Delivering a course can feel like a daunting task regardless of whether it’s the first time or the first time in a while. However, with the right approach and preparation, you can boost your confidence and create a successful learning experience for your participants. Here are five essential tips to help you shine as a facilitator.

Let the Course Guide You

It can be intimidating to hold the self-imposed expectation to remember everything. Know that our courses are designed to help you succeed. Your trainer guide is full of tips, options, and timing suggestions to help you navigate each lesson. Lean into your VIP slides knowing that everything you need is there on the screen. Set up videos by introducing the characters and what you want learners to look for. Review the directions in the trainer and learner guides for table or breakout activity instructions and timing. Let the VIP slides guide you to success. As you gain experience, feel free to add your personal touch and anecdotes to make the content more engaging.

Use Trainer Zone Resources

Take advantage of the resources available in Trainer Zone. This website is your facilitator toolbox and emergency kit for managing your course before, during, and after. Review the course content with help from experienced facilitators in the Quick Prep videos for each lesson. Find custom learning best practices. Download the trainer and learner guides in a PDF format. Find links to after-training resources. All of this will help you create a learning strategy and thus build confidence in delivering your course effectively.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Prioritize practicing your presentation and using the technology (for both in-person and virtual delivery) at least a few times before you’re live with your learners. Practice not only helps you memorize the content but also boosts your confidence in handling unexpected situations or technical glitches. With each practice, you will refine your delivery and become more comfortable with the material. Pro tip: When practicing, do so out loud—either to yourself or to a small friendly audience (for a couple of sections). Ask your preview crew for feedback and clarity. Practice doesn’t make perfect—practice builds confidence.

Breathe and Stand Tall

For both in-person and virtual training, breathing is essential to project confidence. Avoid shallow breaths or holding your breath, as this can make you appear anxious (or become lightheaded!). Neither is great for you or your audience! Stand tall and use a standing desk if facilitating virtually, as it allows for better breathing and improved posture.

Know Your Content

Content mastery is a key component of confidence. You don’t have to know all the answers to your audience’s questions. Study and practice the content thoroughly to make connections between different lessons. Keep a collection of real-life examples (yours, examples from the book, examples shared from previous class attendees, etc.) that demonstrate the application of the skills taught in the course. This will enhance your ability to engage participants and handle their questions effectively.

Thomas Kramer, Senior Training Consultant at Crucial Learning, shares a great reminder to boost your confidence: “The audience wants me to succeed and have an awesome training experience. They are rooting for me, not waiting for me to make a mistake.”

Remember, confidence comes from a combination of knowing the content, applying the skills, and engaging your audience. By following these tips and continuously seeking feedback and improvement, you can deliver your course with confidence and create a positive impact on your participants’ learning journey.

For more in-depth tips and support, you can find the following resources in each course page within Trainer Zone:

• In-Person Facilitation Tips
• Getting Started Checklist
• Virtual Facilitation Tips
• Getting Started Checklist

What are your go to confidence builders? Add to the conversation and post yours in the comments.

The post Delivering With Confidence appeared first on Crucial Learning.

Many organizations use competencies as a means of measuring performance and development. Tying these competencies to your L&D offerings is a great way for employees and leaders to better understand how these courses and resources contribute to individual and organizational success.

WHAT IS COMPETENCY MAPPING?
Competency mapping is the process of determining what specific competencies—skills, behaviors, abilities, and knowledge—a role requires, according to an Indeed.com article on the topic. This process allows employers to first understand their workforce from both individual and organizational perspectives, and then to make more informed decisions about employee development, hiring, training, and career development in a way that supports both employee and company success.

Competency mapping can help you:

• Better understand your employees’ current strengths and weaknesses and set them up for success.
• Improve productivity by helping employees focus their talents on their most relevant tasks.
• Streamline your hiring process with clear job descriptions and applicant screening.

Summed up, competency mapping brings clarity to you and your organization—and demonstrates your value—in a way that benefits everyone.

HOW DO L&D LEADERS/PROFESSIONALS USE COMPETENCIES?
Once organizations get clear on the competencies they want, they can then align talent with those and create plans to fill any talent gaps. It’s important to consider the roles competencies play in everything from performance to development. While there are literally hundreds of competencies, we reviewed dozens of models and identified six of the most common:

• Leadership and management
• Communication and interpersonal skills
• Teamwork and collaboration
• Self-direction and professionalism
• Critical thinking and creativity
• Change management

Creating development plans for current employees is one way to integrate competencies into an employee’s journey. To meet these development needs, leaders and employees look for courses, resources, and activities to assist. That’s where your Crucial Learning courses come into play!

HOW DO YOU CONNECT CONTENT TO A COMPETENCY?
If you can show how your Crucial Learning courses help employees develop and improve competencies your organization values, you help solve a problem and demonstrate the value of your courses and services.

To connect content to a competency, first determine the competencies you want to work with, along with descriptions of each. What does that competency look like within your organization? You may want to include all of your competencies, or you may choose a select few competencies that you and a group leader have recognized as an area of development.

Next, create a list of the lessons, modules, and/or skills from each Crucial Learning course you offer (or want to offer) as part of the solution or strategy. Below is a comprehensive list I created and use when mapping competencies with clients.

Now it’s time to use your knowledge of Crucial Learning courses to tie the two lists together. While you may see multiple connections from course lessons to a competency, choose only a few for each. Your goal is not to create every possible connection but to showcase how even one to two skills within a Crucial Learning course build and support your organization’s competencies. This will help highlight how the competency can be learned and developed.

Let’s look at an example of two common competencies used by organizations (Communication and Critical Thinking) that have been mapped to Crucial Learning course content.

WHY THIS MATTERS
As you facilitate, show learners how the course skills relate to organizational competencies and their performance. This clarity can help motivate them to develop the skills and knowledge they need to excel.

Mapping competencies to course skills is an invaluable strategy for employee development. It helps both leaders and employees bring their best to the workplace. By mapping competencies, you can help employees and leaders understand their specific responsibilities and develop their individual strengths so that they may further contribute to the success of the team and organization.

For more on competency mapping and Crucial Learning courses, check out our free eBook, The Leader’s Guide to Building Employee Competency: Solutions to Develop a High-Performance Workforce.

Want help mapping your organizational competencies to the skills taught in our courses? Contact us and schedule time with a Solutions Implementation Consultant.

The post Mapping Competencies to Courses appeared first on Crucial Learning.

“That’s an interesting question,” I said. “One way to think about it is that you and I have discussed what the most successful people do and how they consistently get the best results and looked for ways to replicate that within our own team. With practice, this course will help others on the team build and strengthen those same skills so we can also get the best results.”

“I know that,” the leader responded. “But for every dollar we spend, how much will we get back? I’m investing in my team, and I need to know what my return will be—my ROI.”

Perplexed, I finally admitted, “I have no idea. But if we track our success, we can find out.”

That seemed to appease the leader to move forward, and it also marked the beginning of my adventures to try and achieve a return on the learning investment.

Let’s start by acknowledging that it’s nearly impossible—and scientifically unsound—to attribute ROI (return on investment) to soft skills training. That’s because while our learning sessions will attempt to change behavior, these results can’t be isolated within the context of a robust learning strategy. Likely, your learning strategy involves lots of levers, content sets, and strategies all aimed at impacting change—not to mention programs, projects, and people across the business. Attributing bottom-line or key results to just one lever is inaccurate and incomplete.

However, there are ways to measure the impact of your learning initiative. Because soft skills training is aimed at behaviors, you can measure behavior change. Through pre- and post-measurement tools you can see how your learners behaved before a course and how those behaviors have changed in the weeks and months following training.

In some cases, you may draw correlations between certain behaviors and organizational effects to show how a program might impact the business, but the measurement requires a broader framework. For example, MaineGeneral Hospital measured behavior change as a result of Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue. They found that managers who took the course showed an 85 percent improvement in speaking up about poor teamwork, a 66 percent improvement in addressing poor initiative, and a 43 percent improvement in addressing incompetence. Leaders believed that this marked increase in respectfully addressing concerns with the right person had a direct impact on patient care—an impressive and critical result for the organization. But is this ROI? That’s where it gets tricky.

Let’s first define ROI and also look at another way to measure return through ROE:

• ROI (return on investment) seeks to measure if an expenditure yielded a profit. Was the financial return greater than the financial investment?
• ROE (return on expectations) looks to clarify and refine the expectations of key business stakeholders and aim learning initiatives at these specific expectations.  These expectations may have indirect financial implications.

So the question becomes, “Do you want to turn a profit on this one-time investment, or do you want employees to develop skills and behaviors that continually generate results?”

A good business leader will likely say, “Yes. I want both.”

Here are some ideas for doing just that.

Start with Expectations

Begin by collecting data and asking questions to better understand what the leader or stakeholder is trying to achieve. Questions might include:

• What are you expecting the training to accomplish?
• What will success look like? Why is that important?
• What do you expect to see that is different than today?
• Why is that outcome important to you? How might it be important to your team?
• That’s clearly important to your team’s success. How would the organization be impacted if you achieve that?
• Who on your team is good at this already? What do they do differently?
• How will you know this effort is a success? What measures will tell you so?

Match Expectations with Outcomes

Once you know what the business leader hopes to achieve or solve with training, you can match those expectations to learning outcomes from the course as well as business measures. For example, imagine your business stakeholder says something like this:

• “Our team members aren’t hitting deadlines.”
• “Our new salespeople immediately give price discounts when clients question our standard pricing.”
• “Our middle managers are ‘too nice’ and don’t hold team members accountable.”
• “Our employees are distracted by their phones when they should be working.”
• “We’ve had several injuries at the plant this year.”
• “We want to be the leader in our industry.”

What would the underlying issue be for each of these problems? What courses would you recommend? What learning outcomes might solve these challenges?

Find Correlations between Behavior Change and Business Measures

Once you’ve identified the appropriate learning initiative, begin by discussing business measures you can track that will indicate success in meeting those expectations. Measures may include profitability, client satisfaction, employee engagement/fulfillment, and team performance. Then identify a baseline of those metrics before you begin training. 

Next comes measuring behavior change. As you prepare for the course, have learners self-report on criteria corresponding to the areas you’ve identified for improvement. This is best done with assessments before the course, immediately following the course, and after the course has ended (e.g., 60, 90, or 120 days). The results are self-reported, so the data is only as good as its sources, but this will help you to track behavior change among the learners.

Once the course is over, review the business measures you’ve identified against the baseline you recorded before training. See if the positive change in behaviors correlates to an increase or decrease in the business metrics in the weeks and months following training. If they increase, you can likely draw a correlation between the behavior change you are driving and a return on expectations. And as a learning leader, you’ll have a complete view of all the work you are doing to drive change and have a better pulse on what courses and initiatives are having an impact.

To put this into a real-world scenario, let’s look at employee turnover, which does have a financial impact in the cost of recruiting and onboarding. So, if for instance, your organization finds an 11% decrease in turnover/attrition among team members of managers who successfully completed your course, and your learners demonstrated a change in behavior, then you could link a correlation in behavior change to the reduction in costs associated with hiring and onboarding new employees. Just remember that you are looking for correlations, not causation.

So, while ROE does not deliver a percentage increase in the initial investment, it is a way to measure the impact of L&D. When you know what business leaders want, and you have clearly identified how learning outcomes relate to their goals and challenges, you can justify the financial investment in training.

Summary

When we start with clarifying and defining expectations (using your consulting skills and questions), and then matching them to both the right course and the appropriate business outcomes, you get a return that matters to both that leader and the business.

At the end of the day, organizations are comprised of people. Every ROI is generated by human behavior. Invest your time to clarify expectations and help leaders see how behaviors affect organizational performance, and you will reap many valuable returns.

The post The Road to ROI is ROE appeared first on Crucial Learning.

Within our Crucial Learning community, we have certified trainers who anxiously moved into virtual delivery after years of in-person facilitation, and we have those who’ve only known virtual delivery and feel anxious about facilitating with real, live, three-dimensional people. One normal is exchanged with another normal—only to be replaced by the next normal (Hello, blended-delivery portfolio!).

While it is easy to get caught up in focusing on course delivery, there are other ways your certification can create value for your company, organization, and fellow employees. Here are three ways we’ve seen certified trainers demonstrate their value outside the classroom.

1. The Internal Crucial Skills Consultant

Looking for a way to connect strategic goals and initiatives to your Crucial Learning programs? Listen to the conversations happening when working with a business leader or HR business partner. For example:

“How can we improve our culture so people are willing to speak up and not sound like they’re complaining?” Use the Make It Safe skills from Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue.

“Leaders are ‘too nice’ and not holding important accountability conversations to get results AND strengthen relationships.” Use the Start with Heart skills from Crucial Conversations for Accountability.

“Whew, that group is not going to be happy or supportive of this change. What could we do to help them see the value and support this?” Use the Diagnose skills from Influencer.

Try to help others see how your crucial skills—and the related course—can help with future situations and opportunities.

2. The Crucial Skills Coach

Your course delivery may have slowed over the past two years, but what about those who’ve already gone through a course? Who are your classroom opinion leaders and cheerleaders from the past?

Reach out to them and see how you can help them apply the skills for better results (or get back on track)—and then promote their success story! You’d be helping a learner get results, sharing evidence that the skills work, and promoting your services. Win, win, win!

Ask course graduates to complete a short survey (What’s working? What isn’t working? What would help? etc.). Enter all those who complete the survey into a drawing for a free one-hour coaching session with you. You get data, and they get focused attention that will help them succeed.

3. The Crucial Skills Connector

Many of you are facilitators and promoters of other great development programs beyond your Crucial Learning certification(s). Some of you are L&D leaders who are responsible for your company’s catalog of courses and resources.

You have the unique opportunity to connect the dots between the crucial skills taught in our courses and the goals and other training curriculum used within your organization.

What courses, when paired with Crucial Conversations for Accountability, build on and/or support the behaviors that are part of your emerging leaders’ program?

If you are moving into a performance review cycle in your organization, what Crucial Conversations skills can you share with your course graduates to help both managers and employees have productive conversations?

You’ve included business execution among the new competencies recently launched for your leadership programs. You also launched Getting Things Done three months ago and have been getting great engagement. Connection? Business execution (competency) is demonstrated by effectively prioritizing what’s important, as taught in GTD (Capture, Clarify, Organize).

As certified trainers, we love being in the classroom (in person or virtually) and helping others learn and do. We find professional and personal fulfillment when learners have those “lightbulb moments.” You can foster more of those lightbulb moments and behavioral impact by increasing your reach across the organization. You are more than a trainer or facilitator. Embrace the roles of consultant, coach, and connector, and you can contribute even more value to your learners and your organization.

The post Using Your Certified Trainer Skills Beyond the Classroom appeared first on Crucial Learning.