ProTip: Give You Training a Leg Up (or At Least Legs to Stand On)

Training can launch an ongoing strategy.  It can teach people service behaviors, empower them, reward their involvement, and initiate ongoing processes for building customer loyalty.  But company efforts must have legs.  The best interventions are ongoing and consistent, not disjointed special events.

- Dr. Paul R. Timm, Seven Power Strategies for Building Customer Loyalty

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Please forgive all the leg plays on words, but there are just so many for a reason.  Something having legs means  it can last for a long time and have a wide impact.  And giving a leg up and having legs to stand on is all about support.  There are tremendous benefits to be reaped from training, provided we keep some key best practices in mind.  Dr. Timm gives us a tip to consider: if we don't make our efforts ongoing and consistent, we won't possibly make the most efficient use of all the time, effort, and money we spent on obtaining and completing the training in the first place.  It needs legs and all the meanings that come with that.

So what can you do?  The easiest thing is to make certain that once the class or the retreat is over, you revisit the material learned with regular frequency.  This can mean anything from periodically asking your team for feedback on how well they've integrated the material into their daily work or which techniques the have found most or least useful to more elaborate ongoing training involving recertification in the training materials.  Whatever the case, what matters is that the content you spent all the time and effort on is not lost following the training, but reengaged with and preferably re-worked as time goes on. We all know it's true - use it or lose it.