Training’s greatest challenge: creating behavioural changes that stick

Have you noticed the contradiction between what I do and what I say when I’m doing it?

With its major focus on the concepts of behaviour description interviewing, the theme of my Interview Right to Hire Right workshop is that, “past performance is the best predictor of future performance.”

Some reject this premise. Rather than accepting that an individual will usually approach a work task in the same way they have done in the past, they ask, “Can’t I just train them to do what I want them to do?”

As someone who has spent more than 20 years training leaders from all types of non-profit, public and private sector organizations, I would like to respond, “Of course, you can do that.” After all, the purpose of training is to change behaviour—how participants will approach tasks associated with their jobs following the training—with a resulting improvement in results. In the case of Interview Right to Hiring Right, that would mean that managers and supervisor would always hire the right person and eliminate bad hiring decisions.

During Interview Right to Hire Right, participants are exposed to tips, tools and techniques to enable them to change their behaviour, and to now incorporate “past performance is the best predictor of future performance” into their hiring practices. Change your behaviour to take advantage of the knowledge that people tend not to change their behaviours.

But I am enough of a realist to realize that this won’t always be the case. Even when participants are committed to change, beginning to do tasks differently is difficult. It is so easy to revert to asking the same questions in the same way as before attending the Interview Right to Hire Right workshop. It’s further proof that, “past performance is the best predictor of future performance.”

You may ask, what does this mean? Is all training a waste of time and money? Hopefully not, but careful preparation is needed to avoid this being the case.

This begins with an understanding that training is not just what happens during the time set aside for the training session. What happens before and after influences the impact of the training. Will the training result in desired changes in behaviour, or will training just be a break from the day-to-day routine with a day’s worth of work-related tasks left undone?

There are actions that trainers, those who request training, and participants in the training can take that will increase the likelihood that the training will stick. In my next blog posting, I will describe strategies I have developed to improve the impact of training.