the internal trainer manifesto

guide by

Robert Blaga

Internal Trainer Manifesto Tr a i n i n g I d e a s f o r J u n i o r T r a i n e r s

January 2013 | First Edition

This guide is free and does not contain affiliate links.

It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License,

so you can freely share it with your friends and colleagues.

© Robert Blaga 2013

2

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction or What This Guide Is Not The Philosophy

Before and After the Session Logistics Delivery This Is Just the Beginning

Caring about your clients

Having fun

Conducting a Needs Analysis

Measuring the Impact

The Follow-Up

Involve Their Managers

The 2-Hour Training Session

The Magic Number 12

Interactivity or Death

The Debriefing

Going Visual

I Believe in Informal Feedback

3

Introduction (What this guide is not)

4

The Internal Trainer Manifesto – Training Ideas for Junior Trainers.

©Robert Blaga, January 2013. www.robertblaga.com

Introduction or What this Guide is NOT

This is NOT your usual how-to guide. The words are written so that everybody can understand and use the information. But this is not intended for all the trainers of the world. In fact, I can say without regret that this manifesto is meant for a small minority of professionals who are willing to embrace the funkiness and the usefulness into their sessions.

How do you know if this is for you?

If you…

…Are madly in love with your job and would, if necessary, do it for free;

…Care more about your client’s well being than about receiving positive feedback;

…Have fun delivering memorable training sessions;

…See yourself as a guide, rather than a teacher;

…Are willing to walk the extra mile for your clients,

Then this manifesto is for you.

5

Also, I would like to stress the fact that this is NOT the ‘official’ way of doing training; it’s the way it works best for me and my funky clients. That’s why, if you decide to go on, I can tell you what I always tell my participants:



Introduction or What this Guide is NOT

As for me… I'm Robert Blaga and I have a passion for education and learning. I’m a full time trainer of leadership, communication and training process and I work for an European based multinational company.

Back in 2005, when I first started as a junior trainer, useful resources were scarce, training programs were expensive and a mentor was hard to find.

This manifesto/guide is dedicated to those who have trouble finding their "north" in training, just like I had back then.

Although you will find these resources most useful if you are still a beginner, you could still spend a few meaningful minutes reading if you are already a senior trainer.

Enjoy!

!Robert

6



The Philosophy

7



The Philosophy

There is a clear vision behind every great achievement. I’ve learned this the hard way, back in high school, when my choice was to study… economics, accountancy and marketing intensively for 4 years. Why? No obvious reason other than the fact that my parents told me it’s a good choice for the future. And I hated it for the whole 1460 days I was a high school student (yes, I counted the days).

That lesson being learned, the choice for college was 100% mine: psychology. The vision behind it was honest and clear: I wanted to understand people and help them become more.

After a semester spent studying psychotherapy, I found my true calling: learning and education for adults.

This has been my passion for 10 years now and I’ve been fortunate enough to be paid for something I would gladly do for free (and I sometimes do just that, of course).

And over the years I’ve come to have two strong beliefs about how the trainer (me and you) should think and behave:

8

He should genuinely care

about his clients!

He should have fun

with his clients!



Caring About Your Clients

When I write ‘clients’ I mean all the people that are touched by your work. I include here:

My training participants

Their managers

Their colleagues

Their clients

Thinking about all of them makes my approach a lot more people oriented.

It’s not just about how people in the training room act differently after the session.

It’s about how people will make their lives better and the lives of their coworkers and even families and friends better. It’s also about becoming better people, not just better professionals.

9

And it’s not just about building competencies (knowledge and skill).

It’s also about attitude.

Being aware of the fact that my mission is more than to deliver a session and go also allows me to honestly acknowledge the shortcomings of [my] training in general.




And of course, there are some occasions I have to decline because I understand the client is not looking for a partner, but for someone to do the job and go. And from my experience this almost never works well for the client or the trainer.

Being honest is the first sign that a trainer

cares for his clients

Sometimes I have to decline a contract because I know that training is not the best solution for their challenge. Maybe coaching or just a little change in the company policy could solve the problem better.

Some other times I have to decline because I know I am not the best option. Could be my style or my expertise, but I choose not to sign a contract just for the financial advantages it brings.

10




Of course, caring is not just about refusing clients when you realize you will not help them achieve more. It’s also about going the extra mile for them, even if this means less money and time for you.

11

Two years ago one of my clients asked me if I could help him develop the necessary skills for him to facilitate the workshops I usually facilitated.

He explained that his budget for next year was zero and that they will not be able to pay me to come and deliver.

So all the progress they made would vanish because of this. I said yes without flinching.

I lost a contract, yes. But I cared too much about the client to let him suffer just because the money was gone.

And I also gained a client that was so happy I accepted that he recommended me to three other potential clients.

Everybody won!




I know trainers and training companies that build relationships based on the principle of caring.

One of my favorite training companies, Achieve Global, started offering their clients extra services at no extra cost when the financial crisis struck in 2008. They understood it is good business to help people when they most need it, even without the immediate financial reward.

12

Did they lose money? In the short run, yes. But in the long run, the company became more stable in a market deeply affected by the crisis. They showed their clients they are not just another training supplier, but the true partners every company deserves.

There are many stories like this in many fields, not just in training. Some companies base their entire existence on caring for their costumers. Like the famous examples of Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom or Ritz-Carlton Hotels (Google them and you will find out why).




Another way of caring is helping your participants after the session.

One counterexample is a famous training company (I won’t name it for obvious reasons) that delivers one of the best Presentation Skills courses on the market.

While the feedback is fantastic, their commitment to their customers is very low.

When I asked them for some sort of a follow-up after their session with my company and for a way to measure the impact, their answer was blunt: we don’t do that, we just deliver.

That was one very short business relationship.

13

I take time to share with my clients new pieces of information I come across well after the contract has ended.

If I know that one of the issues that troubled them was creating a culture of feedback, when I get my hands on some new research or book on that subject I gladly send them a summary. They always appreciate it and the relationship becomes stronger because they understand that I care.



For the past 10 years, this has been the most important principle in

my life as learning professional and I don’t see myself changing it

for the next 30 years to come.

Having Fun

This is the second principle. My entire existence revolves around the principle of having fun, in life and in work (and sometimes in-between). And because of principle NO.1, I make it my mission to also help others have fun.

In training, I carefully design the process so that people will be engaged in fun learning activities. I strive to transform even the most trivial tasks into fun (or funny) experiences.

14

One example is splitting a group into smaller teams. Instead of the boring ‘this side of the group is team A and this side is team B’, I engage the participants into a short game that will naturally show them witch team they will be in.

On a Communication Skills session I ask them to form a line based on their upcoming birthdays (first person in the line would be the person who will celebrate their birthday first etc.). And they have to do it without talking. After they finish, I simply split them into two equal teams (first half of the line formed a team and the other half formed another).

It is fun for them not only to discover ways of communicating without talking, but also finding something personal about their colleagues.

Short activities like this one can make training more active and the participants more willing to participate in more “serious” tasks.



Look… even this guy thought it’s OK!

Having Fun

Another example is the review of concepts in a two-day session. In the morning of day two, instead of the classic “let’s see… what did we learn yesterday” you can ask them to draw a picture that represents the main lessons they learned. Sometimes I also have a contest between two teams, something like Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Everybody loves a friendly competition.

And you can use this approach for almost every aspect of training: introductions, icebreakers, energizers, discovering new concepts, ending sessions and so on.

You can use this principle even before the training starts. I sometimes send a funky invitation to the session that sets the mood for the entire event.

Like writing ‘all people bringing laptops will be forced to drink tea instead of coffee’ or ‘the session will end at exactly 17:23, but my watch is known to be somehow inaccurate’

15

Also, after the session has ended, there are ways to continue the fun part by sending a thank you note “for being nice” with an easy puzzle containing one key point of the session. You make it fun to review content.

Or if I need to send participants some materials, I make sure to include one or two pictures from the session.

Learning should be fun.

If it’s not, you are doing it wrong!



Before and After the Session

16



Before and After the Session

It is my strong belief that training success has more to do with what happens before and after the session than what happens during the session.

If you don’t believe this, think about one great learning experience you had. Was it in a classroom? Probably not.

There are rumors out there that say training courses only count for about 10% of the learning that occurs in the professional environment (I think they are extremely optimistic, these rumors). The other 90% happens through experience and mentoring.

17

For appropriate learning to take place you need more than the 16 hours of training. You need:

To know exactly what the initial challenge, problem or situation is

To measure the impact your session has, so you can take corrective measures

To conduct a well designed follow-up, so concepts are reviewed

To involve their managers in the learning process.

In the following pages I will briefly explain what each of these points are all about.



Training success has more to do with what happens

before and after than during the session.


Imagine you are a chief engineer who wants to build a bridge. How do you make sure your bridge is useful? How tall, long and strong should it be? How much material do you need and what type of materials? Where is the starting point and where is the end point?

All these questions need an answer before you even consider laying the first brick or putting the first pillar in place.

Just like building a bridge, before creating and delivering a training session you need to answer some questions that will help you make it useful for your participants. Because we don’t want people to cross our bridge and afterwards say

“This Bridge is fantastic, but it didn’t help me get where I wanted”.

So, to build the training bridge we must first establish where to put it: what is the current state of affairs (the current level of competencies) and the desired outcome (the future level of competencies).

18

The distance between the current and the desired level of competencies

is called the performance gap




Sometimes, training sessions have different desired outcomes than building competencies. Often we only want the participants to know something new after training, which is only half a competency.

When conducting a needs analysis, you must usually choose from a list of methods. For the process to be more valid, you need to select at least two of the following methods:

Direct observation

Interviews with the future participants

Interview with their managers

Interview with their colleagues, clients or suppliers

Interview with the HR representative

Questionnaires for the future participants

Questionnaires for their managers

Questionnaires for their colleagues, clients or suppliers

Questionnaires for the HR representative

Performance reviews.

19

Whatever method you choose, keep in mind the fact that, for the session to be really helpful,

people need to cross

your bridge and get to the side

they need to get, not on the side

you want them to get.



Measuring the Impact

Congratulations! Your bridge building project is over and people have already crossed the bridge. You should be satisfied with your work and should give yourself a nice tap on the shoulder. Or should you?!

Most trainers stop their efforts after delivering the session (but you are not most trainers). Not continuing your training efforts after delivery misses the main point of the training process: really making an impact.

20

Let’s have a quick review of the model, so you can better understand what we are talking about.

It is no understatement to say that almost everything we know about evaluating training programs comes from only one person. And that person is Donald Kirkpatrick, who published a four-level model for training course evaluation back in 1975. The model is very easy to understand and apply, while also being very effective.



Measuring the Impact The Four Levels of Learning Evaluation

1. Reaction.

This level evaluates how the participants perceived the session.

Question to ask: how happy were the participants with my session?

When to evaluate: at the end of the session.

How to evaluate: feedback form.

2. Learning.

This level evaluates the skills (knowledge and behavior) and attitudes that the participants acquired during your session.

Question to ask: how much knowledge did the participants acquire? What behavioral changes have occurred?

When to evaluate: during or right after the session.

How to evaluate: test or demonstration.

21

3. Behavior.

This level evaluates the transfer of knowledge, skills and attitudes to the participants’ job.

Question to ask: How much of what was acquired during the session do the participants apply in their day-to-day job?

When to evaluate: after 3-6 months.

How to evaluate: observation

4. Results.

This level evaluates the impact of the training in the participants’ job, department or company.

Question to ask: what is the overall impact of this training in the organization?

When to evaluate: 6-12 months after the training session.

How to evaluate: very hard.



Measuring the Impact The Four Levels of Learning Evaluation

Most training sessions end with a feedback form (level 1). Some end with a test (level 2). Very few conduct an analysis after 3-6 months to observe how participants apply the new skills in their day-to-day jobs (level 3). And only big corporations tend to make a ROI analysis after 6-12 month (level 4).

But limiting yourself to the first level can kill your career very fast. Imagine you deliver a powerful training session. The participants love you and give you the best feedback ever. The HR Manager that hired you is pleased. Everybody drinks the champagne and you leave satisfied and with a big check in your pocket. Six months later, you find out that the same company is hiring another trainer for a similar project. What happened, you ask the HR Manager. And he answers: ‘nothing changed after your session, sorry.’

22

Of course nothing changed. People don’t change overnight! They need more practice than you can squeeze in 16 hours of training. To create a new habit we need a high degree of repetition (and some other stuff, as explained by Charles Duhigg in his brilliant book The Power of Habit)

And the situation is also no better regarding knowledge. In the 19th century there was this German psychologist named Herman Ebbinghaus. In 1885 he published a groundbreaking book, On Memory, where he first described something that we still consider to be valid almost 130 years later: the forgetting curve. This concept explains that after 30 days without repetition, most students will only remember about 20% of the studied material. The other 80% is forgotten.



So what can you do to preserve learning and increase the impact?

The Follow-Up

If there is something that kills the results everybody expects after a training session, it’s the lack of a well-designed follow-up.

Some people make the mistake to consider the training evaluation and the follow-up one and the same thing.

So what is the difference?

23

While the evaluation only gives you information about the impact of your session, the follow-up is a tool used to further consolidate the skills that the participants acquired.

I am repeating myself on purpose here: most training courses end the moment the participants exit the training room. By accepting this situation (and sometimes encouraging it) the trainer misses the chance to really have an impact on people’s lives.



The Follow-Up

When I design a follow-up I keep in mind some guidelines:

Make it shorter than the actual training

Example: for a 16-hour training course, the follow-up session could last 2-4 hours.

Focus on how they applied their new skills in their jobs, and not on teaching new concepts

Focus on the challenges they encountered after training and what solutions they found (or you can all find together during this session)

Engage people to recall the concepts they acquired and to refresh the course information

It is continuous (for example: twice a month for 1 hour for 6 months)

Use different methods (we’re going to be talking about this in a minute or two)

Respects the Rule of the Follow-up:

24



To assure 90% retention and integration of new skills

acquired during training, the participants should refresh the

information 6 times in the first 90 Days.

The Follow-Up

If you choose to respect the Rule of the Follow-Up, that means you will have to find 6 ways of refreshing information and skills in the first 3 months or 90 days after the training has finished.

It’s unrealistic to assume you will be able to meet twice a month with the group to conduct face-to-face meetings, so let’s look at the alternative.

You can use email, phone calls, video conference, sending a gift or a poster, writing a letter and the list is actually unlimited.

I believe in the power of follow-up like in no other learning instrument. But even this will not work unless everybody is on board. You, the participants and their managers.

25

Without the managers on board, appropriate learning may occur,

but change will not.




Imagine you attend a wonderful session on feedback and you are determined to apply what you’ve learned. But when you return at the office, the atmosphere is close to hell: you have 200 emails that need an urgent answer, two reports are due by the end of the day and your manager needs you to take care of something really fast.

By the end of the day you are exhausted and you haven’t applied anything you learned in training. The next 3 days are pretty much the same. After a while, you forget about the session and you enter the dreaded routine. Nothing changes. The money and time you and your company spent with organizing and attending the session are wasted.

26

The participants need support to change after training, no doubt. This support can best come from the people who are actually in charge of supporting and directing. The managers have this on their job description.




I take time to talk to managers and explain the concepts we are covering during training. They also receive some instruments to measure the way people apply what they’ve learned and advice on how to sustain further learning.

The first thing I suggest, though, is something they should do before the session starts: explain to their people why they must attend. What is it the manager thinks they should accomplish? What are their expectations? This sets the tone for a very effective training.

27

The second thing I usually suggest is to ask the attendees to prepare a short 10-minute presentation about the main concepts they learned, how they plan to apply it and what help they need from their manager. This is such an effective strategy because it creates a partnership between the manager and the employee.

Everything else involves frequent one-to-one meetings where the two discuss the progress made, the challenges and how the manager can further help the employee achieve more.




I honestly think that the manager has the potential to have more impact on learning than the trainer. This is why I cannot deliver a powerful session without help from the upper hierarchy.

This diagram shows the relationship between the three actors involved.

28



Manager

Participant Trainer

Logistics

29



Logistics

There are many things that must be covered before you say “Hello and welcome to this session”. There’s the venue, the food, the tools etc. There are theories about how the room should be arranged, where to put the video projector and what type of chair the trainer should have.

But for me, the true impact of logistics comes only from two sources:

1. The length and spread of the training session.

2. The number of people attending.

30

The length has much to do with our neurological wiring, since we now know for sure how much time the brain can stay focused with understanding and retention. The news is not great. According to John Medina, a brain scientist turned writer, we are actually wired to focus for no more than 10 minutes. That’s why when teaching, professor Medina turns an hour into six mini modules.

Group size has also been discussed extensively over the years. Like the famous Dunbar number, advanced by Robin Dunbar in 1992, witch stresses that a person cannot maintain stable social relationships with more than (roughly) 150 people. Also, three researchers (Marcia W. Blenko, Michael C. Mankins, and Paul Rogers) are credited in an article in Harvard Business Review Stats for discovering the optimal group size for decision-making: seven. How many people is optimum to have in a training room? I have my own view on the matter.




On the market, most training programs last for two days. Trainers and training companies promise long lasting change in people’s behavior and attitude for only 16 hours of training (just to be precise, those two days only have about 12 hours of classroom training, the rest are just coffee and lunch breaks). If you felt some sarcasm, you felt it right.

31

It’s not that I don’t believe in two-day sessions. I deliver them just as often as the next guy. I also deliver sessions that last for one day or four hours. This is just because not all of my clients are willing to invest in funky ideas, so I have to help them the best I can and meet their constraints. But for sure there is a way I think training is most memorable, useful and fun.

This method has been invented long before I started as a trainer and is widely spread as it is in one field: language courses for adults.




Imagine you want to learn a foreign language… let’s say German. Would you consider learning for two consecutive days, eight hours each day? Would you find this useful, memorable and fun? I can tell you from my own experience learning French with a mad teacher, that the experience was tiring, boring and I forgot everything in less than two weeks after finishing.

What the sane language trainers do is to split the number of hours into very small digestible bites. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 hours is the average session length. The first half an hour is designed for reviewing the homework and previous notions that were taught. Then some new concept is presented and the student spends the next hour or so practicing.

32

This strategy allows for old material to be easily remembered and new material to be easily integrated. Spreading the sessions over a long period of time allows the student to repeat (and repetition is the mother of learning, some say). But more than this, spreading the sessions puts the student in the same mind-frame for a longer period of time, eventually transforming the new knowledge into new habit.




Just like in language courses, my ideal training session is two hours long. If the client is willing to invest the time and money, then I will choose to spread the 16 hours of training (without the breaks) into 8 sessions of 2 hours each.

My ideal structure of a session has four parts:

1) Review the collective homework (30 minutes)

Here I ask people to share their experience with the concept they discovered last time we met. How did they practice? What were the challenges? What were the results? We don’t go into so many details, just a quick review and some clarification of the main points. If there are big challenges, we may decide to spend the whole session clarifying (although that never happened yet).

2) The participants discover a new concept (10 minutes)

3) Understanding and practicing the new concept (50 minutes)

4) New homework (30 minutes)

33

I found one week to be enough time between sessions for the participants to practice the new concepts.

A classic training program will end after 8 weeks.

How many companies are willing to engage in this type of program? Not many, I admit.

But those who do

enjoy the far better results.



The Magic Number 12

A few months ago, someone posted a question on LinkedIn: what is the optimum number of trainees in a training course? The answers were a bit confusing at first glance. Eight, Twelve, Sixteen, Twenty… Everybody had some magic number on their mind. At some point, someone just said: it depends. It depends on the course structure and design, the objectives, the type of course… This last person had a very strong point.

I attended a training session with 24 people once. At first I thought the trainer was crazy to allow so many trainees. It turned out to be one of the best sessions I’ve ever attended. I’ve learned a lot of useful stuff and I solemnly swear the objectives have been met.

On the opposite side, I once delivered a six-day training session for four people. They said it was beautifully unconventional while been extremely useful. Also, one of the trainers I work with told me about a client that contracted him for a Situational Leadership II ® course for… one person. He made some adjustments and delivered. And it worked well.

34

I told you all of this because I want you to take my “magic number” as it is: my preference for the type of sessions I deliver, not some law you should live by.

And of course, as the title suggests,

my magic number is 12.



The Magic Number 12

35

When I have that many people in the room, I can play a lot with the design. I can form three equal teams, if team work is needed. I can form four equal teams, if I need two people doing something and the third observing. Also, if individual work is what’s happening, I can allow one minute for each person to report back their findings and spend only about 10-15 minutes with this.

I found it is harder to debrief and only a handful of people actually speak in groups larger than 12. With 12 I can conduct a half an hour debriefing where everybody has enough room to speak their mind.

I don’t mind having less or more… But the best feedback and results I’ve got when 12 people were in the room.



Delivery

36



Delivery

I usually start Train the Trainers sessions by asking a very simple question (you can also answer, if you’d like):

What is the first picture that comes into your mind when I say the word ‘trainer’?

If you are like most of my trainees, you will probably say: a man with a flipchart, a man in front of an audience or some variation of this. It’s obvious that people disregard the work a trainer does before and after the session. The delivery is the star of the show.

37

So it mustn’t come as a surprise that most authors treat this topic extensively. What could be a surprise is the fact that I don’t. If everything before and after is rock solid, I think learning will happen and people will have a good time.

So when I write about delivery, I only think about a few things that I believe will make the difference. Four, to be more precise:

What is the interactivity level I strive to get and how do I get it

How I debrief activities

How I use visuals to create memorable learning experiences

How I ask for feedback and how do I use it

Of course there are many more topics worth mentioning, like how to use a flipchart, how to deal with difficult participants or how to deliver a powerful presentation. While each of them is important, I feel those four options from above have the strongest impact on learning.

That doesn’t mean I ignore them. You will find articles about these topics on my blog.



http://robertblaga.com/


This may sound harsh, but it is also true. If a session lacks interactivity, participants will be bored to death to the point where they would actually prefer drinking poison instead of listening to the trainer’s babble for 8 hours.

Ok, maybe not poison, but I trust you got the point.

But what does interactivity mean?

38

Beginners, I’ve noticed, think interactivity can be achieved by playing games. In my work with junior trainers I’ve heard on numerous occasions “Robert, can you give me a game I could play with my participants?” I’ve been there myself.

My answer is always the same: what do you want to accomplish and why necessarily a game?

Interactivity can be achieved in a variety of ways. Group discussions, a project, working in pairs, filling in a survey, drawing something, analyzing a case-study, a role-play etc. What all this has in common is the percentage of intervention from the trainer versus the intervention of the trainees.



As a general rule, the trainer's input should be

no more than 30%, while the rest is up to the group


Bob Pike, an actual guru for trainers everywhere, offers a formula for interactivity: you should involve the participants every 8 minutes, you should change the teaching method every 20 minutes and you should give them a break every 90 minutes. Together with John Medina’s 10 minute rule, discussed in the section about the length of a training session, I think these form the basics of interactivity.

I even try to make the 30% I am supposed to fill in with my input as involving as possible. For example, instead of just telling people what the situational leadership model is all about, I ask them questions about how they learned to drive. After that, it’s easy to link the model to their experience.

39

There are many ways to make a session interactive, but I think the best practices come from a philosophy I mentioned on the first page of this manifesto: if you consider yourself more of a guide than a teacher, then you most likely want your trainees to do most of the work, since it’s their adventure, not yours.



If you consider yourself a guide instead of a

teacher, then you most likely want you trainees to do most of the work,

since it’s their adventure, not yours.

The Debriefing

During a training session, people learn in different ways. They will learn from you, from each other, from a lightning that comes down and strikes them in the middle of the head or in some other crazy way.

I’ve had a guy in training that told me the biggest lesson he learned was actually during lunch.

But for all I know, the debriefing is the most powerful learning tool a trainer has (and probably the hardest to apply). When you debrief, all the lessons are surfacing, all conclusions are drawn and the usefulness of concepts is acknowledged.

40

But when do you debrief and how do you do it? It’s more of a science than an art, because it all comes down to how people learn.

Each person has their own learning style and there are several theories regarding this aspect.

My favorite is Peter Honey and Alan Mumford's model, witch is simple to understand and apply in a training context. What the model states is that there are four stages of experiential learning, each stage matching a preferred learning style.



“the debriefing is the most powerful learning tool a trainer has”

The Debriefing

Because in a training room you will most likely have all four types, it’s important to design things so that you ‘touch’ every preferred style.

A game, role-play, case study or any activity will only address the first stage and the first learning style.

The debriefing addresses the other three (notice the letter ‘D’ for ‘debriefing’ on the corners of the three boxes).

41



Reflector

[reviewing

the experience]

Theorist

[concluding from

the experience]

Pragmatist

[Planning

the next steps]

Activist

[having

an experience]

This is what the model looks like:

The Debriefing: How To!

FIRST, you offer the trainees an experience. It could be anything that puts them in a learning situation.

SECOND, turn back and talk about what happened. You can ask questions like: How was it? What did you notice? How did you feel during the exercise? How did you decide on the appropriate course of action? What made the task easy? What made it hard?

42

THIRD, challenge participants to learn something from this experience. Ask questions like: what can we learn from this? How would you do it differently? What are your conclusions? What are the key learning points?

FORTH, apply what’s been learned to their day-to-day life. Ask questions like: How does this activity resemble real life? What are the things you can apply immediately in your work? What are the thinks you need to adapt to be able to apply in your work? What will you do differently when you go back to the office? How will you apply what you learned?



2. Talk about what

happened

3. What can we learn from

this?

4. How will you apply what you learned?

1. Experience

The Debriefing: The Missing Link in Team Building

The best moments I’ve had in training were during the debriefing stage. I’ve seen people have that ‘AHA’ moment that every trainer craves to see. I’ve heard people who initially said the exercise was stupid changing their mind in a split second when asked ‘how does this resemble the way you do things at the office?’

For me, debriefing is also the missing link in most team building programs. People have fun playing silly games, paintball or extreme outdoor activities… and then they go back to their jobs and nothing ever changes.

In my experience, the debriefing makes the difference between good team building programs and bad ones.

43

The best feedback I’ve received after a team building was from a guy who told me it was the first time when they actually learned how to work better as a team, not only have meaningless fun. His final statement was something I will never forget: “We’ve been doing teamdrinking before, not teambuilding.”



“We’ve been having team-drinking before, not team-building.”

44



Going Visual

You probably know the famous saying a picture is worth a thousand words. And of course you think it’s sort of true, right? But to what extent is it true? It’s so true it actually received a scientific name: PSE - picture superiority effect.

Compared with other forms of communication, like text or oral presentation, pictures perform way better: we remember them better and for a longer period of time.

In his wonderful book that I keep quoting, John Medina tells us that

after 72 hours people

remember about 10% of information presented orally. That figure turns to 65% if we add a

picture.

Going Visual

Vision is so important that it wins in the face of all the other senses.

That is why it is my firm belief that we, as educators, should use MORE pictures in our classes. We can express anything with pictures, from simple concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to complex notions like ‘leadership is not a popularity contest”.

I use two visual channels to transmit memorable ideas:

1.Projected images on a PowerPoint like application.

2.Drawings

45

With PowerPoint, the idea is straightforward: instead of text describing a concept, how about projecting an image and asking the group how they understand the image? I’ve found some powerful pictures on websites like Fotolia, Dreamstime or iStockphoto. They are cheap to download and come in different sizes.

But drawings make my world go round. When I draw to illustrate a concept, people are paying attention. Their interest for the topic increases, because they can see how a concept is taking shape. And they are more likely to remember the picture, because they were there as it was built.



Yours truly, drawing a team concept

Going Visual

There is something magical about drawing. It may be the fact that our unconscious transforms the experience in a childhood play. Or the fact that we visualize the world around us more than we hear or smell it.

Whatever it is, since I started drawing in my sessions the learning took off, feedbacks improved and results were obviously better.

And after the session, I can take pictures of the drawings and include them in the presentation I send at the end. I’ve had teams who loved the drawings so much they decided to hang them on their office walls, so they can better remember the lessons they learned.

One time I’ve been surprised to hear a team member referring to the drawing on the wall when people were making a mistake they said they wouldn’t make after training.

46

But I can’t draw, you may say. Neither can I. My talent is zero, but I’m a hard worker. I don’t do complicated things. Just light bulbs to represent ideas, hearts to express feelings, little people, sad or smiley faces, some easy animals… nothing too fancy. But if you put it all together, it makes a lot more sense to people than just writing words on a flipchart.

If you don’t know where to start, ImageThink has a list of interesting resources. Also, there are some books you could buy from Amazon; here are the search results for ‘visual facilitation’.



There is something magical about drawing

http://www.imagethink.net/resources/

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_10?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=visual facilitation


We are almost at the end of our journey together and I hope it was as useful for you as it was fun for me to write it. It is only appropriate to end with a short piece on feedback.

While I think any kind of feedback is better than no feedback, I also believe informal feedback is better than formal one. But before I explain myself, on the next page you’ll find some rules that guide me when I solicit feedback.

47



4. Make it easy!

Same as above.

5. Make it personal!

There’s nothing worse than using a standard feedback form for all your trainings. Add some things that are specific to that session, like the training objectives.

6. Give them space!

Don’t look over their shoulder, you will intimidate them and the answers will not be accurate.

7. Do not read the feedback while they are still in the room!!!

This is just bad mojo!

8. Read, weep and learn!

Don’t be too sad (or too happy) about the feedback. Overall, it’s subjective thinking. Just draw your own conclusions and strive to do better next time.

9. Collect and compare!

Make a database and collect all your feedback there. It’s useful to compare your progress from time to time.

I Believe in Informal Feedback: 9 Rules

1. Tell them why it is important to give feedback!

Mention the fact that you need to improve yourself and the best way to do this is to learn from their feedback.

2. Make it anonymous!

People are more honest when they are absolutely sure there is no way they can be found guilty of badmouthing.

3. Make it short!

Imagine this: it’s the end of the session. You are tired. You are hungry. You want to go home. If the form is not short, you will further frustrate the participants. It should take a participant no more than 7 minutes to complete.

48



What this little exercise does is more complicated than the actual activity: it forces people to think about your session through both lenses: negative and positive, while a formal survey, I’ve noticed, makes them more likely to give you one or the other.

This also helps you to admit that no session is perfect (or a complete failure), and helps you get used to receiving critics also.

Whenever I use this I learn something new about my session and the impact it has on people. And I improve my training style and my sessions with every little colorful note I read.

Talking about feedback, I would really appreciate yours.

You can send it at [email protected].

Thanks!


I’ve discovered some years ago that the most useful feedback I have ever received was on a post-it note, from a woman who told me in a couple of short sentences what she liked and what she considered in need of change. This gave me an idea that I’ve been using for quite some time now, with excellent results:

“Draw a vertical line through the middle of a flipchart page, creating two columns. Draw a smiley face on the first column and a sad face on the second. Ask participants to write a positive feedback on a post-it (something they enjoyed or something they think you should keep doing) and a critic on another (something they think you should improve). Now ask them to stick the notes on the appropriate column.”

That’s it.

49



mailto:[email protected]



This Is Just The Beginning…

50



This is Just the Beginning

Whatever you choose to adopt or to adapt from this manifesto, I hope it helps you achieve the results you and your clients deserve.

But if I were to give you one final piece of advice, that would be to really care about the people you work for and to have fun. Without these two it’s not worth it. With these two, I’m sure you will be successful, not only in training but also in life.

I hope you enjoy[ed] the ride.

Thanks for reading!

51



Self-Advertising

If you liked this, you may also like the articles I write every week on my blog, robertblaga.com .

Also, there are more goodies coming in the shape of guides (like this one), customized training packs for you to deliver and more.

I will announce them on my blog and publish them on www.internaltrainer.com.

If you have questions, suggestions or you just want to say hi, you can email me at [email protected] or follow me on twitter @internaltrainer. I promise to answer back!

!Robert

52





http://www.internaltrainer.com/




https://twitter.com/internaltrainer

https://twitter.com/internaltrainer

the internal trainer manifesto

Education