Training professionals who demonstrate these 3 skills consistently deliver maximum business impact.
What do AstraZeneca, Saudi Aramco, Hilton Worldwide, Phillips Healthcare, Pfizer, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, HealthNow (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western NY), Maxim Healthcare, and Oneida Casino have in common? The role of training in these organizations is evolving to enable training professionals to add more value using consulting skills, and as a result, I had the honor of teaching consulting skills to each organization’s training staff.
What’s clear is this – decision making in organizations is increasing in complexity, and the need for training professionals to serve as performance consultants is skyrocketing. To meet the demand for enhanced skills, we teach 3 specific skills that are highly coveted by stakeholders.
If your organization wants to maximize transfer of training, we highly recommend your training staff master these 3 highly coveted skills:
The Ability to Define What Success Looks Like
Trainers who become effective performance consultants always start with defining what success looks like. They identify the actions required, the steps that must be followed, and the decisions that must be made in order to achieve success in a role, task, or job. Once identified, the list of success factors are documented to ensure they are repeatable because those serve as the road map for training a given role, task, or job.
The Ability to Differentiate Between Symptoms and Root Causes
Ask any manager for a list of problems they’re facing, and you’re likely to be given a list of symptoms. Highly effective performance consultants are taught to be extremely adept at defining root causes and developing solutions for them. When I teach consulting skills and problem-defining techniques, I coach consultants to ask 4 specific questions:
- What is the problem? To effectively get to the root cause, I coach new consultants on the use of the 5 Whys technique.
- Where do we see the problem? Answers help identify the location of the problem.
- When does the problem occur? Answers further isolate where the problem occurs in a process.
- How big is the problem in measurable terms? Answers help to define the scope of the problem which can then be used to determine priority for addressing the problem.
The Ability to Predict Levels of Performance at Defined Intervals in Time After Training
Great performance consultants understand their stakeholders love predictability and loathe uncertainty. So the first thing they do is identify the key performance metrics their stakeholders use to measure success. They then go to painstaking lengths to define and agree on ranges of acceptable performance at various intervals after training is completed. By doing this, their stakeholders can easily predict and measure employee performance using a development life cycle report that is aligned to the key performance metrics. The stakeholders get what they need to manage their business and the trainer / performance consultant becomes a highly valued business partner in the process.
If you are a training professional who wants to maximize business impact from your training, master the 3 skills I described above. If you do, you’ll consistently prove your worth and dramatically enhance your influence by demonstrating the ability to evaluate systems, align solutions to key business metrics, and execute with precision.
If you want to develop new consulting skills and/or enhance your existing skills, contact us today. I am honored to consistently be rated one of the top trainers on consulting skills because I use a simple and proven process for helping consultants develop the skills most coveted by their stakeholders.
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Excellent article. Thanks – this is very helpful.