The blogs and postings have been on hiatus for a couple of reasons. One is that I like to take occasional breaks so I don’t repeat myself too much. Second, some change in LinkedIn has stopped me from receiving notifications of when people read what I’ve written. That’s still not resolved, but I’m tired of waiting for them.
In the meantime, I have had a chance to lead some training sessions with a variety of clients on different topics (motivation, leadership, collaboration, negotiating, team building, etc). While consulting is my passion, I have enjoyed exercising some different intellectual muscles and hearing the perspectives of many different people in different roles.
The participants’ attitude and engagement level towards the training comes from the company’s culture. More open cultures led to more questions while more closed ones resulted in more on-way communication of material. There was, however, a general thirst for more knowledge and skills, even by those who were attending after a long work day.
Of course, the nagging doubt about all training is how much difference it will make and over what time horizon. For some participants, they have very little formal authority in their current position, so one can only hope that the skills they learned can be applied in the near future. For others, perhaps they’ll have the opportunity to use something they learned in a “real life” situation and experience positive results. My challenge is to improve the courses so they have a better chance of “sticking.”
For more information on these training courses, please contact me at warren@allaboutperformance.biz.