Getting agreement

Getting back to the discussion you were having before training – what happens if you have an employee who can’t see the point of learning objectives, or is apathetic about the whole thing and is only doing it because they think they have to?

The answer to this is QUESTIONS.

It is useless to demand co-operation or to give someone else objectives. Co-operation must be given willingly or it isn’t co-operation. If you set the objectives, they’re your objectives, not someone else’s.

What you need is to develop the skills of advanced questioning. You will need to do even more homework and it may be quite difficult, as people who are very apathetic frequently have no idea what their goals are.

If you’ve outlined what the company and department is trying to achieve and are getting down to the specifics of how this person’s role impacts on that, you need to start with the yes/no questions:

Your role is to ensure that the project worksheets are ready on time for the team to start work without having to wait for them to be completed, isn’t it?
Currently, you are finding that sometimes you’re unable to meet the deadlines due to workloads, aren’t you?
If this programme were to provide you with some techniques that would help you to meet those deadlines reliably, would that be useful?

Realistically, there is only one acceptable answer to each of the above questions. At this point it may be useful to introduce a ‘carrot’. This is a statement that will tell the person what advantages they will experience personally if their skills improve. It might be getting less hassle from impatient team members, lower stress levels, being able to go home on time, being seen as an efficient operator and gaining respect.

In order to do this effectively, you must know which of these matters most to them. If they are notoriously thick-skinned, suggesting that less hassle is an advantage may be akin to casting your seed on stony ground! Choose something that will strike a chord with them.

The next stage is open question asking.

What would you like to be able to do (in relation to time management) that you’re having difficulty with at present?
What do you see as the biggest problem areas for you?

... and so on. Once you’ve got all this information, helping the individual to create their learning objectives may come in the form of a suggestion:

So if we said that you’d like to find a way of being able to focus on the project plans, without constant demands from other people taking you off course, that would be really helpful. Would you agree with that?
So what do you think the key skills might be that will help you to do that?

It may sound like a slow and painful process, but it is worth spending time to get real commitment from the individual concerned. Commitment grows from interest, and the fact that you are demonstrating interest in the trainee will usually trigger a corresponding flicker of interest in them. You’ll have to keep working on it – you can’t treat this as a one-off – but you’ll be surprised at the turnarounds you will experience, just through taking an interest in what each person does and how they’re doing.