Here is an iron-clad improvement suggestion for your next internal training: Make the whole session feel more like a discussion than a lecture. Why? By doing so, you will make the concepts more sticky. Isn’t that the goal of training? To enact some sort of lasting change among the attendees? If it is, then take me up on the suggestion and see what happens. Here are the only tools you need: Good questions, active listening, and the ability to tie responses to core concepts. The “good questions” you can come up with ahead of time. (Note: Follow up questions will be on the fly.) The active listening part is bit more tricky. You have to hear the words and then listen for the bigger ideas behind the words. This is where I see many of us get tripped up. The reason we actively listen is so we can complete the third step which is tying their responses to the core concepts in the training. If you do these things, there will be a few side effects. First, you won’t be able to cover as much in any given session. Second, covering less material will help ensure the participants retain more. Third, covering less material will mean you get to do more training sessions later on. Yay! When training is done right, we learn just as much from each other as we do from the trainer. #leadership