CIASTD Monthly Newsletter

As I looked around the crowd (and I use that term loosely) that attended the August CIASTD Program Meeting, it was obvious that the vast majority of those in attendance came from the external consultant community.

The question I asked myself then was, how many of you who are internal trainers or consultants saw the program announcement and ignored it with the thought something to the order of “I’m inside a corporation, I don’t do sales, I don’t need to go to this.” If that was your thought process in electing not to attend this program, you missed a highly valuable program.

In my August Facilitator piece I talked about earning your seat at the strategic planning table. Tim Roberts told us how to do this. Don’t look now, but we are all in sales. Whether you’re internal or external, you’re selling yourself and the results you can provide for the business unit leader.

One of the superb points that Tim made was that we are in the business of talking to business leaders (both you who are internal and my external consulting colleagues and myself) who are interested in one thing: business results. They don’t care that we provide carefully crafter training programs; that everyone’s going to have a good time at the program, or that it will be presented by a highly credible expert. They only care that we can deliver something that will increase their bottom line.

Tim highlighted another blinding flash of the obvious that I continually have to remind myself of when I go about selling what I have to offer. That is that what I have to offer (and you too, oh by the way) is not our training, but ourselves. What we are doing is building relationships with business units through those relationships we then are allowed the privilege of presenting what we can do to those business leaders and much of their acceptance of our ideas is based on our personal relationship and credibility with those same business unit leaders.

Tim made me pull one of my favorite reads off the shelf and made me review it again. That book is a wonderful piece by David Maister titled The Trusted Advisor. It provides some of the best guidance on how to build and maintain the business relationships that will keep you in businesss that I have ever read. Put it on your must read list. The other book that I will pull out and re-read is another classic by Peter Block titled Flawless Consulting (Make sure you get the 2nd edition). This is another wonderful how-to that will serve you well as a tool to build relationships with the business unit managers you serve.

One last time. We’re all in sales! Building the relationships with the senior leaders who are your customers is what you must do to earn your seat at the strategic planning table.

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September CIASTD Meeting

Advancing the Practice of Evaluation
Friday, September 23rd

Compiled by Eric Denney, Facilitator Staff

Join us for the upcoming October meeting to see Patricia Windle Todd present “Advancing the Practice of Evaluation.” The presentation will run from 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., with the usual cranberry juice cocktail networking session from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

Over the past two years, Eli Lilly and Company has been on a strategic journey to infuse evaluation into the organization. After an analysis of the current and future state related to measurement and evaluation, Lilly University introduced a plan to advance the practice of evaluation by building evaluation competence, providing tools and processes and creating a community that fosters evaluation planning and implementation. This presentation will share best practices as well as lessons learned related to the implementation of the global evaluation strategy.

Pat’s been with Eli Lilly and Company for almost 15 years. For the past 5 years she has devoted her time to advancing the field of measurement and evaluation at Lilly and externally. She was responsible for developing the global evaluation strategy at Lilly, developing an evaluation curriculum, and implementing electronic systems for testing and evaluation.

She is an advisory member of the ASTD ROI Network and is shaping the direction for evaluation for ASTD and its members. She is also a member of the Evaluation Consortium, a group of evaluators from Fortune 100 companies. Pat has presented at ASTD, ISPI and AEA conferences, as well as a guest lecturer for ID graduate students at Purdue and Indiana Universities. Pat earned her Ph.D. in Instructional Research and Design from Purdue University.

Cost for the program is $25 for members, $35 for non-members, and $15 for students. There is, however, an additional $5 fee for walk-in registrations. You can register at the CIASTD website by clicking on the following link:

https://secure28.nocdirect.com/%7Eciastdc/secure/ciastdregister.htm

The meeting will be held at The Marott, located at 2625 N. Meridian Street, near the intersection of Fall Creek Blvd. and Meridian.

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August Meeting Recap

Sales Training: Driving Results

For the August meeting, Sales Trainer Tim Roberts presented “Sales Training: Driving Results.” Creating the right training environment means only one thing for Indianapolis Sales Trainer, Tim Roberts: Positive Energy. This program demonstrated how Tim sells sales training everyday to CEO’s, presidents, and owners of Indiana businesses. This fast-paced, interactive program kept the audience laughing, confused, stunned and changed (as promised in the advanced promotional material!)

The first session found the audience divided into teams (by tables). Each team was required to come up with a name for their team, and then to explain some unusual similes that Tim provided. As the teams reported out, Tim used the opportunity to provide teachable moments where he emphasized key messages about training techniques and learning.

After the break he shared three concepts that he uses when teaching:

People don’t argue with their own experience – instead of starting off with “teaching” start off by listening and observing what people already know. Tim told about Dave Arch who uses two techniques (CPR) Concepts, processing, review. (EAT) Experience, awareness, and theory. This is a good way to take yourself out of the picture as an instructor. Instead of facing initial resistance, the and prepares the audience for new teaching. (Notice that this method is directly opposite to the model used in many college classrooms.)
Adults are babies in big bodies. Have people doing things to have fun and they will learn best.
80/20. They should be doing stuff 80 percent of the time; the instructor should be doing stuff only 20% of the time.

Roberts was a dynamic speaker who practiced what he preached. Those who attended were treated to an outstanding program that challenged, entertained, and informed.

Tim Roberts is the founder and president of Effective Selling Methods, Inc., an Indianapolis-based sales training and consulting company. In addition, he has served his community on numerous boards and committees including the Indiana Psychology Commission, the Indiana Judicial Nomination Commission, the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications, and the Board of Directors for The Rainmakers. He is also a proud sponsor of the Indiana Blue Chip Business Awards and CEO-net.

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Books in Review

The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
By Marcus Buckingham
Reviewed by Jay McNaught

Buckingham, M. (2005). The one thing you need to know: About great managing, great leading, and sustained individual success. New York: Free Press.

I’ll admit, I was skeptical when I saw the title. After his previous successes with First, Break all of the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths, I thought Marcus Buckingham was grasping for straws with this one. But I was wrong. As it turns out, this is a well-researched and well-documented book that does a nice job defining leadership and success, and helps us to better understand the differences between the two. The concept is simple – Buckingham seeks to discover the “one thing” about each topic that defines it and serves as the best explanation. “Other factors will undoubtedly come into play, but the kinds of insights that are most useful are the ones that underpin, and that therefore, control, every other factor. These insights give you leverage” (p.15). In his attempt to identify the “one thing” -- or the controlling insight as he called it -- it had to pass three tests: It had to apply across a wide range of situations, it had to serve as a multiplier, and the controlling insight had to guide action (Pps. 15-16). “Don’t misunderstand. I am not so naïve as to believe that you can reduce all complex phenomena to a single cause. In fact, as a social science researcher by training, I have been forced to become singularly suspicious of oversimplifications, the kind that lead to one-size-fits-all explanations and get-slim-quick-pill action plans. No matter how careful your analysis, the link between the effect you are trying to predict and the factor you thought was causing it never turns out to be quite as clear and direct as you hoped” (p. 12).

One thing that I thought was interesting: Buckingham believes that the best way to study something is to take a look at the really excellent examples. He points out that in medicine, for a long time we tried to study how to make people healthy, but studying sick people. Or in psychiatry, we studied the mentally ill in hopes to learn how to have better mental health. Buckingham takes the opposite approach. Much like Collins did with Good to Great, Buckingham examined the excellent examples and tried to learn from them. He studied the best leaders and the best managers he could find in hopes of finding the common denominator – the “one thing.”

I particularly like his chapter on leadership. Buckingham tells a personal story about his own experiences in New York on 9/11. He then uses the account to help us understand why Giuliani was such a powerful leader during that horrifying time. Buckingham recalled how Giuliani’s popularity had actually fallen prior to 9/11, “… in the twelve months prior to September 11, he had seemed to fall out of sync with the majority his constituents… He had become distracted by his short-lived run for the Senate, by his public and contentious divorce, and by his fight with prostrate cancer… Our loyalty was slipping away” (Pp. 129-130). Yet the events of 9/11, and Giuliani’s response, won them back. “During 9/11, he won it back to such an extent that, if given the chance, many of us would probably have voted him into a third term. He was now greeted by standing ovations wherever he appeared, He was the world’s mayor, Time magazine’s Person of the Year, Sir Rudy after his knighthood by Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly everybody loved him”(p. 130). Buckingham traces the reversal to a response that Giuliani made in a news interview. “He revealed himself to be a leader who understood what all of us, all twelve million diverse, disagreeable, discordant New Yorkers, were going through. He found the emotion we were all feeling – This day is unbearable – and he articulated it for us” (p.131.) Buckingham personally remembered the impact of have an empathetic leader. “We didn’t know what was going to happen next, but we now knew that we had a leader who would do right by us, who would steer us through the uncertainity. He had voiced what was in our hearts. He had spoken for us all. And we loved him for it” (p. 131). This and other research leads Buckingham to identify the “one thing” about leadership. “The One Thing every great leader knows he must do is: Discover what is universal and capitalize on it. The better you are able to do this, the better you will lead” (pp. 132-133).

One Thing You Need to Know is a fascinating book that has implications for many types of training programs; especially management and leadership development programs.

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Ask the Doctor

Tips and Thoughts for Training
By Linda Edington, EdD, Facilitator Staff

The reason we do what we do as trainers and facilitators is because we want to impart information and knowledge in order to enhance or increase the participants’ skills. For a return on investment of the participant’s time and ours, retention of the information and therefore a demonstrated skill becomes critical evidence.

To accomplish deeper learning I suggest paying attention to the following:

move information from short to long term memory by utilizing pictures, open ended questions, anecdotal or what-if scenarios, simulations, applications in whatever form is possible given the time and space of the workshop
solicit from the participants what they see as the reason, value, motivation, or incentive to learn the information you will be presenting
providing an example or modeling the learning activity is another version of “walk the talk” and provides a consistent message and not a “do as I say and not as I do”
as quickly as possible reward the learning with acknowledgement and affirmation to reinforce the learning has moved from short to long term memory
throughout the workshop ask yourself what is most important for the participants to be able to do after taking this workshop
as a public commitment, have participants name the opportunities they will have to use this new learning after the workshop

Reference: Lugenbehl, D. (2003) Learning at a Deeper Level. The Community College Moment.

Linda is Director of Academic Affairs for the Indianapolis Campus of the University of Phoenix. We intend to make this column a regular feature in the Facilitator. If you have a training tip, technique, or thought that you would like to share, send it to Linda at linda.edington@phoenix.edu. While she may not be able to include every idea that she receives, your input will provide valuable input for this column.

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Member Profile

This month’s CIASTD member profile focuses on Adam Stedham, an account director from General Physics (GP) Corporation. GP is a training and consulting company with approximately 1200 employees who conduct $150 million per year in business servicing multiple commercial and government market sectors. They are currently involved in projects centered on homeland defense and emergency preparedness, business process outsourcing, engineering, manufacturing operational excellence, and instructional design.

Adam became interested in working for GP after he spent six years working as a nuclear reactor operator in the U.S. Navy. He was recruited into GP from that position. Since joining GP, he has worked with several clients, including Eli Lilly, Sea Ray Boats, Federal Express, Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, U.S. Steel, and Tropicana.

In addition to his technical background, Adam’s expertise is in project management, instructional design, and performance improvement. Adam blends the technical side of process improvement (Six Sigma) as well as human performance technology and instructional design. Adam feels that employees with highly developed technical skills sometimes lack human performance improvement skills, so he finds that he tends to spend a fair amount of time working to enhance those processes.

Adam lives in New Palestine, is married to his wife, Jill, and has two sons: a one-year old, Sam; and a three-year old, Ian. He is currently working on his MBA at Anderson University. I asked him if he had any recommendations with respect to good books; and he confessed that between work and school he doesn’t have a lot of time for recreational reading. Occasionally he does like to play basketball, however, and wished he had a bit more time to devote to that pursuit.

When asked about what he felt was the greatest challenge in business today, he said that companies are no longer looking for training expertise alone. They are looking for business impact. You have to understand the business side of things first, and then you can tie training in where it is appropriate. This view led him to choose pursuing his MBA before a master’s degree in adult education as he had originally planned. He felt that it was more valuable to gain the required business background first, and then later on go after the degree in Adult Education.

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New Members

In each issue of The Facilitator, we will list members that have joined or re-joined CIASTD since the previous issue. Since the last issue of The Facilitator, we have had these new members.

Dean Layman
Pamela Fozo
Andrea Boucher
Sundai Mills
Bruce Strom

Joshua McNair
Tanya D. Popper
Amber Welsh
Gayle L Beebe

If you are a member of CIASTD, and would like access to the complete membership list, it is available on our web site at www.ciastd.com.

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