If my 46 year old self could have mentored my 23 year old self in being a training professional, what would I have said?
I’ve been a staff developer in various guises since 1998, stumbling into the profession mostly as an escape route from another plan that hadn’t worked out. I brought with me a PGCE of all things and a weird mix of cocky self-assurance and a well-honed impostor syndrome that has dogged me to this day.
I benefitted from having some very skilled colleagues around me who helped me to develop but it’s always nagged me that I could have done better back then if I’d thought more carefully about what I was doing and why I was doing it.
I won’t bore you with the “why”, but you’ll probably be able to work it out reading between the lines,
As for the “what”, here are the main points:
Ask yourself 2 questions.
What are you for? Where is your focus?
A lot of trainers I’ve come across have confused the need to maintain attention and engagement for the need to be entertaining, to turn the session into something of an act.
By all means, use your skill to make training an enjoyable experience but that’s not what you’re for. Early on, my focus was ensuring that people liked me and the groups I had where I got that affirmation were great. But the times I didn’t get it were devastating. So all my energy was ploughed into getting that good feeling and that shaped my practice and not for the better
One of the best pieces of advice I received on my training was from Rob Allen, while I was working at Netskills. He was on a workshop I was running and after one session he told me that he was enjoying it. The things I was telling them were important and my delivery was good, he said. His question to me was how could they have arrived at the same understanding but without me telling them.
That flipped my understanding of what my role was.
As a trainer or a coach, if you have learned something transformational you naturally want someone else to share that experience. If you try to do that by just sharing the information or relaying a story, people may get your point but what you’re doing is denying them the opportunity to follow a similar journey to yours to discover it. That will never be as effective a learning experience.
Be an intentional storyteller
Storytelling is very important to me and is something that plays a very important role in learning. I wish I’d realised that sooner.
But I hope mentor-me would also caution against a few things.
Stories are subject to the law of diminishing returns. A story can be powerful but if you follow it with “and then there was this other time…” you lessen the impact of the first and the second one.
Helping learners to form their own stories is more important than imparting your own. Provide opportunities to share stories and explore them deeply. Treat it as a growth and social bonding activity, not a showcase of past events.
Take a step back and look at the balance
As a way of taking the performative element out of the training, think about the balance of activity learners will experience. Diana Laurillard’s 6 learning types is a useful guide to this but it can be simpler to think about it as a triangle. I have colleagues Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos to thank for the basis of this! You might want to change the labels; this is just one way of breaking this down.
At any given point in the session where are your learners in terms of their activity?
- Consuming could mean listening, watching or reading. It’s essentially a passive mode.
- Interacting could mean discussing, collaborating with others or working with a system or toolkit.
- Reflecting could mean any activity that aids meaning-making or action planning.
The labels could be changed to reflect anything you wanted to map. The benefit of using a triangle is it acknowledges that more than one thing can be happening at once.
How often do you facilitate the move between each state? Too often can be chaotic; not enough can drain momentum.
What can you be doing at any one time to make the activity type more effective? Or could the learning outcomes be achieved better in a different part of the triangle.
This might be a useful tool for coaching.
Structure is not a cage
A rigid, structural approach to a training session can be unnecessarily constraining and prevent you from responding to a developing situation. But there are benefits for the learner of communicating and sticking to a structure.
Imagine being led blindfold round an obstacle course. Your more likely to trust the person if they help you to visualise the journey from the outset, help you to prepare for difficult patches and then to be able to retrace the steps again afterwards.
It’s a question of trust. Being trained can feel like being unmoored from your current practice and sense of self, even for seemingly innocuous topics. People will be much more willing to go on the journey if they feel led down a path they can follow.
Thinking back
You can see my career journey on my LinkedIn profile. I wasn’t a terrible trainer in those early days. I just wasn’t as good as I thought I was and my head was in the wrong place. I don’t think I helped some people as much as I could have and my colleagues at the time had to pick up the pieces more often than they should.
I’ve been undergoing a training course this week which as unexpectedly brought up a lot of this in a surprisingly emotional way!
Many people find themselves having to design and deliver training in organisations without much in the way of support. One of the things I did was to coach new trainers and I hope I’d be much better at doing that now.
