Making Training for a Living

I've moved my blogging around the training business

2008-08-13T18:43:00.003-05:00

I'm afraid I just don't have time to work on this blog anymore, as my work as a marketing consultant to training consultants is filling my schedule, and then some!

If you are interested in building a stronger training business, as a consultant, please visit my blog at Best Consulting Practices.

Thanks.

Are Employees Really Smarter than Executives?

2007-12-10T00:30:00.000-06:00

Most of the projects that clients hire me to design and develop end up being delivered one time, to any given employee. (They may be offered multiple times to catch everyone, but each employee only goes through the training once.

They can't see the value of repeating their messages as often as they should, which is ironic, because in many of these companies, the executive team gets a lot of help from consultants, and most of that help goes over the same principles again and again.

Now, I think most of these executives think they are a little smarter than their average front-line employee, and they certainly think they are more determined to enhance their contribution to the company's performance.

So if they are so smart, why does it take constant repetition for executives to modify their behavior, while front-liners are supposed to hear or see something once, and immediately adopt best practices with optimal performacne and no backsliding?

The language we use for these two situations certainly provides some clues. The employees get "training," but the executives get "coaching."

I still can't figure out much difference, except that coaching is a long-term, frequent-contact type of training. Some would say that training is telling people what to do, while coaching is helping them to figure it out. But in truth, coaches do a lot of telling, too . . . including telling the people they are coaching how to figure out what they want to, or should, do.

I don't think the employees are any smarter, or any less so, compared to executives. And I know their performance would benefit enormously from repeated messages.

So we probably have to look elsewhere for explanations. Perhaps the executive team doesn't want to invest any more than they have to in trainng employees. After all, training is one of the first things to take a hit when times get tough.

It seems likely that 1) top management has never really thought about this comparison; 2) they overestimate the costs of providing more frequent training (which could be in smaller chunks, and 3) they underestimate the return on investment in doing training better. (In fact, they tend to underestimate the return on infestment in training their employees, period.)

In teaching, we often assume that the brightest students will learn how to do things with less time and individual attention than their less perceptive classmates. But move into the corporate training environment, and suddenly we have we think the opposite approach applies.

No wonder employees so rarely carry out the strategic vision of executive management as well as they might!

Overcoming the Cons of Freelancing

2007-12-05T11:41:00.000-06:00

In my previous post, I highlighted some of the cons of the freelance life (inspired by a Nick Usborne newsletter article).

After all, there are so many sites and articles and other sources extolling the wonders of freelancing, of being self-employed, that a lot of good employees probably feel guilty just because they don't work for themselves!

But freelancing is not for everyone, which is what Nick was pointing out. My reaction was that sometimes people try freelancing, discover they aren't happy with the life, and give up. And some of the most common frustrations that I pointed to included the amount of work it takes to run your own business, the loneliness you can experience, and the challenges (and fears) of marketing yourself.

All of these frustrations stem from the same common confusion, that "working for yourself" means "working alone." Most freelancers can't even imagine where "delegation" fits in their business, yet that's exactly what they need.

Add to that some external advice, a few trusted sounding boards, and you may discover an entirely different "freelance life" from the one you have been struggling with.

Here's one way to look for help. Imagine that you're an employee in a fairly large company again, except that the company's business, market, etc. are exactly what you are trying to do as a freelancer.

Ask yourself two questions:

What parts of the company's business that directly or indirectly affect you would typically be handled by someone else?
Who else would listen to your ideas, suggest better methods, or alert you to resources you need?

Answers to the first question might include routine mailings, billing clients for work, archiving past projects, scheduling travel and meetings, and technical support for your computer system. Answers to the second would include managers, colleagues, and people from other departments who are part of the process of delivering a service, creating a product, or capturing a customer.

Now, look at all of those things as opportunities to get someone else involved in your work (and not all for pay, either). Hire a virtual assistant, or contract tech support. Develop a brainstorming network -- no selling! -- with people who are not only in your business, but people who are in other markets or functions. (Sometimes a writer and a graphical designer see things in one another's work that a fellow writer or designer will miss.)

Building a team of subcontractors and associates will decrease your work load, reduce your loneliness, give you new ideas (and refine the ones you come up with yourself), and give you the support you need to tackle challenges like marketing.

There's a best of both worlds approach, between freelancing and employment, if you look for it.

The Cons of Freelancing

2007-12-03T12:15:00.000-06:00

I'm a freelance training developer, and you're probably either currently a freelancer, or someone exploring the freelance life.

Trouble is, a lot of freelancers tend to pay attention to mainly people just like ourselves. We read their blogs, exchange ideas on various fora, get ideas for growing our businesses from people who are doing what we're doing.

Nick Usborne recently reminded us that there's nothing special, or more virtuous, or worthier, about being a freelancer. It's a matter of fit, and an awful lot of that fit has less to do with skills and abilities, and more to do with lifestyle and execution.

Nick runs a site called Freelance Writing Success, and puts out a newsletter that mostly goes to freelancers and freelancer wannabes. He recently posted his thoughts, heretical as they may be, on "Is the Freelance Writing Life for You?" (Note: although Nick talks to his audience as writers, most of what he has to say applied to freelance content developers of any kind, including people in the training and employee communications field.)

Besides busting the myth that freelancers are automatically better at what they do than are employees, he actually suggested that freelancing might not be for everyone!

His article lists both pros and cons of the freelance life. But if you're looking at going freelance, you've probably seen lots of the pros. In addition to Nick's cons, I'd highlight the following as the biggest challenges, what I see in people who aren't happy out on their own:

It's a lot of work. A Lot! Think of all the things that someone else handles for you in a large corporation (phone and internet service, tax withholding, a lot of marketing and contact management, "billing" for your services), and then do them all yourself.
It can be lonely. Some people never realize how much they miss bumping into people around the office, those random conversations outside of formal meetings.
It's scary. There aren't too many things that will get you fired from a "real" job, but there are lots of ways you can end up with few customers, and little income, on your own.
Marketing is a major challenge for most of us. Taking the initiative to identify prospects and ask them for business is something that just isn't second nature to most people. That's why good salespeople should be rightly respected as specialists, but every freelancer has to do sales.

My main piece of advice for the wannabe freelancer, or the freelancer who is unhappy with his/her situation? Freelance conditions aren't either-or. You don't have to either be lonely or be in an office, you don't have to either work for a large company, or handle all the billing details yourself.

In my next post, I'll suggest some ways to keep the pros in your freelancing and overcome these cons.

Hard Choices

2007-11-28T15:48:00.001-06:00

I recently got an urgent call from a client who needed some fast, but in-depth, work. His company had generated a pile of survey data from various functions within a crucial business process, and they were on a very tight schedule to present some clear conclusions and recommendations for action to the board of directors.

I only had a few days, over a holiday weekend to boot, to tackle this stuff. The short version of the story is that I decided I could pull it off (if I didn't want to sleep too much), that I would have to charge them higher rates because of the timing considerations, and I got the job done.

But it reminded me that sometimes business comes along that offers some tough choices:

I could, as I did, say "yes." This is what we usually do, because we hate to turn down any business, and because we always think we can get things done faster than is really the case.
I could, very reasonably, have said "no, I can't possibly do it." Besides the pressures of the holiday weekend, I might have just decided I couldn't get it done (I barely made it, and I'm pretty fast at this stuff).
I could have said "no" on the grounds that I couldn't do a decent job. Now, in that situation, I might have told the client that I simply couldn't fit it into my schedule at all. But my decision would really be based on the fact that I would not be able to do it well in the time allotted. Poor work doesn't help my client, and doesn't satisfy me, and there is no sense in running your own business if you're going to get involved in projects you can't be proud of.
"Yes, but . . ." I could have negotiated partial results. That is, I could have said that I would take on the project, but spelled out what I could do for them. I would give them less than they would get if I had a longer time to work on it, but I would still give them something of value.

Now, of all these, which is the hardest one to offer the client, and stick to?

For me, it is the last one, #4. It isn't easy to say "no," but saying "yes, but" is often even harder. The client always wants it all, the entire project, no matter what the timeframe. They are used to me pulling off minor miracles. And as consultants, we tend to think that we can indeed always get it done, no matter what "it" is.

The worst outcome is producing results that don't meet your own standards. Saying "yes" without the "but" is the easiest way to end up doing just that.

If you can't put the "but" in there when it is needed, if you can't negotiate services down to the level that either the budget or the timeframe dictates, then say "no." Simple as that.

The Guerrilla Consultant on the Perils of Experience

2007-11-20T11:22:00.001-06:00

Last month I wrote several posts on "The Perils of Experience" (see Parts I, II, III, IV of that discussion).

In a recent edition of his newsletter, The Guerrilla Consultant, Mike McLaughlin talked about "What Clients Want".

And lo and behold, much of his discussion was about how experience and expertise blinds some consultants to obstacles, in the client situation, to implementing effective solutions.

It's a good, thorough discussion on this theme, take a look when you get a moment.

Lessons From a Mime: Part II

2007-11-06T20:19:00.000-06:00

I mentioned, in my last post, the passing of famous mime Marcel Marceau (and his character "Bip").

I think we can safely make the following observations about Bip:

He was a great communicator, indeed, that's what everyone loved about him.
He did not make use of the latest technology.

Bip got the most out of the tools he had. He couldn't use some fancy "delivery modes" like . . . talking, but he really knew what you could do with the limited "modes" at his command.

And he could work cheap. Think about what was invested, in terms of technology, materials, objects, etc., and the return on investment -- the power of the communication he produced with no sound and no props -- was phenomenal.

Now, admittedly, one of Bip's flaws was that he never thought of trying to communicate in other ways. This is pretty common in employee communications and in training projects. The client has discovered the "one true way" to communicate, and that's all they can think about.

These days, more often than not, it is some kind of on-line training, courses that you can take on the Internet or your company intranet simply using a web browser. But that's just the latest and greatest fixation, there has always been a tendency to try to make one method of communication do everything.

The pecking hierarchy starts with the latest technology, and the client tries to jam everything into that mode. If they find things they simply can't make work -- or can't afford to make work -- through that delivery channel, they reluctantly drop back to more "primitive" tools. Some of them are even forced (dreadful as the thought may be) to have a face-to-face meeting or class, or to print things for people to read, or maybe call people and talk to them.

Now, if Bip were to adopt some other tools, I think he'd develop them the same way he did his physical, visual communication channel. I think he'd figure out everything he could communicate with no props and no sound. Then I think he would add some props and some sound, and get everything he could out of those. And then he might do the same with media, and eventually with on-line delivery.

In other words, instead of starting from the top of the techology ladder and trying to twist a single tool into every imaginable shape and use, he would start from the bottom. He would get all he could out of the basics, probably generating a terrific return on investment, and when those basic tools weren't good enough -- because they didn't achieve results, or were too slow, or even too expensive for certain applications -- he would look for the next tool to handle what was left.

Instead of saying, "if only Bip could talk", I'd like more clients to say something like: "If only we could talk as well as Bip doesn't!" When the focus is on communication by the best means (best being both impact and cost), rather than on "talking", spreading best practices effectively among employees, enhancing their performance, suddenly becomes a lot easier.

Lessons From a Mime: Part I

2007-11-02T10:41:00.000-05:00

Marcel Marceau passed away recently, the world's most famous mime. Younger people might not be terribly familiar with him, but his character "Bip" was well known to many of us. And Bip had a thing or to, er, "say" about employee communication and training.

Bip was a man of habits, and he seemed to encounter the same problems over and over again. For instance, he showed an exceptional facility for getting himself trapped in a glass cage, which we could infer as he felt his way along the invisible walls.

What was striking about Bip's approach to life is that he generally employed the same strategies every time he re-encountered a familar problem. And an awful lot of my training clients have shown the same behavior.

I think of these as "more of the same, but louder" clients. They've been telling the employees to do something a certain way, and it hasn't worked. They hire me to tell them again, with the expectation that I'll essentially duplicate what they have done, but that my message will be better written, and perhaps employ the dark arts, only known to professional writers, that instantly open the minds of recalcitrant employees.

These days, with my depth of experience, I usually don't mince words. I suggest that instead of just repackaging their strategy for reaching employees, they need to look at the strategy itself. They may need to change the message. Or the message may be fine, but perhaps management practices and workplace conditions work against employee change (ever try training a sales representative to push a product that pays a lower commission than everything else in the catalogue?). Or some aspects of the delivery could be enhanced -- perhaps shorter, more regular discussions of the best practice in question will have more effect than big announcements with a lot of fanfare, followed by months of silence.

The point is, if a strategy truly isn't working -- and they've probably tried it several times before they broke down and hired an outside consultant -- it isn't going to work in new hands, either. Fix the strategy. Otherwise you're like an American tourist speaking English progressively more slowly and more loudly to make the citizens of a foreign country understand you.

Of course, as a content developer and instructional designer, you need a couple of things. The first is the ability to see what is wrong with their strategy, and to be able to offer better options. The second, harder to come by, is the courage to tell a new client that they've brought you in to do something that won't work, and you'd rather not waste their time and money.

Some clients won't deviate from their preconceptions, no matter how persuasive you may be. Their training and communication project won't work, no matter how good you are.

You can take their money and run, that's up to you. I like working with clients who get results. It's one of the reasons I'm a freelancer instead of a staff person. So, I'm willing to speak up, and walk away if necessary.

It usually isn't.

The Perils of Experience IV: Working More & More for Less & Less

2007-10-25T22:43:00.000-05:00

In recent posts, I've talked about how one learns, after perhaps decades of consulting or subcontracting, to very quickly size up familiar situations, and their predictable outcomes, with new clients. Perhaps a client is bewildered by a new need or confusing circumstances, but you recognize it as quite similar to problems you have solved for clients in the past.

Your experience gives you a sort of 'direct perception' of the client's situation, the roles of the various players involved, and the way things are likely to play out. You can probably predict not only how you will end up addressing their needs, but even some of the most likely bumps you will encounter along the way.

The "perils of experience" I mentioned previously mostly had an impact on the client. When you don't let the client work through the process, or you jump too quickly to the conclusion that this new client's situation is just like others you've handled, your client can be shortchanged.

But being "shortchanged" is exactly the peril the freelancer faces, if you are not careful to think about pricing with this experience in mind.

The risk is that as you become more and more efficient, you'll be spending less and less time on these projects . . . and producing less and less revenue. (If you're afraid to raise rates when appropriate, or to charge for fair value, read no further.)

If you have accumulated the experience (and learned from it!) to recognize both problems and solutions more quickly than a rookie, you should be charging higher rates for your time. Combined with your increased efficiency, this can still produce savings for your client -- but don't let the client take all the savings out of your pocket!

Here's what happens. A rookie can do a certain task in 15 hours. It is not at all inconceivable that, with a couple of decades of experience (my case), you could perform that same task in only 10 hours.

If you charge the same rate as you did when you started out, you'll now be producing a better product for the client, faster, and getting paid one-third less to do it! And don't imagine that you can just use that time to book more work and make up the difference. First, time doesn't work that way, and second, why should you have to find more clients and work more time just because you do a better job than someone who doesn't know what you do?

Keep in mind that your experience usually saves the client money and resources. I know that when I work on a writing project, for example, clients soon discover that they need fewer reviews by fewer people, and they often end up cancelling meetings they thought they would need when they started the project. Plus the final product is simply more effective than rookies can produce, no matter how much time they put into it.

So I charge more per unit of work, but do the work faster. The client's expenses are not much different from what they would pay to have someone work at a lower rate, but put in a lot more time, and their internal costs (staff time, etc.) are much lower.

In effect, we share the savings my experience and efficiency bring to the project. But don't even think of asking me to hand all of the savings over to the client. I provide additional value and benefits, due to all I've learned from many previous clients, and I charge for it.

The Perils of Experience III: Leaping to Conclusions

2007-10-21T19:15:00.000-05:00

I've recently talked about how after years consulting for a variety of clients, you can almost instantly size up a situation and see where the solution to the client's needs is likely to lie. I also discussed, later, how as your confidence grows in your own perceptions -- which are usually right, that's not the issue -- you can forget that just coming up with the right answer quickly isn't enough, that the client has to do the work to really understand the problem, see the situation, and embrace a solution.

Another "peril" I referred to in my original post was that of leaping to conclusions, a particularly ironic fault in an experienced consultant.

With new clients, especially -- people who aren't necessarily accustomed to calling in outside help to deal with the kinds of problems you solve -- they have usually jumped to several conclusions of their own long before they called you. They saw a problem, thought they understood it, and thought they knew what they should do about it.

It is only when they've tried a couple of things and figured out that either they don't understand the problem, or they don't know how to address it (or both), that they've called you.

It is somewhat amusing, then, to realize how easy it is to do the same thing, as a consultant, that your clients have been doing: making snap judgments about the problem and its solution, and charging down some chosen path without sufficient humility and wisdom to look around and see if what you've come up with really is a good fit for the client's needs and circumstances.

Actually, this is what many consultants end up doing in the latter part of their careers, and we also see it in all kinds of companies that sell products and services, not just consulting. They develop solutions that are good solutions, that have worked repeatedly for a range of clients or customers. And then they get so enamored of those solutions that they apply them to every problem they see, whether or not they will work.

Becoming a problem in search of a solution, or a "one size fits all" tailor to your clients, is all too easy. It feels good to have figured out how things work, to know that you have diagnosed their situation so quickly, that you've dealt with their sorts of problems over and over again.

That's where the warning bells should sound. It all feels a little too good, and if you give in to the feeling too often, without using your head and all your senses to measure your first impressions against the client's real circumstances, you're not likely to be the savior, for your client, that you imagine yourself to be.

Where Does Effective Training Start?

2007-10-18T16:51:00.000-05:00

reprinted from the Oct 18, '07 issue of The Training Tipsheet

According to a recent article in Workforce Management magazine -- "Counter Intuition at FedEx Kinko’s" -- Kinko's, the copy service chain, is delivering customer service training to tens of thousands of employees, dispersed across more than 1,600 outlets. And you probably know that many of their workers are younger, often college kids.

So you might assume that delivering training on-line would be most efficient -- and maybe it would. But Kinko's decided that classroom training delivered by live instructors would be most effective. Sherry Vidal-Brown, vice president of learning and development, is quoted as saying:

"Delivering good service means looking customers in the eye. That’s why we want service training to be face to face."

Why is this newsworthy? They thought about their people, their subject matter, and the best ways to influence employee behavior, and then they chose their delivery format.

Isn't That What Everybody Does?

Frankly, basic as that seems, that process is all too rare in corporate training.

Many times, the delivery method for a major training effort is already determined, at the very first project committee meeting, by:

Cost. "Train people on-line, because delivery costs are low." Or, "Incorporate training into the annual employee meeting, since we already have them there."
Habit. "We've always done training on X this way . . ." Or, "Most people I've talked to say they handle this by doing . . ."

Heeding cost and efficiency concerns is legitimate. Starting with those constraints rather than the desired outcomes is a shortcut to mediocrity. Learning from your own and others' experience is one thing. Blindly copying it is another.

What things cost, and what you're used to (and perhaps skilled at) doing are important factors in deciding a delivery approach. But they aren't where you start, if you want the best possible outcomes.

Aim High, and Back Off

Instructional design and training development are much like strategic planning for your company, where you:

determine the results you want to achieve;
identify the best methods to reach your goals;
consider the constraints -- resources, conditions, etc. -- you face; and
adapt your methods to get the best results you can within those constraints.

Companies that plan their core business strategies this way are much more successful than those that start with constraints, or those that just extend past practices. Even when companies can't afford the best methods or tools to reach some of their goals, goal-oriented (rather than cost- or habit-based) planning helps them make better compromises between ideal implementation and real world limitations.

The same process applies to training projects. Determine the change you seek in your employees and identify the the best options for producing that change. Then apply considerations of cost and efficiency.

You may not be able to use the most effective method every time, but you will use more effective methods more of the time.

Kinko's took the bold step of investing in methods they believed would be most likely to change their employees, bringing a level of customer service to their retail outlets that would give them a significant competitive advantage over the copy and print services of big office supply stores like Staples and OfficeMax. And they decided to include support staff and management in the training as well, so that everyone would share a common vision of a vital component of their strategic plan, what they believe will help them win in the marketplace.

Good strategic plans are challenging to create, and lots of companies take the easy way out. Good training design takes courage and thought, and it is easy to opt out of those, too.

But goal-oriented training design is worth the effort if you want to be at the top of your industry.

The Perils of Experience II: Spectators Don't Create Change

2007-10-16T15:27:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post, I talked about how, if you have been in the business of creating training and employee communications for some time (decades in my case), you start to very quickly see the lay of the land and where things are going. Although the situation may be new to your client, you can come close to sketching out the path of the project almost before it begins.

That kind of experience is, of course, valuable -- to you and to your client. But it also has its hazards, and one of them is that your can undervalue the need for the client to learn from experience.

One hazard of relying too much on your experience is that you will spoil the client, the way parents sometimes do. We've all encountered kids (or adults!) who never learned to do something important because their parents always did that for them. As youngsters, they never made the effort to go through the important steps to reach some goal, they simply delegated all that to someone else (mom and dad).

In the corporate training situation, an experienced instructional designer and training developer can often see exactly where the problem lies, and what it takes to improve employee performance. And that's the danger point -- when the consultant or freelancer fails to recognize that the client doesn't have the same experience, and doesn't have the same immediate perception of the situation and the solution.

When the outsourced training help says, "Oh, I've been there before, here's what has to happen," what really happens is often one of the following two things:

The training consultant fails to help the client see the problem, and why and how the proffered solution will work. It's much like the experiences we sometimes have talking to our doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, when the situation is so obvious to them that they forget how to communicate about it with someone who doesn't have the same experience. We don't take the time to carefully work through our understanding of the client's needs, resources, opportunities, and we just don't communicate effectively. The result is that the client may, at best, waste a lot of time chasing unproductive solutions, and, at worst, reject your advice altogether, because this conversation is so frustrating.
The client is delighted to have a nearly "turnkey" solution, nods enthusiastically to everything you propose, and stamps the problem "solved." Unfortunately, this turns the client into a spectator in the training process. They never really embrace it, and the trainees, especially, can immediately detect that their managers or their training department is just going through the motions, that they aren't really invested in the training or the outcomes.

Of these two, the second is the more dangerous situation.

Clients who are complete spectators in creating the training they need are bound to be disappointed with the results.

That's bad for your relationship, for your reputation as a provider of training, and for their internal reputation with the employees they are trying to influence!

The next time those "spectators" launch some training project, the employees will already be skeptical. They'll just ride it out, like any other fad, and go on doing things the way they always do.

If you encounter a training need that your vast experience allows you to size up instantly, stop and remind yourself that your client needs to work through it step by step. They need to understand what they need to do, and why they should do it that way. And they have to be making decisions about options you offer, not rubber stamping decisions you make for them.

In the short run, spectator clients are easy and profitable to work with. In the long run, they are frustrating and a drain on your energy and revenues.

Bring your experience to bear, but make sure your clients do their share of the work to benefit from that experience.

How Much Do You Pay Your Spectators?

2007-10-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

reprinted from the Oct 4, '07 issue of The Training Tipsheet

When you hire outside help to develop training and communication tools for you, you naturally want to get a good return on your investment. Unfortunately, many companies act as if hiring a professional content writer, instructional designer, or training developer means that the job is largely done. They can just hand things over to the freelancer, provide some materials and hold some meetings, and their communication problem is solved.

Outsourcing content and training development is just another form of delegation, and delegation takes preparation. Turning over even the simplest task to another person and getting results instead of headaches means investing a little time to figure out what another person could do, what kind of person could do it, what information and support that person will need, how to get started, and how to manage the project once it has been delegated.

It means doing your homework before you hand things off to someone else.

Contrast that with a situation every freelance developer knows well. The company is in a hurry to get something done, probably because it has become a "hot button" for some executive all of a sudden. Without much careful thought, a "team" is assembled, a freelancer is located, and an initial meeting is held.

In that meeting, the project leaders thinks that he or she is going to pass along a lot of information to the consultant or developer, with the help of other team members. But because there has been little or no work done on the project before outsourced resources are brought in, what really happens is a lot of groping, crawling, and meandering toward a definition of the project in the first place.

In short, someone like me sits through a few hours of a meeting in which different players exchange confused views about what we are supposed to be doing. Perhaps legal and marketing have wildly different ideas about how a product can be promoted. Perhaps IT and HR have sharply different opinions on what is appropriate in systems for monitoring e-mail and browsing activity.

Whatever the case, much as I enjoy the fees, I really would rather you didn't pay me consulting rates to watch you figure out what it is you're supposed to tell me so I can get started.

And later in the process, you could have your team review the drafts of the content and return feedback, corrections, and suggestions . . . or you could call another meeting, in which your team members will confess that they have been too busy to read the drafts, and will skim the documents right there for the first time, firing off knee-jerk reactions to phrases that catch their eye.

And, finally, after that, we can schedule a little more work (and fees) into the project because shoddy review early in the process left gaps and other problems that need to be corrected much later, and much more expensively, when the project is almost done.

Invest your time, your staff's time, and your internal resources before you start the clock on your external resources. Being paid to be a spectator may be convenient for the freelancers you hire, but it's a silly way to spend your money.

Do your homework, check to make sure you are ready before every meeting you schedule that's on a consultant's clock, and you'll be surprised at how much easier it is to complete your training project on budget!

The Perils of Experience I: Introduction

2007-10-11T10:54:00.000-05:00

As you spend a lot of time performing the same services for many different clients -- writing content, designing training, identifying problems and solutions, developing and spreading best practices, whatever you do as a freelancer -- you may learn from experience (some people don't). And as you learn, you start to see where your client projects are going way before your clients do.

You may have had this experience in another field. For example, if you're a teacher (or a business trainer), you find that you can size up a new group of students very quickly. After your first few hours with them, you're already expecting resistance from this one, confusion from that one, enthusiasm from another.

It is a matter of quicker perception. Master chess players are said to perceive a "situation" on a chess board, not independent positions of many pieces. That's why they can do the trick of playing 20 amateurs at once. They don't remember all the games individually. They come back to each board almost as if it were the first time seeing it. But they directly perceive the game situation, and what is likely to happen next, almost at a glance.

So it is that I've often sat down with a client do discuss their need to change employee behavior in some way, to lead them to new practices that will help the company, and immediately had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done, and how it would all play out. For the client, it was a new situation, perhaps the first time they got so frustrated they decided to call in outside help.

But for me, it was a variation on a theme I'd played many times before. And while the client was groping with what to do and how to do it, I could pretty much sit down after the first meeting and sketch out what was going to happen.

Now, most of the time I'd be right, and my experience and insight were just what the client needed. But over time I realized there are several hazards associated with all this experience, and that's what I want to talk about in the next few entries.

These hazards affect both the client and the freelancer. And the most important issues are:

Undervaluing the need for the client to learn from experience. You can't just hand them the solution and expect it to work.
Leaping to the typical conclusions, while investing less effort in finding new solutions.
Pricing: giving away revenue you deserve, because of your experience and knowledge, by failing to balance efficiency and value in your pricing scheme.

I'll take up the first one in my next entry.

Kinkoids Do What Should Be the Obvious

2007-09-27T09:28:00.000-05:00

A recent article in Workforce Management magazine highlighted a new training effort at Kinko's, the copy service chain. Counter Intuition at FedEx Kinko’s (Garry Kranz) relates how Kinko's has launched a training initiative on customer service.

Given that they have over 1,600 outlets, and that many of their workers are young college kids, you might think that some kind of on-line experience would deliver the training. But Kinko's has decided to have their employees come into the classroom, working with (gasp!) live instructors.

In this article, Sherry Vidal-Brown, the vice president of learning and development, is quoted as saying something quite atypical of corporate training world:

"Delivering good service means looking customers in the eye. That’s why we want service training to be face to face."

In other words, "We thought about the skills we were training and chose the most effective method to deliver that training."

If you are a freelancer (or even a corporate staff member) working in training development or instructional design, you know how unusual this is. If you don't live in that world, let me explain what's peculiar about this.

They thought about their people, the subject matter, and the best ways to influence employee behavior, and then they chose their delivery format.

Again, if you are not already in the training business, his may seem like, well, Duh! Doesn't everybody do that?

Certainly not. In fact, it is rather rare. Many, perhaps most, corporate training decisions about delivery format are based on:

What they usually do. If training is typically classroom, let's do that again. If most training has been moved to the company intranet, well, then, of course that's where the next course will be delivered, too.
The tools they've invested in. It was a big deal to go to on-line training, or video conferencing, or to build that new training room, so you'd darned well better use it for everything you can so they get a return on that investment.
Tool features rather than employee/business needs. In other words, advocates of particular tools see benefits to using them in just about every situation, and that's where they start. They don't start with what's effective for this situation, but with their beliefs that a certain tool is effective in every situation."Train people on-line, because delivery costs are low." That could mean, "Save money, and get no results."

This is not a cheer for classroom training! I don't care what delivery mode Kinko's arrived at. For something else, a different format might be better.

I'm just amazed that they thought about it at all!

New To Corporate Training? Take Both Forks in the Road

2007-09-14T11:06:00.000-05:00

If you have a lot of experience teaching, coaching, guiding others to better performance, you're probably well suited to developing employee training for businesses. But if you're new to this, or just thinking about this field, you may be surprised that the answer to questions like:

Should we turn left or right at the fork in the road?

"Yes!"

Given the craziness that goes on in most educational institutions, newcomers to the business world, or outsiders looking in, often become somewhat delusional about the sense of purpose and keen focus they believe is characteristic of "the real world." That's natural, because business owners and executives typically suffer from the same delusions.

Unfortunately, it is the person who is supposed to deliver the message who usually discovers that there is no message, at least not one you can readily identify. Developing training repeatedly puts one in the position of pointing out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

And, as in the above "fork in the road example", it is often the instructional designer or training facilitator who is the first person to ask where we are going. Here are a couple of examples from my own clients:

One company was rolling out a whole new line of products and services. As part of employee training, I created videotaped messages from key executives in charge of the rollout. Asked when this product line could be expected to make a real contribution to the company's bottom line, one executive emphasized that there was no pressure, they wanted to work out the bugs and get it right, and that it would be at least six months, maybe a year, before anyone looked for revenue. The next executive said that revenue production would begin immediately, that they expected an almost instant return on their investment in this new line.
Another company had several branch offices that delivered their services, and they found that each branch had different ideas about what they were doing. So I asked the five-member executive committee to consider several strategies (e.g., income production, market share, maintaining corporate values) and choose the most important ones. Three of the five came up with completely different priorities from one another. The other two said they didn't know how to prioritize these options.

These examples are amusing, but in real life they are very challenging for the trainer. There is a significant risk of "kill the messenger" thinking: management will decide the problem is you, for having brought up the embarrassing question. At the very least, you may be faced with trying to develop training that can't possibly be effective.

There are no simple solutions to these situations, at least not simple enough to describe in this note. But you can often find ways to resolve these conflicts if you detect them early enough.

If you have no idea this stuff happens, and you walk into that committee meeting wearing your rose-colored glasses, holding to your deep faith in the focus and clear thinking of business owners, you're walking into a meatgrinder.

What Do Your Clients Call You To Their Friends?

2007-06-18T17:24:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not asking whether they say ugly things about you behind your back!

I mean, when your clients are actually trying to help you, when they are telling colleagues and associates about you, what do they say you do?

I find that clients often have a hard time with the broad concept of "training developer" or "content developer", much less "instructional designer." A straightforward "trainer" makes sense to them -- they think of it as someone who stands in front of the room, like a teacher, a familiar concept.

But they have a lot more trouble talking about what goes on before someone steps in front of the room, or before an online course is posted on their intranet.

So, as they describe how I have helped them, they tend to latch onto what kind of content I've developed, on the specific solutions I've developed for particular needs.

Ask half a dozen of my clients what I do for them, and they might reply:

He's our "Video Guy".
He converted our documentation to online form.
He writes the help files and user guides for our software.
He creates the instructor guides our managers use to deliver in-house training.
He wrote the copy for most of the web pages on our site.
He designed an online course we use to train new employees.

They don't see that I'm generally doing the same thing -- helping them get a particular message to a particular audience to achieve a particular result.

And that makes the whole referral business a little tricky. Well-meaning clients who think of me as "Video Guy" will mention me to others who are working with video, but might never think to say something about putting together a leader's guide for a staff meeting or in-house training session. Wonderful clients who are thrilled with what I've done for their web site might not realize that I can greatly enhance the impact and efficiency of some of their online, and even their in-person, training.

When you have a client who is willing to promote you, be grateful. But don't be so grateful that it blinds you to the need to educate your client about what else you can do, for them, and for others they know in their industry.

Are You Willing to Make your Client Uncomfortable?

2007-06-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

Comfortable, easy, trusting conversations with clients about their training projects are something that come with time and experience. You work together on multiple projects, over a period of time, learn your roles, and everything becomes smooth and efficient.

Of course, you cannot expect to start that way. The first project or two will include some relationship building, getting to know and trust one another. It won't be as comfortable as later efforts.

And it shouldn't be. One of your first jobs, when working with a new client, might be to take your client contact a little outside his or her comfort zone.

Most of us like to hear what we already believe, see what we've already noticed. We like news that fits our views, and in business life, the same applies -- we are happy working with information that fits the pattern we've already constructed, that is easily interpreted by our current views.

But training is about change! The point is to get people to work in better ways, to do things differently. And good training often requires some questions that don't fit that cozy history, the current accepted view.

If you're not willing to ask your clients questions they haven't thought about, to probe about attitudes and even resistance among employees, to explore past failures as well as successes in training and communication, you're not giving your client what they hired you to do. You're not holding up your end of the bargain.

So your client might fidget a little when you explore their needs and dig for information. It's natural to be a little uncomfortable when you are asking the questions, when you lead them to look at things they haven't considered before. But you'll find that helping your client think in new ways, even if it takes a fair amount of diplomacy and persistence, will produce better results.

And once your client recognizes that your thinking complements theirs, that it leads to real change in the workplace, comfort levels will suddenly be just fine.

From Copywriter to Trainer II: Review and Approval Hazards

2007-06-07T23:03:00.000-05:00

If you're new to writing training material, the review and approval process can kill you if you're not prepared for it. Some writers who come from other backgrounds, like copywriting, think that review is review is review.

Think again.

For many other business communications, the focus of the review is on the impact the material will have. Will it influence people to act? Is a lot of impact derived from a brief communication? Does the writing make emotional contact with the audience?

In training, those things should also be important, but they can be obscured by an obsession with accurate detail. Very often the review committee includes researchers, or clinicians, or engineers, or software developers, or lawyers -- people who intimately know the precise details (and limits) of the product or service, and who want all of those details to show up in your work.

It isn't unusual for the main struggle with these committees to be about what you can leave out. The experts frequently try to stuff every detail, every specification and technical measurement, into your content. And they don't see how that interferes with influencing how people work, which is why you're developing the training in the first place.

After all, they are heavily influenced by massive amounts of minute detail, so isn't everyone?

One of the first things you want to determine, when you start working with the client's project team, is whether there is someone more or less in charge who can stop the endless spiral of hair-splitting and detail accretion. If the review group is made up almost entirely of experts, you could be putting in a lot of time, and doing a lot more drafts, than if their input is constrained in some way, if someone is in a position (and has the sense and the will) to know when you have to move on if you're ever going to deliver effective training.

And you definitely want to know what kind of review group you're working with before you agree to deadlines and estimate your charges!

How Important is your Training? The "Inconvenience" Yardstick

2007-05-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

Training is important. It's a key tool in enabling employees to execute the organization's strategies, the best ideas management has conjured up to ensure success, whether that's measured by bottom-line profits or by service to the community. Even the best ideas won't have much impact on the results the organization achieves if those ideas live only in the board room or the executive suite, instead of at the desks and on the phones and in the service vans of the people who really bring your products and services to your customers and clients.

Training is inconvenient. You have to take people away from their work in order to help them do their work better. Participants may have to travel, locally or across a considerable distance. They have to abandon their in-baskets and limit access to their e-mailboxes for a few hours or a few days. They might even have to pay attention!

These two concepts are linked. You can estimate the importance of the training, in management's eyes, by the level of inconvenience they are willing to impose on themselves and on their employees to get the job done.

It's usually a bad sign when you have to battle to get employees' time, when their supervisors think training is a nice idea in the abstract, but can't imagine taking their employees off the front lines for a few hours, much less longer. Nothing sends the message that "training is nice, but not important" more clearly than unwillingness to give company time to the training.

Some companies push a lot of training onto the employees' personal time. Live training sessions are held on weekends. And often the real appeal of online training , for management, is that employees' can do it anytime, anywhere -- which really means, at home, on their own time.

If it were really important, they'd be using company time to do it.

Another clue about the importance of your training event, if it is a live event (in one place, or in a phone, video, or web conference), is whether you can count on participants abandoning their cell phones and other distractions during your event. The best environment is one in which both you and each participant's supervisor have made it clear before the event that the training is their work, while it is in session.

It isn't unusual for participants, or their managers, to clamor for "complete notes" to be handed out at the start of the event, or even in advance -- meaning they don't want to have to write anything down. In case they can't attend the entire event, or aren't interested, they want a pile of paper they can take back to their desk that has all the information you covered.

Frankly, training under those conditions is rarely worth the investment. If the participants can't be fully present and engaged in the activity, they certainly aren't going to change any of their work behaviors based on what happened in your training event.

And behavior change is the purpose of training, pure and simple. Like changing any other habits, it takes some efforts and imposes some inconvenience.

A company whose employees can't be inconvenienced can't effectively use training to achieve better results.

Freelance Pricing Philosophy VI: Charge your Rate from the Very First Project

2007-05-23T13:38:00.000-05:00

One thing most of the freelancers I know have learned, the ones who have been at this for years, anyway, is:

"Never bet on the come!"

In other words, don't let promises, or hopes, of future work influence your pricing and other conditions of your first project with a client.

Sometimes a client will suggest that if this first project works out, there could be a lot more work further down the road. But, the client says, this is the first time they've used an outside developer for this kind of project, and they don't have much money budgeted for it. If they could only get this first one done successfully, for a "reasonable amount," it could open the door to a long-term relationship with lots of additional projects a litle later.

Just say no, and stick to your rate.

It isn't that the client is trying to manipulate you. (That can happen, but usually this is a sincere proposal, especially from a contact who hasn't worked with outside developers before.) But major work projects are not appropriate "loss leaders" to bring new customers into your business.

Why not cut them some slack and get the first job done on the cheap?

First, cash flow. You'll be losing money on the project. If you're going to "invest" in some kind of losing proposition in order to win new customers, you have to have a pretty good idea of the payoff, and the probability that your return on the investment will put you in the black. And you want that investment to pay off fairly quickly, not months or years later, unless you're a fairly affluent freelancer who just does this for fun. (And if you're a fairly affluent freelancer, I'll almost guarantee that you never agree to these kinds of deals.)

Second, the most important reason for walking away from a proposition like this is that your contact cannot keep his or her end of the bargain:

S/he will rarely be in a position to promise future work. Many of the future projects that are mentioned will be possibilities at best. Accept 10 of these propositions, and at least 9 of them will either fail to generate any additional work, or will lead to small projects, months and years later.
Your contact cannot get you back to your standard rate, once you have worked at a discount! When his or her boss gets a project done for X amount of dollars, that boss is going to allocate roughly the same amount for the next project of that kind. And your contact will not be able to convince anyone higher up that more should be paid for the same work the second time around.

As in most pricing situations, the biggest influence on which rate you'll defend -- by walking away from the deal if necessary -- is your own marketing. If you don't have opportunities elsewhere, you'll panic and take the lower rate, convincing yourself that you'll catch up through those later projects.

But you'd be better off to skip the discount project altogether and put all that time into your own business, finding prospects and closing sales. The only "client" who should get a discount on your time based on a promising future is yourself.

Freelance Pricing Philosophy V: When you're the Subcontractor

2007-05-15T15:30:00.000-05:00

If you're working as a freelancer, you may find yourself working for other independent contractors or small businesses. For example, you might be a copywriter supporting a graphic designer. Or you may be developing the product knowledge information to support a sales training consultant who will work with a sales force on technique. And there are lots of writers who are supporting PR or marketing firms, and so on.

Whatever the case, you may get the suggestion that you should charge these customers a lower rate than you would charge their client -- the one who is getting your combined product -- if you were working with that client directly.

The argument you'll hear is,

"You have to leave enough room for me to mark it up before I pass it on to the client."

This argument seems so plausible that many subcontractors accept it without a second thought.

Why?

Let's rephrase that statement and look at it again:

"You have to set aside a portion of what you would have earned to pay me."

Now, there are a few ways of looking at this. If the person who has hired you to help on a project is saying, "I expect a fee from you in return for having brought you some business," at least that is straightforward. You can decide whether you want to work on an "agent's fee" basis for this project, just as you would in any other marketing arrangement.

And if your regular rate is more than a particular customer can bear, then it is perfectly appropriate for the person hiring you to ask if you can work for less on a project. And it is just as reasonable for you to decide you can't, or to accept the proposition. At least you're making a conscious decision, in view of the facts of the case.

But in truth, many times the person (or company) that has hired you is just assuming that they have to make a profit on every single item that passes through their hands.

And I don't agree with that.

Take the copywriter-graphic designer team, two independent contractors who form alliances to work with various clients. Why do they work together on a project?

Because neither would win that project from that client as individuals. The customer wants a complete solution, and only by teaming up can these two freelancers meet that need.

In other words, if you hire me to work on a project because you need my writing or instructional design or content development skills to win the project, you are still making more money with me in the project than going in on your own -- even if you don't get a penny of my billings.

And frankly, if I've helped you win a project you couldn't even have bid on otherwise, I don't think you should reward me by trying to force me to reduce my rate.

It's funny how many freelancers who are pretty professional about their pricing when dealing with corporate customers become hopeless amateurs when dealing with fellow freelancers.

When anybody challenges your rate, collect information, figure out what is driving the request, examine options, and make your choices. And don't let the fact that it is another small operator influence your thinking.

You can give away just as much money to small companies and individual contractors as you can to big companies, and the reasoning behind it doesn't do anything for your bank account.

The Ugly Question: ROI of Changing Employee Behavior

2007-05-08T23:42:00.000-05:00

If you're providing training development or instructional design services to organizations, your purpose is to make change how the organization works. In other words, people who go through your training, or get your communications, should do their jobs differently.

If you're new at this, you may be surprised (or relieved, unfortunately) if you never have this discussion. If you don't know what is going to be different about how people do their jobs, why are you doing the training, and how are you making your design decisions?

That doesn't mean everything has to be measurable in precise terms. Without a doubt, management can directly observe, or subjectively evaluate, many favorable changes among their employees.

And sometimes you need to deliver "insurance" training -- meaning that the absence of certain results is considered success. Sensitivity training (especially in regard to sexual harassment), diversity training, various kinds of workplace safety issues fall in this category.

After all, if the company has gone through the last couple of years without an accident in the workplace, it doesn't make sense to cancel safety training because it is no longer needed . . . and then wait until accidents start to happen to justify resuming the training.

All of that said, if both client and the contract training developer are sometimes reluctant to have heart to heart chats about the behaviors, or desired changes in working styles and actions, that should come about after the training is completed, they are even more likely to assume links between the training and better results for the organization as a whole.

In other words, you could be working hard to produce a change in behavior that won't lead to a change (or prevent a negative change) in the company's fortunes.

This is the real "why" question, the issue of return on investment (ROI). Why is the organization investing staff or contract time and money to develop something, and employee time to take the course or attend the event? Will it:

prevent a costly disaster, or head off regulatory action?
increase productivity, producing a better ROI on employee activity?
decrease costs, waste, defects, or customer service problems?
produce more sales, greater customer loyalty, greater visibility in the marketplace?

There are many, many reasons for investing in training and employee communications, and most people in this business are all too aware of worthy causes that company management overlooks.

But that doesn't mean it makes sense to apply those resources to things that aren't going to make a difference.

From Copywriter to Trainer I: What's your response rate?

2007-05-04T17:14:00.000-05:00

An awful lot of the work I do as an instructional designer and training developer is simply writing, generating content, on deadline, in the client's voice. General business writers do that as well, and marketing copywriters are used to churning out content to produce a desired effect, much as training developers do. (Well, that's what the good ones do. A lot of training developers and instructional designers are making good livings pumping out materials without the least interest in whether they have any impact on the trainees, but that's a different topic.)

From time to time, if you're working mostly around marketing, advertising, direct mail, or similar fields, you might wonder: would it be all that hard to expand into developing training material?

Maybe not, it's definitely worth a look. Good, effective writing is the foundation of a lot of successful training, and you already understand the business environment (giving you an advantage over, say, people who come into business from fields like teaching).

One of the biggest differences between marketing copy and training content involves the client's expectations for reaching the audience.

What percentage of your audience has to embrace the message for the effort to be worthwhile, to offer a satisfactory return on investment?

In advertising, direct mail, and anything else related to sales, we expect to reach some portion of the audience. Huge mailings, with huge budgets, go out in the hope that a few percent of those who receive the sales letter will actually respond.

In the training world, you're expected to reach 100% of your audience! Whatever you're explaining -- a preferred procedure, a regulatory requirement, a best approach -- the training is expected to produce the desired result from everyone who receives it.

Now, there is usually some external support. Participants in your courses and events know they're expected to pay attention, to use what they learn, and so on.

But nobody is going to be excited if 25 people take your course or read your instructions, and 5 of them actually put them into practice -- even though that would be a great response to a sales letter.

An excellent salesperson once said to me, in regard to a service he sold (and on which I developed training), "This isn't Biblical. I don't abandon the 99 to go after the one lost sheep. Some prospects just aren't going to be interested, and I have to let them go so I can work on the ones we can eventually bring into the fold."

There's the challenge. In training, it is crucial to reach as much of the flock as possible, preferably every single woolly creature in the group. And that's something to put in the front of your mind every time you sit down to design and write a unit of training -- especially if you come from a world that looks at this equation rather differently.

From Teacher to Trainer: The Biggest Cost Obstacle to Corporate Training

2007-05-01T08:47:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I asked you to guess what category of cost presents the greatest obstacle when you are convincing corporate management to provide some sort of training or communication, whether to spread best practices, disseminate policies, or motivate employees.

It doesn't matter whether you end up with a seminar led by a facilitator, a self-study print-and-audio packet, an online course, or a regional conference. All of these different format have different cost structures to develop the material, and different delivery costs -- but the one cost factor that you must justify to make the training happen is the same for all of them.

employees' time away from their 'real' jobs.

Now, incredibly enlightened management understands that learning to do their jobs better is just as much a part of employees ' jobs as all the other things they do. And if you work in the consulting business for a few decades, you may even meet management like that once or twice.

The point is that two hours in your seminar, or two hours online going through an interactive course, are two hours that they aren't creating products, selling to prospect, working with customers, maintaining equipment, or doing whatever else it was they were hired to do. It is hard to underestimate how big an obstacle this is to spreading best practices in an organization.

And, to a point, this is a legitimate concern. At the very least, it usually means dividing up the audience into "shifts". After all, you can't have all the tellers in a bank, all the nurses on a hospital floor, or all the mechanics in your auto dealership absent at the same time. Somebody has to be around to service customers and clients. (Big difference from everyone going to assembly, or taking standardized tests, or even taking a math class, at the same time in school.)

This is where you have to think about 'return on investment'. The time they spend away from their post or take away from sales calls has to produce a benefit that will, over time, mean the company is more successful. You have to produce a sufficient change in behavior to produce better results, enough better to pay for the time you took.

Or you have to reduce a risk -- in other words, instead of producing an obvious plus, you head off a powerful minus. If your training greatly reduces the probability of lawsuits, regulatory action, negative public reactions, or physical disaster that could destroy your company, it is worth the time, in the same way that insurance for your home and your car may still be valuable to you even if you never enter a claim.

Recognition of this time obstacle should illuminate all your conversations with management about training. Some trainers and instructional designers look down their noses at this attitude, thinking that their training is so wonderful, so informative, so inspirational that only a Philistine would think that employees can make a better use of their time at their desks or service bays or customer calls. That brand of arrogance is, I suppose, somewhat satisfying, but not very successful.

At the same time, many, many supervisors, employees, and managers have very short-term views of their work. They may rarely, if ever, think about making an investment in something that will only pay off over time, preferring to devote all their attention to "fighting fires" and responding to immediate, apparently urgent, situations.

These individuals take a lot of education. Respecting their points of view, and producing training that delivers tangible results, will go a long way toward opening the door to more training -- as will support from key players at the executive level.

Most trainers and managers are prepared to talk about development costs, or delivery costs for something like a seminar delivered by an outside expert. But all too often, the conversation about time is much less open and respectful.

Learning to have that conversation is one of the best ways to develop the support you need to have a real impact on the contribution employees make to the success of your (or your client's) company.