Leadership’s Role In Making Training Stick

By Russell Bourne

Investing in training to upskill your customer-facing teams in their areas of need can be a hugely impactful thing to their performance, morale, and employee retention, and of course your company’s revenue and profit as a result. However, it’s not foolproof. There’s always a real risk that trainees won’t meaningfully change their work habits. 

We’ve written before about how to get the most out of external training, and certainly each individual is responsible for their own education and adoption of what they learned. This article will focus on the role people leaders play in ensuring the training and post-training environments give their people the best chance to adopt a better way.

How Training Stuck for Me

A couple years into my career as a CSM, my company sponsored a sales training course. I was at a crossroads because I’d earned a Sr. promotion into a strategic book of business about 6 months prior, and was struggling with the adjustment to selling into a more complex base. To be honest, I didn’t want to attend the training because I didn’t think I could sacrifice the time away from my desk. But as the saying goes, sometimes you have to stop fighting fires to build fire stations. 

The training covered many skills, and at the end of it, my colleague and I agreed that we would do an experiment of one skill per week. Week one, we focused on questioning skills, and the deal was, any time we were on a customer call that week, we would relentlessly ask questions as trained. I got my first call from a customer needing an extra license. The old me would have sent a quote and then spent the next 3 weeks in chase mode, and might or might not have gotten the order.

Instead:

“Yes, I can send you a quote for an Exchange license. What do you need it for?”

“We have a big new hire class onboarding next week and we need to spin up a new Exchange server to host their accounts.”

“That’s great. Sounds like it would be a disaster if not having email and calendar delays their onboarding, right?”

“Yes, it would tie up their whole training schedule.”

“And you’d get some harsh looks from leadership?”

“Oh yeah, it would be on me.”

“Okay, I’ll get it right out. When did you say you need to have the license key in hand?”

“I need it in 2 days.”

I couldn’t believe how well it worked. Instead of me chasing down a deal, the customer sold the importance and timing to himself, and he signed the order that day. This one event was a major turning point in my career, and my colleague experienced the same on his side. 

If you’re a revenue leader you don’t have to rely solely on CSMs taking initiative to get results from your training investment. You can intentionally create results like this for your people, yourself, and your company by doing a few small things to make the training stick.

Table Stakes

It goes without saying that not all training is created equal, and step one is for a leader to choose training that is engaging, proven, etc. Other articles go into more depth on that.

Assuming that’s been done, once the training commences, your team follows your example. Treat training like it’s just a nice-to-have, and they will too. If you invest in training for your team, you must attend the training sessions with them, actively participate without multitasking, and share your learnings as if you were a peer. 

Scientific Mindset

Continuing on with our thread of leading by example, another important behavior to model is the scientific mindset. No doubt, some attendees of the training, possibly including you, won’t buy into what’s being recommended. Others might have a fear that changing their behavior will negatively affect their current performance, no matter what level they’re performing at.

The fix for this is what my old co-worker and I stumbled on by accident: experiment. Pick one concept at a time and apply it in isolation. In our case, questioning skills was the first one we chose and it turned out to be the key that unlocked our potential. If I’m being honest, we tried another concept the second week that didn’t move the needle. So, we didn’t use it going forward. Had we tried both concepts together, we’d have had no idea which one was working and which one wasn’t.

As a leader, you should certainly introduce the concept of testing, or you can go as far as making the schedule for which things get tested and when. You can test behaviors in isolation like I did, or you can run A/B testing. Keep the reporting as simple as possible; the only input is the execution of the behavior you’re testing, and you can choose one or several meaningful outputs. 

Remember, the only difference between goofing off and science is whether you write it down. Why not apply the scientific method to your experiments?

Psychological Safety

Closely tied to having a scientific mindset is fostering a workplace culture of psychological safety. For the uninitiated, psychological safety is the belief among members of a group that they will not be punished or humiliated by speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or by making mistakes. 

There have been many, many studies showing workplaces with psychological safety are more innovative, more productive, and better for employees’ mental health compared to workplaces without it. A seminal article in the New York Times is now 10 years old but still worth a read; and I encourage you to look up recent research on the topic as well.

Leaders create psychologically safe environments by, you guessed it, modeling the behavior in their leadership role. Moderate your team meetings by specifically asking people to share mistakes they made and what they learned. In brainstorming sessions, literally say the words “no idea or question is to be shamed” and enforce it. 

A workplace that’s psychologically safe is absolutely ripe for learning that comes from training and for the experimentation that comes after it.

Follow through

It takes time to form new habits. In fact, according to this study, it takes an average of 66 days, and as many as 254! The worst thing that happens after training, and we’ve all been there, is that you go back to your desk and go right back to the same routine from before.

The reality is not everyone on the team will take it upon themselves to change their habits. Fortunately much of what I wrote above, especially around experimentation over time, contains a built-in pattern of repetition over the long term.  Outside that, it’s a leader’s responsibility to make sure the training concepts have an unmovable place in weekly meeting agendas, 1:1 meeting agendas, and even daily conversation. You might not have 254 days worth of experiments, but you can always return to certain concepts later through contests, and after enough time, re-experimentation is warranted.

One of the things I specialize in at The Success League, and one I enjoy most, is preparing leaders to get their teams to make the most of our training. Each team, and each set of content, has its own set of needs and its own set of tools that will resonate. Hopefully the ideas in this article help you design or choose your program for the long run.

Considering team customer success training? The Success League is a customer success training and consulting firm that offers Corporate Training that drives real change. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io to view our full suite of offerings or contact us here.

Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.