Develop Customised In-House Training Programmes

Monica Murphy returns with her popular diary where, this month, she gives valuable insights into the research and development of a customised training programme...

A training need identified in our organisation last year was that of managing meetings. After one too many unsuccessful attempts to use an outside trainer to deliver a customised course, I decided I was going to have to tackle it myself. The biggest challenge for any third party trainer was, as usual, to discern between a meeting management course for, say, a banking institution, versus a course of the same title for a construction company. There are similarities, but usually they are just the basics and, to get your teeth in the real problems, you need to spend some time, if at all possible, in the environment of your participants. If this isn’t possible, do meet frequently with the sponsor of the course, to get as much information as you can about what their needs are; and listen very carefully to what they tell you, so you come up with a course that is relevant.

The training need was specifically at construction-site level, as opposed to office building meetings and that meant, as a trainer, I had to visit sites and sit in as an observer in the various types of meetings. It was an invaluable experience to sit through some meetings and see and hear for myself what some of the challenges were.

Then followed a period of researching various meeting management theories and best practices. Because the learners would be deadline-bound managers, it was essential that this course would be practical above everything else. One of the reasons why the ‘sort–of-customised off the shelf’ meeting management course didn’t work was because it covered far too much impractical theory on motivation and the like. No doubt, such theories are very important to know, but trying to remember the various bits of the pyramid in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is hardly going to help them in an already strained environment of stressed out managers. Admittedly, it was painstaking to distil, out of volumes of theories, some practical tools for everyday use, not to mention accessing non-copyrighted graphics, but it was possible all the same.

I confess that, as a learner myself, I’m not a big fan of role plays and its not because I don’t learn anything from them, its just that they make people (me included) nervous; and nervousness is not a good predicator to learning. People feel like they have to perform or act, yet many role plays have no script or guidelines on how to do that. They are told to be someone and then usually resort to their own attitudes and behaviours. However, I’m a great advocate of Benjamin Franklin’s expression: Tell me and I will forget, Teach me and I will remember, Involve me and I will learn. And the only way I could involve participants was to come up with some realistic meeting role-plays.

Having had the advantage of being privy to the meetings, I had plenty of real-life examples of challenges and issues arising in meetings. The most difficult part of the role play development was to try and imagine it all working in my head and then getting it down on paper. For example, Jim is the character who turns up not having read the agenda so Jim has to be asked a question by the chair so that his failure to read the agenda will be exposed. There was a lot more to that than I first thought. I had so many roles and characters that, in the end, I had to get some of my colleagues to act out the role play so that I could straighten out any confusion. The most time consuming part was putting together the ‘values and attitudes’ part of each character but I was determined that, if I was going to ask these participants to become someone else, I was going to give them crystal clear direction so that they really could become someone else and not have to rely on their own ‘nervous’ disposition. There was some room, certainly, for their own attitudes and behaviours to be exhibited but there was enough character ones to get them into the role play and off the starting blocks.

Eventually, after months of development and research and design, the course was ready. I decided to start off with a role play, with a view to getting people in the mood for taking part and getting over any initial reservations. Unsurprisingly, it was quite a bland show with not many of the participants really getting into character. Regardless, I was happy with the number of issues that arose to kick-start our meeting management discussions.

By mid morning, I had no choice but to indulge in a ‘Jerry Springer’ Module. This is one that isn’t as practical as I would like material to be, but is the anchor of the subject and therefore, needs to be understood at least at a basic level. The module in question was on understanding groups and the power of group dynamics. The trick, of course, as ever, is to make the theory as tangible as possible and to place it as near to your participant’s daily tasks as you possibly can. Simplify it, give everyday examples and then ask for some more. This does take some forethought on the part of the learning professional but it’s worth doing. Your audience are much more likely to remember at least some of the theory, if an example of it in practice comes out of their own mouths. Then followed another role play, one which was much more interesting to observe. This time, the participants took to their characters much better and were also more familiar with each other and less uneasy about doing a role-play.

I recommend setting a ‘role-play table’ aside in the room so that people have to physically get up out of their seats and, in doing so, leave their own personalities behind. I tried, where possible, to give each person a role that is completely different from a role which they perform in their regular working lives. For example, the manager becomes an overworked, under-appreciated subordinate. Many participants, in post-course feedback, thought that this was a good way of seeing things from another’s perspective, and therein lies one of the successes of effective meetings.

The last role-play of the day really brought results. Slowly, the tools and techniques being discussed throughout the day were being absorbed and used. We arrived at a situation where we had agreed actions on each agenda item and no raised voices within the thirty minute timeframe. Far be it for me to assume that these participants will never again struggle with chairing and attending meetings, but if they employ a couple of the techniques as demonstrated in the role plays, they are at least moving in the right direction. As trainers, sometimes that’s our task: to point people in the right direction and to gently point out the behaviour that doesn’t generate positive results. It has been my experience that they will do the rest themselves.

Some useful sites for trainers:

www.effectivemeetings.com  

http://www.managementhelp.org

www.freefoto.com

Monica Murphy