The Magnificent Seven

TECHNIQUES FIELD TRAINERS USE TO INFLUENCE WITHOUT AUTHORITY

“They don’t listen to me!” complains a pharmaceutical firm’s District Field Trainer about his colleagues. “They don’t respect me,” another field trainer chimes in, “so they ignore my feedback on field rides.” The first DFT adds: “During training sessions, they joke around like we’re hanging out at a bar. And they don’t respond to my emails or follow through on action items unless I get the manager involved.” 

Welcome to the club. Being a field trainer in the life sciences sector can be a fulfilling way to mentor fellow sales professionals while also gaining skills and experience that will serve them well in future leadership roles, but it also comes with its share of challenges and frustrations, many of which stem from the:

Trainer’s Dilemma: Being accountable for driving learning and performance outcomes while not having any formal authority over the colleagues they’re trying to help.

Trainers and coaches have been dealing with this conundrum for eons. Friedrich von Steuben probably made the same complaints to General George Washington as he whipped the Continental Army into shape. Fortunately, over the years, our profession has amassed many techniques and best practices to help us influence learning and performance without wielding formal authority.

WHAT IS A FIELD TRAINER?

If you are unfamiliar with the role, field trainers are individual contributors—in our example, pharmaceutical sales professionals—who have been assigned some additional responsibilities related to training their colleagues. They are not officially part of the training department, though sometimes they work closely with it. Their extra duties can include:

• Interviewing and helping to select new colleagues
• Guiding new colleagues through onboarding
• Mentoring underperforming colleagues, working side-by-side and providing feedback and suggestions
• Facilitating group training events, such as team conference calls and workshops
• Liaising with home office trainers on how best to roll out new training programs

A field trainer’s effectiveness is usually judged on the basis of how well they influence the learning and performance of their fellow sales professionals within their region, and in order to influence outcomes, they must be able to get their colleagues to engage with them on a process of self-improvement. That is a tall order even if you are a manager with formal authority, so it’s not surprising that field trainers often complain that colleagues are uncooperative.

HARD AND SOFT POWER

Getting other people to DO things requires power, and power generally comes in two forms:

1. Hard power involves compelling others to act out of deference for your strength, formal authority, and a fear of negative consequences, such as poor performance appraisals, no raise, no bonus or even termination. Field trainers have little or no hard power to leverage in their coaching and training interactions with colleagues.
2. Soft power is less about coercion and more about persuasion. It involves influencing others to do things willingly, because they see it as something desirable and/or in their best interest.

Most leaders use both forms of power, but the best and most successful ones have mastered the art of influence. The following are ten influence techniques that you should master, if you want to be more a more influential field trainer:

SEVEN INFLUENCE TECHNIQUES FOR TRAINERS

1. LEVERAGE DELEGATED AUTHORITY

What little formal power a field trainer has is always dependent on how much of it management is willing to share. Some managers may feel uncomfortable doing so, but most simply have not thought about how best to empower their trainers. Push for candid conversations with your manager about what your manager expects you to accomplish, by what means, and with what support from him/her. Once you and your manager are aligned, ask your manager to make clear to the rest of the team what that delegated authority is and what your manager expects from their interactions with you. 

When I worked in retail management and a new hire started, I would sit down with that new hire and their trainer to make clear what my expectations were. It sounded something like this:

“Shona is going to be your guide through this process, working at my request to get you onboarded. I’m expecting Shona to push you to get up to speed quickly and to report back to me on your progress. If you fail, it reflects poorly on her, so I know she will do her part. However, if you’re not getting the support you need from Shona, come to me. In turn, I expect Shona to have your full cooperation and commitment to this process. For the purposes of your onboarding, Shona is the boss. Any questions?

Through that type of conversation, I conferred some of my formal authority onto the trainer, empowering her to take the lead. My management team and I would have these delegated authority conversations frequently with not only new hires but in any situation where we were expecting someone to influence a colleague, supplier or customer without formal authority for it. Without clear expectation-setting, employees will revert to treating trainers like just any other work buddy that they share drinks with and compete with for dominance within the pack.

2. RESET EXPECTATIONS WITH THE TEAM

If you want your interactions with colleagues to go differently, something in that dynamic needs to change, and that must start with you. What do you need from them in order to do your job as a trainer? How can you get them to give you what you need willingly? When I was a field trainer, I often had to shadow an under-performing colleague for the purpose of helping them improve their performance. Here’s how I would start it off:

“As you know, [our manager] wants me to go on this ride with you today in the hopes that I can help you get your numbers up. I consider us friends, but in order for you get anything useful out of this experience, I’m going to need to put aside our friendship and observe you in a neutral way and give you feedback in a candid way. Do you want that from me or do you just want me to ride with you and tell you that you’re wonderful? 

(Response was usually, ‘Yes, I want it straight.’) Well, just as I need to put our friendship aside for the purposes of this ride, I need you to do the same and to be open to what I have to say. Once this ride is over and we’ve talked through my observations and suggestions, and you’ve gotten what you needed out of the experience, I want us to go back to being friends. What do you think?”

This conversation enabled me to reset expectations and establish some ground rules to go along with these new boundaries. I essentially asked my colleague for permission to change the power dynamics within our relationship, at least temporarily, in order to help me help them. By giving me their consent, they gave me a little power over them, again, just temporarily and for a specific purpose.

This approach works well with groups, not just with one-on-one coaching. Say that you are running a training event. Before you launch into the content, facilitate a discussion to arrive at agreed-upon goals. Then, ask the audience what ground rules they would like to establish in order to achieve those goals. Be prepared to offer some suggestions. Flip chart those ground rules and ask everyone to make a commitment, perhaps by having each of them sign the ground rules.

Once the group has established some ground rules, take the lead in reinforcing them throughout the event, recognizing and praising when individuals act in a way that is aligned with those commitments. When they act in contravention, remind them of their commitments. At your next event, pull out that list again and ask everyone to re-commit, then proceed. After a few meetings, you will find that the group polices themselves. We have found this approach to work with even the toughest and most contentious crowds.

3. OVER-PREPARE AND OVER-DELIVER

Why should your colleagues listen to you? Why should they do what you suggest? Why should they share with you and make themselves vulnerable in talking about their development needs? Why should they do that prework or participate in that activity? When you are elevated to a field trainer, your colleagues are constantly going to test you to see if you’re worthy…to see if you’ve earned the right to train them. Every interaction is a test.

Passing a test only earns you the right to advance to another test and maybe open a window of opportunity to teach them something…what trainers call A-HA! moments. We live for those moments. On the flip side, failing a test can mean losing credibility with that colleague and having them check out of the process. Enough of that can cause you to lose credibility with the whole team, which will make it impossible to influence outcomes.

Before you go into a training or coaching situation, be over-prepared. Even if you think you know the material, do the research to understand the subject matter more deeply. Anticipate the questions, concerns, and objections. Be prepared to be tested by your colleagues. When you don’t know something for sure, buy yourself time to research the answer. Connect your colleagues with experts and top performers as resources whenever helpful. Forming these triadic relationships will add to your credibility as a trainer and coach.

If you are delivering live training, invest the extra time into your design and preparation, so that you over-deliver. Trust your audience to appreciate the time and workmanship you put into creating a great learning experience for them. If you pass enough tests, they will start to listen, and some may even seek you out; and when they do, you’ll know that you’ve arrived.

4. FACILITATE, DON’T DICTATE

A wise mentor once shared:

“If managing people is like herding cats, then what we do is more like herding lions. Nothing is going to happen unless the lions want it to happen.”

New trainers often feel like they need to impose their will early on a group to gain their respect, so they start barking “requests” at people. Because they lack hard power, that typically backfires, prompting a few lions to challenge their authority and most others to dis-engage. Good facilitators avoid telling the lions what to do; instead, they influence where the lions want to go. For example, when a few rowdy lions are dominating a discussion at a training event, a facilitator might say something like this:

“I really appreciate how passionate you are about this topic and the energy that you’re bringing to the discussion. I’m worried, though, that some voices may be getting drowned out and that we’re missing out on hearing what they have to say. How can we make sure that everyone has an opportunity to share their viewpoints and experiences?”

The facilitator frames the problem in terms of the audience’s need (to hear each other’s perspectives), not their own need for control, and poses questions to the audience, guiding them towards a solution that they are bought into implementing. Facilitation takes patience and does not always lead to the solution you initially had in mind, but if you are willing to be flexible and put aside your ego, it can lead to greater audience engagement and ultimately make you a more successful trainer. Marshall Goldsmith, a best-selling management author and world-renowned executive coach once said in a CNN interview:

“I’m not here to tell you who you want to be. I’m here to help you be the person that you want to be. And that’s hard enough.”

5. GET EARLY WINS WITHOUT BURDENING THE TEAM

New field trainers sometimes gravitate toward the adminis-trivial aspects of the job, mostly because they’re relatively quick and easy things to do. They produce surveys, forms, lists, communications, and templates—all of which may be useful in some way but are not directly helping anyone grow their business and may be perceived as creating busy work for the team. They might make a great show of sending emails asking for input or announcing some new training effort. The net effect of focusing too much on these kinds of things early on is that it fails to get you any early wins, and it’s the early wins that will set a positive tone for your tenure as a field trainer. Resist the urge to tackle the easy things first: if instead you help one or two colleagues grow their business, it will earn you the right to ask for more from the team.

New trainers also have a tendency to overwhelm their audiences with too much content too fast, without taking the time and effort to streamline content, chunk it, and pace its delivery for maximum uptake. Get very focused on a specific outcome to help you keep your training interventions tight. Less is more. Think in terms of micro-bursts of learning (sometimes called microlearning) targeting very specific audience needs. Asking a colleague to spend 10 minutes learning something relevant will be a much easier lift than asking them to spend an hour or two on it. Instead of asking them to read an article, for example, send them a brief summary with the article as an optional reading if the summary catches their interest.

Rather than use them in a strategic way—to drive the business—some managers treat their field trainers as interns. They assign them administrative tasks like distributing materials to the team, collecting completed items back from the team, following up with the team to make sure they get things done on time. Too much of this can put field trainers in a bad position. They start to be seen by the team more as someone who nags them about paperwork rather than as someone who can help them grow their business. And what do we do with people who nag us about paperwork? We do not seek them out: we ignore them or hide from them, typically. That does not set up the field trainer for success. Stay focused on your primary purpose: helping colleagues grow their businesses.

6. MAKE KEY OPINION LEADERS YOUR ALLIES

Just as your customers are influenced by key opinion leaders, your colleagues are too. In every region, there are likely to be one or two informal leaders who sway the group. Whenever I work with a new team, I always look for these influential people and make the extra effort to forge good working relationships with them. Often, they have their fingers on the pulse of the team and are great sources of intel on how the team is feeling and what the team needs, so I actively enlist their help with needs assessments and brainstorming sessions. They usually feel a vested interest in helping the team, so people like that are naturally ones you want to recruit to help you with your training efforts.

At a minimum, these relationships should prevent KOLs from undermining your efforts. If they disagree with your approach, they should feel comfortable discussing that with you in private rather than challenging you publicly or, worse, torpedoing your efforts through back-channel conversations. Ideally, though, you want their active participation, not just cooperation, in driving your training efforts with the team. For example, if you’ve had success coaching a KOL, that colleague will advocate for you with the rest of the team, making it easier to coach others. If you ask a KOL to take the lead on a particular discussion, your colleagues are more likely to listen. Over time, their influence will rub off on you, enabling you to do more with the team without their direct involvement. Make KOLs your partners.

7. KEEP SCORE

People will only change if they feel a need to change, and few things motivate sales professionals to change more than competition. Everyone would like to be first, but no one wants to be among the last. Look for ways to create transparency for the team, so everyone can see where they are on metrics that are important to learning and performance.

Dashboards could include performance (lagging indicators) metrics, such as progress towards sales goals, as well as predictors (leading indicators) like frequency of customer visits. Metrics can include completion of prework, post-work assignments, and other training-related commitments, which can also be seen as leading indicators for performance results. Basically, get in the habit of tracking training commitments and connecting those to performance. The more tightly connected that training and performance results are, the more your colleagues (and your manager) will value training. That transparency, and the related peer pressure that comes with not wanting to be at the bottom of a list, will start to create a sense of accountability around training.

When I was training supervisor for a retail chain, I had no way of forcing franchisees and store managers to complete their store’s training requirements in a timely fashion. I tried asking nicely, sending reminders, and talking to their bosses. I finally had enough and started tracking all of the commitments on a spreadsheet, then generating a weekly report that went out to all of the managers, franchisees, and their bosses. Before you know it, compliance surged.

Then, I started adding leading and lagging performance indicators (collected from other departments) to my report and calculating correlations. Not surprisingly, stores that were up-to-date on their training requirements were 80-95% correlated with all of the performance indicators, and 90% correlated with overall store profitability. That helped convince the laggards that training was important. However, the most compelling aspect of it was that these rankings were circulated, so that everyone could see which stores invested in training and which ones did not…natural competition and professional pride took care of the rest. That taught me the power of score-keeping.

PERSISTENCE IS NOT FUTILE

It will take time for colleagues to get used to you in your new role, and there will be hiccups along the way. You will need to educate them on your role, revisit expectations continually, and your patience and skill will be tested repeatedly. Stick with it. Show that this is not a flavor-of-the-month thing that they can ignore. They will test your resolve, but if you persist, they will come to realize that you will not be ignored or deterred, that this change in you is permanent regardless of the field trainer title...that you are becoming a leader.

One hard lesson that you will likely learn along the way is that not all of your colleagues are coachable. They may lack the motivation and self-awareness needed to change. Some colleagues can’t be helped, at least not right now. Even that is a valuable leadership lesson in humility and patience, so don’t let those setbacks sour you to this noble quest. There are few callings more rewarding than helping people learn and achieve success.

Again, welcome to the club.

Gus Prestera, PhD