The Most Important Element Managers Forget When Training Employees

“Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.” 

– Peter Drucker

Recently, I’ve been working with a group in the LA area that wanted to reassess the way they train their employees, particularly their management team. I asked what types of training do they give their employees and the response was “we train them on what they are supposed to do.” I asked to see any materials that they use, any slides, modules or outline but none was present. I also asked the organization if they believe their trainings were effective and they responded with mixed results. I finally asked why they felt they needed additional training from me. The company just thought more training meant more sales.

Depending on where you work, there might be a negative or positive feeling when you hear the word “training” or “company training.” For some companies the word “training” is non-existent. Many times, we are asked to train other people either because we’ve done a good job at work or we might be seen as an expert within our company. Training is not easy though (Read Still Re-Training Your Employees? Is It A People Problem Or A TrainingProblem?). There are different learning styles the trainees have and different methods of teaching from the facilitator. There is one element though that most companies or managers forget to consider when training their employees.

What are your objectives?

Most trainers are not trained to train. If you are put in a position to train and have no training experience (or even if you do) you should focus on this one key area: the objectives of your training. Brainstorming the objectives will force you to think about what you’re trying to get out of your own training. These are some questions you should be asking yourself:

What should the trainee(s) be able to do, say, make, create, develop, use or see after the trainee(s) is done with my training?

Have you ever wondered why most trainings begin with the objectives and the objectives typically begin with “by the end of this training you will…?” Put some thought into the things you want to accomplish after the trainee(s) walk out of your training at the end.

Is your training content aligned to your objectives?

Telling someone what to do is not a training. Showing someone what to do is not a training either. Everything you do in a training must be correlated with your objectives. Your goal as a trainer is to meet those objectives and have the trainee(s) accomplish those objectives as well

How many objectives do you have?

If you develop a training program for your staff and have 15 objectives for your training, do you think the training will be a long training or a short training? Most likely it will be a long training and with long trainings people forget most of the content. Stick to 5 objectives but heavily focus on mastering those objectives. If you need to cover more objectives then you should consider splitting the training module so that it is not one long training.

If you want to put your brain to work and implement some of these ideas, think about training a group of people to make a sandwich. If your goal is to make every single trainee make the exact sandwich every single time, what objectives would you develop? How can you make your content correlate with your objectives? Will your objectives include the understanding of ingredients, speed, and quality control? Focus on your objectives and you will have more consistent results with your staff. 

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