Trainer Tools

Leadership development is a big topic, it cannot be reduced to a series of bullet points stuck on PowerPoint slides. If we are to develop great leaders, we need patience, and we need to provide impactful experiences and create learning spaces where leaders can work with colleagues to learn, reflect, and grow.

Simulations can be an enjoyable and effective part of that ... if they are well-designed!

In this podcast we talk to Bjorn Billhardt and Matt Confer who share their top five tips to creating great leadership development simulations

Bjorn Billhardt is the CEO of Abilitie.

Prior to founding Abilitie in 2015, Bjorn was the CEO of Enspire Learning, Inc., a custom e-learning development company he co-founded in 2001.

Abilitie offers award-winning team-based leadership simulations that hone people management, business acumen, and strategic leadership skills. Abilitie’s simulations have been utilized by over 40 members of the Fortune 500 in more than 30 countries around the world. Bjorn is a recognized authority in the field of talent development and simulation design and has been a speaker at conferences such as Training, ASTD, and ISPI.

Matt Confer is the VP of Strategy & Business Development at Abilitie focused on new client relationships and partnership development in the learning & development industry.

Matt’s interest in the learning & development space began at Deloitte Consulting where he was a Manager in their Project Controller Practice and worked to help develop and then facilitated a brand new on boarding program for new campus hires.

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, I welcome back Garry Platt to continue discussions on his specialist subject: Transactional Analysis.

Transactional Analysis, or TA, is a theory of how humans interact with each other - its main application being to help understand human behaviour and communication: each interaction between people being called a "transaction". It was developed by Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne and has been a tool in the trainer and coach toolbox for many years in helping us understand ourselves and our own interpersonal behaviours, but also understand those of others.

In this episode Garry talks about "Drivers", also known as "working styles" and this builds on the first TA series

This podcast includes a promotion for the 2019 Learning and Development Executive Summit

Garry Platt is an experienced training consultant with more than 30 years experience in the business. He has worked with a number of international organisations helping them to enhance their approach to training and development. Within the last 12 months he has worked with Deutsche Post DHL, Formica, Siemens, Mercedes AMG F1 Team and was the keynote speaker at the SHE Conference in Blackpool.

Academically qualified to Masters Degree level in Education, Training and Development his work combines current research and study in Human Resource Development with a pragmatic and workable approach.

During the last 10 years an area of specialisation has become the evaluation and return on investment analysis of training delivered in organisations. Drawing from the experience of hundreds of companies and organisations he has drawn together a large range of methods and approaches which many organisations have selected from and introduced into their own.

Garry currently works for EEF and can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or email ([email protected])

Dr Nanette Miner believes that many companies risk going out of business within the next fifteen years because they have failed to train people to be leaders.

She works with organisations to help them plan for the long-term, investing in their people to build business acumen and thinking skills, so once they reach leadership positions, they are in a position to guide the organisation successfully.

In this podcast, I chat with Nanette about her thinking, the learning pathways she recommends and what sits behind her big scary claims.

Dr. Nanette Miner is a leadership development and workplace learning strategy consultant. She is the founder of, and Managing Consultant for, The Training Doctor; a South Carolina-based consulting firm that helps its clients to prepare today, for the organizational leadership they will need tomorrow.

Clients appreciate her skill at asking relevant, timely, and often challenging questions that stimulate new thinking and help organizations to prepare for the future of work. Her focus on business goals, integrated with sound principles of adult learning, results in enhanced organizational effectiveness and astounding return on investment.

She is a frequent speaker at trade conferences and corporate conventions, and an expert-guest on the topic of workforce development and millennial career-development for syndicated talk-radio shows such as America’s Workforce Radio and Inc. Radio.

Her most recent book is Future-Proofing Your Organization by Teaching Thinking Skills.  As a scholar-practitioner, she is has authored books on various aspects of business management, marketing and employee development, and has been published in, or quoted by Huffington Post, Fast Company, the BBC, and numerous industry and trade journals.

Nanette has been passionate about business and learning since she was a youngster. She has a bachelor’s in business and marketing, a masters in human resource management and organization development, and a doctorate in adult learning theory.

How many stories do you have of crappy e-learning that is designed to tick boxes rather than improve knowledge or, perish the thought, improve performance? Most e-learning packages I have done work best as anesthetics, putting me to sleep in an instant, and putting me off e-learning for life.

That's the problem, bad e-learning doesn't just fail to as a learning experience, it scars learners so that they never want to engage the medium ever again!

Edan Kertis made it his quest to make e-learning - or digital learning - into something engaging, that people enjoyed and valued, that made a difference to real world performance. To do this, he came up the AFT model.

Learn more about the AFT model in this podcast, and how it can be applied, not just in the digital world, but in any learning programme.

Edan Kertis is the CEO at myQuest. He is an entrepreneur, behavioral change expert, software engineer, and the creator of the AFT learning model.

Edan has dedicated his life to the quest of developing digital tools that empower people to reach their personal and professional goals.

In 2012, Edan founded myQuest, a fast growing company that developed a learning and training technology which helps hundreds of companies around the world to deliver their training with outstanding results.

In 2018, Edan analyzed, compiled, and sorted through all of myQuest’s user data from the last 6 years and created what is now known as the AFT learning model.

The AFT learning model (Action->Feedback->Trigger) is one of the most innovative and powerful models to teach and train people online. When used correctly, the model dramatically increases engagement and completion rates as well as knowledge retention.

In this podcast, I continue discussing the "Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning" with Krystyna Gadd, focusing on the last of the five secrets which is about understanding how the brain learns. We don't go too deep into the neuroscience of learning, it's more about simple techniques to adopt to increase the likelihood of retention.

Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the myths surrounding accelerated learning. There are 5 broad areas or “secrets” to accelerated learning, that Krys shared in a recent article called “Get up to speed” that appeared in the Training Journal in 2016.

Krys finds working with trainers an absolute joy and she constantly seeks out ways to enable trainers to cut down on preparation time, improve retention of information and accelerate the learning though their organisations.

Krystyna is the founder of How to Accelerate Learning and creator of The Learning Loop® a brand new and innovative way to train trainers, facilitators, subject matter experts and line managers.

Knowledge and skills are not even half the battle when it comes to getting lasting performance improvement.

People not only need to know what to do and how to do it, they need to have the confidence to do it, the judgement to know when to do it, and the dedication to break old habits, overcome self-limiting beliefs, and construct new - more helpful - mental models.

Only then will we consistently see people taking the great leaps forward that we - and they - aspire to.

In this podcast, I chat to Emma Shaw, an enthusiast for L&D that's all about mindset shifts - which also happens to be my own favourite part of the business.

Emma Shaw discovered Learning and Development purely by accident and has had a passion for it ever since. With a very varied career within the field, she has always found one thing consistently fascinating; what makes people tick and how they evolve.

As a facilitator and natural coach, Emma uses accelerated learning techniques, NLP and other creative approaches to bring out the best in people whilst creating the best learning environment possible and even sometimes challenge the status quo.

She is passionate about ensuring that learning interactions really deliver results, so she is keen to always ensure a full needs analysis is done to create the right learning outcomes. That way, the learning becomes meaningful, high impact and stands out from the norm as a unique and memorable experience.

Emma runs her own consultancy business in the North West and has an entrepreneurial spirit. One of her new projects is co-founding a new membership site specialising in wellbeing, mindset and successfully navigating life.

Her key areas of skill within are behavioural and mindset change, sales, customer excellence and management/leadership development, as well as personal development and career coaching. You can find out more on www.espressolearning.co.uk

And feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn.

Knowledge and skills are not even half the battle when it comes to getting lasting performance improvement.

People not only need to know what to do and how to do it, they need to have the confidence to do it, the judgement to know when to do it, and the dedication to break old habits, overcome self-limiting beliefs, and construct new - more helpful - mental models.

Only then will we consistently see people taking the great leaps forward that we - and they - aspire to.

In this podcast, I chat to Emma Shaw, an enthusiast for L&D that's all about mindset shifts - which also happens to be my own favourite part of the business.

We learn new skills through repetition.

Douglas Seifert, PhD is the founder and CEO of Syandus

He founded Syandus 15 years ago to create a new way to learn. By combining cognitive science with game technologies, Dr. Seifert focuses on providing scalable ways to solve issues related to knowledge retention and skill acquisition.

Dr. Seifert served as Principal Investigator on 8 Small Business Innovation Research awards from the National Science Foundation; this research fueled the development of the virtual immersive learning technology on which the Syandus platform is built.

Syandus is now used to create customized modules for medicine, sales, leadership, and employee performance.

To find out more about how Syandus works, see this link for the Syandus sales training promotional video (scroll down for the video).

Let me be honest, I am biased. I hate smartphones in the training room.

If I deliver a learning event, I am trying to create a space where learning can happen safely. It's social, it's inclusive, it's active, it's fun, it is - I hope - challenging and valuable (I hope so, because it's costly!) ... and this requires a level of participation and engagement from the learners, and - because we're people in the same space - a level of courtesy ... but then I'm not one of the Millennial types, so what do I know.

Paul Levy argues that today's youngsters have (or may have) a new skill set and that all the assumptions I packed into the above paragraph may be wrong. He says we should be open to the idea of embracing smartphones in the learning space and using them to enhance and share the learning.

I'm not convinced ... what do you think?

Paul Levy is the founder of CATS3000, a change and innovation company that helps people and organisations to realise potential and thrive. He’s worked with individuals and organisations all over the world for the last twenty years to challenge mediocrity, and to open space for change and transformation.

Paul is also a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Innovation Management at Brighton Business School in the UK. He’s the author of several books, including “Technosophy” and Digital Inferno (based on his acclaimed blog, The Digital Inferno. He is also lead facilitator with the Social Media Leadership Forum.

He’s also a director of Rational Madness Theatre – an award-winning organisational theatre company that uses theatre to inspire and provoke change, transformation and innovation.

He’s a facilitator, trainer, writer, thinker and collusion breaker.

Paul Lives in Brighton in the UK.