The real reason trainers love working in hotels
Introduction - the benefits of experiential training
I have been running multi-day, residential, experiential negotiation training workshops around the world for almost fifteen years. I was fortunate to start with the leading company in the field in many ways and then, with my partners in Amplius Partners, wrote and delivered new and better workshops.
The content, theory and cases were updated and improved but we stuck to a similar format, aware that it created a powerful environment in which trainees took on and tried new methods readily.
The power of the format was a combination of intensity, challenge and challenge. One of the most important lessons in negotiation is that people value things more when they have had to earn them. This also applies also to training. If your trainer stands at the front of the room talking at the group then, no matter how useful and fundamentally true their lesson is, it does not stick.
When trainees have been challenged, have applied their “old” framework of solutions and seen them fail, and then have stepped out of their comfort zones to test new ideas and seen them work, they value the lessons more. Experiential training is transformative and “sticky” because it leverages this aspect of human nature.
The case against…
Multi day, residential workshops do have severe drawbacks though. They are difficult to organise and schedule, and take trainees away from their work for many days and they are very expensive. There are several root causes for this expense;
1. The trainer.
Since I am an expensive negotiation consultant, I have to acknowledge my own bias here. You can pay a lot less than I (or one of my peers) would charge for a trainer to deliver a course but it will not be effective in delivering change.
My clients pay well for my time because they value the results I deliver, not the time spent talking. I keep my rates competitive versus my peer group but, dollar for dollar, the return on investment you will get from a genuine negotiation expert (who is also a phenomenal trainer) versus a professional trainer is incomparable.
People who can deliver the real results are expensive.
2. Travel and expenses.
A three and a half day, residential workshop means paying for conference facilities and hotel accommodation for at least three nights for each attendee and the trainer plus all their catering. Attendees may need to fly to the training location, there will be cabs to pay for and extras for the room. By the time you add it all up it could cost the company more than the training itself.
3. The time and opportunity cost.
This issue is the hardest to quantify, but could easily be the most expensive issue of all.
Taking three to four days out of people’s time, away from work and family, costs a lot. The value of attendees’ lost working hours is part of the investment and will be returned in the improved outcomes of their deals, however we cannot ignore the potential impact of lost availability to customers and stakeholders, the impact on efficiency of having to catch up on three to four consecutive, full days of lost work and the work-life balance implications.
Why this is a great delivery model for the trainers
So while it’s true that there are great benefits to residential, experiential training it would also seem obvious that the costs are significant. And yet the training organisations overwhelmingly favour this format and try to discourage customer demands for change. Here’s why;
1. Efficiency for the training company.
The big training companies employ trainers. This should be obvious but isn’t when the companies try to claim that their trainers are, in fact, expert negotiators who happen to run training courses all the time. The companies that make this claim do so to justify their prices and also, in some cases, to lend authority to their trainers when they say provocative things in their workshops. My view is this; if most of the time a person spends at work is spent delivering training, they’re a trainer.
If your business is to employ trainers, obviously you only make money when they are training people. The 3.5 day format is a phenomenally efficient use of trainer time. They have a day to travel, half a day to set up and then the rest of the week is chargeable.
Splitting your workshop into smaller chunks is less efficient in terms of trainer utilisation. They may still need a day to travel and some time to set up, but they then deliver a single chargeable day and before having to repeat the exercise. If you are a highly efficient training company you might get two chargeable days out of the trainer in a single week, but most weeks you probably won’t. So the return on each trainer’s salary is lower and you need more of them.
2. Consistency
The major training companies’ workshops are impressive for many ways but one aspect that is often underappreciated is their consistency.
When I worked at the leader in the field, the flagship workshop was regularly compared to a Big Mac within the firm. If you walk into a McDonalds anywhere in the world, a Big Mac is going to be what you expect it to be. For corporate clients rolling out major training programs, across multiple offices, countries or continents this is extremely important. The product must be consistent.
Maintaining that consistency and quality of output across a team of dozens or even hundreds of trainers is an exceptional achievement, and it is only made possible by avoiding variance in your programs at all costs.
Changing a flagship program without risking the consistency and quality across all markets is a major undertaking, and would require significant investment in retraining and certifying all the company’s trainers, so the large companies would rather not do it. Especially when the outcome of the change would be to make their business model less efficient.
3. Control
All multi day, experiential workshops are timetabled to the minute. The great strength of the format is its intensity and effectiveness and this is not achieved without the development of and adherence to a detailed plan. When this is coupled with the pressure to maintain consistency, this means the leading companies’ workshops are tightly scripted, trainers are monitored for compliance and they strongly discouraged from going off script.
The intensity of the 3.5 day format helps the trainers to stay on script. Little time is available to ask questions, and the attendees are so completely occupied with the content of the workshop they have little time to reflect on their real life negotiations and ask questions based upon them.
If you break the workshop up into, for example, four working sessions over a period of weeks, attendees will have plenty of time to absorb and contextualised the learning from each session and come to the next with questions, the answers for which cannot be scripted. The large training companies do not want this for two reasons;
Firstly, efficiency again. Questions take time to properly understand and answer, which can eat into the available training time. The trainer will be wary of losing time to exploring an issue when they have a full day of training to deliver.
This is unfortunate but justifiable, although one benefit to breaking the workshop up is that you can make more time for exactly this kind of exploration, which can only benefit the people attending the training.
Secondly, and less justifiably, what if the trainer cannot answer the question?
The big training companies fear that, if their trainers cannot answer questions, their credibility will suffer. This should be a red flag.
As an experienced and seasoned negotiator, I don’t expect to be able to answer every question myself. But I am comfortable enough in my own skin, and confident enough in my own experience and abilities, that I have no problem with saying to a client “That’s a great question and something I haven’t ever come across, why don’t we dig in some more and come up with an answer together?”. For this reason, it is important to me to have space in my training workshops to have such conversations.
So why would the big companies find this so uncomfortable?
As I have mentioned above, the large training companies’ workshops are timetabled to the second and scripted to the word. The timetables and scripts have been honed to the point where they are incredibly effective for the majority of trainees.
They’re so good that large firms realised many years ago that a good trainer could deliver these workshops well without necessarily ever having been a great negotiator as long as they stay on script. The penalty of using trainers, rather than real experts, is they are very uncomfortable off-script. They don’t want to explore issues, as they fear that doing so will expose them more.
However, trainers are cheaper to hire and easier to manage than seasoned commercial experts. This makes them better suited to a large company that needs to deploy compliant trainers to deliver a consistent product, week after week, around the world.
The penalty is that many of the people delivering the most expensive training workshops in negotiation are actually less experienced negotiators than the people they’re training (this is also why want so badly to convey the idea that they are practitioners and not trainers). Sadly when the trainer is not truly a seasoned, expert negotiator, they are far less comfortable answering questions.
So why am I writing this?
As I have mentioned, I have worked in negotiation training and consulting on and off for fifteen years. I was a partner in the leading company in the field (back when they called all their consultants “Partners”) and then a true, founding partner in Amplius Partners, an excellent company which has had and continues to have great success since I left it in the capable hands of my co-founders. Both were training companies.
At the same time I have been a true consultant working on commercial effectiveness, procurement and outsourcing advisory services in three of the world’s largest consulting firms, rising to Senior Principal before co-founding Amplius.
Now, as I approach the fourth decade of my working life, I have chosen to combine the two aspects of my career.
I love training people to negotiate. I love showing them the difference that really understanding negotiation can make to their personal and professional lives. But I also love working with them and their employers as a consultant to make sure that they can achieve all the potential that their training has revealed to them. So, I started my own little company to combine those two aspects of my work.
I don’t employ trainers, so I don’t have to keep them efficiently employed to maximise my return on the salary I pay them.
I have lived and continue to live my material. There is not a question a client can ask me that I fear, because I have the confidence to admit when I don’t know the answer and the consultative skills to work with my clients to find it.
I don’t have shareholders, creditors or backers seeking return on investment, which means I have no incentive to cram as many billable days as possible into every working week.
All of this means I can be selective and flexible in the ways I work with clients and yet it was only this week, when a new client asked me if I could possibly break a workshop into four consecutive Tuesdays over a month and deliver it in their (very high quality) training rooms, that I stopped and asked myself “Why not?”.
I explained the pros and cons to my client and we decided together that the pros were important enough to them to make it the right choice. I will work extra hard to mitigate the cons and I am comfortable that I can. It is very liberating.
If you are working with anyone who refuses to be flexible about what they do, do you consider it to be a red flag? If so, why?