At Holden Advisors, it’s fun to hear stories from our workshop participants about how they negotiated an extra $200K into their deal or took what appeared to be lost cause and turned it into a $5MM opportunity that’s on the cusp of closing. (Both true stories.)
Unfortunately, like with any training, we also hear, “I was so motivated leaving the classroom, but now I’m starting to forget what I learned.”
If you’ve ever attended a great course or conference, you’ve probably felt the same way. You leave the class fired up, get back to your 1,000 emails and almost instantly your motivation and knowledge start to fade. And, if you’re like most people, that’s the extent of your professional development for the year. Next year, you’ll get the chance to attend another conference, learn some new skills and the cycle starts again.
There has to be a better way! Luckily, there is.
We’ve found that coaching is the key to keeping your new-found knowledge fresh and useful. At the same time, it enables you to apply your knowledge to real-life situations affecting your business. We’ve had the most success with the three-step process below (a different kind of “MBA”):
Let's take a look at each of the three steps:
Instead, managers should participate in the training. At Holden Advisors, we assign managers specific roles in our workshops.This enables managers to not only learn the material along with their employees, but also provides them an opportunity to add an extra layer of realism to the training and know what material to reinforce after the training is complete.
Graph courtesy of Growth Engineering (www.growthengineering.co.uk)
These refreshers can come in a variety of forms, but we’ve had the most success with virtual sessions for managers. These coach-the-coach sessions directed at middle managers remind them of specific topics and tools they can reinforce with their sellers. Through these easily-digestible webinars, managers get just what they need – not too much, not too little – for their next set of meetings with their employees.
If you want to become a faster runner, you time yourself occasionally. If you enter a weight-loss program, you step on the scale from time to time. If you want to learn a foreign language, you practice it. So why do you attend training and then never hold yourself accountable to your new skills (or as a manager, hold your employees accountable)?
With a simple system aligned with your core competencies, you can easily track your (or your employees’) performance against what should have been learned in the training. An accountability system keeps coaches focused on important areas that need improvement and ensures employees continue to work on their newfound skills.
Embracing this three-step “MBA” process helps our clients get the most out of training – whether it be immediately following the class, in 1 month or years later. And, when you remember what you learned in a previous class, it’s much easier to build upon that knowledge. Imagine, instead of learning one piece of disconnected knowledge per year, you have the opportunity build on what you learned previously to be truly outstanding in your career field.
That’s when you know your training dollars were well spent.
1 https://www.worklearning.com/2010/12/14/how-much-do-people-forget/