Applying The Laws of Adult Learning (Part 1)

My sincere apologies for the long silence due to work and personal commitment. Anyway, it is good to be back.

In the previous 2 postings, we have discussed the laws of adult learning. Today, let us discuss how to apply them in real class room or training room situation. I have been applying the laws since day 1 of becoming a professional trainer. They helped me to create a safe, conducive and interactive sessions. 

So, how to apply the laws?

1. Law of the Big Picture - We need to provide adults learners with an overview of the lessons to be learned at the early part of the session as this will help them seeing the big picture of the content.

2. Law of Application - We need to help adults learners 'see' how the content can be used and applied in their work to help them better understand and stay interested in the learning process.

3. Law of Repetition - Repetition is the mother of all learning. Master Trainer, Bob Pike used to say that we need to revisit key learning points at least 6 times in a 1 day session. Through repetition, adults learners will be able to remember key learning points a long time thus increasing the chances they will apply them.

4. Law of Fun - Trainers need to create a fun learning environment where learners feel safe to interact with the trainers, materials and one another. using stories, games and other interactive methods will greatly enhance learning.

5. Law of Sequence - To help adult learners follow the session, trainers need to sequence their content in a logical manner with small chunks of delivery at one time. Personally, I use the 90/20/6 Rule created by Bob Pike ie 90 minute session (max) at a stretch, lecture for 20 minutes per block and get them moving every 6 minutes (via Q&A, discussion, etc).

6. Law of Interaction - Adults bring tons of experience in training rooms and good trainers know how to tap into these. Allow them to interact with one another using case studies, role plays, presentations, small group activities and others.

7. Law of Intervals - Bob Pike advised that for adults, 90 minutes of learning at one stretch is the max. Allow them time to absorb key learning points and interact with others. For me personally, for 1 hour of session, I give them 10 minutes of break to absorb, interact and refresh themselves.

In part 2, we will discuss how to apply the remaining laws of adult learning.          

The Laws of Learning (Part 2)

In part 1 last January, we learned about the laws of adult learning that can help us to plan and conduct impactful sessions with our adult learners. Today, let us explore some more adult learning laws to help us become a better trainer.

1. The Law of Experience

Adults learn best if we can relate and tap their experience in the learning process. Adults bring vast and rich experience into the class and we as trainers need to capitalize on this.

2. The Law of Whole Brain Communication

When presenting adult learning sessions, we need to tap on both the left brain and the right one. Left brain which focuses on logic and right brain on feelings, intuition and creativity can help adults learn better if trainers are able to tap on them.

3. The Law of Whole Senses

There are 3 main ways adults receive information when learning namely, via visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Trainer need to use all these senses to create rich learning experience for adults.

4. The Law of Forgetting

After 30 days, adult will forget 90% of what they have learned (based on Prof Ebbinghaus's research). As trainers, we need to take this into consideration when designing training material and activities.

5. The Laws of Familiarity

In presenting adult learning, trainers need to relate the content to things that learners are familiar of. As such, it is important for trainers to know the background of learners such as education, socio-economy, language and others.

6. The Laws of Safety

Activities designed by trainers need to be comfortable and 'safe' for adult learners to perform. Issues such as learners' readiness, suitability of activities against gender and religious background need to be considered as well.

7. The Law of Recall

Trainers need to design and deliver training materials that are easy for adult learners to understand and remember. Several tools can be used to achieve this.

In our next discussion, we will discuss how to apply these rules to make our session an impactful ones. 

   

Asking Coaching Questions Using GROW Model

As mentioned in the previous article, coaching is one of the tools that leaders can use to improve productivity, increase performance and boost morale. One of the most popular coaching model used by many coaches around the world is the GROW  model.

In this conversation model, a coach asks questions that explore the coachee's Goal, Reality of current situation, Options for improvement and Will to do them.

Let us look at some of the questions that a coach can ask using this GROW  model;

Goal questions

1. What do you want to achieve in life?
2. What is your career goal?
3. What do you want to achieve x years from now?
4. Where do you see yourself 3 years from now in this organization?
5. Which area in your job that you want to improve?
6. What do you want to discuss in our coaching session today?

Reality questions

1. Where are you now relative to your career goal?
2. What aspects of your job that give you the greatest pleasure?
3. Which areas in your job that you want to improve?
4. What makes you happy and fulfilled?
5. What have you achieved so far in your career? life? finance? etc

Options questions

1. What are you planning to do to achieve your goals?
2. What actions will you take to improve yourself?
3. What kind of support do you need to move you closer to your goals?
4. When are you planning to implement your plan?
5. How do you measure your success in moving towards your goals?
6. What new skills, knowledge or attitude that you need to have to move you closer to your goals?

Will questions

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how motivated are you to achieve your goals?
2. What are the possible challenges that you will face to move towards your goals?
3. How will you overcome the challenges? What is your plan?
4. On an emotional level, what emotions can prevent you from achieving your goals? How will you manage them?
5. How will you motivate your self to stay focus on your goals?
6. How will you reward your self when you achieve the milestones in moving toward your goals?

These are some possible questions that can be asked when coaching using this model. You can create your own questions to be asked as well. Don't limit yourself to the ones above. 

Even though the model provides a step by step guide, in real coaching session, things will not go as smoothly as in the model. A good coach knows when to move forward with the questions or stay on the questions until the coachee is clear with what he wants or when to backtrack and go to the previous steps. The key is to stay flexible and sensitive to the need of the coachee.

Try the questions in your coaching session today and you will see the results in your coachee. 

Improving Performance Through Coaching (Part 2)

As we have discussed earlier, coaching is one of performance improvement tools that leaders can use to make positive changes in the workplace. However, not everybody can be can be a coach or coachee. As the coaching process involves long term commitment, patience and good interpersonal skills, selection of coach and coachee needs to be done carefully. 

Generally, characteristics of good and effective coach include;

1. Possess good communication skills especially listening and asking great questions.
2. Formally trained and well verse in the coaching principles and processes.
3. Patient and committed.
4. Believe in human potentials.
5. Strive on challenges.
6. Flexible but firm.
7. Able to feel empathy without personally attached to it.
8. Withhold judgments.
9. Not imposing his values, beliefs and knowledge on coachee.
10. Able to think on his feet and adapt.   

To select a coachee, we need to consider characteristics such as;

1. Committed in term of time and other resources.
2. Doer of planned actions.
3. Willingness to change and improve.
4. Curious.
5. Positive learning attitude.
6. Good listener
7. Humble.
8. Having an open mind.
9. Willing to share personal experiences.
10. Accepting own strength and weaknesses.

In the next article, we will discuss the step by step process of coaching.

Stories That Change Lives

We all love stories. They make us cry, laugh and reflect. Stories are powerful tools that can be used to teach life-changing lessons. Look at the great religious leaders of our time. All of them used stories to transfer key lessons and teachings.

Life-changing stories have certain structures that make them easy to follow, understand and remember. The next time you want to use stories to impart lessons to your team members, remember the acronym SEAL.

Short (in time and characters). Entertaining stories are short for obvious reasons as mentioned above. How short is a story? Personally, I prefer them not to exceed 5 minutes. We also need to limit the characters in the stories to not more than three. Why? If it is more than three, we will find it hard to tell the stories and worst still, our audience find it hard to understand.

Entertaining. Our stories need to be entertaining. How to achieve this? Tell them with passion and enthusiasm. Use dialogues to bring the characters to life. Tell of the struggles and how your heroes (or heroines) overcome them. Use your body language and vocal varieties to give your stories more impact.

Audience-appropriate. Avoid stories that may offend people. Sexist, racist and stories that ridicule certain segments of societies need to be avoided at all costs. Study and get to know your audience before you decide which story to tell them.

Learning-oriented. Good stories have learning points. Before ending your stories, make your audience reflect on them by mentioning key learning points. I love to ask my audience what their thoughts or lessons that they can learn after I tell my stories. This will make them reflect and when they reflect, change happens.
So the next time you want to tell stories to your teams, use the acronym SEAL above to ensure your stories have all the elements they need to inspire change.  

Trust Busters

It is always easy to destroy than to build. The same goes for trust. It takes years to build and seconds to loose. In our interpersonal relations with others, many at times we ignore the little things that can break that fragile trust we have with our colleagues.

Below are some of the trust busters habits that we need to be aware in our daily interactions with our colleagues and loved ones;

1. Failure to keep promises
2. Showing incompetence
3. Lack of respect towards others
4. Not listening enough
5. Untidy and poor hygiene
6. Not respecting time
7. Over promise
8. Withholding information
9. Talking bad about others
10. Cutting people in the middle of their sentence

I am sure you can list some other trust busting habits that you observe in the workplace or home. The idea here is to be aware of them and take some kind of action to manage or control the habits. Trust is important in teamwork environment. If we are not aware of these habits, we may end up destroying the one thing that makes our team effective.

The Power Of 1-Minute Praise

All of us long to be praised for a job well done whether we want to admit it or not. Sincere praise has the power to boost morale, motivate employees and increase productivity.

However, how often do we receive and give sincere praise to others? In my training workshops, most participants lamented that when their bosses call them, most of the time it is because the bosses want to reprimand them. 

Even though giving negative feedback do improve productivity if done correctly, it has to be balanced with sincere praise as well.

Giving sincere praise for a job well done doesn't have to take too long. From my experience, most of the time it will only take 1 minute or so. How to give a powerful 1-minute praise that can make the morale shoot through the roof? 

Three simple steps in the form of the acronym BIT will help you the next time you want to give a 1-minute praise to your team members.

Behavior : State the positive behavior that you observed your team member has performed. Be specific as much as you can. For example, you can say something like this ; "Steve, I really liked the way you handle that phone call with our client Mr Smith. You were respectful and polite even though Mr Smith was angry and raised his voice at that time."    

Impact : Next, explain the positive impact or outcome of his behavior that you have observed. Your conversation can go like this ; "Because you were respectful and polite, we are able to keep Mr Smith as our client". 

Thank you : Lastly, end your 1-minute praise by giving sincere appreciation and thank him for a job well done. You can close your conversation similar to this ; "I really appreciate your effort and would like to thank you for a job well done. Thank you." 

These three steps will help you to give sincere, morale-boosting 1 minute praise in a more structured and well-organized way. Try it today and get ready to see the positive changes in your team members. 

Making your Speeches Memorable

How can we make people remember and understand the points that we are trying to make in our speeches? Some speakers keep on rambling points after points without clear explanation, examples or elaborations. Others keep on telling stories one after another that finally make the audience go into 'screen saver mode'.

You can avoid all the above if you use the 4As below to spice, color and anchor your speeches for better retention and understanding;

Anecdotes - Anecdotes are short stories that help to explain your key points. Use wisely, it will keep your audience entertained, More importantly, it will help you to illustrate the point better and clearer. Just make sure that the story is short (2-3 minutes), simple and without any complicated plots. Then, tie up the story with the point that you want to deliver.

Analogy - Analogy uses the concept of prior knowledge of the audience to explain your ideas. For example, if you are talking about financial savings, then you can use the analogy of planting a tree and watching it grows to illustrate the concept of growing one's assets. One caveat to this idea is to use simple analogy that all of your audience can follow and understand.

Activity - Short and content-relevant activity is another powerful tool to explain a point. The classic activity to teach the audience about resistance to change is the 'arm folding' activity. To make it more impactful, debriefing is a must at the end of every activity. One key point to remember is to keep it sort ie 2-3 minutes.

Acronym - Acronym is another attention grabber that help to hammer your points to your ideas. For motivational speeches to youths and students, I use the acronym DREAM to illustrate and explain my points. Just ensure that your acronym is not too long ie less than 9 letters as audience will have problems remembering them if it is too long.            

How to Give Morale-Boosting Praise

Experts said that most managers catch their subordinates doing something wrong rather than doing something right. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of that poor subordinate. How would he or she feel? Dejected? Unmotivated? Unappreciated? You bet!

Catching them doing something right and doing it properly on the other hand, will boost their morale, increase productivity and most importantly, reinforce the positive behaviour being praised.

So, how to give that morale-boosting praise? The acronym SIPS can guide us.

Specific - Our praise needs to be specific. What behaviours are we praising? What are the effects of that positive behaviour? Congratulating Donna for handling that difficult phone call from Mr Joe last Friday and because of that he is still our customer is an example of specific praise. Telling Alex he did a good job last week without going into the specifics, on the other hand is vague.

Immediate - We need to praise someone within 24 hours after a particular behaviour is shown. Telling Ahmad that he did a wonderful job assisting a customer 3 months ago will have little effect on him.

Personal - Muthu loves being praised and rewarded in front of a big crowd. Siti however, prefers a personal note or phone call. Not all people wants to be praised in public. Study our team members and choose the best praise method for them.  

Sincere - An example of insincere praise goes like this, "John, you did well last Monday for helping Mandy with the department's proposal. Because of that, the proposal was submitted on time. Great job! By the way, could you sit in for Tony tonight and do over time? His kid is sick and he needs to be home". Do not sugar coat request with praise because it is the fastest way to kill its effect.

So, a great way to boost morale is to catch our team members doing something right. The next time you do that, remember SIPS to give that morale-boosting praise.

Technique To Give Effective Feedback

Giving feedback is an important task for many executives and managers. Poor feedback causes subordinates to be unclear of the improvements they need to do, creates misunderstanding and can lead to poor job performance.

Good feedback needs to be done in a clear and well-structured manner. Using the acronym OILS, below are the steps that we can use to give well-structured feedback to our team members.

Observation. After stating the purpose of the meeting, we can start by giving our observation of the overall performance of our team members. Be specific and accurate as possible. For example, we can say, "Last week, I noticed that you were 1 hour late for work on Monday, Thursday and Friday" rather than just saying "Last week you were late for work".

Impact. The next step is to inform our team members of the impact or consequence of the observed behaviour. In the example above, we can continue by saying, "When you were late, I had to ask Mary to cover for you and this is not fair to her as she has her own job to do".

Listen. Next is to give the opportunity for our team members to explain the reasons behind the incident or scenario. At this stage, we listen actively for their explanation. If needed, we can ask open-ended questions to better understand the situation.

Suggestion. The last step is to offer suggestion on how to solve the situation or problem. To create a sense of ownership, we can first ask our team members for their suggestion to improve the situation and if needed, we offer our own suggestion.    

How to Give Effective Feedback

Have you ever been told by your boss during your performance appraisal that there is ‘room for improvement’ but at the end of the session, you do not know what to improve and how to improve it?

Giving feedback that is constructive can be a morale booster to employees. The opposite is also true. Done badly, feedback can lead to confusion, conflict and dissatisfaction.

The next time you are face to face with your subordinates or colleagues, remember to use these suggestions to make your feedback more constructive;    

Start with the right intention – Ask yourself why you are doing it. Is it to highlight poor performance? Correct bad behaviour? To diffuse a situation? To complement a job well done?

Prepare early – Be clear of what are the things that you want to say. If possible, write them down on a piece of paper. Keep it minimum. From my experience, three items per session is more than enough.

Be timely – The rule of thumb is, the closer the event and the time that you want to address the issue, the better. Normally, do it within 24-48 hours as the effect of your feedback will be lesser with time.

Be aware of your surrounding – Remember to criticize in private but praise in public. Establish a safe place to talk where you won't be interrupted or overheard. Criticizing in public will humiliate the person can causes him to be defensive.

Separate the person from the problem – Highlight the problem without ‘attacking’ the person. “Last month, you were absent for 7 days” is highlighting the problem while “You are useless and lazy” is ‘attacking’ the person. Avoid the later.  

Be specific - Tell the person exactly what they need to improve on. This ensures that you stick to facts, thus reducing ambiguity and confusion. If you are saying “I need you to be more professional”, what does that mean? Maybe the best alternative is to say, “I need you to submit the monthly report before the 5th of every month”.

End on a positive note – End your feedback session positively. Thank the person for his time and reaffirm your belief that he will improve. If your session is to highlight positive performance, encourage the person to repeat the desired behaviour.

Try this formula during your next feedback session and you will notice the positive impact.

How to ‘Sell’ Your Idea

Have you ever presented an idea or solutions to an audience and once it’s done, you swore that you would never do it again? Your thoughts jumbled up and you lost your way in the middle of your presentation.

Maybe the steps (remember the acronym ANSVA) proposed by Prof Alan H. Monroe from Purdue University below can help you ‘sell’ your ideas to your future audiences better; 

Get Attention – You can get the attention of your audience by using storytelling, a shocking statistic, humor, a powerful statement and others that will get your audience to sit up and take notice.

Establish the Need – The next step is to convince them that there is a problem. This will give them the idea that what is happening now is not good enough and that change is needed. You can use statistics, informing them of the effects of not making changes or showing your audience how the problem directly affects them.

Satisfy the Need – Propose your solution. Tell your audience how you will solve their problems. Discuss the facts in detail. Use examples, testimonials, and statistics to prove the effectiveness of your solution.

Visualize the Future – You can use three methods to visualize the future. Firstly, you can describe what the situation will look like if your proposals are adopted. Secondly, you can describe what the negative effects like if your proposals are rejected and lastly, you can describe the negative picture first, and then reveal what could happen if your proposals are accepted.

Call for Action – The final step is to let your audience have an idea of what they can do to solve the problem. List the actions immediately. Persuade them to take action now. Keep your call for action list simple, between five to nine items.

So, the next time you present an idea or solutions, remember to use the steps discussed above. It will help you to organize your thoughts better and make your presentations more impactful. 

Get What You Want : Tips To Be A Better Communicator

We communicate every day. In our workplace, we give feedback to our team members, attend weekly meetings and ‘sell’ our ideas to our bosses. Some people are good communicators while others still have rooms for improvements.

To make our message more understandable and thus increasing the chances of getting what we want from it, we can use the 7Cs of Communication below;

Clear – Be clear of the reason why we communicate with others.  What is the purpose of our communication? It is to sell a product? Persuade others to accept our proposal? Highlight our team members’ poor performance?

Concise – Stick to the point and keep our message simple. Avoid beating around the bush. Remember, keep it as simple as possible. Simple message has better chances of being understood by our team members.

Concrete – When our message is concrete, our team members will have clear pictures of what we are saying. We can use examples, stories and metaphors to make our message more vivid. Limit them to one for each point that we are trying to emphasize.

Correct – A correct communication is an error-free communication. When speaking, pay attention to our language structure and pronunciation. Check and re-check our spelling and grammar when writing a memo, report or proposal.

Coherent - When our communication is coherent, it flows logically. For example, when presenting a proposal, our message has an opening, body and closing (call for action). Our ideas are connected and relevant, making our message easy to understand.

Complete – A complete message enables our team members to get all the information they need in order to take action. It has specific time frame and outcomes. For example, when writing minutes of meeting, we need to clearly state the task, person in charge and dateline for action.    

Courteous – Trust is important especially in face to face communication. It can be achieved by being friendly, open, and honest. Avoid ‘punching below the belt’, character assassination, insults or aggressive tones.

Next time we write a report, give sales presentation or asking for that extra budget for our department, the 7Cs of Communication above will help us to increase the chances of getting what we want by making our communication more impactful. Try it today!