I began writing the Train Like A Champion blog 8 years ago this week to offer some thoughts about how we, as a community, can offer better training and professional development. Actually, no. Not just better… how can we offer the best? How can we literally train like champions? But even if we offer the best professional development programs, who is our champion?

In Monday’s Train Like You Listen podcast, I talked a bit about the best professional advice I’d ever received. As learning professionals, we need to find people around the organization who can be champions, allies, ambassadors – whatever term you want to use – basically people outside of L&D who “get” what we do and the value we offer and who can spread word among their peers.

In a world where everyone is busy and focused on their own deliverables, finding champions throughout the organization is often easier said than done. Here are a few ways to make inroads when attempting to identify champions around the organization:

Show and Tell

Often, seeing is believing. Our co-workers have seen too many bad presentations and sometimes they don’t know what’s possible until they’ve seen what’s possible. While it’s always important to put together engaging presentations with compelling slides, when you have key influencers in your session, it becomes a matter of life and death – at least life and death for your future L&D initiatives.

So don’t just knock your next presentation out of the park. Go find decision-makers in attendance and ask for their feedback, and offer to help if their team needs something similarly engaging and effective in the future.

I did this once and several months later someone I’d never worked with before came up to me and asked for some help with a training program. “Caroline said that before I even thought about trying to create something, I should talk with you,” was the way the conversation began.

Co-Create

People in departments across organizations are asked to put together presentations every day, and the vast majority have no training in instructional design. Some have a feel for what works, but many simply follow their gut or do what they’ve always done.

If you know that someone is working on an upcoming presentation, they may find an offer to help with their presentation useful. Spending a lunch break with someone and helping them do some basic things such as identify learning objectives (to keep the presentation tightly focused and engaging), use a lesson plan or brainstorm ways to get the audience involved in the learning can all be useful steps.

I’ve found that working alongside SMEs or others who’ve been asked to put together a presentation has helped elevate not only my own reputation but also the reputation of what “good training” should look like across the organization.

Ask wise questions

“I don’t do touchy-feely! This topic is boring, but people just need to know it!”

I met this comment with two questions: “If you think it’s boring, then what do you think your learners are going to think? If it’s important enough that everyone knows it, don’t you think we should find some ways to make it engaging?”

The executive in charge of quality control was willing to humor me and to allow me to apply some of my “touchy-feely magic” to his training design.

Asking questions to get people to think for a beat before rejecting good instructional design can be quite powerful. It moves us from order takers to true partners in the learning process.

Another “wise question” I’ve learned can be effective, when all else fails, is: “Would you at least be willing to give it a shot and see how it works in real life before you reject the idea?” This was a question borne from desperation. I knew I had an amazing activity that would be much more powerful than anything the client had tried in order to have people digest their technical content. But, it involved using Play Doh. And the audience would be very experienced professionals in their 50s and 60s. It was risky.

After we tried the activity, and it worked to perfection, the SMEs who were so vehemently against the idea were now its biggest champions. To this day, they are quick to defend our crazy instructional design ideas when one of their colleagues (who is new to working with us) pushes back or tries to dismiss our ideas.

Finding ways to partner with people across the organization – by showing them what’s possible, by working alongside them in developing new ideas or simply by asking questions – can turn skeptics into champions of our work.

What have you found to be successful ways to create champions for your work across your organization?

With Thanksgiving (in the United States) coming up this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we show gratitude to others. I definitely think there are very powerful ways that we, as trainers, can show our gratitude to our learners.

Put some effort into room set up

What the learners find when they walk into your room goes a long way to setting the tone for the session and says a lot for how you’ve prepared for them.

Make your session mean something (even if they don’t want to be there)

Sometimes people come to our sessions when they don’t want to, and sometimes they come with expectations that don’t align with what you’re planning to cover. One thing I like to do is begin sessions by simply asking people to introduce themselves and share one expectation they have for the day. If their expectation aligns with the scope of the session, great. If not, I take their out-of-scope expectation and put it into the Parking Lot so that I can talk with them in more depth during a break. Sometimes fate intervenes and allows me to cover parking lot items in the flow of conversations that emerge organically in a session as well.

Keep them engaged

One of the foundational philosophies underlying the training that my colleagues and I design is Dialogue Education. Based on Jane Vella’s work, we adhere to her 12 principles which are basically a “thank you note” for training attendees. Concepts such as ensuring a safe environment for learners to participate, working in partnership with learners, ensuring relevance of content and ensuring practice with reflection (praxis) are all key components.

Delight them with something new

Sometimes “new” is the content you’re delivering. Sometimes “new” is a model you’re sharing, a process or procedure or a new way to solve a problem. Sometimes “new” is a way for them to engage – tools like PollEverywhere and Kahoot often excite my participants so much that they want to bring it in to their own future presentations.

Celebrate their accomplishments

Assuming you’ve engaged your learners and allowed them to get involved in your session, offering opportunities to celebrate what they’ve learned and demonstrated they can do in your session is appreciation/celebration-worthy.

What’s missing? How do you appreciate and offer thanks to your learners?