Don't Train.....Do This Instead!
No one ever says it out loud, but we all know it's true: most training seminars on their own are pretty much useless. You might be shocked to hear that coming from a company focused on talent development, but how many times have you seen people attend training but then never put what they "learned" into practice to improve their work? It happens far too often. Companies bring in training in hopes of effecting culture change, and they are routinely disappointed.
There are two necessary elements to making learning stick and positively changing behaviors for the long run: practice with feedback, and expectation-setting. Sadly, these essential aspects of culture change are frequently ignored.
First, training seminars should always be accompanied by exercises, and even better, putting the new skills to use in real-world situations under the guidance of a mentor or coach. To reinforce learning, students must synthesize using the new skills - but practice without feedback is a recipe for developing (and reinforcing) bad habits. Practice under the direction of an expert is essential to mastery. (In a related post back on Sept. 12th, we elaborated on the quote "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." (which, incidentally, we misattributed to Confucius -- in fact, the quote is from a different Chinese philosopher, Xunzi, and a more faithful translation is "Those who heard of something know better than those who never heard of it. Those who have seen it know better than those who only heard of it. And those who've practiced know better than those who saw it.". Thanks to our friend @Guanshi Li for the correction.))
Second, management plays an essential role in embedding learning from training into regular practice. Managers must become familiar with the skills and tools being taught, and then consistently ask for evidence of their use for the months and years following the training event. Fail to do this and you’ve wasted your training budget. Until the best practice taught at the training becomes the standard practice used day-in-day-out, you won’t see a penny of ROI from your training expense.
At CÆDENCE, facilitating your success is our only job. We work hands-on with your team to help you tackle your toughest project management, new product development, issue resolution, and quality challenges. We also want to ensure your problems don't recur – we develop teams and systems using skills workshops combined with expert mentoring to accelerate your team’s performance to excellence. We partner with your management team and provide the tools and support required to help them engrain skills into the company culture.
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers. Here are the steps involved.
When customer tensions rise, the right approach can turn friction into collaboration. At CAEDENCE, we call it the 3C’s: Calm, Clarify, Control. Here's more detail.
Will AI Replace Direct Customer Communication? Absolutely Not! In an age of chatbots and algorithms, the highest-impact discussions still happen person-to-person.
B2B customer relationships are not a breeze. We’ve navigated hundreds of challenging accounts and distilled five secrets that consistently turn friction into forward progress.
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth? When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently affect team development.
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
Negative customer experiences can destroy your business! Have you been faced with any angry customers this year? CAEDENCE's Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ enhanced problem-solving toolkit was the answer. It integrates seamlessly with your existing problem-solving approach and systems.
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
