Yes, I do deliver training programs myself unless I see there is a more qualified facilitator for the specific activity.

Yes, I develop eLearning activities whenever such a format is the best solution to your problem.

Yes. Clients often want me to work with their in-house trainers so that they can continue rolling out the program when I am not around. No problem, I will be happy to train them. We will have to include this in the project scope as it may take longer to complete this step. I am not hiding my content from you as many training companies do, and I do not copyright it. It is yours by definition. I build it for you, so you can copy it, roll it out, duplicate it, teach it to your people by your means, improve further and share it the way you want.

I charge per project, not per hour. Since each project has its unique scope, so is the price. It is also vital for a client to understand the monetary benefits of solving the problem to see if working on the solution with an outside consultant makes sense.

I am glad you asked this. Yes, we can. However, it might be more difficult for you to budget for it. To do that, we need first to evaluate what profit you expect to get from the achievement of your goal. Then we agree on a certain % of that profit number to become my compensation. It is de facto a profit sharing.

Yes, absolutely. It is even less complicated because the consequences of decision choices have fewer grey areas for people to understand and learn.

Conventional courses are instantly available from any training house willing to sell to you, and there are tons of them out there. They all want to deliver it quickly to be able to send you the invoice. But as I said many times on this site, there is almost a guarantee that your goal after the course will be as far as it was before the training. Performance consulting takes a longer route because it strives for the result for you, not for the training provider. Therefore, the most prolonged phase is the analysis and then the design, followed by the prototyping activities. It usually takes 1 to 1.5 months, depending on the availability and speed of your people involved in the approval process. Once those are approved, it goes much quicker and depending on the availability of your learners you can see the first results in a few weeks. So, I would tell from experience that the entire project, from the kick-off meeting to the first result, takes approximately 2 – 3 months. The solution that does not need training can take as little as three weeks. That was probably the shortest I have ever had. A client often sees the uncovered issues at the kick-off meeting and takes measures immediately after.

Remember How my projects usually start piece in the How I work with clients section? If not, go to the menu, click on it and scroll down. Look, if a client approaches me or I come across a client with a demand for performance consulting, it is always a problem they want me to solve. Putting their names on my website afterwards would mean I am advertising that their teams had some serious issues; otherwise, they would have solved them themselves, right? Nobody wants that to be shouted about, including you. Call me if you need a subtle reference, and I will see whom I can give you.

It is just me. I can use subcontractors for specific technical jobs or recommend a more qualified trainer to deliver a particular activity.

Usually, the fewer grey areas for people after making a decision, the easier it is to design the intervention to correct the behaviour. That said, hard skills, security and often compliance are the easiest, followed by commercial skills like selling and negotiations. The toughest are relationship, leadership and multicultural communication skills, as they include a lot of uncertainties and nuances of judgement with not-so-black-and-white outcomes of each decision made. Nevertheless, performance consulting is even more effective for addressing performance problems arising from those issues because it gives the learners many practice opportunities in a safe environment.

Remember the doctor’s story from the section What performance consulting is? Buying antibiotics is easier and quicker than taking proper tests. Still, I don’t recommend you take shortcuts with your health. Similar in business with your teams. Buying a training program without analysing the performance issues is an ignorant, potentially dangerous, costly way to solve the problem. And most importantly, it is unlikely to solve it. It is a guess, Vs an investigation. You decide which way you go.

Yes. We need to include that from the beginning in the project scope as it takes longer to implement this way and may influence certain decisions we take during the design phase. I always check if the client has LMS and wants this project to be a part of it. If you are just planning to include LMS into your company’s learning practices I can help you with that too, but I recommend you first check these links: https://www.wbtsystems.com/learning-hub/blogs/10-factors-selecting-an-lms https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/how-to-choose-an-lms

Yes, I can. However, I want you to be clear that it is impossible to solve any significant performance problem in 2 hours. Suppose you still want to use the gathering for that. In that case, we should plan suitable teaser activities to introduce the topic to future learners and get their interest in more formal interventions.

I understand you. Companies that seldom train people often use training as additional motivation for their employees. However, what if the training will not help to solve the problem that your people are currently struggling with and that you promised them to help with? With one hand, you are pushing them to achieve the goal, but with the other, you are sending them to training that is useless for achieving what you want. It looks like an excuse for not supporting them enough. It is similar to demanding high results but giving inadequate tools to do so. This does not help their motivation and your authority. Instead, think about how acclaimed the targeted training or activity could be if it focuses on the actual problem or skill people have to work on. You should provide your people with top-quality tools and ask for the best performance out of them. This would be genuinely motivational.

As odd as it sounds, I heard this once from a country director whom I feel much respect for. He wanted to say that he did not believe that training can change someone’s behaviour because there are so many information dump courses in the business world. And he rightfully doubted that his team would learn anything from that kind of program. Of course, his people were trainable. It all depends on the type of activities you take them through and how you organize them. You may want to check this scenario-based training simulation by Cathy Moore to see how it works even for some unusual learning tasks. Learning Zeko language.

As we progress from the goal writing to the barriers, it may become evident that the solution for your problem lies outside of the training area. It may be in the environment that people have to work in or motivation. Job aids, policies, software or physical location, should be looked at. Also, it could be that the knowledge does exist in your organization already, but some part of your team has no easy access to it. Many other hurdles may exist, but I assure you that performance consulting will uncover them all.

Prague, Czech Republic.

English, Russian and Czech. However, I do not limit my performance consulting by the languages I speak. You and your subject matter experts should speak the above languages, ideally, English, so that we can work together. The learners can speak any other language. We will need simply translate the instructions for them, e.g. an eLearning self-paced activities or job aids. The exceptions are only face-to-face delivery and webinars that I deliver only in the above languages.