Train Your Team For Success

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

How to Build Teaching Material to Scale Your Company the Right Way

I wish I had known Andrew Barry back in 2018. He would have saved me a lot of pain … and money.

Instead, I had to learn the hard way what happens when a fast-growing company fails to properly train their team.

WeContent was finally picking up steam. After months of cold outreach, I had just closed our best month ever—literally double the revenue from the month prior. But that also meant we had twice as many blog posts to write. I quickly got to work contracting three new writers and a freelance editor to meet the demand. The folks I found had good resumes and strong portfolios. I assigned them to my existing accounts so I could focus on our new, bigger clients.

Companies hired WeContent to teach complex tech topics through blog posts and white papers. The irony is that when I hired my new teammates, I failed to teach them the process that had made us successful. Instead of taking the time to train my team, I simply assigned article topics and deadlines for the first drafts.

The writers submitted their work promptly, but I was too busy for a proper review. After a quick scan of each piece, I sent the first batch of articles over to my longest-standing client. About a day later, I got this email from the CEO:

Ben -

First, I’ll say the first 10 or so articles are absolutely amazing and have been really good for us, have gotten a lot of great feedback. You knocked it out of the park.

That said, wanted to drop you a line as I would want someone to tell me. The quality has dropped off significantly.

Totally understand this might be a part of the leveling up process but I’ll just say the last few articles we’ve gotten back have been pretty rough. I think Laura can give some more detailed feedback as well but what I’m seeing is:

• I’ve spent more time editing these last 3 or 4 articles than all other articles combined, that’s not taking into account Laura’s time.

• The lack of understanding of our product, platform and general company is frustrating

• Our voice from the first several articles is completely gone. Zero conversational tone. These feel worse than reading a research paper.

Let me know how we can improve on our side to get you what you need.

(Emphasis mine)

By the time I got that email, it was too late. I had commissioned about 30 blog posts for that month, and all of them were coming back with the same issues in quality, research, and voice. I had no choice but to pay the contractors (it wasn’t their fault), let them go (I couldn’t afford to pay them again), and rewrite all the articles myself. It took me three months to catch up, during which I received no pay and lost half of my new clients.

That takes us back to Andrew Barry. Had I known him in 2018, I would have learned the critical lesson of training my team for success.

Barry is an accountant by schooling but a teacher by passion. After working in corporate training for a decade, he started a learning development and consulting group called Curious Lion. Barry has worked with organizations ranging from Pinterest to KPMG to the NBA.

Curious Lion does more than build online training programs—they create learning cultures within companies. When education becomes a habit, you’re able to grow your business without the false starts like we had at WeContent.

Much of your job as a founder is to teach and train. You have to teach potential customers about your unique approach and solution (See Chapter 3: Sell With Storytelling). You also need to train employees, contractors, and virtual assistants to run the ship while you continue steering. Fail at one of these jobs and you’ll run out of fuel. Fail at the other, and you’ll blow up the engine.

But teaching is more than just the transfer of information. Facts and formulas are useless without knowing why they’re important, where they fit into the big picture, and how to use them.

Almost all of your training material will be in written form (even training videos start out as scripts.) So what does good training content look like?

To set your team up for success, let’s look at Andrew Barry’s 5-Step Framework for writing training material:

1. Building blocks

2. Learning outcomes

3. Delivery format

4. Storyboard

5. Reinforcement

1. Building Blocks

Before you write a single step of your training program, let’s go over the fundamentals. We’ll call these Building Blocks because they set the foundation for your program. Your building blocks include resources, principles, and your employees’ levels of prior knowledge.

Resources

Your resources are the content, tools, and experts at your disposal.

There’s a good chance you’re not starting your training program from scratch. Look at your existing content to see what you can repurpose: your past training courses, customer knowledge base, case studies, templates, and frameworks.

Your tools can be as high-tech or low-tech as you want, ranging from Word docs to slide decks to interactive training software. However, as we’ll discuss more below, multimedia content is more effective than written content alone.

When it comes to experts, you’ll likely find those by staring in the mirror. If you’re still in startup phase, you and your co-founders are probably the experts. If you’re not an expert in the training you’re conducting, talk with your advisors or hire a consultant. Training your team well is worth every penny.

Principles

“Learners will only remember a handful of things,” said Barry, “so take the time to clarify the top three to five takeaways you want them to leave with.”

These three to five main takeaways are your principles. You can also think of them as buckets of knowledge you need your team to acquire. For example, when I finally identified the learning principles for WeContent’s freelance writers, they were:

1. Client’s brand voice

2. Conducting research

3. Creating outlines

4. WeContent’s writing style

These principles will eventually turn into chapters or modules in your training program.

Prior Knowledge

Last, but not least, you need to figure out what your trainees know and don’t know about your business. In education parlance, this is called “levels of prior knowledge.”

Hopefully you’ve hired a competent team who knows their jobs and industry well. But don’t take for granted all the nuances of your particular business. This was the trap I fell into when building WeContent’s writing team: my writers knew how to write, but they didn’t know how to write for WeContent’s clients in WeContent’s style.

So before building your training program, make a list of everything your team should already know before getting started. Then make a list of things they don’t know. This will become the outline for the next section: Key Learning Outcomes.

When in doubt, err on the side of caution and recover the basics, which aren’t always as basic as you expect.

2. Key Learning Outcomes

With your building blocks in place, it’s time to start creating new material. But don’t just dive into the first module. Before you start writing, you need to identify your key learning outcomes.

Key learning outcomes, or KLOs, are what you want your audience to be able to do differently after completing each section.

Each section of your training program should focus on a single learning outcome. Learning outcomes can range from remembering factual information (i.e., definitions) to creating new solutions to complex problems. Your KLOs depend on your team’s level of prior knowledge. Less-experienced trainees should start with learning factual information, while veterans can jump straight into more challenging tasks.

For a great example of well-defined KLOs, check out The HubSpot Academy, a free online training portal for marketers, salespeople, and customer success professionals. For example, their course on website optimization is split into five lessons. The first video is simply titled, “The Importance of Website Performance.” The learning outcome for this video is crystal clear: after watching the video, the viewer should understand the importance of website performance for their company.

Creating KLOs does not need to be complicated. Barry’s team uses the tried-and-true SMART framework to develop KLOs for their clients:

• Specific—What will your trainee be able to do differently after this lesson?

• Measurable—How will you know your KLO has been achieved? For example, HubSpot Academy uses quizzes after each lesson.

• Attainable—Can your audience realistically achieve the KLO given their level of prior knowledge?

• Relevant—Will the KLO have a positive impact on your audience’s work or life?

• Time-bound—How long should it take to achieve the KLO?

At the end of each section, your audience should be able to do one thing differently than before. Get clear on what you want that one thing to be.

3. Delivery Format

I was never very good or interested in science. But in the seventh grade I learned a lesson I’ll never forget:

The Scientific Classifications of Living Things:

• Kingdom

• Phylum

• Class

• Order

• Family

• Genus

• Species

I still remember this completely useless list some twenty-plus years after learning it. Why? Because my science teacher, Mrs. F., had us recite the list in a dozen different silly voices. First we said it like a mouse. Then like a lion. Then we said it like we were sipping tea with the Queen of England. Then we sang it like rockstars. With each silly voice, the list was further lodged into my brain. It will stick with me forever.

You probably had similar experiences in school with unique learning methods. It goes to show that how you teach something is just as important as what you teach.

Effective training programs combine the right material with the right delivery format. Choosing the right format goes back to your building blocks: resources, tools, and experts at your disposal. Will your training be primarily written or video-based? Will lessons be self-paced and online, or live and in-person? Will you prioritize group training or individual learning?

Generally speaking, the more complex the learning material, the more hands-on the training should be. Trainees should have access to experts who can answer nuanced questions and a cohort of peers with whom to collaborate on work. If your trainees are still learning the basics, you can use self-paced, online training. This is HubSpot Academy’s approach.

The best training programs use a variety of delivery formats to appeal to every type of learner. This is called a “blended” approach—incorporating visual, audio, written, hands-on, and collaborative learning styles into one lesson. Even the most basic training materials can be improved with multimedia content.

The tone of your training is also important. Think back to my science teacher’s unique approach—it wasn’t just the delivery format that made it so effective (call and response), but the fun and silly tone.

Do you want your training material to feel formal or informal? Collaborative or instructional? Authoritative or explanatory? Your tone should fit your culture and seriousness of the lesson. Reciting lessons in silly voices probably won’t work in a room full of investment bankers (but it might in a marketing agency).

Delivery is everything in teaching. Choose wisely.

4. Storyboarding

With your building blocks, learning outcomes, and delivery format in place, it’s now time to build the actual lesson. Barry calls this process “storyboarding.”

“We believe that the best educators are storytellers because they inspire learning with imagination, teaching us to visualize and think about things instead of simply presenting us with information,” said Barry.

Craft your lesson like you’re telling a story. Curious Lion recommends a narrative framework that looks like this:

• Hook—Capture attention (Again, see Sell with Storytelling).

• Signpost—Alert to what’s coming and why the person should care.

• Sensitize—Be consistent in your choice of music, color, and images to create a receptive mindset.

• Elucidate—Explain the more complex topics with definitions and examples.

• Reinforce—Repeat key points early and often.

• Conclude—Present dramatic climax and summarize key points.

Start writing your lesson by using a bulleted outline. Fill in each of these steps with the written, visual, and interactive material you plan to use. If you’re creating visual learning material, Barry recommends using a storyboarding template. Search online for “storyboarding template” for a wide variety of options.

You won’t get your storyboarding right on the first try. After creating the first draft, do a dry run of the lesson with a colleague. When you first present the lesson to trainees, note the questions they ask so you can improve your material for next time.

5. Reinforcement

The last step of any good learning program is reinforcement. You’ve worked hard to teach your audience something new; don’t waste that effort by failing to follow up.

“[Reinforcement] is becoming increasingly important in a world in which remote work is the new normal for most companies,” said Barry.

As a trainer, give your audience a chance to practice what they’ve just learned. Use case studies and role playing to reinforce new behaviors. If the lesson is more hands-on, such as fielding customer support phone calls, give trainees real-life reps and review with them afterward.

Your team also needs time to talk with you or the expert. Build in Q&A time, facilitated discussions, coaching and mentoring, and case studies where the expert and learners work through problems together. For additional help and support, encourage your audiences to give feedback to each other. Help them set up a “buddy system” for peer-to-peer learning.

My favorite form of reinforcement is—you guessed it—writing. Have your trainees write an essay, or even a series of essays, teaching someone else the lessons they just learned and how to apply them to their work. Writing forces you to understand the material on a deeper level than conversation alone does. This exercise also creates a paper trail for your trainees to refer back to.

Learning from My Failure, So You Don’t Have To

In the aftermath of WeContent’s blog post debacle, I took a hard look at the way I ran my business. It was clear I had set my team up for failure. Instead of training them on my editorial standards, I threw them into the ocean without a raft. The curse of knowledge bit me hard, and it almost cost me my business.

So when I hired a new freelance writer six months later, I made sure they’d be ready. I wrote a detailed creative brief for each article to serve as their training material. Coincidentally, this document included all the same steps as Curious Lion’s training development approach:

• Building blocks—My client’s mission, brand positioning, value proposition, and product descriptions; word count requirement; and links to relevant prior research and blog posts

• Learning outcomes—Blog post objective and target audience description

• Delivery format—Tone and style guide

• Storyboard—Blog post outline

• Reinforcement—Blog post call-to-action

Most importantly, I spent hours giving detailed feedback to the writer, especially on his first few articles. Because sharing information is not enough. True learning comes from trial and error. Which is probably why, even had I known Andrew Barry in 2018, I still might not have heeded his advice on training my team. That was a lesson I had to learn the hard way, but you don’t.

Great founders teach and train.

Free Tool #3 BONUS: How to Create a Perfect Digital Training [Ebook]

Training is one of your most vital jobs as a founder. Don’t leave it up to chance. Go to curiouslionlearning.com/ebook to download a free ebook from Andrew Barry, How to Create a Perfect Digital Training.