How to train people fast

A recurring topic I'm asked to consult on is how to train people fast and how to teach not just procedures but also agency and good judgment.

Here is a short overview of how I do it (an excerpt from this essay of mine).

The problem

A core reason employees don’t receive enough training is that it is very time-consuming, and many teams are already overworked.

Moreover, most trainers “push” pre-prepared content onto the team. Because such content is pre-prepared and used to train many different teams, it cannot be very relevant to the specific team being trained today.

As a result, the team nods during the training but then goes back to their workstations and faces the same obstacles and questions it faced before – obstacles and questions that the training didn’t address in enough detail to be useful.

The solution

Here is how I deliver most of my trainings to corporate clients.

The training doesn’t contain any slides (even though, sometimes, I send optional pre-reading materials).
The training begins with me picking a topic (say, delegation), and asking the audience what problems they face in this respect.
Then, I address each problem in great detail. I ask them what they would do and give them feedback (“good idea, because…” or “bad idea, because…”). I explain what I would do in that situation, how I would do it, why, and what would happen if I did differently. I ask if what I said makes sense, if they see themselves doing it, or if they see any obstacle to that. This is because you cannot reliably solve people management problems by discussing them abstractly; you must discuss them concretely and in high detail.
Many problems are also discussed in the form of hypotheticals. I ask questions such as, “What would you do if you have an employee who refuses to take on a task,” then give them feedback on their answer, explaining why I think it would be a good idea or pre-empting possible issues.
We take anything between one and fifteen minutes to address each point. The objective is to discuss the obstacles in great detail to ensure that the attendees have all their doubts and reservations addressed. If I didn’t do this, the audience would nod as I spoke but would go back to their workstations unchanged.
A typical training session lasts 90 minutes, in which we cover 5-10 people management situations. The attendees leave changed, with better clarity on what they should do, how, and why. And they will actually do it.
After the session, I send the attendees an email with the most important points covered in the session. Again, this is not pre-prepared material, because it’s crucial that it addresses the exact problems this specific audience faced, using the words they use and using examples they live in their day-to-day.

Tried and tested

I have run dozens of such workshops with large multinationals from the tech, financial, and pharmaceutical sectors, and they have always proved very effective, thanks to their concreteness.

Why it works

In most trainings, the trainer talks about some procedure or framework, the attendees nod, but then go back to their workstations without anything having changed. That’s because the training didn’t address the real problems of the audience, their bottlenecks to action.

Most trainers circle around the hard questions that are what the audience needs to get answered: what do you do when there’s not enough time to do everything? What do you do when there’s a subordinate who is fully disengaged? How do you have hard conversations? How do you do it when turnover is already a problem?

Instead, my approach is all about surfacing and addressing these hard questions. It’s about acknowledging that the real world is messy and time is a major constraint. It’s about empowering managers by giving them the tools they need rather than the tools we think they need.

Moreover, I believe that it’s necessary to teach not only what the right things to do are but also how to do them right. Hence the focus on roleplay, on working on concrete examples, and on examining difficult and messy situations.

It’s an approach that produces results in the real world.

(You can find more examples and case studies in the post this excerpt is taken from)

Italian Tech Week

Next week, my hometown of Turin will host the Italian Tech Week event, and I know that a few of the European readers of this newsletter will attend.

I will be around, so feel free to reply to this email if you'd like to grab a coffee nearby.

Singapore book signings

This early October, I'll be in Singapore, and I will hold two book signing events.

On the 2nd of October, I will be signing books at the Markel Brunch. The event is already booked out, but if you have a seat already and will be there, I will be glad to see you.

On the 4th of October, I will be signing books at Sarnies (probably the best coffee in SG: 136 Telok Ayer St) from 15:00 to 18:00. It will be very informal; there will be time to chat, and I'll bring some copies.

See you there!

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Luca Dellanna

How to train people fast + events I'll attend in Italy and Singapore