Train the Trainer Events for serious impact on your bottom line

A key component of effective leadership is communication, and live events are the perfect forum for senior leaders to share their vision, mission, and goals. But with live events sometimes having limited reach in the current climate due to travel, flight disruptions and the dreaded C word, it’s important to ensure that those not in attendance hear the same message in a way that works for them.

Train the trainer events can be a highly effective method of cascading messages throughout your company to keep everyone informed and engaged, but in order to cut through, here are our considerations to maximise impact.

Firstly, some backstory. Many moons ago, while working on a remote island in Fiji, I watched as big NGO’s (Non-Government Organisations) came and went, with ample funding from various philanthropists, to help a community of tiny villages better manage their natural resources to combat threats such as climate change, species extinction, overfishing, and coral reef decimation.

I remember standing in the village one day with my friend Loata. To my left, stapled to the wall of her colourfully painted wooden house, a poster about protecting turtles. To my right, on the floor, a turtle caught earlier that day lay awaiting its fate…as a valuable source of protein for the village.

To me, that poster couldn’t have been clearer. A giant red cross and the fine associated with harming an endangered turtle was as clear as day, but somehow the message wasn’t resonating with its intended audience.

This scenario played on my mind for some time. The longer I remained within the community, the more apparent the disconnect became between the messages spoken from above (governments, NGOs etc) and what was being heard at the other end of the spectrum.   

While you could argue that the information was being communicated, the audience simply wasn’t engaging and didn’t perceive the initiatives as relevant to them personally.

Employees learn from their leaders, both the successes and the mistakes, so it’s important to share both, to make sure that the messaging isn’t only clear, but relevant. If each individual or group isn’t engaged in the ‘WHY’ it matters to them, they can quickly become disengaged and unproductive. That’s bad for everyone - business and the environment!

The ‘why’ is critical. It challenges our innate emotionally charged bias-based decision-making. 

At BI WORLDWIDE, we utilise the principles of Behavioural Economics throughout our solutions to challenge and overcome those biases. We help our clients to develop content that’s both engaging and long-lasting, helping their leaders break down barriers and communicate effectively with their workforce. A key to this is direct, targeted communication that’s PERSONALLY relevant. By speaking to individual needs we can better connect, and consequently stand a greater chance of encouraging the audience to think or behave differently.

In a business setting, effective leadership starts with giving your team a clear goal that’s worth THEIR time. For example, if I don’t understand why (there’s that key word again) we need to sell more X over Y then I’ll just continue selling Y. By engaging your workforce in this way you increase productivity, make them feel more emotionally invested, more caring about their role, and more willing to commit their time and energy.

But more than that, it’s giving people access to the bigger picture that’s so important. Without it, people lose that common goal they should all be working towards, and we all know that common goals not only help develop creativity and innovation but also bring people together and encourage them to communicate and find solutions.

A train the trainer event is a powerful tool for all leaders in business, from The Board and C-Suite to Leadership Teams and Line Managers. The approach keeps subject matter experts flowing knowledge throughout an organisation, creating a culture of learning and knowledge sharing. Not only this, but it can also be a hugely cost-effective alternative to funding multiple events. In a world where sustainability and less travel are important factors, hosting one event and then giving your leaders the tools for the information to be disseminated can be a powerful solution. 

So, how did we change perspectives on the turtle as a meal?

• Community-elected representatives and the district chief were taken offsite to remove the distractions and to reflect that the messages were being supported at the highest level.

• During the event, the challenges to engagement were acknowledged and resolved.

• The sessions were designed to allow open conversations around each topic, allowing all perspectives to be shared and context given as to the relevance of the message to everyone.

• Then, equipped with tools, and facts, together they agreed on how the ‘why’ should be cascaded throughout the wider community to each of the different groups.

It was agreed that the next time someone came across a turtle on the beach or next to their fishing boat, the thought process should be ‘I can either catch this and take it home, OR, I can play my part to protect these endangered animals now I understand how low the odds are for it to survive (1 in 100)’.

And it worked. Back in the villages, the impact was very fast, real, and tangible. Within weeks, piggeries had been moved away from rivers, recycling points had been set up and, in case you were wondering, turtles were no longer on the menu.

And the turtle on the floor? I bought him for 50 bucks and took him back to the sea to live another day.