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Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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So it doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does it usually takes me by surprise. It’s every facilitator’s fear—the inappropriate comment. They come in lots of shapes and sizes, ranging from overly personal to highly offensive.

I remember a train-the-trainer session where a prospective trainer’s opening line was, “So Adam and Eve were in the garden.” I thought for sure this was a joke. He got to the end and said, “And that’s how crucial conversations skills could have prevented original sin.” Not the punch line I was expecting.

We all fear and dread over-shares and inappropriate comments, but what’s the best way to handle them in the moment? One thing that’s worked for me is to use a contrast of sorts: thank the person for being willing to share, and clarify what’s appropriate to share in this setting. What do you do in these types of situations?

Comment below to share your ideas.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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My sons hate practice—piano, soccer, math—you name it. If it’s the least bit related to practice, they hate it on principle. They even started hating other words that sound like or rhyme with practice. For example, last year we hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru. In preparation for the four-day trek, we decided to do a number of practice hikes. Now, my boys enjoy hiking—until I inserted the word “practice” in front of it. “We know how to hike. Why do we need to practice something we already know?!?!??” After many years, I’ve now come to expect this from teenage boys.

Fast forward to a recent executive development session I conducted. The mere mention of practice stirred the group into a frenzy: “We understand the concept—why do we need to practice?!??!” In that moment I caught a glimpse of my whiny boys’ future. And while I expect it from my teenagers, I was surprised to hear this from execs. It was like they forgot that development was the key component in executive development.

So why do we practice? To torture teenagers and executives? To experience the higher pitches of their vocal ranges? No. Why, then?

Ethna Reid, a master educator from the Exemplary Center for Reading Improvement, provides a definitive answer to this question, “If you want to know if you’re changing behavior you have to see it immediately.” Our goal is to change behavior, and for that to happen, practice is required. So here are a few tips to make practice more effective.

1. Allot enough time to practice. So many trainers, when running short on time, skip and/or drastically cut practice time. If you can’t practice it, don’t train it.
2. Practice until they get it correct. Participants who attempt a new skill and fall short should be praised for their effort. And they should also be coached and allowed the chance to do it correctly before moving on.
3. Make it observable. If you can’t observe their practice, you have no idea the degree to which their behavior is changing, if at all. Have participants write it out, say it out loud, or otherwise demonstrate the skill so you can evaluate their progress and give feedback (both positive and negative). This doesn’t mean a person has to stand up and share in front of the whole class—practice is often best done in smaller groups. So when you are working in smaller groups, be careful to float from group to group so you can observe the participant group progress as a whole.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it sure helps.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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One of my year-end activities is tallying up the total number of training days I delivered (one way to ensure my fingers are ready for any math challenge that comes my way). It gives me a sense of how many individuals were impacted by these sessions as well as of my own learning experiences with the different groups.

This year, as I was right in the middle of reflecting and pondering—in a state of really “deep think” about the year’s experience as a whole—I received an e-mail from a work colleague. Attached was a Wall Street Journal article titled, “So Much Training.” As that was exactly the topic I’d been contemplating, I opened it straightaway.

It wasn’t until I was about three paragraphs in that I realized that, due to the heavy meditative haze I’d been operating under, I’d misread the title. There was a second half that I had overlooked entirely: “So Little to Show for It.” And as you might guess, this second phrase was more indicative of the article’s content.

The article explores why many organizations aren’t realizing the full potential of their training initiatives and makes the point that, in order to receive the full value, what happens before and after training is more important than what happens during training. While this isn’t the first time that I’ve heard this, because I was in the middle of my review exercise it hit me in a different way. It got me thinking of the degree to which I helped and hindered the groups with which I worked.

In training terms, I’m the “during” guy, not the “before” or “after” guy. I arrive to deliver a training session or two, and then I’m off to another organization. But just because I’m not responsible for the “before” and “after” doesn’t mean that I should focus solely on the “during.” I can talk with those who are responsible—ask them what needs the training fulfills in their organization, provide them with learning objective worksheets they can distribute to the managers of those who will participate in the actual session, suggest ways to measure achievement of learning objectives across individuals, recommend post-training practice strategies, etc.

And as the “during” guy, I think there’s a lot I (or anyone in this position) can do in the session that can help support (not replace) “before” and “after” activities. I have activities to use (have the class take two minutes to brainstorm common tough situations they face), commitments to extend (have participants set a date and time to follow up and practice with a partner from the class), questions to ask (“Where and how do you think you’ll be able to use this skill?”), and tools to offer (introduce the contract cards as an easy-access review or checklist).

As you prepare for your 2013 training sessions, consider what you can do to change the title of the Wall Street Journal article to “So Much Training, So Much to Show for It” for your organization.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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This classic scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off comes to mind each time I prepare to train a new group. For those of you who have seen the movie, you’ll remember this scene. Ferris is absent from class. His teacher monotonously says his name during roll call in hopes that repetition will work its magic and Ferris will somehow show up.

I’ve realized over the years that, like Ferris Bueller’s teacher, our participants are hoping that we show up—and not just physically. It’s one thing to be physically present, but the participants of today expect more. They expect us to be present with them, not just present in the room. Able to read the group’s interest level and respond accordingly. Able to apply the material to their circumstances. Able to inscribe a personalized message on their heart, mind, and soul! Well, or at least a personalized message on the inside cover of their participant guide. I think you know what I mean.

So what’s your trick—what do you do in your preparation or during the session that allows you to be present with your participants? I’m interested in two categories of responses here: 1) what advice do you have for trainers who are fairly new to the VitalSmarts suite of programs and 2) what advice do you have for trainers who are so familiar with the suite they run the risk of phoning in their training?

Join the conversation by sharing your thoughts below.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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Recently, I was in the back of the room (no, I was not asked to sit there—at least not this time) of a training session. I was watching Angela as she worked her way through the material. She was working well with the group and doing a nice job of engaging them with the material.

After lunch on the first day, her class found themselves wrapped up in a fascinating discussion. They were engaged. They were applying the material to themselves and pulling poor Angela off her schedule. Time began to fly. The first ten minutes of discussion quickly doubled. Twenty minutes behind and they were still interested in continuing on. Angela paused to ask, “Wow, this seems valuable. Should we spend more time on this, or should we move on to the next concept?”

While this is a great question, she addressed it to the wrong audience. She should have directed it to herself. She was asking the group to make a decision without all the information to do so. They don’t know what they’re giving up in order to spend more time where they are. Yes, there are ways to make up time, and yet so many times what happens is the sections toward the end of the training are shortened—sometimes to the point of being non-recognizable. You condense the heck out of the materials, and in the end, the participants suffer.

Participants need you, the facilitator, to make these types of decisions. Instead of asking the group and allowing them to make the decision, solicit input and make the decision yourself. At times, you’ll decide to spend the extra time, and other times you’ll decide to move forward in the material. But you, the facilitator, need to decide to decide.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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It’s 3:55 in the afternoon. And even though the participants accepted an appointment that clearly stated the session would run until 4:45, most are packing up and leaving—at least mentally. But the big problem is you’re ready to join them.

The end-of-day malaise. I think most everyone’s experienced it, but there is a wide range in how trainers respond. How you respond makes the difference in whether people pack up mentally or hang in there with you until the end of the day—the time they agreed to when they accepted the appointment in the first place.

So many trainers I see start to turn up the volume, become more animated, or otherwise “crank up the show.” Yet that’s been one of the least effective ways to approach the situation. Participants sit back and lay bets on how long until the presenter’s batteries run out.

Which brings me to this: What have you found that works to address the end-of-day malaise?

Join the conversation by sharing your thoughts below.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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They say the West was tamed eventually—not by rough characters and the guns they carried, but by settlers. They came from the East staking claims and portioning off land.

In much the same way, many teachers stake out their claims in the classroom. They arrive to a new class, pace off an eight-by-twenty-foot space in the front, and establish their figurative, yet extremely real, territorial borders. In essence, these teachers declare that space as theirs—they walk it, stack and pile their stuff in it, and lecture from it into the space beyond (the area staked and claimed by the participants), thus creating a great continental divide (but at least it solves that terrible “student-teacher mixing” problem they’ve been experiencing for so many years).

If the teacher wants to establish him or herself, he or she needs to think in terms of the whole room—not “my small territory in the front,” and “the badlands” . . . I mean, “the participants’ space.” And to do this, one of the things a teacher needs to do very early on, and very deliberately, is to break the plane. In other words, walk into the participants’ space and spend some time moving around within that space, thus marking the whole classroom as their joint territory.

Moving into “participants’ space” allows the teacher to walk around during assignments, make sure people are on task, offer comments and suggestions to individuals, check understanding, etc. You ought to break the plane within the first fifteen minutes, and then frequently thereafter—especially during activities and exercises.

When you do this, you’ll find that you’re able to catch problems early, help participants internalize learning, and attain a higher rate of compliance in following exercise instructions.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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I spent last week in the classroom—the back of the classroom. No, it wasn’t for misbehaving. I observed a couple of our certified trainers deliver training. I don’t get to do this very often, so I wondered how this experience would compare to the view from the front of the class. I prepared for what I thought I should expect and settled in for a two-day experience. Yet nothing I did prepared me for the end of the class.

The trainer had wrapped up, answered questions, and closed on a high. I was turning my attention to something else when I heard the unthinkable. He said, “I really enjoyed having you here for the last two days and hope you learned some new skills and approaches.” Now hang on, because while I have heard this last part many times, it was this next part that really caught my attention. “I’ll be coming around your work area this next week and will stop in to see how you’re doing with your skills and answer any questions you might have.”

Wow! What a novel idea! What difference would it make to be able to re-connect with the participants? Coach them? Encourage and praise them? Help them apply their skills to the situations and circumstances that are most pressing? So here’s my question for you: Do you know what happens to your participants once they leave the class?

Share your thoughts below.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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It seems like a simple question that should elicit a fairly straightforward, simple answer. But nooooo, Al wanted more than the standard “8:00 A.M.” response. So he asked again, “When does training start?”

The setting was our VitalSmarts best practices meeting, and Al Switzler was trying to get us to think more deeply about our preparation and to pinpoint the time when we “turn on” for training. “So many times the presenter turns on the charm, enthusiasm, energy, interest in participants, the smile (Al went on for a while, but for the sake of brevity I’ll summarize the majority of his list with, “etc.”) once the clock strikes that magical start time hour.” He went on to say that training should start much earlier than the time printed on the invitation letter, and that if you are currently starting at that time, you’re starting too late and missing huge opportunities to engage the participants and set the appropriate climate.

With this in mind, I’m interested in hearing when training starts for you. What do you do to make sure it starts off well? Share your thoughts below to get the idea flow started.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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You’re in a session doing your utmost to train some people up. You ask a question. A participant responds. He’s somewhat correct, but also somewhat wrong in his response. What would you do?

Would you. . .

A) Affirm the participant for responding, and fill in with the more accurate information.
B) Inform the participant he was inaccurate, and fill in with the more accurate information.
C) Ask another participant to respond.
D) Start answering your own questions to avoid future problems.

If you answered A or B, you’d be grouped in with the majority of the trainers I interact with. They use the “yes-and” approach (say something like, “yeah that’s right,” and proceed to correct the mistake) to address the gap. The problem here is that if you use this approach with a response that is inaccurate rather than incomplete, you send the participant away thinking he or she was correct, and set him or her up to experience difficulties later on during attempts to apply the flawed understanding.

And the correct answer is. . . E) none of the above. Drat that trick question!

During a recent meeting with one of my ultra-favorite, really-smart, rock-star heroes Dr. Ethna Reid (If you’d like to know more about Ethna, her research, and her results, click here), I found myself pondering the following comment: “The fewer errors students are allowed to make, the more discriminating they will be about correct usage.” The more I thought about it, the more it really resonated with me.

In many ways this flies in the face of what seems like the best response in the moment. A participant makes a flawed attempt to use a skill or makes a comment that falls short of the mark. You want to correct the point without making the participant look bad so you jump right in, bridge the inaccuracy with a “yes-and,” and transition to the next idea or concept. Old habits (and the bamboo plant gift in my office) die hard.

Instead of giving way to this urge, prepare your participants to be more effective by 1) pointing out the correct and incorrect portions of their responses, and 2) giving them an opportunity to correct it themselves. Do this and you’re sure to see your participants move beyond a surface understanding of training skills to discriminating usage.