Training & Performance Practices

I’ve been privileged in my career to work with clients who have taught me a lot about training and performance change, individually and organizationally. Rather than hoard these insights, I asked these learning leaders if I could interview them and share our conversations with others. To that end, I’ll be sending out a new interview monthly throughout the year. And

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I’ve been in the training business for a long time and have seen many reasons training fails – the design is weak, the content isn’t relevant to the audince, the delivery isn’t effective, the timing is bad, the wrong people are selected, the training isn’t reinforced… The list goes on. While those are surely important considerations in creating successful training

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The ultimate goal of training – and leadership for that matter – is to develop employees’ performance. The better people perform, the better the organization performs. When thoughtfully deployed, training is a great lever for improving performance. The problem is that it is rarely thoughtfully deployed. There are many places training can go wrong – the content may not meet

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This famous line from the classic film Cool Hand Luke is unfortunately more prophetic than we might like to admit. We think of communication as a straightforward process: I talk, you listen, you talk, I listen, we understand each other. What’s so hard about that? Sometimes communication actually is that straightforward, but often it’s not. The Bay of Pigs provides

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You’ve heard the saying, “those that can’t do, teach.” In the corporate world they say the same thing about trainers. “They” aren’t necessarily wrong; there’s a lot of bad training and bad trainers out there. They’re not necessarily right, either. The best trainers have the ability to lift the performance of an entire organization. Navy SEALs, whose lives literally depend

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