Note: This article excerpted
from Building Business Acumen for Trainers: Skills to Empower
the Learning Function and is used with Permission by
the Publisher, Copyright2006 John Wiley & Sons.
Listening is an essential skill for selling T&D in an
organization. Listening demonstrates [our department's] ability
and willingness to adapt to the needs of an organization. We must
go out of our way to understand our customers in order to determine
how to help them achieve their objectives. We cannot expect people
to come to us. Only after we build strong inroads with people and
establish our credibility will people proactively seek our help.
Until then we need to reach out. When we listen to people and
observe the work they are engaged in, we will discover
opportunities where we can make a difference. They may not be what
we expect. Going in with an open mind and attentive eyes is what is
necessary. We also need to be careful not to jump to conclusions or
take what we hear from people at face value. What people ask for
and what people need may be very different. Working together we can
explore solutions.
The ability to think from other people's organizational and
personal perspectives is central to building institutional support
and selling T&D. Each area of an organization represents a
frame of reference. Because T&D serves all areas of the
business we have to become skilled at moving in and out of various
perspectives. Our perspective becomes secondary to understanding,
appreciating, and thinking from other perspectives. Pacing with
people, meeting them on their turf, and making an effort to speak
the language inherent to their functional area is our greatest
challenge. When we succeed in temporarily abandoning our
perspective and immersing ourselves in other people's
organizational worldviews, tremendous results become possible. It's
a simple truism; when people feel that you have listened to them,
they are more inclined to listen to you.
We have to be careful to avoid the temptation to immediately fit a
functional area's needs into our collection of prefabricated
solutions. That flies in the face of listening. People need to feel
that their unique needs have been understood and that we haven't
rushed to offer them a cookie-cutter solution. Selling T&D as a
strategic asset demands that we help our customers feel unique even
when we may realistically slot them into tried-and-true
interventions. We stand to learn a lot in the process. Our
customers offer us wonderful opportunities to continuously develop,
grow, and stretch in new directions. Learning is dynamic, so it
should come as no surprise that we need to model these principles
in the way we do our work.
As we become more skilled at listening, we also become better at
anticipating what our customers will need. We start viewing our
customers' new projects and initiatives as opportunities for
T&D. We come to the table with ideas and recommendations. Our
customers begin viewing T&D as a strategic partner. Powerful
things happen when our customers realize we are looking at the
world from their organizational perspective. In the beginning it
will be impossible for you to reach out to all the areas of your
organization, so start with a small win. Small wins add up to
bigger ones. As you build momentum and institutional support other
areas will hear your T&D success stories and begin coming to
you.
Focusing on building strong relationships is critical to the
success of selling T&D. We need to allot greater amounts of
time to cultivating relationships. How people perceive us is
directly related to the amount of time and effort we spend in
reaching out to others and taking an active interest in them.
Achieving results is only one part of the equation. Broadcasting
our achievements and accomplishments in the form of hard facts is
not convincing enough to engender trust and widespread support of
our activities. We have to reach out and make an emotional
connection with people. One of the best ways to do this is to share
a story (see TheStrategic Use of Stories in
Organizational Communication and Learning [Gargiulo, 2005],
and Stories at Work: Using Stories to Improve Communications
and Build Relationships [Gargiulo, 2006]). Our customers need
to realize we have their best interests at stake.
There is an interesting paradox in people's perceptions of T&D.
People require ongoing learning to succeed. Learning implies that
the learners are missing some information or experience. However,
most people avoid parading their deficiencies in front of others.
No one is accustomed to exhibiting personal vulnerabilities and
people often fail to see their blind spots. So on the one hand
people have a built-in resistance to T&D's generic charter of
promoting learning, yet on the other hand people possess an
intrinsic desire for receiving learning help and support. Our
T&D customers need to believe we can help them and be willing
to trust us. When we become too focused on the formalities of
T&D we are apt to weaken our relationships with those
customers. Marching people through our procedures, processes, and
standard course offerings may hinder rather than aid our cause. Not
that these things should be eliminated, it's just that they are not
enough to build new relationships and nurture existing ones.
In order to build long-term institutional support and sell the
benefits of T&D, we need to leverage every person of our team
as an ambassador of goodwill. It takes a critical mass of people
working together to effectively reach out to all areas of an
organization. The foundation for promoting T&D stewardship is
the culture we develop within our own teams. We must endeavor to
create an ethos for our T&D team that exudes warmth,
fascination, and tireless interest in others' well-being and
development. These are qualities that generate excitement,
commitment, and ownership. There is nothing soft and fuzzy here.
Beyond the obvious humanistic merits of such an approach, this
advice is couched in utilitarian benefits. Our customers and
employees alike will embrace and respond to the positive energy we
create. Encouraging our team members to be ambassadors and building
a positive working environment for the team will help T&D to
become an indispensable partner at the organization's strategic
table. We want people to seek our participation and ideas when
planning key organizational initiatives. In fact, we will know we
have really succeeded in selling the potential of T&D when we
begin to help the organization uncover new opportunities, when we
are not just responding to support it in achieving the goals and
objectives it has already set.
2006 ASTD, Alexandria, VA. All rights reserved.