades away the question is how do you make training stick and there are ways to do that there are ways to go through a training effort that’s not just a one-off not just a flash in a pan and the four ways that I can think of off the top of my head are one to practice create practice sessions the second approach is to build internal champions on your company’s side that will continue to maintain the value the third approach is to make sure the training you pick has very simple concepts it might run deep there might be a lot of details but they have to work their way up to really simple points that you can carry in your head and use in real time and the last is to create cohort groups that help maintain the commitment to grow and change evolve and make those things stick so I want to talk about each one of those just very very briefly and the first one is the practice session we call it presence in practice in our work we’re training people to have great presence winning presence to engage and influence those are skills that need to be put into practice so what we do is we set up a system we set up some rules and we teach a system whereby you can practice not feel too vulnerable but have enough pressure that it’s real and that the system will help create positive feedback it’s actionable and you can get your your skills practice so then they’re going to be internalized closer to a muscle memory the second one we call them presence champions these are your internal champions if you have people who learn the skills of the training and are positioned to coach and maintain it given some authority a certification in uh an approach so that they can help keep it alive internal champions are a big part of making the flash in the pan a lasting part of the culture certain people have those skills and you’re going to pick people from inside a training who have the ability to step and say “Hey I’m going to own this thing.” They’re probably the people who lead the presence and practice sessions so that you’ve got people who are champions of a process leading others to keep it alive to the simple concepts story for example is a really complicated system that we’ve distilled into a very simple problem solution outcome for somebody method a model of beginning middle and end that’s so simple you can use it while you’re talking you can use it in a meeting you can use it when you’re planning make sure you’re picking programs that distill their deep rich content into simple simple simple ideas that you can carry around in your active mind and apply them they may run deep but they’ve got to distill to something simple and the last piece the cohort group it adds something really important if you figure a present champion is an outside champion who’s working on the team to keep them lifted up a cohort is peers and when your peers are stepping up it’s easier for you to step up just like anything else it’s easier to to lift weights with a fitness partner it’s easier to run with running partners you can do it on your own but when you start doing it as a team it builds its own life so I want you to think about these things when you go into training training is great cool information it’s in my head but I want it to last what you do is you follow those simple four things and you build the practice sessions in our case presence and practice so that you keep working on it you find internal champions inside the firm to help represent this value and keep it alive in the culture third you stick to simple concepts training should be something that I can walk around with and keep it in my head not have to consult a manual every time but carry the simple principles with me so that I can be better in real time not just when I go back and do my homework and last set up peer groups cohort groups they’re going through it together so that as a little collective culture you’re saying this is important it matters to us those four things will help you do something that training is really supposed to do give you useful value that keeps showing up you’ve got to make it stick