Top training tips for managers

Take a step back and map out the behaviours you’d like to see, and what changes can be made to get there. Beyond the ‘main training event’ — be that a webinar, workshop, eLearning module or similar — consider putting some simple supporting strategies in place to make sure that the new knowledge and skills are retained and applied, such as:

• A buddy, mentor or shadowing system
• Job aids, step-by-step guides and cheat sheets
• Regular informal check-ins and progress chats

Setting goals can lead to many positive outcomes, from improving motivation and enhancing focus to acting as a metric to measure and guide success.⁵ Goals should be:

• Collaborative
• Relevant to business, department, or team
• Measurable
• Aligned with the training topic
• Achievable
• Time-bound so that people can consolidate and apply learnings

Before any training engagement, sit down with your team to discuss how the training will help them to achieve their personal and professional goals, how this will be tracked and rewarded. For example, if a member of your team takes part in a course on successful pitching, their goal could be to win 3 new contracts within 12 weeks of the training, which would be rewarded by a bonus of x% of the average deal size.

While goals and rewards are important, you do want to avoid setting precedent that your people will only be motivated to take part in training to get a bonus or promotion, rather than to necessarily change behaviour or improve their performance. To balance this, actively encourage a culture of learning by taking an interest in, and promoting the benefits of training by:

• Discussing the benefits
• Explaining its relevance to business, department, and team objectives
• Exploring how they will grow from it and how it applies to their role
• Scheduling post-training meetings to discuss the experience
• Encouraging team members to share its most beneficial aspects
• Planning further meetings to assess its impact on members’ performance and address any additional support needs

The greater the opportunity to make use of new skills or knowledge, the higher the chances that they will create long term change. Try assigning low-risk ‘sandbox’ projects that are:

• Relevant to the training subject
• Hands-on
• Aligned with business, department, or team objectives
• Clearly beneficial to the employee, team, department, or business
• Supported by the manager or an experienced team member
• Assigned before the training begins

For more on the science behind this, take a look at our article on mistake-based learning environments.

To maximise course value, encourage your people to share what they have learned with the wider team. This could be as simple as:

• Including daily or weekly ‘Top Tips’ in team newsletters or bulletins
• Sharing 3-5 key takeaways during your daily standup
• Capturing and sharing a video demo of their new skills
• Hosting a masterclasses to ‘teach it forward’
• Writing an opinion piece on the training

Research shows that reflection can help the brain to retain new information and prompt further self-directed learning.6 As a manager you can help this process by providing your people with the space and time (roughly 20% of the total training time as a guide) to actively reflect, completing tasks such as:

• Organising and typing up notes
• Identifying 3 immediate tasks where the learning can be applied
• Identifying areas where they’ll need further support to apply the training
• Reviewing the goals and metrics specifically set in relation to the training
• Developing a plan to share the learnings with their team
• Drafting a quick post on their training experience on social media
• Researching any further relevant reading or resources