By Sylvie Dale

Here’s my new sales hire. Teach them all about how to use Salesforce.

Here’s my new account manager. Teach them about time management and customer service.

I can do that. But is it the most helpful thing? When I did that in my early career, I got really tired. My learners got tired. It’s way more info than they need to be successful in their first 30, 60, or 90 days. This is simply content bloat. There’s a better way to design e-learning, live training, or coaching. 

Learning professionals who want to build a solid program should take into consideration the “awkward moment” – the pause, the hesitation, the thing people avoid at work.

Instead of starting from:

What do people need to learn?

Consider starting from:

Where are people getting stuck, frustrated, or slowed down? 

Let’s be honest. Whether it’s your job to design e-learning, create instructor-led training, or manage the overall program, you’re dealing with a limited amount of staff time and you need to spend it in the most effective way. So focus on the leverage points that get the most impactful wins. 

What’s at stake?

Not only does this impact the success of the individual going through the learning experience, but it impacts the whole organization. Doing this right will even save employees from getting let go unnecessarily, because we can come from a place of understanding about how the whole system works with its individual learners to support the success of the employee. 

As learning professionals, we are more than just designers, presenters, and coaches. We are problem solvers. Every organization has those friction points which reveal problems – moments where people hesitate, avoid a tool, or make the same mistake over and over.

In my time at Advance Local, a large media company with several regional news markets, I worked with sales managers, directors and VPs to come up with new materials to address what our leaders perceived as training needs. 

These leaders were my customers (in addition to the sales reps and account managers who took my training). I look at the learning need from several perspectives and help stakeholders decide where best to put the learning development resources for the best business outcome. 

It comes down to taking some time at the beginning to ask the right questions in the right way. I don’t need my stakeholders to tell me what specific training modules, exercises or learning tactics to employ. 

That’s for me to decide after I have used discernment and curiosity to ask better questions before kicking off the design process. 

Maybe your learning needs analysis needs a makeover:

GOOD	BETTER
What does post-training success look like from your perspective?	What business results do you wish you had related to this role that you aren’t seeing enough of?
What should your employee(s) be doing well?	Where have you found your employee(s) are getting stuck?
What behaviors have you seen in your team members that help them succeed?	What behaviors have you seen that slow down the progress of your team?
With what skills are your employee(s) expressing less confidence?	With what skills are your employee(s) demonstrating less confidence?
How well do your employee(s) fit the profile of those who have a high chance of success in this role?	What personal strengths have you observed in your employee(s) that will help them be successful in this role?

The great thing is, this works for designing e-learning and instructor-led training on a variety of skills:

• SaaS / cloud-based software like Salesforce
• Leadership
• Role-based onboarding
• Soft skills like sales and customer service

Examples of “awkward moments” that can inform our next e-learning, training, or coaching:

• Slowness in completing a work task
• (managers) Doing a direct report’s work for them
• Trying to get manager / team members to do their work for them
• Skipping a step in the workflow
• Avoiding calling prospects or customers
• Not listening to customers / talking over them
• CRM errors, like ordering the wrong product
• File errors, like deleting a group-owned file
• Leaving important form fields blank
• Using pen and paper when a digital record is required
• Having to repeat a work task several times
• Expressing ongoing frustration about a specific task

Enabling employees’ success in other ways

Sometimes these awkward moments are signs that we need to change the process, documentation, hiring strategy, or even the workplace culture. I want to be sensitive to that while conducting the needs analysis and bring it up with leaders with a bit of “radical candor.” 

Leaders and Talent Development professionals need to take ownership of our employees’ success. There is always more we can do to improve that.  As we focus on things people do during training planning, let’s ask ourselves and our stakeholders:

“What more could we do to make it easier for our learners to succeed in their roles?”

Leverage points which help employees succeed

• User experience changes to a software platform or a form
• Alignment with managers on coaching strategy with their teams
• Brief, early tutorials on collaboration tools like Teams or Slack
• Using jargon-free language on employee documentation
• Soliciting feedback from employees
• Providing infographics to guide employee conversations with customers
• Flexibility during live training to address awkward moments safely and respectfully
• Deeper-dive training where higher-level skills are required for a job task, like interpreting and presenting

I noticed these awkward moments, and here’s what happened

We had a Salesforce ordering system with the “submit” button in a weird place. Sales reps often forgot to submit finalized orders and had to re-create them. Developers were happy to move the button to a more intuitive place, and ordering went much more smoothly after that. 

A new form for requesting advertising design work initially had fields for “headline” and “body copy,” which people said were hard to figure out. Managers asked for remedial coaching. After the form fields were rewritten and the creative request training was revamped, people had what they needed to successfully request design work.

We launched a beautiful dashboard for our clients’ marketing campaign reporting. It had curated metrics by solution and wonderful graphs and charts. Sellers avoided using it and asked their account managers to keep creating PowerPoint files for them. We conducted a boot camp workshop on storytelling using those metrics and boosted adoption of the dashboard. 

All of the sellers in a specific team were repeatedly referred to me because they were “bad at sales discovery”. It turned out that the sales manager was undermining their confidence by interrupting them during the sales meeting and taking over the conversation. I conducted  one-on-one coaching with the sales manager, which gave her some techniques to better coach her own team and improve their confidence.

During an onboarding sales role play exercise, one seller got visibly uncomfortable about having to participate. Setting up a one-on-one role play helped him practice his skills and be more confident when we rejoined the larger group.

During an online live training, one participant struggled with basic Teams meeting tasks like sharing her screen and using the chat function. She was the inspiration for including a short “how to use Teams” module at the beginning of onboarding training, which benefited all learners. 

Avoiding “gotchas”: Addressing awkward moments safely

People don’t often remember what you said, but they almost always remember how you made them feel. So we should be respectful and inclusive about how we do this. 

• Examples should be shared with compassion and without identifying people
• Design role plays carefully to avoid embarrassing participants
• Address more sensitive issues one-on-one or in smaller groups
• Introverts should be treated with consideration during group exercises
• Ensure the learner has the info they need before asking them to complete a learning exercise

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In a world where we have finite resources to help our learners do their jobs better, focus is key when designing e-learning, live training, or coaching. 

If you design learning around where people hesitate instead of what they need to learn, employees and their teams are more successful. 

About the author: Sylvie Dale is a Talent Development professional with more than 10 years’ experience doing live and virtual instructor-led training, building elearning, and supporting organizations in helping their employees succeed at their roles. Your comments are welcome – use the Comments link at the top of this article and let me know what’s on your mind.