Ask them.

If I could get away with it, I’d end the chapter right here.

Ask them.

It’s my all-purpose answer to questions about how to develop an effective training program. Billions of dollars are wasted on training, and it’s not because bad people are kissing off good and useful material. Nor is it due to bad material being thrown at good people. The fault lies with the unasked and therefore unanswered question:

What do you need?

Once they’ve seen a basic job description, even a rank beginner can meaningfully address the question. They know what they need. Well, most of them do. As a new employee, I sat through weeks of training at Xerox’s magnificent training complex in Northern Virginia concentrating hardest on who among my female colleagues I would invite to join me for dinner that night (I was single at the time). I got back home to Ohio, a fully trained sales rep, but on my first call I was so scared, I drove around the 1–270 beltway that encircles Columbus two full times—at an hour a lap—before I had the nerve to get off at the exit nearest the customer’s office. Inside I was a babbling idiot. “I’m Frank Pacetta, what your name is?” is the way I introduced myself. Peter Rogers, another Xerox rep who was with me, still teases me about it.

Months later, I continued to be a high-energy disaster, more interested in finding out where that night’s party was being held than getting serious about selling. My boss sent Peter Rogers out again to help, coach, and warn me—one young sales rep to another—that I was going to blow a great opportunity if I didn’t pull my act together. It took marriage, Julie’s pregnancy, and a $600 bank balance to end my days as an unreformed underachiever.

I was lucky that I didn’t get fired long before Frankie was born. I really regret the wasted years. I burned off the middle portion of my twenties, which I could and should have put to far better use. I cheated myself and cheated my family. As a reformed underachiever I closely watch the younger members of my organizations to make sure they don’t make the same mistake—not if I can help it, anyway. I’ve always relied on training to keep my teams focused, pumped up, and productive.

My point about asking people to tell us what kind of training they need stems from what didn’t happen to me. Just that question alone, asked by my boss at the time, would have revealed that I was totally “CC”—Clearly Clueless. Or, which is even more central to the point, if my boss’s boss had asked, “What does Frank need to get him on track?” it would have helped. Instead, what happened—and still does—is that a one-size-fits-all training program is brought into play that is only marginally useful. That is, if you’re lucky. Many companies don’t even offer any kind of training whatsoever.

People want to learn what they can use—now. The issue is relevance. How can I, as a teacher—and that’s what a good leader is—help you do your job better, have more fun, and become more successful?

If that answer is, “Learn to conjugate Latin verbs,” you’ve lost them. The major complaints about training come down to this:

• It’s dull.
• It doesn’t relate to me.
• I know this already.
• I don’t see a real-world application.
• There’s no chance to practice.
• The trainer hasn’t been there and done that.
• There’s too much material.
• It’s too complicated.
• It takes me away from family.
• It takes me away from my customers.
• What I was taught doesn’t work.
• My boss told me to forget what I learned and do it his way.
• I didn’t get a chance to use what I learned and forgot it.
• There isn’t enough training.
• There isn’t any training.

The last complaint wasn’t an issue at Danka when the company acquired Kodak’s high-volume color copier division. Kodak had an excellent training facility in Rochester, New York, that each new employee was required to attend for about three months. I made it a point speak to each class of trainees. I’d start by asking if they enjoyed the experience. “Oh, absolutely.” “Okay, What did you learn? Do you remember all three months’ worth?”

Meanwhile, the instructors were standing there and they wanted to kill me. It seems like a dumb question, doesn’t it? Here’s the vice president of sales asking trainees to tell him what they learned over the course of three months. Well, damn it, what did they learn? They better be able to tell me—and better than that—show me, or we’ve just wasted a lot of time and money.

Of course nobody is going to be able to spew back the entire curriculum. But what I heard in response to my question was so sketchy and spotty—and worse, so ho-hum—that I was alarmed. For some reason, few managers ask that question of trainees who have just returned from training sessions. Maybe it seems better not to know. But it isn’t. Start asking. Find out if the training is dull, too theoretical, or doesn’t pertain to the employee’s job. Buck that information right up the chain of command.

The training bureaucracy will scream. Scream right back. If you don’t insist on real-world evaluation of training programs, you’re cheating yourself and your people. At Kodak, I suspected that the lackluster sales performance we were experiencing had nothing to do with training problems and everything to do with lack of customer contact. The idea of sales talent sitting in a classroom for three months bugged me, so I kept probing during bull sessions with trainees until we got beneath the “Oh, the training experience was absolutely great” to “Three months is kind of long to be away from my family” and “They threw an awful lot at us” to “I’d like to have a chance to try some of this before I forget it.”

Newly returned trainees are a gold mine of information. Ask those who have gone through in-house or local training programs a series of Pacetta Poll questions:

• What was of most value?
• What was of least value?
• What subject would you like to have more work on?
• Did you feel there were gaps in the program, and if so, what were they?
• How would you rate the value received from your training experience on a scale of one to ten?
• Did you have fun?
• Out of all you learned, what have you utilized since you’ve been back?
• Has your manager or team leader reinforced what you learned, encouraged you to use it, and inspected its effectiveness?
• How does the training compare to what you received previously from us or from another employer?
• What would you suggest to improve the training program?
• Were your instructors passionate about their material? Rate them on a scale of one to ten.
• How will our customers benefit from your training experience?
• Did the training relate to our vision, culture, product, and customers all of the time, most of the time, occasionally, or not at all?
• How often would you like to undergo formal training of this sort: monthly, quarterly, annually, or I don’t know?

There I go again with a lot of questions. And here I go again with my insistence that you do something with the information you gather. I don’t want to hear, “But, Frank, training is not my area.”

Make it your area. To practice people-ology, training cannot be delegated or relegated. Over the years I’ve heard tons of excuses, most of them are built out of prefab elements like, “My manager never did…,” or “Corporate refused to.…” My answer is, “So corporate tied you up in the basement without food and water, and there was no way you could go out and do what had to be done?”

Give me a break!

If training stinks, fix it. Look at the answers to the questions I’ve laid out above and develop a plan to correct the shortcomings. We’ve been talking about barrier busting, right? If your trainees tell you they haven’t used their learning since they’ve returned, that’s a barrier. You’ve lost their services for several days or weeks; somebody had to pick up the slack, which means you and their colleagues have paid a price for training that’s not yet returning the investment. You can’t let that go on for long without demotivating those who made the extra effort.

Ask all newly returned trainees to develop a specific action plan detailing when and how they will utilize what they learned. Ask them to do it while they are in training. There’s no sense racking up additional down time. Also, build in the requirement that the plan specify what learning will be applied the first day back into it.

Let’s do it. Throw the ball! Training that isn’t used won’t be retained.

I’m not going to let poor training screw up my operation. Anytime a trainee answers the question, “What was of least value?” you’ve got important information to act on. If it’s a vital area, bring in your superstars and top performers and use them as backup instructors. They can do this coaching one-on-one or in a group. The same goes for the question, “What subject would you like to have more work on?” It’s an ideal mentoring situation. Mentor mania, here we go!

And what if—what if—the training gets the highest possible ratings and accolades? Count yourself lucky. Now, you can ask the trainees to pay for their superb training experience with measurable higher performance and productivity. That’s the whole purpose, isn’t it? Now you’ve got a chance to track ostensibly superior training to see how it translates in real-world terms. Do sales increase? Are customers happier? Is quality improved? Does the bottom line show a difference?

By tracking the effectiveness of training, you can counteract a tendency that most of us fall prey to: We get to be old fogies. It’s so easy to reject new ways of doing things because they’re unfamiliar and seem to challenge our on self-worth as leaders and managers. If new techniques pass muster, shame on you for saying, “That’s not the way I do business.” Give new ideas a chance to succeed or fail. Just find out which is which.

OFTS—Old Fogey Training Sabotage—can be a big program, but the manager’s age is not the issue. It’s all about attitude. A newly trained person who returns to the field and is told, directly or indirectly, that what he’s learned has no validity is less likely to retain and make use of the material. According to Neil Sessoms, former director of curriculum development for the copier and duplicator division at Xerox’s Leesburg training complex, this destroys the follow-up process that must occur for new knowledge to take root. The fault lies with the trainee’s boss. “This manager not only does not reinforce, not only does not inspect, not only does not role model what the trainee has just learned,” Sessoms contends, “but as a rule discourages or diminishes its importance. He insults its credibility in a thousand ways, whether it’s an outright critical statement or by treating it casually—’Oh, that’s interesting, but tell me where we stand on this month’s outlook.’”¹

Neil Sessoms is right. Veteran managers have been through so many iterations of the latest and greatest training they become callous and cynical. Here we go again. They roll their eyes and proceed to demean and discredit the training process both before it takes place and after.

Doc P’s truth serum time again. You’ve done it, right? The thought of losing key people and scrambling to fill the vacancies while they go off into training never-never land is a major pain, not to mention a major expense. When they return, the last thing you want to do is listen to a bunch of new jargon and way-out theories. Totally New York nodsville. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just get back to work.

Sessoms believes this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The manager expects training to be a waste of time, and it is, because the trainee can’t make full use of what he or she learned. The next step is for the demonstrably ineffective training curriculum to be revamped yet again, confirming that the manager was right all along. Vindication. Sessoms sees the manager’s rationale unfolding this way: “That’s why I didn’t reinforce it, mat’s why I didn’t learn it myself, that’s why I didn’t inspect you or pay any credence to it because I knew it was going away. And because I didn’t do any of these things it was unsuccessful. Sure enough it went away. And here comes another.” Effective training never gets off the ground. It’s a vicious circle.

Time for Doc P to take some of his own truth serum. I used to do that all the time. I would look for excuses to keep my people from being dragged off to Leesburg. I wanted them on the job, but I was also reacting to negative feedback from trainees who came home and complained that they had wasted their time. What was needed was a mechanism for me to push back on Leesburg and get them to fix the problems on their end. But if I’m not conducting an evaluation—the one I laid out above—I don’t have any ammunition. My bosses are going to give me the New York nod—and they did. What’s more, if they are not doing an evaluation of me and my teams, top management will never know whether training is failing because the curriculum is lousy or because I’m sabotaging it.

All it should take is one “no” to the question, “Has your manager or team leader reinforced what you learned, encouraged you to use it, and inspected its effectiveness?” for my boss to be on the phone asking me what’s going on. There’s a fundamental disconnect here. Somebody needs to be held accountable for training. If I’m sabotaging training and my boss doesn’t know it, he or she is as guilty as I am. The responsibility to expect and inspect runs right up to the top of the leadership hierarchy.

The Busyness of Failure

Training, like recruiting and retention, often is treated like a stepchild. When I conduct one of my informal and unscientific Pacetta Polls I keep hearing that “Training is weak, but we don’t have time to do anything about it.”

We’re too busy. What are we busy doing? I think I know: Managing the negative consequences of being too busy to do all the stuff that needs to be done. The winner is the person or company that doesn’t bleed to death before crossing the finish line. This hemophiliac’s marathon is as self-defeating as old fogey training sabotage. Those who can run fast and bleed at the same time are, by definition, superstars. The lesson learned—the wrong one—is to hire superstars, forget about the training, and get them out on the track clocking up the miles.

Unless there’s unlimited talent and unlimited supplies of blood, it’s the wrong lesson, for sure. But we’re three-quarters right. Superstars are always worth hiring and retaining. Go ahead, but forget about training them in a generic one-size-fits-all mode. Get them out on the track racking up miles, and then study how they do it so the techniques can be taught to others.

Use training to clone your best people. They become the curriculum.

Let’s work through that sequence. What’s usually keeping most mediocre or failing organizations from total collapse is a cadre of hard working, high performing people. The same is also true of seemingly successful operations that could be and should be doing much better. In both cases, the top performers have figured out how to survive and prosper in spite of everything management does to bleed them to death. They may have cultivated superior product knowledge or a feel for the competition. In Cleveland, one of my managers had a brilliant tactical instinct for identifying the customer’s decision-making priorities and process. I made two of his techniques standard practice for all the sales teams and trained them to make sure it happened.

Simply by asking your best people how they handle important business activities and observing them in action, you can get a training profile that’s extremely useful, and is more relevant, specific, and field tested than anything an outside consultant could tell you. But go beneath the surface. If a top sales rep is making six or seven calls a day, that’s useful information. Before you require all reps to make the same number of calls, find out what else the model is doing. Are her proposals especially comprehensive? Is his prospect base larger? How long does it take between initial contact and final agreement? How do you identify the decision maker? Those elements are all procedural and, as a result, teachable.

This isn’t just sales stuff. It works for any business function:

• What do they do?
• Why do they do it?
• How do they do it?

Now there is one flaw to this, and it’s a key reason why training is so screwed up. If you don’t value what your top people are doing, it’s pointless to use them as a training template. Until we come to terms with identifying what it is that we must do to pay the rent every month, we’re probably training people to do things that aren’t worth the time and trouble. It’s not about identifying what we’d like to do or what seems like the trend of the future, but about knowing what do we have to do every day to keep the doors open.

Quick. What drives your business? I’ve been harping on this since chapter 3. Write it your red notebook. Until you can do that, forget about training. It’s not going to do any good.

Learning for Performance’s Sake

Training is not a panacea. Neil Sessoms reminded me of that. He said, “If you’ve got a bad compensation plan, you can’t outtrain it. If your product line stinks, you can’t make it smell better with training. If you’ve got a competitor with a distinct technological or price advantage, you can’t out train that either.”

He’s right. But isn’t it tempting to postpone the heavy lifting in the hopes that training will save the day? Many computer hardware and software companies follow this strategy: Train a huge support staff to deal with confused and irate customers who can’t make the stuff work right instead of getting the bugs out before the product is released. No amount of training is going to counterbalance tens of thousands of people who feel that you’ve sold them an inferior product when, in fact, you’ve done just that. Roger Gittines, my coauthor, bought a computer directly from the manufacturer off the Internet. When he got it, the fax modem didn’t work. After calling customer support, he learned that the fax modem shipped with the machine was incompatible with its operating system and that the company was aware of the problem at the time it filled the order. “You mean we paid nearly two thousand dollars and you knowingly shipped us a defective product?” his wife, Jane, asked the customer support representative. “I have entered the information about your problem and the company will be in touch with you,” was the reply. I don’t care whether that was or wasn’t an example of a well-trained response, nothing short of “We’re sending you a new computer and a dozen roses” was likely to work. No, training wouldn’t help. The company had a product problem and the only way to solve that was to fix the product.

By treating training as an all-purpose panacea, we contribute to training bloat. There are training professionals who are more than happy to serve up a sprawling smorgasbord of learning experiences that are based on the academic model of learning for learning’s sake. Neil Sessoms points out that business requires learning for performance’s sake: “You don’t care if they skip every class, as long as they can do it. And you don’t give a damn if they have to take every class twice if that’s what’s needed for them to learn how to do it. There’s no knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It’s called criteria referenced instruction. Learning a whole lot of stuff and not being able to perform it is worthless.”

What I like about Neil’s approach to training is that he doesn’t want to train you. He doesn’t do smorgasbord. “Sell me on the idea of doing training for you,” he says. “And then when you’ve convinced me that there’s a positive goal for the organization, that the management hierarchy is supportive, that they’re begging for it, and they need it, and they will play an active role in developing it and enforcing it and that they have a stake in it because it’s in line with what they’re being expected to do and deliver, then we’ve got something to start with.”

Amen! Think how much better that is than having a training consultant or manager selling you a product that may be something you’ve heard or read about in a magazine. Big name companies are signing up. All aboard. Forget it. The key question is, does it fit in with what you need?

Begin the evaluation of your training programs by 1) asking recent trainees for their assessment of the experience, and, 2) determining how the training is actually impacting your business goals. If there’s no impact—save your money!

The Express Train(ing) Track

Neil Sessoms is on my recruiting wish list. I want to hire him for my “situation room,” a phrase the White House uses to describe the basement nerve center the president uses to stay in contact with the military chain of command during an international crisis. My situation room is more of a flight simulator, like the ones pilots use to train for emergencies. The simulator spits out a variety of “what-if” situations and the flight crew must respond without crashing.

When I visited the University of Dayton to attend a closed basketball practice, Coach Oliver Purnell had the team concentrating on what do in close end-of-game situations. It was all “what if” and “what to do.” He wanted those kids to know how it felt and what the options were so that when the real thing occurred they’d run through it smoothly.

Business people need the same sort of practice.

Bring in the experts and savvy veterans and let them observe and coach as people role play through the scenarios. Do it on-site. Then send them out to work the street, work the Net, or work the line. Coach Purnell said he is always nervous about watching an eighteen or nineteen year old running down the court with his paycheck in his mouth. I think investors feel the same way about rookies running damage control or taking million-dollar gambles with stock dividend checks in their mouths.

What if the train(ing) doesn’t stop here anymore? Just as I recommended that you become a “recruiting company,” the next step to achieve and maintain competitive advantage is to become a training company or to go work for one that is.