Training "Stickiness"

Bear with me. I will tell you now that this blog would be even better if I were to show you a graphic. If, however, you are willing to use your imagination, I promise that the end of your imagining will be an understanding of why what we in professional learning call, "hit and run" training, rarely works.

So imagine a three-row, three-column table. Titles on the rows are the people involved in training--the trainer, of course, the learner, and the learner's manager. At the top of each column, envision the phases of training--before, during, and after. So far, so good.

Next imagine that we asked a thousand people to list possible actions, including analyzing performance gaps between current and ideal, planning, goal-setting, presenting, evaluating, and generally engaging in conversation around the training. Now put these actions into a survey and ask people to respond to the importance of each action taken at the various training phases by the various actors.

In terms of making the training "stick," what do you think is the rank of probable impact by phase and actor? If you are a trainer, you would like to think that the number one most important thing is actions taken by you, the trainer, during the training. You would be wrong. In the nine cells of the three-by-three table, trainer actions during training is not even in the top one-third of probable impact.

The number one predictor of effective training is (drum roll here) action taken by the trainer's manager before the training. Number two in impact is action taken by the trainer before the training. Number three refers to the manager and what he or she does after the training. Finally in a distant fourth place comes the trainer during the training. Interestingly, action taken by the learner falls into the bottom half of all impacts.

I wish I had conducted the research that exposed what I had suspected all along. Instead it was VitalSmart's social scientists whose work has resulted Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, Influencer, and soon-to-be released, Change Anything. In my experience, confirmed by research, training works best when it is embedded in organizational change and human performance improvement. Someone must lead the improvement and, generally, those someones are the managers.

In the last several months, we have featured in the TLA Monthly Update training results in three TLA intensive site schools, Forest Pines Drive Elementary School, Baucom Elementary School, and Lufkin Road Middle School in Wake County. In each case, the principal and TLA staff sat down and talked about how our training products could help their school. In one case, we customized training by designing it in-house.

In the other schools, we used proprietary products. But in every school, the principal participated in the training, talked with staff in between training sessions, and led conversations around the hoped-for change. After the event, TLA staff talked with the principal about what had happened and what might happen next. Is anyone now amazed that the staff in all three schools report that their improvement efforts have taken root?

I promised that you would leave understanding why "hit and run" training rarely works. If in the future TLA eliminates "open enrollment" training where folk come as they will and leave thinking that something significant has happened, you will understand why. Time is too short, resources too scarce, and our cause too important to be wasteful.