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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.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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Like many of you, I spend a majority of my time on the road (hence the title of this column). So it was a new experience to be off the road for a three-week stretch. It also allowed for a new type of teaching experience.

It happened at the conclusion of a lesson I sat through at church. The instructor, Joe, asked me to stay behind after class, and despite the painfully vivid warnings my seventh grade memories generated, I agreed.

When everyone left, Joe confessed, “I studied this thing forever. I must have read it three to four times, and spent about two and half hours prepping for this twenty-minute lesson. Then one tough question, and bam, I’m rambling man Joe. I guess I need to spend more time in prep.”

Now right up front, you need to know that insufficient prep time was not the big problem. Something was happening during his teaching time that is a little more difficult to observe from the instructor’s vantage. Someone would ask a question that couldn’t be answered in the set of points he was supposed to make, he’d open his mouth, and introduce rambling man Joe to the group.

What Joe really needs is better stalling skills. The best teachers, trainers, and facilitators use stalling skills to create a little space so they can process the question before they respond. They don’t feel as though they have to know the answer to every question. But they are skilled at creating a little time to allow themselves to think before they respond.

If this sounds (or feels) familiar to you, here are a couple of my favorite tips:

1. Ask the group what they think. This old standby gives you a chance to think, gets the group involved, and other students often give really good answers.
2. Defer until later. It’s ok to say something like, “That’s interesting. I haven’t thought of that before. Let me think about it and get back to you in the morning.” Or even, “That’s interesting. Could we talk about that during the break?”
3. Ask the person for some clarification. Either ask them to give a little more detail, or even ask them why they are asking the question.

If you create a little space for yourself to think, there is no need for long pauses, slowing the rate of your speech, or jumping in with a half-thought-out response.

If you have additional ideas, let’s continue the conversation below. Hope to see you at REACH!

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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I’m writing this article, as I have many times in the past, during my plane ride home (Woo-Hoo!). However, I’m not returning from conducting a training, as is often the case, but rather from a number of certified trainer workshops that were held on the East Coast.

These sessions really reinvigorate me. I see familiar faces of those I’ve certified and worked with in the past. I get to hear about how others are using the materials. I’m exposed to a whole range of best practices (e.g., some people have taken questions submitted to the authors via the newsletter and sent them as part of the invitations to attend training with a teaser like, “Come to training to find out how to best respond to this and other similar questions.”). And I especially enjoy hearing the firsthand accounts of how participants responded to and utilized their newly acquired skills.

This whole last week has got me really excited to see everyone at the REACH Conference this year. I can hardly wait. So help me out. Give me something to tide me over. Please send me some of your recent experiences with the training or cool new ideas you can share with me to help the time go more quickly.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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In last month’s post, I talked about those crucial first ten minutes of a session—the time when the participants decide how much attention they are going to give to you and the material. But, what about the 107 ten-minute segments (this comprises the math portion of this article) that follow? It turns out each ten-minute segment is pretty important, and to describe exactly why and how that is, I’m going to rely on a mash-up.

What’s a mash-up you say? Have you ever read two books on completely different topics that present ideas which seem so similar that you’d like to blend them together—kind of in a “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” sort of way? Doing so would constitute a mash-up.

So here is my mash-up of Brain Rule #4 from John Medina’s Brain Rules with Change the Pace fromDoug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

Brain Rule #4: Audiences check out after ten minutes, but you grab them back.

Change the Pace: Using a variety of activities to accomplish your objectives on the same topic and moving from one to the other creates the illusion of speed.

When you mash these two together you realize that people don’t want you to switch topics every ten minutes or even increase the number of topics covered. They want to be engaged. And given that their attention lasts about ten minutes, you have to change up the type of delivery. Pace is an illusion. You can seem to go fast while not skipping from idea to idea, but rather moving in between different activities that help you fully explore an idea.

So what does this mean for trainers? You should be thinking about your presentations in segments of ten minutes. Every ten minutes or so you should change the mode or style of learning. If you’ve been engaged in an extended lecture, it’s time to switch to a table activity, or have people turn and teach their partner, or turn and identify three opportunities to use or apply the idea currently being discussed. Now take ten, and then get back to work.

What are your thoughts? Suggestions?

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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“You have about ten minutes with this group. If you don’t get them engaged in the first ten minutes, you’re done.” These were the first words out of Seth’s mouth during a phone call to prepare for an upcoming session. The next were, “If it were any other group it would be different, but this group is special.” I don’t think Seth knew how mistaken he was.

You see, Seth didn’t realize that regardless of the background, the level, the experience, you’ve got about ten minutes to get them engaged. This is a crucial moment in the training experience—a time when the participants decide how much attention they are going to give to you and the material. So how you spend that first ten minutes becomes very important to the experience you and your group will have.

Many times, I’ve seen trainers allow those ten minutes to be filed with too much fluff, and not enough stuff from the program. Next time you’re training, take some time to prep that first ten minutes to see if you can more quickly and effectively engage the participants with an exercise, video, story, example, or case study that will grab their attention and their willingness to give you their second ten minutes of attention (but that’s a topic for next time).

What are your thoughts? Suggestions?

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a Master Trainer and Vice President of Professional Services at VitalSmarts.
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A little while back, I showed up for a class and found myself surrounded by introverts. And not just any old introverts, I’m talking about an elite group of genetically enhanced super-introverts hand picked from across the company to attend my class.

I asked a question . . . silence. I waited them out . . . in silence. We watched funny videos . . . (you guessed it) in silence. And just to be clear, I’m talking the kind that’s way beyond the sound of silence that Simon and Garfunkel were singing about.

Anyway , nuff said about my group. I’m interested in your input here. Write in and tell me what you’ve done to work with a group like this one. Yours truly . . . in silence.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a master trainer and vice president of professional services at VitalSmarts.
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I’m not a superstitious person, but I do have a set number of training rituals I adhere to. You know, things like always using a three water-cup rotation to ensure I stay hydrated, and never, never, never (and I mean never) training with spare change in your pocket—I find I’m just too tempted to break out in a stirring round of “I got change that jingle, jangle, jingles as I go trainin’ merrily along.”

One ritual I never miss is handing out the evaluations at the end of the course—because you need to know how you did, right? In fact, this ritual is so regular and significant that I started thinking of trainings in terms of the overall score from the eval. When people asked how my session had gone, I’d respond with something like, “Well, you know, it was about a 5.7.” I even got pretty good at predicting the overall scores before I finished the training.

Last week I taught back-to-back classes. The first session was okay (it was about a 5.4), but the second session was on track to be at least a 5.8 and maybe even a 5.9. Just as I was whipping the class into a late afternoon learning frenzy, with a 5.9 clearly in sight, a participant from the previous day peeked through the door and beckoned me out of the class.

I knew if I ducked out to talk to this guy, I’d be looking at a 5.4 at best. I looked over and saw he was still there waiting for me, so I took one last look at my 5.9, gave the class an exercise to work on, and slipped out of the back of the room.

He apologized for interrupting my session and then said, “I just wanted to come by and let you know that I had a crucial conversation this morning with my boss that I’d been putting off. It was a conversation I had thought was hopeless, but in the end it turned out great. In fact it worked out so well this morning, I’ve set up another one with my director for this afternoon. I just wanted to let you know that all that stuff you were teaching us really worked. Thanks.” We talked for a minute more before he took off for his second crucial conversation.

It’s experiences like these that help underscore that some rituals aren’t the driving reason for why we do things. In other words, it’s not all about the evals! Yes, they are helpful. Yes, they provide valuable improvement feedback. But, in the end, the reason we step in front of any class shouldn’t be the elusive 5.9, but to help individuals meet and overcome the significant challenges they’re facing. Thank you, Justin. I’m glad you took the time to remind me of this last week.

Steve Willis’ From the Road column will now be published in the Trainer Talk Newsletter, our e-newsletter for VitalSmarts trainers. To read past From the Road articles, visit the newsletter archive.

ABOUT THE EXPERT
Steve Willis is a master trainer and vice president of professional services at VitalSmarts.
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I’m on the road training almost every week—training here, training there, training, training everywhere. So, it’s a rare and nice occasion when I can be in my home state of Utah for three or more consecutive days. And, it’s even nicer when those consecutive days involve the annual REACH Conference.

REACH 2010 was held August 4-5 in Salt Lake City. It was great to see so many familiar faces from sessions I’ve conducted over the years and to meet so many new certified trainers. I loved catching up with people and especially loved the new ideas and insights they shared about how they are using VitalSmarts training materials. One new insight came from David Zinger, a Certified Trainer from Manitoba, Canada.

David has a great way to prepare his participants to engage in exercises. While I’ll highlight how he uses it to set up the Angry Accountant exercise in Crucial Conversations, I want to emphasize that this approach is not limited to this specific exercise or program.

After he introduces the first skill of Master My Stories, David asks participants to turn to page 140 in their manuals and take a couple of minutes to read and discuss the definitions of facts and stories with a statement like this, “Take a couple of minutes to review the definitions on page 140 because we’re going to use them in the next exercise.” He gives them a chance to review and talk about the definitions and then launches them right into an exercise that allows them to put those definitions to use. This exercise puts the responsibility for learning squarely on the participant and puts you in a position to coach and clarify.

I encourage you to try this out in one of your own upcoming sessions (In fact, I used this approach today during an Influencer class) and I think you’ll agree with me that David is definitely on to something here—Thanks again, David!