The trainer’s self-introduction

I consider a trainer’s self-introduction to be very important for the following reasons:

•  It is an opportunity for the trainer to establish credibility. Once a trainer has established credibility, it is very easy to command the attention of the audience. Conveying the subject matter becomes easier. 
• It sets the tone for the training session and provides a natural segue for the trainer to launch into the next topic – which could be a round of introductions from the trainees (if the class size is reasonably small to allow this) or the subject matter itself.

     My thoughts on a good introduction:

• It should be formal, but not pompous.
• The trainer needs to clearly convey the credentials that justify his/her being a trainer for the course.
• As far as possible, the credentials should be quantified. For example, instead of saying ,“I have a lot of experience in this area”, you might say, “I have 15 years of experience as a customer support engineer and that has given me a lot of learning opportunities in the area of handling difficult customers”
• A little bit of humor certainly helps and puts the audience at ease.
• You can talk about your personal interests and hobbies, but spending too much time of those can distract the trainees and take their focus off.

Handling difficult training situations: When your trainees know more than you do

I was once in a very awkward situation as a trainer.

I started off my career as a field support engineer. During my first days on the job, I was trained by a very senior engineer who mentored me well and taught me a lot of skills needed to survive on the job. A couple of years later, I became a technical trainer and started teaching courses for other field support engineers.

Once it so happened that I was teaching a course that was a mandatory certification requirement for all field engineers in my line of work. And guess what! My former mentor and a couple of his equally senior colleagues were “students” in my class. It was the equivalent of a high school physics teacher having Newton, Einstein and Galileo as his/her students.

Every student in my class knew that they all knew more than I did. And I was myself acutely aware of this fact. Luckily for me, they were all very understanding. Rather than wasting everyone’s time and energy, we decided to convert the class into a knowledge sharing session rather a one-sided lecture. However, for compliance requirements, they agreed to submit the required assignments.

So how do you handle it, when you find that your students are all much more knowledgeable than you are ?

My thoughts:

• First, don’t get embarrassed or flustered. No one knows everything. It is perfectly normal for even a trainer to run into people that are more knowledgeable and accomplished.
• Be willing to learn. Be humble. Do not try to impose your authority as a trainer on your students who know more than you do. This will only irritate the audience. Even if your knowledge of the subject is not as good as theirs, they will respect you if you are authentic. But if you try to hide behind a façade of false authority,  you will lose whatever respect you might have had J
• Change your approach: If you have a class of beginners who are new to the subject, you can be the “Sage-on-the-stage”. But if you have a class of experts as your trainees, let go of your ego and be the “Guide-on-the-side”. Be more of a facilitator and help everyone learn off each other. Remember that there is nothing disgraceful about this. You are also enriching yourself by learning from the experts. Gather as much as you can and then pass it on to your future students.

Handling difficult training situations: When you need to deviate from your prepared outline

Let me share with you a real experience that I once had when I was teaching a course on problem solving.

In my class I had a diverse group of trainees from various disciplines like Finance, HR, logistics, engineering, etc. According to the instructor’s guide for the course, I needed to walk the trainees through a case study involving an engineering problem. This case study would form the backbone of the course. But many of the trainees were non-technical and I quickly realized that if I continued with the engineering problem as a case study, I would completely lose the attention of most of my class. The class would end up a complete waste of time.

I knew I had to deviate from the canned script. So I told the trainees to individually identify a problem in their own work to use as a case study. I told them this class would be an opportunity for them to brainstorm and solve a problem bothering them at work. This immediately got the attention of the trainees. Some of the problems they identified were very interesting and relevant. For example, one of them told me that he had to attend conference calls at 4 AM on several days of the week to liaise with our headquarters in another country. As we proceeded through the class, he was able to come up with several thoughts on how to solve/manage the problem. He told me he had never had the time or opportunity to think about this problem in a calm and structured manner. Personally I felt very satisfied that I was able to create some value and make life better for trainees through the class.

What did I learn from this experience?  As a trainer you must have the mental flexibility to deviate from your prepared outline and improvise in order to keep the energy levels in the class high. 

Handling Difficult Trainees: The bored trainee (Part 2)

What makes a trainee bored ? Let’s explore some more reasons and how to manage these.

Lack of interest in the subject matter – It is common knowledge that adult learners need a reason to learn. If the trainees realize that the content has no relevance to their work or growth, it is completely normal for them to feel bored.

Managing this: 

1.       The best way to avoid this situation is to do the due diligence ahead of the training. Is the training really relevant to the trainee’s work. Many times, people end up in training courses just because someone (their manager or HR or the training department) told them to. Often nobody has the time or inclination to really go through the course content and check if it really meets the business requirements.

2.       Assuming that the class has already started, and it is too late for step 1 above, the next best thing is for the trainer to really determine what the trainee’s needs are. In some cases, the trainee may not even know exactly what they want. Thus the onus now rests with the trainer on how to make the class as relevant as possible to the trainees.

3.       Sometimes, it may be just one or a few trainees who are not motivated or interested. In such cases, the trainer can work with them separately.

Lack of instructor’s credibility – Sometimes, the trainees may not be really impressed with the instructor’s credentials. They may genuinely  feel that the trainer is not sufficiently competent to train them.  This could be also due to a I-know-it-all attitude on the part of the trainee(s).

Managing this:

1.       In any training class, it is necessary for the trainer to give a self-introduction and establish credentials at the outset. This will command attention and respect. The trainer needs to establish how he/she can create true value for the trainees if they pay attention.

2.       If a trainee or group of trainees do not feel very impressed by the content, they may need to be presented with more challenging examples/problems. 

        If the instructor truly lacks the credentials to teach the class, it is indicative of a deeper problem. Some serious introspection is needed. Should the trainer be really teaching that class ?

Instructor’s presentation style: It may be that the trainer’s presentation style is not very effective. Some instructors unfortunately have a soporific voice that tends to put trainees to sleep.

Managing this:

Instructors can consciously work on their voice modulation and delivery. Alternately, an instructor with a dull voice can try to avoid speaking  for too long at a stretch (mix up speech with activity/demonstration etc.)

Other suggestions:

- As a trainer you may have to deviate from your prepared outline and improvise in order to keep the energy levels in the class high. 

- Something to suddenly disrupt the boredom– like a joke/surprise/puzzle – can help inject positive energy into the training room.

Handling Difficult Trainees: The Bored Trainee (Part 1)

I am sure everyone who has been in a training class has met at least one trainee who couldn't hide his/her boredom. The more polite of these bored trainees try to stifle their yawns (or yawn with their hands covering their mouth). Those who have lesser control over their own physiology and/or psychology fall asleep outright. Some of the bored trainees who are less sensitive to the feelings of the trainer and their fellow trainees find ways to distract themselves – like working on their laptops, web-surfing on their smartphones, drumming on the table, sketching etc.

Irrespective of how the boredom manifests itself, a bored trainee is a problem for the trainer. A bored trainee brings down the overall energy level of the class. Also, it is common knowledge that yawning is contagious. The sight of trainees yawning can actually get the trainer yawning too – and it is very difficult to yawn and talk at the same time! While this sounds humorous, it is a very uncomfortable situation for the trainer. It is very easy for a trainer to lose grip over the class. Ultimately the training does not stick and the trainer gets no satisfaction. Overall, this leads to a waste of time and other resources.

Now, what makes a trainee bored ?

Biological/physiological reasons:

If it is the post lunch session of a training class, it is completely reasonable to expect a drop in energy levels. Obviously a good strategy to manage this would be to engage trainees in hands-on activities or games that need them to move around (where possible). A monotonous lecture is the last thing trainees would want at this time.

Personally, I try to avoid having training classes post lunch. I try to finish the “lecture” part of the training in the morning and leave the post lunch session for hands-on learning. If trainees need to learn something important, why not have them do it early in the day when their energy and attention levels are at a natural high? If you have a training session that is going to take 8 hours of theory, divide it into two sessions of 4 hours each and have the sessions only in the morning (before lunch). It might sound idealistic and impractical, but if you want to deliver training that really sticks, you need to identify when trainees will be most engaged. What is the point in trying to lecture someone when they it is hard for him/her to listen?

If you think you need to proceed with the training even if the trainees are not at the peak of their attention levels, then some serious rethinking is needed. What exactly are you trying to achieve through training ?  Training should not be a mere formality. If it is reduced to a formality, then resources (time, money etc.) are being wasted. Training should be viewed as a way to achieve real business results, not something to just get over with.

More on handling bored trainees in future posts.

Don’t express to impress

One of the training sessions I attended while in college made a tremendous impression on me. The session was conducted by a leading communication skills trainer. He taught me something that immediately created a paradigm shift in me that has stayed in my mind ever since.  And this was: Never express to impress. 

Don’t worry about how to impress your audience. Make sure you have something worth their while to tell them, and then tell it without any hesitation or inhibition. Simple but awesome piece of advice. If you don’t have anything worth your audience’s time, don’t waste everybody’s time by making the presentation in the first place. Honesty is indeed the best labor saving device in the universe!! 

More disadvantages of using slides:

Wow, the more I think about it, I realize there are more disadvantages of using slides. Here are two more:

         

• Slides take out the human touch in presentations. Although people don’t realize it, the human touch is very important in effective communication. Tone, body language, gestures all make up a very significant part of the overall message that we deliver. With a big electronic display near the speaker, the audience gets distracted from the non-verbal cues that the speaker delivers. A lot of the message is diluted or completely lost.

• Slides can tend to waste everyone’s time. The presenter wastes time putting together slides which, instead of making the presentation effective, actually reduces the effectiveness. The audience, instead of focussing on the speaker, focusses on the slides and loses the main message.

Another disadvantage of using slides:

Speakers often forget that the human listening capacity and mental retention capacity are limited. So they can imbibe only a few key learning points in each session. Using slides makes presenters think that they can thrust as much information on the audience as they have on their slides. After all, you can have hundreds of slides in a single file ! But the human mind does not accept information that way. So speakers end up having numerous slides and make presentations that overwhelm the audience with information.

I took a minute to think about the most impactful speakers of all time. A few names popped into my mind immediately – Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King…(not in chronological order). Guess what – none of them used slides!

Are your slides controlling you ?

Recently I attended a training session conducted by a person whom I respect for his subject matter knowledge and passion. As he was conducting the session, he made a very profound remark. He said, “I personally prefer conducting these sessions without slides because I get a feeling I am being controlled by them”. This struck me as completely true!

In many (if not most) presentations, the speaker often identifies his/her entire talk with the slides. Slides are prepared first without any thought about the logical flow of the message, and then the speaker talks around the slides. This is putting the cart before the horse. I personally prefer to write down the key points of my content in a logical flow and then prepare slides if needed.

Some people use slides to just show the key points (as a memory aid). Although this is relatively harmless, it can distract people including the speaker! A better way would be for the speaker to carry a small card in his/her palm or leave it on a table in front and look at it occasionally. This will make sure that the speaker retains the entire attention of the audience and not the slides.  If you have too many keypoints in your talk to fit into a small card or a sheet of paper, then you should seriously re-think your content. Are you trying to dump too much on your audience ?