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Letter from the Editor 
This was the first three-week vacation that I’ve taken in … well, since before I started working! My family went to Europe – southern Germany, a bit of Austria, and eastern Switzerland – as a way of recognizing 1) my wife’s and my 25th anniversary, 2) our older daughter’s graduation from college, and 3) our younger daughter’s 21st birthday. Frankly, we knew that we needed to go this year or we’d probably never have the chance as a family again since Katie’s entering the work world.
Because we had lived in Germany for the first five years of our marriage, it was in some ways returning home. It was the opportunity to point out to Katie, “Here’s where we used to feed the fish when you were two years old….” And it served as a useful time for me to reflect on Entelechy (German beer and wine has that effect!)
Since starting Entelechy 14 years ago, I’ve always struggled with what I’ve considered “the easy way” versus “the only way” when it comes to training. For 14 years, we have created customized training solutions to help clients achieve specific goals or to address specific performance problems.
The work is hard. The problem is always bigger than initially indicated. There are those who fight change. There are politics, organizational changes, and turf wars. Sometimes the problem cannot be solved through training – and the client refuses to believe that we’re turning the business down.
The work is messy. Sometimes in the examination of the stated problem, we discover many other issues that are preventing the client from achieving desired results. Which do we address first? How do we enlist client staff to take responsibility for issues they can and should address?
On the other end of the training continuum – the other side of the fence where the grass always appears greener – is the “product-based” camp. They provide off-the-shelf training programs that are slick, with laminated job aids, videos, and legions of distributors preaching the gospel to the masses. From an owner/operator standpoint, the “build-it-once-and-sell-it-a-million-times” approach sounds refreshingly easy. Customization in this camp means printing the client company’s name on the cover! No mess, no hard work, ....
I am NOT debasing the off-the-shelf folks; some of them have created quite a product and are serving their clients quite well. In fact, we will continue referring some of our potential clients to this camp when we discover that they don’t really need customized training. I believe that Entelechy’s training programs would make for outstanding off-the-shelf training programs.
It’s just that I can’t get over the nagging feeling that we’d be shortchanging the customer with a program that was good but – because it wasn’t customized to meet the client’s specific and unique performance challenges – not great. The program MIGHT address the challenges. It MIGHT meet the needs of most of the participants. The training MIGHT result in performance improvements and/or increases in sales or margins or quality or customer satisfaction or….
I’ve had three weeks to reflect on Entelechy’s approach to training and – in spite of the messiness and the hard work associated with it – we’ll continue providing training and performance solutions that we KNOW will work. Clients will get more than they expect; we’ll continue our 100% success rate; and I’ll sleep well.
It’s good to be back!
Training Customization – What to Customize
Effective training is customized training. It is built to address a specific issue, to provide skills or knowledge to increase performance so that a specific business goal can be achieved.
Whether you build from scratch, bring in an off-the-shelf program, or hire a training partner like Entelechy to customize training for you, training should:
- Focus on your business issues
- Embed your products and services
- Embed your policies and best practices
- Embed existing models and training
- Use your own measures of success
Focus on Your Business Issues
The result of any training effort should be improved business results. Improved business results usually means:
- More sales
- Greater margin for sales
- Increased productivity
- Reduced errors
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Reduced turnover
- Increased morale
Identify what business impact YOUR training is going to have (see the section on Performance Consulting for more detail) and focus your training on addressing that one thing.
As you review the materials, ask yourself, “Will knowing how to do this particular thing help participants achieve our business objective?” If the answer is yes, keep the exercise. If the answer is no or maybe, consider eliminating or modifying the exercise.
Embed Your Products and Services
When you embed your company’s products and services in the training, the training takes on a more relevant flavor. Even if you’re not teaching products or services, the participants’ perception of your training improves when they see references to their company.
A second benefit to embedding information about your company’s products and services is that this important knowledge is reinforced.
Third, a company’s products and services ARE the foundation of the company. They determine who we hire, how we manage our work, how (and to whom) we sell, and who our customers are. While it sounds obvious, without our products and services, we wouldn’t exist as a company. Therefore, there should always be a link in your training to your company’s products and services.
As you review the materials, identify where you can add information or references to your company’s products and services.
Embed Your Policies and Best Practices
In addition to products and services, HOW your company operates is key to its success and can be leveraged in training. HOW a company operates comprises its policies and best practices.
Policies include all of those procedures that have been outlined and agreed upon by the company’s leadership. How we hire, how we treat employees, our pricing, our discounting strategy, how we communicate to the world, how we terminate employees, and hundreds of other procedures are often documented by the company.
In addition to company policies, policies exist in every department in the organization. Sales has policies for discount pricing. Manufacturing has safety policies.
Add relevance and a chance for reinforcement of policy information by reviewing the materials and embedding relevant policy information that supports and augments the training.
Best practices, like policies, illustrate how we should act in an organization. Unlike policies, however, best practices are often unwritten. They are often the stuff that helps the exemplary performers stand out above the rest of the staff. Even though they may be undocumented, everyone – especially management – knows what they are and can describe them to you.
Best practices are those behaviors that illustrate what the best employees do in a given situation or regarding a specific skill. In short, if everyone did these best practices, the organization would be outstanding.
Key to the success of your training is identifying these best practices and embedding them in your training. While Entelechy’s training identifies the best practices in the industry, these best practices are sometimes unworkable in a given organization. For example, Coaching for Performance is based on face-to-face interaction between a manager and an employee; if your organization’s managers ONLY manage remote employees, identify the best practices that exemplary managers demonstrate and embed those in the training.
Best practices removes the sentiment heard in non-customized training, “That’s great in theory, but it won’t work here….” Furthermore, it ADDS the sentiment you want participants to voice, “Wow, I’m going to try that tomorrow!”
Embed Existing Models and Training
Entelechy’s training is meant to build upon other training that you have within your company. When possible and practical, be consistent in your use of terminology and models. For example, Entelechy’s training on Social Styles (found in several modules) uses the terms Doer, Speaker, Listener, and Thinker. Another well-known purveyor of social styles training uses the terms Driver, Expressive, Amiable, and Analytic; another vendor uses colors to distinguish the four styles. Use a single model to help participants avoid confusion.
Recognize that vendors have different copyright restrictions on the use of their training materials and models. Many vendors require you to at least ask for their permission to use their models in other training venues; in some cases they may charge you for the use. (Remember, when you buy training from Entelechy, you can use that material when you want, where you want, and how you want within your organization without charge!) Therefore, before you replace an Entelechy model with another vendor’s model, please make sure that you have permission to do so.
Use Your Own Measures of Success
Every company has its own measures of training success, including:
 Level 1 – Participant reaction sheets administered to participants after the training.- Level 2 – Learning measures to determine if participants are “getting it” in training.
- Level 3 – Training transfer measures to determine if participants are using the skills they acquired in class while on the job.
- Level 4 – Business impact measures to determine the relationship of the training to the business.
Leverage your own measures of success. If you don’t have any of the above, feel free to contact Entelechy and we can provide you with some that we’ve found valuable.
This information comes from Customization Guide for Entelechy’s Modules and
Programs, a guide that accompanies each purchase of a downloadable and customizable module or program available through Entelechy’s website at
www.unlockit.com.
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Terence Traut, President of Entelechy "unlocking potential"
ttraut@unlockit.com
phone: 603-424-1237
fax: 603-424-6361
http://www.unlockit.com
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