Train to Ingrain
The common sense approach to leader development!
Are you wasting money on training that does not produce results?
A Hard Fact: Training and development programs rarely change the behavior of the people who attended them. As a result, most of the tens of billions of dollars invested each year in these programs fail to produce lasting changes in workplace performance or have a positive impact on business results.
It is possible to create permanent measurable improvements in individual performance that can have a positive impact on your business results. But it requires three conditions to take place:
- Follow up assessment and training programs with adequate reinforcement. It takes months of on the job application and reinforcement to ingrain a new skill
- Present training as ongoing programs rather than single events. Performance improvement has to be an ongoing process.
- Hold Direct Managers be responsible for a coaching role. The largest part of performance improvement must happen in the workplace. Therefore the Direct Manager needs to be intimately involved: communicating expectations, support, observing, encouraging, giving feedback, coaching and maintaining accountability.
So how do we do it?
To create permanent changes in employee behavior, you will need to motivate them to learn and develop, focus their attention on needed improvement, provide ongoing feedback, and hold them accountable.
The solution is Train to Ingrain! A new common sense, reinforcement-intensive approach to leader development that effectively stimulates brain cells to make new connections, thus forming new neural networks. New habits and skills replace old behavior patterns. The key is a unique six-phase methodology: Commitment, Assessment, Training, Reinforcement, Integration, and Feedback.
The Train to Ingrain approach:
- Involves Direct Managers in the training process to provide support, encouragement and coaching before during and after training
- Administers pre and post course behavioral assessments through 20/20 Insight GOLD to focus attention and motivation, establish accountability, measure performance improvement, and support ROI calculations.
- Trains participants with the integrated Vital Learning Leadership Curriculum, utilizing online, classroom and teleseminars sessions that concentrate on skill practice and application after training.
- Incorporates a structured program of follow-up reinforcement including continued learning, ongoing feedback, coaching, and accountability.
- Guides training professionals to set up learning support networks and incorporate training strategies that promote learning transfer.
- Helps decision makers align policies and practices with desired workplace performance.
The Train to Ingrain technologies are brought to organizations through a unique alliance of two powerful resources:
- An award-winning, behavior-based leadership development curriculum developed by Vital Learning Corporation, and
- A versatile, award-winning feedback survey system developed by Performance Support Systems.
20/20 Insight GOLD, published by Performance Support Systems, is an award-winning software program that lets you create and use practically any kind of multi-source feedback survey you can imagine—including 360-degree feedback projects, ongoing individual feedback, team and organization climate surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, and many more! It is the only performance feedback system in the world that is versatile enough and economical enough to support The Ultimate Use of 360: measuring improvements in performance - an essential element of Train-to-Ingrain.
The Vital Learning Leadership Curriculum is an award-winning training program that helps participants address more effectively the recurring challenges that every team leader, supervisor, or manager faces on a regular basis. The comprehensive behavior-based curriculum features a highly practical “how to” seventeen-unit leadership development curriculum that includes a special system of resources that support ongoing reinforcement.
For further reading check out Train-to-Ingrain Background Reading - a list of the major resources that led to the Train-to-Ingrain concept—well-known books and articles that document the problem and recommended solutions.
Train-to-Ingrain isn't a single program, event or intervention. It’s a new contextual framework for conducting such programs. It's an ongoing process in which efforts to ingrain new skills and improve an individual's performance become a routine aspect of work. At the heart of Train-to-Ingrain is the imperative to provide enough follow-up reinforcement to achieve permanent, measurable changes in behavior, improved workplace performance and positive impacts on the bottom line.
Follow-up reinforcement is the "missing link" of most training and development programs. Quite a bit of supervised application, feedback, encouragement and coaching is needed to ingrain a new pattern of behavior, so this can only take place during day-to-day work. And if new behavior patterns aren’t reinforced on the job, participants will eventually fall back on their old, comfortable ways of doing things.
Effective follow-up reinforcement has four elements:
- Coaching
- Ongoing development
- Follow-up assessment
- Accountability
For this reason, Train-to-Ingrain defines a key role for direct managers, drawing them into a three-way partnership with trainers and learners that we call the Learning Triangle.
Involving the direct managers is absolutely essential to transferring classroom learning into permanent improvements in workplace performance.
The Bottom Line
Changing behavior patterns and improving individual performance require physical changes in the brain. It's virtually impossible to achieve this without an ongoing program of follow-up reinforcement that involves the learner’s direct manager.
Any organization can get started in Train-to-Ingrain in a matter of days. After that, it can go to work on achieving dramatic results over the long term by building on this foundation—optimizing eight critical areas of training and development. Train-to-Ingrain isn’t a rigid concept; your organization can customize an approach that’s compatible with its learning culture.
How do you get started?
The good news is that it’s not necessary to change everything all at once. In fact, it’s not even a good idea. The sensible approach is to start with a few simple, effective initiatives that will produce immediate results. For example, to get started quickly for leadership development programs that make permanent improvements in performance and have positive impacts on the bottom line, an organization can begin with these three actions:
- Acquire assessment and training technologies that are already integrated and designed to support long-term skill reinforcement
- Define what’s expected of direct managers to coach their subordinates
- Hold direct managers, learners and trainers accountable for performance improvement
To get maximum results going forward, an organization will need to do more. It will need to build on this foundation to vastly improve learning transfer in all developmental programs. Your organization may already be on track in several areas. Every organization needs to pursue a customized strategy of optimizing its approach to training and development, and should do so at a realistic pace. The following actions will have the greatest impact on learning transfer:
- Demonstrate Commitment to Reinforcement
- Involve Managers as Coaches
- Follow-Up with Reinforcement
- Hold Key Players Accountable
- Employ Training Transfer Strategies
- Support Learning Networks
- Focus on Results
- Align the Culture
Without appropriate follow-up systems or participant action plans in place, progress and results are nowhere to be found, and expected results just never materialize."