Every leader has a responsibility to ensure that their team consistently performs in a way that predictably creates successful outcomes. That only happens if team members consistently do the core actions for the role to a standard of performance. Depending on the role and task, the standard of performance might be quite rigid. If you lead a team of ER nurses, everyone should approach triage the same way. If you lead a team of account executives, there is more opportunity for team members to personalize their actions.

If performance across your team isn't consistently meeting the baseline expectation after a reasonable ramp up period, you might have an enablement problem. Here are nine common enablement mistakes to look out for.

#1: You didn't show your team members why they should care.

Your team is busy. For many of them, training is one more thing to check off the list. Worse, they have all experience bad training before that did nothing but suck up time they could have put to a better use. In many cases, whether you are a team leader or an enablement professional, you're starting with a skeptical audience that is distracted thinking about the activity the believe they need to be doing instead of training.

One good approach to grab their attention is starting with a story. You can use a negative example of the bad consequences that happen when people don't apply what you are going to teach, or a positive example of how people applied the learning and achieved their personal goals.

#2: You didn't set expectations about what team members should be able to do after completing training.

Have you ever been lost in a class, wondering why the instructor was talking about a topic? Learners need clear expectations of what actions they will be able to complete at the end of the training. The specific knowledge and skills being trained should align to those actions and should be explained in such a way that a student understands why they are learning them and can judge for themselves whether they are learning.

#3: You didn't relate your material to the team's existing knowledge and experience.

No learner comes into your enablement as a blank slate. If you help them make the connections, their prior experiences are like connected puzzle pieces that will allow the material you are teaching to snap right into place. At the same time, some of what they already know may have given them misconceptions that will get in the way of learning. Identify those, and correct them. 

#4: Your presentation of the material was bad

Most of the criticisms of failed enablement that I have heard start with the assumption that the material or the delivery was bad. The variations of this kind of failure are well known: unclear slides, too much or too little material, bad pacing, lack of knowledge on the part of the instructor, and so on. In my experience, even where the quality of the material is lacking, it's symptomatic of the other kinds of failure, not the primary cause of failure.

#5: You didn't relate the learning to real world application

High school algebra students aren't the only learners who spend a good chunk of learning time thinking, "I am never going to use this." Make it clear to the team how they will use what you are teaching when they get back to their work tasks.

#6: You didn't have your team practice

Without practice, you get the illusion of understanding. Often, a learner's first hint that they weren't successful in learning is their first attempt to apply a newly learned skill. You don't want that to happen in the real world. Practice needs to be incorporated at regular intervals in the training, and it needs to resemble a real application of the skill, simplified for time's sake. If your enablement event doesn't include enough time to practice the skills you are teaching, you have to either increase the time or cut the material you are covering. You aren't saving any time or money by covering material that the team doesn't actually learn.

#7: You didn't have team members demonstrate learning and give them feedback

Even with practice, you don't know if your learners are getting it if you don't give them a chance to show you. That demonstration can be letting you observe their practice, answering questions, open discussion, etc. If the class is too large for you to give a significant amount of time for observation and feedback, have learners give each other feedback in pairs or small groups, then ask the entire group what they learned from practicing together. Make sure to praise those who show good understanding and offer gentle correction for those who demonstrate a misunderstanding.

#8: You didn't confirm that team members learned the expected knowledge and skills

There's no point in doing an enablement event if you can't tell if it accomplished the goals. You need to know at an individual level whether your learners are leaving the event with the knowledge and skills you expected, at least at a basic level. Further review and practice may be needed to master the material, but you need to know that they grasp the fundamentals well enough for self-directed practice to be effective. Quizzes are alright for demonstrating understanding of facts and concepts, but it is very difficult to construct a quiz that measures someone's ability to apply facts and concepts to workplace situations. Your best bet is an exercise, scored by a panel of folks who have demonstrated achievement in the skills you are training.

#9: Team leaders didn't verify that team members applied the new knowledge and skills to their work

Even if you made none of the mistakes above, everything still falls apart if team leaders don't help learners turn their enablement into changes in on the job behaviors. Leaders should debrief with learners soon after the return from training to validate that they got the key concepts and skills. They should make sure the team member has a plan for strengthening those skills. Leaders need to set clear expectations for the team member is going to apply the training. Then, they need to observe the team member in action and provide ongoing coaching to make sure the changes in behavior happen and become sticky.

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Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/diverse-colleagues-listening-to-senior-male-executive-at-meeting-in-office-boardroom-3861571/