The Wrong Training for Your Staff: 5 Additional Ways You Can Tell

“We have already eliminated lots of training providers, initially considered prior to consulting with you. Our last discussion has led to great outcomes, and we now want to hear more on how we can tell that a training might be the wrong one for our staff.”  Deline, the CFO of the HOPE Care Center articulated these words to Rodis, the consultant, who then responded, “I am glad to hear about your already positive outcomes. As you requested, let us use our time today to look into some additional ways you and your team could identify the wrong training for your clinicians.”

In the previous article entitled, The Wrong Training for Your Staff: 5 Ways You Can Tell, Rodis described five ways to help Deline and her team recognize the wrong training for their clinicians.  Below are five additional ways he discussed with them.

Limited critical thinking skills

The Navajo proverb, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,” also applies to training clinicians in the sense that some trainings are based on simply providing a fish, while others strive to support and empower the attendees in learning to fish for themselves.

In a previous article entitled, The Wrong Training for Your Staff: 5 Ways You Can Tell, I described the limitations of traditional, lecture-based training.  One additional limitation is failure to impart critical thinking skills to our clinicians.  Yes, critical thinking skills, as a skill, can be learned, and the process during training provides one best time and place to do so.  However, as a caveat, critical thinking is not just a mere technique, something that you do—it is a process.  It requires the right guidance, a trainer not removed, and one that allows time to process.  Critical thinking also requires a dialogic approach.  Understanding this helps us further appreciate why the absence of a dialogic approach (see the article cited above) is one sure way you can easily identify the wrong training for your staff.

Limited soft skills

Developing hard skills likely helped your clinicians earn their professional degree.  During that time, they learned and mastered lot of information.  However, the soft skills are what will help them be the best clinicians they can be, the best asset possible for agencies and for their colleagues.  Although soft skills can be harder to learn than the hard skills, the good news is that the right training provides an opportunity for your clinicians to catch up and learn or hone these skills, which can continuously be refined.  Regardless of the specific topic, a good training will always find a way to emphasize, reinforce, and help clinicians learn ways to master skills like engagement, empathy, active listening, and validation, among others.  This also means that a training that does not pay attention to soft skills is not in tune with the needs of your clinicians or your agency and is, therefore, not the right one for your staff.

Limited persuasiveness

Persuasion denotes clear thinking and speaking, which in turn speaks to the quality of training.  A persuasive trainer will be able to rally your clinicians and help them be open to the available knowledge and content of the training that is being discussed.  This will also help them commit to change and implement what they are learning.  You accomplish persuasion during training through the curriculum, the teaching methods used, the training room and environment, and the way the material is presented.  Persuasion in training is vital.  It motivates your clinicians towards taking action, which is essential.  This also means that limited persuasiveness is one additional way you can tell that your staff may be receiving the wrong training.

Absence of the why

Creating a sense of purpose has been found to be one of the most powerful training tools.  It helps grab the attention of you clinicians and helps them engage, which will then make practice and implementation easier to do.  It also helps foster inspiration in clinicians.  And you accomplish all this by emphasizing the why of training on any specific topic.  Providing training to your staff on what to do and how to do it without emphasizing the why will rarely change behavior or lead to the desired outcomes, and a training in which the why is absent is, therefore, the wrong training for your staff.

Limited engagement

What is Mary trying to convey at this time?  How much does this cohere with your clinical experience or not?  These types of questions opened to the participants of a group training help generate engagement.  Are there different ways to engage, building on one clinician’s feedback to move on to the next point, in a coordinated, organized and systematized way.  Failure to do so significantly weakens both the value and the outcomes of any training.

Engagement is at the core of any method involving teaching.  This helps with critical thinking and with persuasiveness, and one way to do so is to emphasize the why.  Limited engagement is likely to lead to inattention, and the ramifications of this are rather negative.

“We have already eliminated lots of training providers, initially considered prior to consulting with you. Our last discussion has led to great outcomes, and we now want to hear how we can tell that a training might be wrong one for our staff.” Deline, the CFO of the HOPE Care Center articulated these words to Rodis, the consultant, who then responded, “I am glad to hear about your already positive outcomes. As you requested, let us use our time today and look into some additional ways you and your team could identify the wrong training for your clinicians.”

I already mentioned a previous article on this topic that outlines five ways you can identify the wrong training for your staff:

1. Lecture-based;

2. Absence of a dialogic approach;

3. Limited time to process;

4. Removed trainer; and

5. Failure to empower.

This current article outlines five additional ways you can tell the wrong training for your staff:

1. Limited critical thinking skills;

2. Limited soft skills;

3. Limited persuasiveness;

4. Absence of the why; and

5. Limited engagement.

Altogether, ten ways you can tell that your clinicians have been receiving the wrong training.  Which of these ten ways have been present in your different trainings for your staff?

Contact us and let us know how we can help.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to next time.

References:

1. Chang, M. J., Chang, Y.-J., Kuo, S.-H., Yang, Y.-H., & Chou, F.-H. (2011). Relationships between critical thinking ability and nursing competence in clinical nurses. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 20, 3224–3232. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2702.2010.03593.x

2. Krupat, E., Sprague, J. M., Wolpaw, D., Haidet, P., Hatem, D., & O’Brien, B. (2011). Thinking critically about critical think- ing: Ability, disposition, or both? Medical Education, 45, 625–635. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2010.03910.x

3. Alfaro-LeFevre, R. (2013). Critical thinking and clinical judg- ment: A practical approach to outcome-focused thinking (5th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Elsevier.

4. Alfaro-LeFevre, R. (2014). Critical thinking indicators (CTIs): 2014 evidence-based version. Retrieved from http:// www.alfaroteachsmart.com/2014CTIrichJan.pdf

5. Asselin, M. E. (2011). Using reflection strategies to link course knowledge to clinical practice: The RN-to-BSN student experience. Journal of Nursing Education, 50, 125–132. doi:10.3928/01484834-20101230-08