Trainer Tools

Garry is back, this time to talk about his approach to using competences in learning and development.

I would guess that competences are not used that much in your organisation, and if they are, they are only dragged out for performance reviews and little else.  Even then, if my experience is anything to go by, they probably don't really drive workplace behaviour or performance improvement, and maybe they feel more like a tick-box exercise that HR make you do.

It needn't be thus.

Competences can be really useful! Well written ones, with good descriptors of effective and ineffective behaviours, can be a great guide for superior performance and an invaluable tool in learning needs analyses and learning design.

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])

In this podcast, I continue discussing the "Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning" with Krystyna Gadd.

We're up to the fourth secret which is about the importance of the environment. This isn't just the physical environment, but also the social and emotional environments.

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.

In this podcast I talk to Sunita Sehmi about being an inclusive facilitator, and also about how we can deal with sensitive topics like diversity, both as facilitators but also as a learning topic in itself.

Sunita Sehmi is a Certified Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker and Trainer. She is of Indian origin and was born in London before moving to Geneva in 1992. She has a Psychology degree, specializing in Occupational and Developmental Psychology and a Post Graduate certification in the Development and Training of Adults from the UK. She also has a Masters in Human Resources, Coaching and Career Management from HEC University of Geneva. Where she wrote her Master Thesis “How does proficiency in English affect French-native professionals at work?” A qualitative research conducted in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

She is the founder of Walk The Talk, which provides tailor-made professional coaching consultancy and training.

Her business background includes working with International companies in banking, finance, media, pharmaceuticals, and FMCG industries. Sunita’s coaching style advances the skills and approaches needed to develop performance. Her forte is the fact that she has studied and worked in several different countries and thus her understanding and knowledge of language communication and culture is compact and solid.

During her twenty-five years of international experience, Sunita’s objective has always been to support people to uncover and utilise their potential and to help individuals and organizations to perform at their very best.

Sunita is an accomplished speaker and business writer furthermore she has had several articles published articles in the press.

In her free time Sunita is a Mentor for the Richard Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship and a proud member of the School in The Cloud Team.

One of my favourite conversations for a while was with beer-lover and influence expert Alex Swallow.

Influence is a perennial topic in the professional world, and most of us are in roles where we not only need to help others be influential, but we need to be influential ourselves.

In this podcast, I ramble on to Alex Swallow about what makes people influential, what we can do to be more influential and what we can do in workshops about influence to make them more meaningful.

Alex Swallow is The Influence Expert– helping high achievers grow their influence to increase their impact on the world. He is currently a digital nomad- living and working in a number of European cities (and soon, India) with his wife. He is also the Founder of Young Charity Trustees, an organisation that promotes Board diversity for charities. He has previously been a charity Chief Executive, a political intern and an assistant teacher for two years in Japan. He was educated at Cambridge and Sussex Universities.

Paul said he wanted to talk about "involution". I had no idea what he meant, but I was willing to along with it because Paul Levy tends to have interesting things to talk about.

Involution means the opposite of evolution. If evolution is about the fittest surviving, about decisions being taken by those who show up, about rewarding winners, then involution is about taking the time to look at those ideas and content that didn't make it, those people who aren't there ... and reflecting on what that tells us and what value we can get from them.

It's a useful technique in brainstorming in particular, but also in the facilitation of meetings and decision making, as well as part of "the humble facilitator's" approach to training and other learning workshops.

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.

Paul said he wanted to talk about "involution". I had no idea what he meant, but I was willing to along with it because Paul Levy tends to have interesting things to talk about.

Involution means the opposite of evolution. If evolution is about the fittest surviving, about decisions being taken by those who show up, about rewarding winners, then involution is about taking the time to look at those ideas and content that didn't make it, those people who aren't there ... and reflecting on what that tells us and what value we can get from them.

It's a useful technique in brainstorming in particular, but also in the facilitation of meetings and decision making, as well as part of "the humble facilitator's" approach to training and other learning workshops.

A lot of learning and development content is generic off-the-shelf stuff, built on shaky foundations and of variable value.

Many mainstay models and theories that pepper workplace learning are not robust, not subject to the rigours of research and peer critique, and often not supported by evidence. This doesn't mean they're useless: they're not. They have pragmatic value in that they work sufficiently well to survive and are often good conversation starters, but if we want the L&D business to be a serious profession, having a more scientific approach to research and the development of theories and models would be a good thing to develop.

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast I talk to Dr Adam Le Nevez about how we might apply academic rigour to the world of L&D.

Dr Adam Le Nevez is a learning consultant for the UK Foreign Office's Diplomatic Academy.

This doesn’t mean he teaches diplomats to unwrap a Ferrero Rocher in one hand while holding a glass of Champagne in the other. Rather, he partners with designers, faculties, learners and subject matter experts to build practical, innovative and accessible learning experiences for the continuous professional development of staff in the UK’s global network of missions.

Adam has an academic background in sociolinguistics and adult education and is passionate about life-long learning and social empowerment. His research and publications focus on language diversity, multilingual education policy and practice, and teacher education. In his 25 year career he has worked and taught at universities in Thailand, Australia, Finland, France, Luxembourg and Tunisia. His current professional interests lie in digital learning, design thinking and building resilient networks.

This is from 2015 too, and a deceptively useful model for having skillful conversations in facilitated sessions, coaching or even real life!

In this Trainer Tools Essentials episode, I talk to Catherine Thomson about David Kantor's theory of Structural Dynamics. In the podcast, Catherine explains how this theory of communication is applied to conversations in training and coaching.

Catherine Thomson is founder of The Houston Exchange and is also an Associate Consultant within the People and Organisational Development (POD) Division with Edinburgh Napier University.

A graduate of Sheffield University, she is an accomplished organisation development consultant with domestic and international experience across all sectors. Her expertise is in supporting organisations develop leaders to attain a level of agility that matches the unprecedented level of change and complexity currently being experienced in the 21st Century.

She is an advocate of working with leaders using “systems intelligence”, helping them to go beyond reaching agreements to reaching new understandings from which to think and act. In this way they build organisations that are profitable, enlightened, healthy and compassionate.

Catherine trained in Boston MA with the Kantor Institute on Dialogue™ a process that supports greater understanding of the dynamics of how teams communicate within their organisational system. Her recent assignments have included work with intact and cross functional teams at every level in the organisation, exploring personal and group insights into those areas of their communication that is normally less visible (assumptions, beliefs, values etc.) and the implications these have on personal contribution to the group dynamic, quality of decisions and employee engagement. She has helped individuals and teams develop insights and new thinking on how to expand their own behavioural repertoire when working towards new aligned thinking and meaning in relation to change, pivotal conversations and growing people capacity within the organisation.

The Essentials Mix are those TT podcasts that have had the biggest impact on me over the years, the ones I've learnt the most from and become a better L&D professional. In this one (with a bit of director's commentary breaking in), Paul Levy talks about the facilitator's role in challenging mediocrity (i.e. anything less than potential), even at the expense of becoming unpopular!

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.

A while ago Krystyna Gadd presented her Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning and after that we decided to break it down to discuss each of the five "secrets" in a lot more detail. In this podcast we look at the third golden nugget of essential advice "design with variety in mind".

We discuss various models you can use to ensure workshops are designed with variety, including David Meier's accelerated learning cycle as an overall structure, and many others.

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.