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Prepare employees for training text

Have you ever walked into a room to get something but you can't remember what you came to get? For some reason you just can't remember. Participating in training without a clear goal in mind is sort of like that experience. You're there, but you're not quite sure what you're looking for. So you walk back out of the room and a few seconds later you remember you were looking for your keys. Now you go back in the room and instantly find them. Having a clear goal when you come to training is a lot like that second time. It's much easier to find something if you know what you're looking for. I'd like to show you a worksheet I use to ensure participants are prepared for training. It's called the Workshop Planner. Before we continue, I suggest you pause the video and download this worksheet from the exercise files. When you're ready, continue the video and we'll walk through the worksheet together. Are you ready? In this example, we've been asked to deliver a presentation skills workshop to people who need to pitch projects internally to senior leaders. Our learning objective is for participants to deliver presentation in class that effectively demonstrates competency in content development, visual aids, speaking and body language. The workshop planner helps us create an action plan to prepare participants for the training by looking at actions before, during and after the workshop. Before the workshop, we want to determine what the participants should do, what their supervisors should do to support this, and what the trainer needs to do to support the supervisor. During the workshop, we ask the same thing. What the participants need to do? What support do they need from the supervisor, and what should the trainer do? Finally, we look at what we expect participants to do after the workshop, and determine what support is needed from both the supervisor and the trainer. You can do this exercise for our sample presentation skills workshop by downloading the Sample Workshop Plan. Pause the video to complete your plan and then restart it to see the discussion from the live class. - And trainer. - [Man] Needs to facilitate, be engaging. - Yeah, yeah. - Materials that they said they were going to present on, and make it engaging. - Yeah, yeah. - Now, after the training. - The participant needs to be accountable, and follow-up on any action items. - Yeah. - Or just apply. - Or apply. (group murmuring) - Make it simple to apply the training. - [Host] Suzanne, if you're going to start with your training, what do you want them to focus on in the training itself? - My participants? - Yes. - I want them to focus on what we're training them. I mean the specific, the outline that they were given. - Yes. - Before they went to the class. - So come to the training, give them the training. - Yeah. - Have an open mind. - Focus, yeah. - Participate. - [Man] Some way to reinforce what you just learned. - But I was going to say, I think the supervisor needs to reinforce and apply. - Okay. - Like application. - So I want to bring you back together, I know I only gave you a couple of minutes to do this, but you're doing a great job filling this out. I think a lot of you realize that this doesn't have to be complicated. We're just putting everything in one space. I was sharing with one of the groups, every time I facilitate a workshop with a client of mine, we do this as part of our planning process. It never takes more than an hour. So it's a very short discussion, but we have a very comprehensive action plan. In this case, we've kind of done a speed version of it, if you will. But we got a few basic actions, you realize, we do these things much more successful with training and if we somehow forget to do these things the training's not going to be as successful or impactful. So let's just see if we can get just a couple of examples. The training itself, what do we expect, one thing we would expect from participants going to this presentation skills training? - To be on the court. - Pay attention. - Participation. - Participation, right? Which seems pretty obvious, but I'll tell you that some participants can't wait to participate, and other people, it's bad enough giving a presentation. It's really bad giving a presentation in a class with people in the back of the room going, "Okay well, we're going to evaluate you, "and give you a score at the end, "and tell you how you're doing." For some people that's difficult. And so, helping people work through that ahead of time, that this is a constructive process is a good conversation to have. What would you expect, say, from the supervisor? - To be supportive and check in with the employee. Show face at the presentation. - Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then, obviously the trainer. Alright this is usually the most obvious part of this whole worksheet. What would the trainer be responsible for during the training? - Facilitate. - Training the workshop, right? (laughter) Sometimes I'm tempted just to block out that box, but we're like, alright, no, is there. What I find though, if you're having this dialogue, often there's something specific that comes up when we get to that box. "You know it would be great if you gave an example on this." "Or one of the specific challenges that our team has "when they're presenting to senior executives "is not getting to the point. "Can you do an exercise around getting to the point "and putting that more in the beginning "of the presentation?" So maybe there's something specific that they ask of you as a trainer. - Add in the corporate culture, or their company culture concepts. - Absolutely, yeah. So that might, and hopefully it comes up ahead of time, but if not, this is another safety valve, if you will, for those types of things to come up. What about after the training? We often think about, "Hey everybody thanks for being here." And the training's over, but the training's really not over until we've accomplished our learning objectives. So what would we want to see from our participants after this presentation skills training? - [Man] They apply their learning. - [Host] Apply their learning. How would they apply it? - Well the supervisor might need to give them different opportunities for that training piece that they had. What exactly is the content and how would they work through that in this situation. - Absolutely. And then maybe there's even an upcoming opportunity where they're going to give a real presentation, right? - [Man] Yeah. - So think about that transformation for just a moment. Typical training, generic presentation skills class, Yay, you know it was fun. With this model we're saying, identify a presentation you've got to give, come to the workshop being prepared and open to improving your skills and immediately after the workshop, we're going to have you deliver a presentation using the skills you've just learned, and the supervisor, who's very supportive, is going to be there to help coach you through additional development. Very different learning model, right? One is kind of generic and I hope it works, and the other is very performance based. We're moving someone along to, we hope, giving much more effective presentations. So what do we need from the supervisor then, I think you answered it, which is being supportive, encouraging that, but also being that person to coach additional learning, et cetera. Now often, as the trainer, we're like, "Hey, class is over, see ya later." Is there anything we can expect from the trainer after the training? - [Man] Follow-up. - Follow, sure. - [Man] Ask them how their presentation went. - Touching base, following up. - [Man] Maybe set some action items. - Yeah. It doesn't have to end at the formal class. Maybe there's a follow-up coaching session, or maybe it's, "Send me your Powerpoint Deck "for your next presentation. "We'll go take a look at it and I'll review it, "send you some notes on the way back." There's many different options that you can think of as a trainer to extend that learning into the realm of performance. Here's what our final plan might look like. Notice there's not a lot of action items, or steps involved. It's okay to keep things simple. We just want to capture everything in one place. I like to use the Workshop Planner whenever I'm facilitating a workshop. It helps participants be more prepared, it helps their supervisors better support the training, and it helps me do a better job as a trainer.

2.1 Consider the Future & Learn from the Past

Consider the Future & Learn from the Past text

To be a strategic thinker you can't just consider the present, the day-to-day in front of you. You have to take stock of the future through evaluating trends and identifying possible scenarios, and interpret the past so you can learn from it. Here's how to master both skills. When it come to the future, of course no one's foresight is perfect. All you can do is guess, but with practice, your guesses can become far more nuanced and informed. One important element is recognizing both macro trends that will impact society, maybe the rise of driverless cars or 3D printing, and micro trends that will impact your industry specifically. Most people don't bother to seek out this kind of big-picture information. They're content to just do their job, and are surprised when disruption happens, but if you stay on top of trends, you won't be surprised. In fact, you'll be far ahead of others, because you'll have had years to strategize and adapt so that when disruption hits, you not only have a plan, but are already implementing it. To effectively monitor trends, it's important to read voraciously, both general interest and industry-specific publications. It's also useful to identify people in your life, whether inside your industry or not, whom you think of as particularly well informed. Maybe it's a university professor in your social circle, or a guy who works at a think tank, or a magazine reporter you run into at conferences. If you see that they watch trends closely, make a point of drawing them out. Ask them what's interesting, or promising, or worrisome to them, and learn from their insights. It's also useful to engage in scenario building, a process that's popular with the military. This is mapping out, literally writing down like a story, multiple possible ways that the future could play out. Any individual scenario probably isn't going to happen exactly as you imagine it, but pieces of multiple scenarios might well happen, and identifying possible weaknesses or opportunities early on can allow you to plan more effectively for them. Finally, when it comes to understanding the past, it's important not just to be aware of what happened, but also why. As humans, we're pretty good at identifying explanations, but a common problem is that after we find one that's plausible we stop looking. Yet oftentimes there's more than one reason something happened. The company may have gone out of business because the founder made bad hiring decisions, but it's possible that the product-market fit also wasn't right, and they relied too heavily on print advertising when they should have done more online. We can't let ourselves be content with simple answers if they don't actually represent the whole story. We need to train ourselves to ask, "Is there more I should be aware of?" Learning to take a holistic view of the past can yield insights that are often hidden to others. Getting good at strategic thinking means we can't afford to just live in the present. We have to develop a healthy intuition about the future and a clear eye to understanding of the past.

2.2 How to Create an Informed Strategy

How to Create an Informed Strategy text

Strategy's important, but here's the thing, it has to be an informed strategy. You can't input faulty assumptions and expect something amazing to just come out of it because you're being strategic. Here are three ways you can become smarter and more nuanced in your strategic thinking. First, recognize that good strategy doesn't have to be innovative. Sure, sometimes it is, and it can be transformative. Everyone would like to invent the next iPhone. But good strategy, as the professor and author Richard Rumelt has said, is about making choices. And those choices don't necessarily have to be something unique, that the world has never seen. Look at history. Review past examples and see what's worked before. That might provide a useful guide for you. Look at what your competitors are doing. There's probably a pretty good reason for it. Now, depending on what that reason is, you may want to copy them or you may want to circle around and do something completely different, but either way, you want to be aware of and informed by what they're doing. Second, think about future trends in your industry. What do you suspect from your research and general knowledge of the field that the next breakthrough in your industry is going to be, then ask yourself will I or my company most likely achieve this breakthrough or will a competitor, and why? That can help you understand where you may be under-investing and should reallocate your resources or your focus. If you have an intuition about where things are going, you might as well position yourself to try to get there first. Third and finally, make sure you're soliciting input from diverse sources. It's tempting to fall back on what's easy, relying on your own opinion or a tight little circle of people from inside your company, the usual suspects. But that's not how you get the best insights, or the smartest answers. What about the actual users of the product or service you're designing? What do they think and what would they find valuable? Can you ask them, or go out into the field and learn from them? What about people who are in your orbit, but wouldn't necessarily weigh in? The interns or the accounting staffer, whomever. The problem with strategic blind spots is you really are blind. You literally have no idea you're missing something so you don't even know to look for it. But if you deliberately make it a practice to bring in new voices and new perspectives, you mitigate against that risk and give yourself a far better chance of uncovering blind spots. If you want to develop good strategies, if you want your strategic thinking to be well-informed, then following these practices can make a big difference.

2.3 Get the Details Right

Get the Details Right text

A strategy that's good in theory isn't much help in the real world. You want your strategic thinking to be relevant and useful, and actually something you can use. That means you can't just figure out what would work best in an ideal world. You need to apply your strategy to this world that we live in. Here's how to do it. First, take some time to map out your assets and allies. What skills or knowledge, or experience do you possess that can help you? If your big focus is expansion into the Latin American market, speaking Spanish is going to be a huge help, along with the rotation you did in the Buenos Aires office. And perhaps your knowledge of social media, if that's going to be a key component of the corporate strategy there. And what relationships, which allies can you tap? Maybe it's your boss, who knows you want to take a leading role in the expansion and is willing to put you forward. Maybe it's the head of communications who knows how skilled you are with social media, and wants to make sure someone knowledgeable has a role in the new initiative. Maybe it's a friend from college, who's now a corporate leader in Chile and can give you on the ground intel about business conditions in the country. Taking note of the assets and allies you possess helps you get clear on how you can leverage them to make things happen. Next, think about what constraints you'll face. Unfortunately, you'll rarely face a 100% positive situation when it comes to implementing your strategy. In addition to assets and allies, you'll also likely have negative factors at work. These are your constraints. Before you come up with a plan that's just a little too rosy, you want to give yourself a reality check and take note of the obstacles you might face. For instance, it could be people. Maybe the VP of operations wants to install his own guy in Latin America and therefore, block you. It could be structural. Maybe you work in a vertical that's never historically been a path to international careers. And at least at this point the pathways are stacked against you. Or it could be cultural. Maybe your company values experience and longevity more than anything else. So it's hard to get your ideas heard when you've only been there a couple of years. Taking note of the constraints you face helps you understand how you can begin to overcome or work around them. Finally, break your strategy down into specific steps. If you really want to accomplish something make sure you take the time to develop specific goals. And identify the tactics you're going to use to get there. For instance, in this example, your strategy is to become a leader in your company's Latin American expansion efforts. Your goal might be to land a specific leadership role in the team. And your tactics might be, over the next six months, understanding who makes the hiring decisions. And making sure your allies recommend you to that person. You can also refresh your Spanish, so it's sharp. And spend your own time researching the Latin American market, through in depth reading, informational interviews and conversations. So your knowledgeable and can hit the ground running. Thinking strategically is important but only if it's realistic and attainable. That's why you have to get the details right.

3.1 Strategic Thinking with Your Team

Strategic Thinking with Your Team text

Strategic thinking by yourself is nice, but oftentimes your goals can't be accomplished alone. You need buy-in and support from your boss, your colleagues and your employees. Here are three ways to cultivate that. First, if you're developing a strategy, do not unveil it at the strategy meeting. That might sound counterintuitive, but the savviest professionals understand that meetings in which strategies are presented are actually ratification meetings. The real work takes place beforehand, systematically briefing key people to get their input and feedback, and addressing any concerns they might have up front. You absolutely do not want to share your lovingly crafted strategy for the first time and have it torpedoed because your boss has a knee-jerk reaction against it, or some key player misinterprets an aspect of it and goes ballistic, or because someone springs a question on you that you hadn't thought through. Save yourself that self-destructive agony and engage in a campaign of premeetings with anyone whose blessing you need to make something work and bring them into the process. That makes it far more likely they'll be favorable toward it, or at least, less unhappy. It's also important when you're mapping out your strategy to identify objections that people are likely to have and create detailed responses. If you set aside time to brainstorm, you can probably come up with 90% of the objections people are going to throw at you. There's no excuse for being unprepared. For instance, let's say you want to launch a new product. You estimate it'll bring in 10 million dollars the first year, great. But you can easily imagine a skeptic might question at how you arrived at that number, so you want to have a detailed explanation ready, showing not just how you arrived at the number, but why your figures are actually on the conservative side. You'll also want to prepare to face objectors, meaning, individuals who feel particularly threatened by your proposal. For instance, if you're suggesting that marketing should take over a function that sales has always held, there's probably going to be some blowback over the perceived loss of control. But if you're aware that's coming your way, perhaps you can make other concessions that would soften the blow or somehow make the arrangement more palatable. You may never win them over completely if you're stepping on their turf, but if you can at least turn the volume down from nuclear to dissatisfied, that's a win. Finally, you'll want to put in place a system to maintain accountability with your team. At a basic level, that might look like sending around an email after every meeting with a recap of what was agreed on and who's doing what. At a macro level, it means reiterating frequently what your timeline is, what the markers are on the path to that timeline and ensuring there is no slippage along the way. The goal of strategic thinking isn't really thinking, it's accomplishing your strategy, and to do that effectively, almost always, you'll need to bring your team on board.

3.2 Measure Your Success

Measure Your Success text

How do you know if your strategy is on the right track? You developed it with the best of intentions, taking into account all the facts you had at the time. But circumstances change and evolve. It's possible that your strategy should, too. How do you know? Here's a three step system you can put in place to measure your progress and keep yourself moving forward. First, identify your assumptions. You can't really know if your strategy is working if you're murky on what success should look like. Yes, you want the new product to be a hit, but what does that mean? How many units sold? By when? How many mentions in the press or new wholesale partners? It's only when you identify and write down your assumptions up front, that you're able to realistically discern how you're doing, and know whether it's time to change your approach. Second, evaluate your progress at regular intervals. It's common in business life to create annual plans. The research by Rita McGrath of Columbia University shows that it's actually not such a useful habit anymore in these fast-moving times. Instead, she discovered that the most successful companies actually create quarterly plans instead, so they're able to be more nimble in adapting to a changed environment. Similarly, whether we're talking about your business strategy or a strategy for your career, it's useful to build in regular intervals where you evaluate progress against your assumptions. It could be quarterly, it could be when you hit certain predetermined milestones, like 10,000 units sold or your first million in revenue, or both. The key is identifying in advance when and how you're going to track your progress, so it doesn't get forgotten or neglected once you're in the midst of implementation, which can get chaotic and messy, at times. You create the order and the structure up front. Finally, document your processes. We're not just doing strategy for strategy's sake. We're engaged in strategic thinking, because we want to get better at making smart decisions. We want to learn and improve over time. But that's not going to happen by itself. You don't get to be a better basketball player by making a thousand lousy free throws. You get to be a better basketball player by practicing a thousand times and studying, in detail, what you did wrong and how to improve it. It's deliberate practice that makes a difference according to the well-known researcher, Anders Ericsson of 10,000 hours fame. Likewise, we can learn to make better decisions and develop sharper strategies if we review our assumptions, check them against those milestones, and see what we got right and wrong. That enables us to see where we're overconfident, and where we've historically had blind spots. The more self-reflection we can manage when it comes to strategic thinking, the better off we'll be.

3.3 Strategic Thinking is an Ongoing Process

Strategic Thinking is an Ongoing Process text

You have failed yourself if you do strategic thinking once, set a course, and blindly keep at it forever. Circumstances change, and you may end up steering yourself wildly off course. But at the opposite end of the spectrum, you've also failed yourself if you can't reliably follow through on your strategy and fall victim to shiny object syndrome, constantly jumping from one thing to the next, following idle whims. How do you balance the two? How can you make strategic thinking, a smart interrogation of your current circumstances, a way of life? Remember, it's important to regularly audit your strategy, to set up milestones in advance, let's say every quarter, and check in to see how things are progressing and whether results are living up to your expectations or might warrant some changes. The general rule, though, is that if you've taken the time to create a thoughtful strategy, you should stick with it unless there's a clear and urgent reason not to. Here are the questions to ask yourself to figure out if that's the case. Are you failing to meet your initial expectations? This is the most obvious case where a change in strategy might be warranted. You thought 200 people would sign up for the program, and only 15 did. You shouldn't scrap things immediately. It's important not to rush to conclusions. But first, look at the tactics you used. Maybe the marketing wasn't affective, for instance. But if you investigate and everything else checks out, maybe the initial premise was flawed, and you need to change your strategy and offer a different program instead. Has there been a major change in circumstances? Sometimes, big, unexpected things happen, and we have to adapt to the repercussions. Your strategy may have involved focusing on a particular line of business because your biggest client was going to sign a huge contract. But when your buyer, the person you knew best and your biggest advocate, decided to leave her position, that sure thing contract suddenly blew up. That's a time to change strategy. Maybe you were going to expand into a new country, and they just experienced a military coup. Probably not the best time to go there. Or you were going to develop a new corporate campus and consolidate all your regional offices, just in time for an economic slowdown that makes it much harder to borrow the construction funds you need. If there's a big development inside your organization or your client's, or even socio-politically, that may warrant a strategy redo. Is there an alternative that's even more promising? This is the place where you're most likely to experience shiny object syndrome, chasing the exciting new thing, so you have to watch yourself carefully here. Let's imagine that expectations have generally been met with your initial strategy, and there hasn't been a major change in circumstances. No military coups, no unforeseen staffing changes. So what could prompt you to abandon a plan that's working reasonably well? Hopefully not much. The only correct answer is something that provides you with a far greater probability for growth and success than the path you're already pursuing. Note that I said probability, not possibility. It needs to be very likely. Now, it's easy to get excited about a new opportunity and convince yourself that this is the right path, because it's new and different. It's possible you might discover something that really is better, that's almost certain to generate 20% growth when you're getting 10% growth now, for instance. But don't delude yourself into thinking you can pursue both opportunities at the same time equally well. If you're truly convinced, run a small test first, to see if your hypothesis pans out, and don't rush into anything without consulting with trusted colleagues and advisors. The bar needs to be very high when you're switching away from a strategy that's already working. Sometimes you do need to change your strategy, but to be effective, you should do it sparingly and strategically.

3.4 The Limits of Strategy

The Limits of Strategy text

There's a famous quote by the boxer Mike Tyson: everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth. That kind of sums up strategy, right? You need to have a plan so you can move forward in the right direction and set yourself up for success. If the job you really want requires a master's degree, you need to get into a program and get that degree. It doesn't mean you'll definitely get the position, but if you don't take action, it's certainly not going to happen. All that makes sense. But what if something happens that isn't in the plan at all? What if your company gets acquired and the hiring and promotion system changes, or you get asked to transfer to Singapore, or the company shuts down the entire business line you were working on? A strategy is great and extremely helpful for normal circumstances, and even for war-gaming known possibilities, but when something truly unexpected happens, strategy has its limits. You didn't plan for this, so what do you do? That's where the real value of strategic thinking lies, because it's not just about fixed plan, it's the ability to think in a strategic way that adapts to changing circumstances. First, people often make the mistake of clinging to past assumptions. The best thing you can do when there's been a disruption is to take an honest look at the circumstances around you, and if your expectations have blown up, admit that so you can quickly move to formulating a new plan. You don't want to be fixated on past predictions so much that you can't take new data into account. Second, respond decisively. This goes with the first point about clinging to past assumptions. A very dangerous corollary to that is that you're dragging your feet on making needed changes. Of course, you want to gather all the facts and see if your information is correct, but if it is, move as swiftly as you can and don't let the situation worsen in front of your eyes. It's probably not a good idea to dramatically overhaul your strategy in ten minutes, but if a crisis is unfolding, take the steps you can to mitigate things now so you have more options later. Maybe that's sending out a press release saying you're aware of the situation, or looking into it, and providing initial guidance to employees. Maybe it's reallocating resources on a short-term basis to go where they're most needed. You do what needs to be done. Third and finally, you'll have to embrace improvisation. That may seem like the opposite of strategy, which is planned out and finely wrought. But improvisation doesn't mean coming up with something, anything, and flailing around. It means going back to first principles. In this case, the vision for your organization, or your team, or yourself, and recognizing that if the current strategy no longer works, you can devise another one that will still help you get to your vision. If you want to be a leader that makes people's lives better, but the program you were working on just got shut down, look around and scan the horizon for other parts of the company that are focused on meaningful initiatives. You look for another path to accomplish your vision. Sometimes strategic thinking means recognizing the limits of a given strategy and being willing to come up with something new that's another, perhaps better, route to your destination.

3.5 Conclusion

Conclusion text

Strategic thinking is a valuable asset to cultivate. In fact, as you ascend in your organization, it's essentially mandatory, but no one teaches you this. And most people don't even realize they need to learn it themselves. We're human, which means we often have good intentions, oh yeah, strategic thinking, but sometimes fall short. That's why we have to keep reminding ourselves about our intentions and work to develop habits so that isn't such an effort to make it happen. Try some small steps today. Create a recurring event in your calendar once a week for strategic reflection time. Or reach out to a friend who might be a good accountability partner. Making the effort today, to steep yourself in strategic thinking, is a competitive advantage that can pay major dividends for you, your team, and your company. Let me know how it goes and shoot me any comments or questions at dorieclark.com.