Leveraging internal training

Colleagues,
 
Today we continue looking at the five faces of the cube of development by focusing on internal training.
 
Internal Trainers and Workshops
This face includes multiple advantages, including cost effectiveness and responsiveness to organizational needs. The effectiveness of internal trainers and trainings is limited by two factors:

1. Expertise of the trainer
2. Appropriateness of the content

​I am fairly critical of external trainings but using them to improve the expertise of your internal trainers can be beneficial. You can also conduct internal trainings with an external trainer. These can be more powerful than external workshops as the trainer (or consultant) should customize the training to your specific needs.

Appropriateness of content takes us to an important consideration that I didn’t talk about last week: who should decide the content for developing our people? Too many times leaders are the ones who drive training topics, however there are two better sources of information:

1. The people who will receive the training
2. Data

 The people who are doing the work should be the ones identifying what they need to get better. The role of leadership is to collect and share critical data that help people make good decisions. We’ll look more at this in the future, but when leaders help people make sense of data in order to improve performance, the organization is in an incredibly good position.
 
Reflect on these questions:

• How do you (and your organization) make decisions about the content of training/development? 
• Is it driven by the people who will participate in the training?
• If not, why not?
• If you encounter resistance to training, what is that telling you?

 
I hope this is helpful. Feel free to share your own thoughts and experiences by replying to this email!
 
Do good and be well,
 
Frederick