“First seek to understand and then be understood” – Habit #5 from the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People from Steven Covey. This is what we do.
A trainer is a complex creature with many skill sets. Whatever their field, their knowledge is wide ranging and to a great depth, enabling them to pull on varying resources to explain a point to help understanding. A good trainer is welcoming and warm to delegates. I remember years ago an evaluation asking “is the trainer responsive to your needs’’. Although I laughed at the time as did a few delegates I fully understand/stood what that company was seeking. I want to be treated as well as I can be and I seek that for those who work with me.
In my 20+ years as a trainer I have had delegates say to me “I have been awake half the night worrying about today”, “I didn’t want to come but I was made to”, “I don’t know what I want, I was just told to come here” or “I am nearly at retirement and I cannot understand these new IT programs due to medical issues, will they sack/retire me early?”.
Well, I worked with all these people and their concerns and made a huge difference to the way they work and their understanding of IT. My approaches vary: calming and supportive to those who are worried, “humour me” to those who were made to, and creating excitement of the topics and the session for those who don’t know why they are there! For those in pain I create shortcuts and use techniques to overcome their problems.
Humour is a welcoming diversion used to build rapport and the knowledge that they can ask anything and not be considered “stupid”. When people are at ease they chat, ask questions and laugh at humorous situations. What the trainer is saying and doing subliminally washes over them and they get even more information from the training session. Asking questions gives their mind the opportunity to pigeon hole or order what is going on and translate it into real meaning for their situation.
The trainer then picks up their toolset to decide how best to work with the individual and or group. Which techniques will work well and which won’t. We are a very lucky group of people and most trainers want to give back to their delegates. There is respect and understanding even if their learning curve is huge. We consider what is realistic, what can be achieved and to build the training/learning outcomes together.
The control factor, making sure that all delegates are looked after (I use ‘my little ducklings’ for the day) often brings a smile and a laugh. People need to know what is expected of them. How the training session will play out. When the breaks are, where lunch is. They need to be comfortable in their environment. Can they see and hear you? You are nurturing them.
Making sure all the delegates get what they want from the course and respect others is important and do not disrupt the training in any way, so the expectation and respect flows between them, helping them to work with each other.
A trainer needs to check delegates’ behaviour so that we can be sure that learning is taking place. We make use of questions, observations and exercises, reviewing and monitoring all the time. We use steps to success language for example ‘’where would we look to Insert a PivotTable, on the Insert tab”. Or “why is searching important in a database when adding a new record? Answer is for Data integrity and make sure we do not add duplicate data.”
Questions can be phrased and rephrased to aid understanding and to achieve the right answers. Different types of questions are used: open questions What, When, How, Why to give everyone a chance to answer and allows for discussion around the topic and the sharing of war stories.
Once some information or instruction has been given it is good to deconstruct a question/answer and then get the delegates to reconstruct the answer in the correct order. This enables the breaking down of tasks and processes to understand other routes to the same outcome. Scenario-based exercises are very useful and a trainer can mix and match these based upon the group and whether they require affirmations or whether they can be moved to the next level of content.
In summary characteristics to look for in an exceptional trainer:
• And one who makes the tools
Exceptional trainers don’t just train, their topics are irrelevant. They communicate, inspire, and motivate others to become exceptional as well. Like a great film or good book, they stay with you.
