How much do you hold your participants accountable for learning during any training session?
Sanjay Goel
Soft Skills, Behavioural and Leadership trainer, Outbound training, DiSC trainer, Coach, Author, NLP and Hypnosis Practitioner, Customised Content Design and Delivery, Learning Consultancy
During a training sessions, when a trainer is unable to create the desired level of engagement, he is tempted to blame participants for their lack of initiatives. His thought process ‘Participants don’t just open up or are not ready to interact. Something is wrong with them’.
A highly experienced trainer once told me, ‘Don’t worry! 50% responsibility lies on participants and 50% lies on you. You can only take a horse to the pond but can’t force it to drink.’ I uncomfortably agreed to it. Somewhere, I was not sure or convinced about it. Can I create that thirst to make that horse drink the water? If I can take it to the pond, I can also create that urge.
Another issue I think is, when a trainer starts putting the onus of learning on the participants, he give up on the opportunity to improve or develop or grow myself. He is not thinking about the creative ways of creating a powerful engagement or thirst in the participants.
Engagement also depends on the involvement of the participants in conducting the need of that training sessions. Most of the time, trainings are decided by the top management without involving the participants (this happens more in organizations where HR handles everything). There is no buy-in from the participants. They just come in because they were forced.
Also, there is no buy-in from participants’ supervisors or managers. They are reluctant to send their teams to the session. That reduces participation and impacts participants morale.
Couple of things I have experienced that works well in creating participant engagement are,
1. Involve participants, take their inputs. Ask them their challenges and issues. Share with them the objective and how this session is going to benefit them as an individual as well as, as an employee.
2. Take feedback from supervisors/ managers while finalizing the content of the training. What are their challenges in getting work done from their teams? Share how these sessions are going to address those issues.
3. Planning well in advance so that participants can complete their important activities/ tasks.
4. Trainer needs to create a buy-in for the content in the beginning of the session. How attending these sessions is going to help them at an individual level.
5. Trainer needs to create an environment where participants are comfortable sharing their views and experiences. This is often very difficult in organizations where trust levels are very low. In such organizations, employees rarely speak and meetings are often one way communication. Information just flows from top to bottom.
6. Asking right questions, focusing on facilitating instead of providing answers.
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7. Acknowledge and appreciating whenever participant shares. This helps others open up as well.
8. Start your session with some energizer or activity that open up the participants and take them in to relaxed zone.
7. Create an engaging content, using activities, videos, situations and case studies.
8. Focus on improving the content, thinking ways of making it more engaging and exciting.
9. Instead on putting blame on the participants, focus on what he can do better as a trainer. Using his experience to break the shell.
10. There is always a possibility that the content you have designed and the level of participants are different. You would have to make some immediate changes to help participants connect with the audience.
Trainer can implement point 4 to 8. Trainer has little control on points 1 to 3. However, trainer can probe HR and find out made them take a decision of conducting these sessions. Most of the time, as a trainer, we jump into the training without understanding the background (I still do it, especially when the projects come for a consultant), however, understanding the background helps us prepare the session.
After following all these steps, there is still a possibility that you would be unable to create the level of engagement you desire or touch the benchmark you have set in. You can only keep learning.
What is your experience? What works well for you? Do share and it will help us all.
Thank you for reading.