Seminar

"And seeing the multitudes, he went up unto a mountain: and when he was seated, his disciples came unto him. And he opened his mouth, and trained them, saying . . . " (Matthew 5, 1-2.)

Pop quiz. What’s wrong with the above quote from the Gospel of Matthew--aka, The Sermon on the Mount?

Time’s up. Got it, yet?

Answer. Regardless of which version of The New Testament you refer to, you are not going to find that Jesus “trained” the multitudes. He taught them.

Teaching vs Training. Is there a difference? If so, what is it?

This is something I know a little bit about because (a), I went to school for 16 years (teaching/learning). And (b), I worked in the management and professional development field for decades (training/development).

In a nutshell, teaching is the begetter of learning. Training is the begetter of development. So teaching & learning is one side of the coin. On the other side you have training & development.

So let me be clear.

Teaching is the sharing of knowledge—i.e., helping people to learn something--while training is the development of skills; in other words, how to actually do something. I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but basically that’s the difference. There is a difference between having knowledge and having skills.

You can learn art history, for example, by reading books and going to lectures at your local museum. You can also even “learn” how to swim, play the guitar, or fly an airplane by attending classes, reading books, and watching YouTube videos.

But who do you want to be the pilot on your next flight? The dude who attended a three-day seminar on “How to Fly,” or the pilot who’s spent thousands of hours training in the cockpit and in flight simulators?

Here’s today’s second question. What single industry has captured the monopoly on the use of oversized manuals and death by PowerPoint?

If you guessed the learning/teaching-training/development industry you are correct. Professional and management development training in the U.S is big business.

I spent more than 20 years in that industry. Seminars, workshops, webcasts, online training. I’ve taught classes, developed programs, hired and trained instructors, evaluated training and hosted webcasts with celebrity guests. And of course, I’ve attended a lot of training myself. So now that I’m no longer in that business I have a confession to make. It’s the dirty little secret of the training industry.

Most of it is nonsense.

Well, perhaps “most” is putting it a little too strongly. But I’m comfortable saying 50 percent. As the famous department store magnate, John Wanamaker, once said about his advertising, “I know that half the money I’m spending on it is wasted--I just don’t know which half.”

Regarding the training industry, I know which half. It’s the half that’s called “soft skills” training. Soft skills are things like teamwork, communications, problem solving, leadership, and interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills? Didn’t we pick those up in kindergarten?

When I joined the Dale Carnegie organization in 1987 as a newly-minted salesperson I didn’t realize I was getting into the training industry. I thought I was just helping folks win friends and influence people--one sale at a time. After a few weeks on the job I was in a staff meeting in which our manager started talking about our competition.

Wait a minute! “What competition are you talking about,” I asked? After all, there was only one Dale Carnegie, right? And even he had been dead since 1955. And that’s when my eyes were opened.

According to the Association for Talent Development, 65 billion dollars are spent every year training American workers. There are dozens of “major” training companies, hundreds of boutique training outfits, and literally thousands of independent trainers out there. And this doesn’t even include the competition for adult training that is offered by community colleges and universities.

I’ve often wondered if Jesus of Nazareth or Moses came back to preach again today would anyone pay any attention to them? I can just picture them trying to hold the attention of a modern day seminar audience while they do “research” on their laptops, and have their heads in their iAsses as they talk and text to their friends.

With that in mind, here are a few helpful hints for Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Confucius and all the other great teachers from ancient history who may be contemplating a resurrected career as a modern day trainer.

The Venue. Forget about making that grand entrance from the clouds or by coming down the side of a mountain like Charlton Heston. That works well for a Broadway show, but chances are that you are going to be teaching in one of those resort hotel meeting rooms in Scottsdale or Santa Fe with cute names like Cactus Flower and Roadkill. The main thing you want to remember is that your room needs to be freezing cold. That will ensure your audience stays awake.

Pricing. You need to charge “tuition” because those ballrooms don’t come cheap. A good rule of thumb is to charge about $1000 per person per day. So if you are going to take three days to get through all eight Beatitudes or all ten of the commandments, you need to be charging about $3000 for the experience. Okay, maybe $2700 if you’re feeling beneficent. Just make sure it’s a figure divisible by three. Most people will bulk at that price, but not to worry, they will find a way to get their company to pay for it. Unlike as recently as a hundred years ago, in the 21st Century no one has any motivation to improve themselves on their own dime. So don’t be meek when it comes to charging.

Promotion and Registration. Once you’ve settled on a venue and you know what you’re going to charge, it’s time to actually hype your sermon and get people signed up for it. You want to appeal to as large a congregation as possible. The trick here is to be as vague as you can about what your flock is actually going to learn from you.

The best way to do that is to hire an army of telemarketers who have never heard you preach. When you think about it, this is really a no-brainer. Since they really don’t know anything about your sermon, they are free to say anything they think the prospect wants to hear.

Food and Beverages. Americans, especially, can’t attend any kind of public gathering without having something to stuff into their faces. You’ll find this most noticeable at ball games, rock concerts, and movie theatres. But seminars are no different. So make sure you serve at least a continental breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack. And forget about that fishes and the loaves thing. That doesn’t cut it anymore—unless the fish is lox and loaves are bagels.

Learning Objectives. Hopefully your audience will be coming to hear you in order to actually learn something. But don’t count on it. Fully twenty-five percent of your attendees won’t have a clue as to why they are at your seminar. That’s because their bosses sent them to get fixed. These people fall into two categories. First there are those who need remedial training for something they should have picked up in high school—like how to write a sentence with a subject and a verb. Or the difference between “your,” “you’re,” and “ur.” Then there are those in need of a personality transplant—the difficult people. Watch out for these—we call them prisoners, because for sure they don’t want to be in your class.

Most people in your seminar, however, will be easy to please. They will be happy to walk away with just one or two new points or ideas that they can talk about at their next performance review. Which of course is mind-boggling, considering the time and money invested. But again, we are not talking about people with long attention spans these days.

So give them a road map they can follow along with. These are known today as Learning Objectives. And while it may be true that they will only get one or two things out of your seminar, you can’t just have one or two learning objectives. No way! The more learning objectives, the better. Be sure to provide at least twenty of them per day—or a minimum of five per module. (We’ll talk about modules soon.) That way, when the participant gets back to her office and a week later can’t remember a thing that she learned, she can open up her manual, refer to the Learning Objectives, and say, “Oh yes, I learned how to give a compliment,” or whatever.

Manuals. Which leads us now to what your participants are going to actually walk away with. These days most people know how to read. So writing those ten learning objectives down on a stone tablet and just reading them aloud is not going to cut it anymore, Moses. Remember, they are paying big bucks to attend your seminar. You must give them STUFF! And nothing says stuff better than a heavy manual with lots of tabs in it that they can show to everyone back at the office.

These tabs in your manual, by the way, will represent “modules,” which I mentioned earlier. Moses, you had the right idea here. So for example, for your two-day seminar on “How to Live a God-Fearing Life,” you can break it down into five Thou Shall Nots per day.

PowerPoint. We are almost ready to actually run the seminar, but first there is one more thing that needs to be prepared. That would be your slide presentation. Why, you ask, do you need slides? That’s a fair question. The reason is that today we have something called adult learning theory. You see, people are living longer than they did a few millennium ago, and the older you get the harder it is for you to learn anything new. Therefore you have to create multiple channels of “learning transfer.”

First channel, of course, is the spoken word. You guys got that one down, no problem. But because adults today are so stupid we also have to give them the information in writing (second channel). Now that you know about manuals, you got that one as well. But wait, there’s more!

Now take everything you plan to say and write and also make a slide presentation out of it. That will give your audience three ways to take in your wisdom. And since hardly anyone will actually read your PowerPoint anyway, you can put at least 1000 words on each slide. Just make sure that your slides follow in the same order and say exactly the same thing as what’s in your manual. Some people get very confused and irritated if the slides don’t reflect verbatim what is in the manual.

Teaching Your Seminar on the Mount. Now that you’ve got your seminar and it’s venue organized, it’s time to actually teach it.

The first thing you need to do is get to your meeting room about four hours before your seminar is to start. The reason for this is that chances are your room is not going to be set up the way you requested. This gives you plenty of time to track down the hotel’s meeting services guy for more chairs, call Engineering to fix the air-conditioning, and get ahold of Banquet Services to put those hard sticky Danish rolls in the back of the room. Of course this means that you will have to skip breakfast yourself—but hey, you will still be fueled from last night’s huge steak and lobster dinner you’ll bill your client for when this gig is finally over.

Your class members will start arriving only about five minutes before show time. Now is no longer the time to be fiddling with your laptop and PowerPoint. You got to meet and greet! Put on your best trainer’s smile and go around the room making everyone feel comfortable.

Once everyone is seated and introductions have been made, it is time to conduct a warm-up exercise—also known as an ice-breaker. The trick here is to get everyone involved doing something silly and game-like. It should be something embarrassing to do, so that the class learns quickly that things can’t get any worse than this. Rock, Paper, Scissors is a good warm-up. Or have everyone run around the room shaking as many hands as possible and smelling each other’s armpits.

Now it is time to actually teach your seminar. There are basically two ways to approach this. First, if you are a subject matter expert (SME), you can strut your stuff and show everyone how smart you are by lecturing and answering a few questions. This is called the Sage on the Stage technique.

But if you are new to your subject—or even if you just happen to forget what you were supposed to say—you can always turn things around. You do this by simply asking your class what they think the answer is. How cool is that? Let the class teach YOU! And as you probably suspect by now, there is a term for this technique as well. It’s called the Socratic Method. You heard what happened to Socrates, right?

Regardless of which approach you use, you need to keep things moving. These days people can’t sit still for more than fifteen minutes at a time. So you need to break things up by throwing in lots of activities and exercises. This is another way to take the burden off of you. And trust me, the class will eat it up. Here are a couple of sure-fire exercises:

Have lots of those little sticky note pads on each table. These are great. You can ask your class to write stuff down on them—give them five minutes. Then have everyone get up and put their stickies on flip charts. Better yet, once all the stickies are hanging firmly on the flip charts have the class organize the stickies into categories! You can eat up about fifteen minutes with this exercise.
Not nearly as complicated as the sticky exercise is the “practice with a partner” exercise. So let's say you are teaching your class how to graciously accept a compliment. And let's say there are four things to remember when accepting that compliment. People can’t just walk around all day with four points written on the palm of their hand hoping someone will compliment them. So the four points need to get burned into their brains’ memory. You do this by practicing. So have everyone stand up, face a partner, and practice saying those four points to each other. You can eat up about ten minutes every time you do this exercise.
If all else fails, you can always direct your class to “Talk amongst yourselves.” This is only good for about five minutes. But it is perfect if you have to step out of the room to take a phone call or go shake the dew off your fig leaf.

Ending Your Seminar. Congratulations! The long day is over, you’re tired and ready to go back to your hotel room and take a short lie-down before going out again for surf and turf. But there is one more thing you still have to do. You need to find out how well you did. You need to get some feedback.

I know what you’re thinking—isn’t feedback that awful screeching sound you get when your microphone is not properly adjusted? You are correct, but the analogy still works. You need to get some written final evaluations as to how well the class members liked your seminar. But what you don’t want are those screeching evaluations—the kinds that suggest you performed less than perfectly.

So the trick is to design the evaluations so that you only get good reviews. The final evaluation form can have anywhere from five to 500 questions, depending on how much time is allotted at the end of the seminar for people to complete them. The more questions, the more creative you have to be in order to make sure each question generates a positive response. Usually you will ask people to answer each question on a scale of 1 to 4—i.e., from poor to excellent. So design the questions something like this:

Your Overall Experience

This seminar was good.
This seminar was very good.
This seminar was excellent.
This was the best seminar I’ve ever taken in my entire life.

Got it? Here’s another example that more specifically relates to you:

My Instructor Was . . .

Good.
Excellent.
Awesome.
God.