Thanks to Luis Suarez at E L S U A for reminding me of an interesting story teller experience.
As the VP of HR for a company, the training department was under my domain....and we had created a nice 2 to 2 1/2 day orientation for our sales staff...company info, product info, and even some sales training. It was a nice program. But, it always seem to take 5 days to deliver the training. For brief period, we chalked it up to overestimating the learning capacity of our new hires....and it was, after all, classroom training as opposed to a self-paced eLearning module.
We had, at the time, the technology for me to listen in to the training, without having to attend or disrupt the class. So caught up on my work, I decided to spend a day listening to what the problem was with our training.
Our problem was a former sales rep (now our trainer) who would stop every item or two on the checklist to tell a personal (related) anecdote that he had experienced as a sale rep with the company...and occasionally contrasting it to experiences he had elsewhere. Mystery solved! I listened for a full day, and determined that the training was easily no more than 2 days in length, but the stories had more than doubled the length of the orientation.
Before completely blowing my top at our trainer, I decided to investigate. So I asked the sales reps themselves. We primarily hired entry-level sales reps, but occasionally hired seasoned veterans. While it was true, the veterans were a bit bored by the stories, the newer sales reps loved the trainer and had praises for how it prepared them for the real thing of selling.
As I recall, these stories were exaggerated...in some cases, they made me cringe, but they got the sales reps to laugh, lighten up, and ask serious questions about what to expect...all of which helped them know what to expect when they got on the telephone to sell.
So one day, our General Manager asked about the training program program and why it took so long to get new sale staff through the orientation, and I just told him that it was no orientation, it was full fledged training....let it go.
Great post, Tom ! I thoroughly enjoyed it from the perspective that it clearly shows how powerful those stories could well be to demonstrate something and let is sink with the audience. Even though some of them may have found it a bit too boring they would be stories they would not easily forget and therefore when confronted with a similar situation they would be better prepared to react. At least, they would know what others have done and how they managed.
And I think that is the very power of storytelling, that you can make it as compelling as you wish to get your message across and the more excited and involved you may be with the story the more successful the sharing of knowledge would be. Thanks a lot for reminding us about that ! Good stuff !
Posted by: Luis Suarez | February 02, 2006 at 06:41 AM