How do you design a training program for employees that actually has people leaning in, engaging, participating, and getting something out of it, as opposed to passively flowing through a mandatory training? In this post, I’m going to use the case example of how Amazon trains hundreds of thousands of employees to get you your package in Prime time.
What Amazon Can Teach Us About Employee Training
How on earth has Amazon trained people to be able to get you a package in under two days, and if you’re in a city, sometimes an hour or three hours? Now, there are robots involved in that as well. But my brother, before taking over all the physical products, inventory, and shipping at We and Me, worked at Amazon. And they had a really beautiful three-step process that I want to walk you through. I think it serves as a kind of foundational inspiration for how training in general can be designed to move people as quickly as possible from learning to transfer, meaning from learning to “I’m actually enacting, doing something with this.”
The Three-Step Training Process
Step one: do and speak. The trainer is doing the task while speaking through every step of the task, while somebody else is watching.
Step two: just do. The trainer goes back and does the same task silently while the other person watches, purely focused on the actions being taken by the trainer.
Step three: just speak. The trainer talks through every step while the learner does it. The learner is doing all the work, hands-on. And then, after it’s done, the learner explains back to the trainer how they did it.
So: do and speak. Just do, where the trainer does it silently. And just speak, while the learner actually does the task.
Why Telling Is the Worst Way to Train
This method, in a beautiful way, practices what I refer to as The Contribution Method. The Contribution Method is the philosophy that telling someone, just speaking to somebody about how to do something, is one of the worst ways. It takes the most effort and the most prep, and it’s one of the least effective, but one of the most commonly used.
Go to any conference, summit, or symposium on Earth and walk into a breakout room, and I guarantee you there’s going to be a PowerPoint presentation, people sitting in rows while they listen to one or two people talk at the front, and no doing, action, or participation happening at all.
And we know from an immense amount of educational research that when we involve people in the learning, they learn a lot quicker. You know this. Can you imagine learning how to drive from a PowerPoint? It wouldn’t be effective. And so, if you’re in a leadership development class, you’re not going to learn how to communicate without communicating.
How to Redesign Training You Already Have
Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Cute example, cool, it’s interesting, but I have this really complex training. It’s two days’ worth of material. It’s all this content that I need to get into people’s heads.”
Here’s the way you’re going to do this, even with pre-existing content that you have to get across. Go through your content and highlight all the places where you’re inviting active participation or contribution. In most meetings, the page is going to have no highlights. Or there’s only one highlight at the very end, and that highlight is, “Okay, everybody, you just listened to a 45-minute lecture. Any questions?” One call to act, one invitation. This is not going to engage people.
So your job, your homework, is to go through and every once in a while create a highlight and write something next to it. If you just presented five slides, you’re pausing and saying, “I’m going to give you 10 seconds to think about what you just heard, condense it down into one sentence, and then turn to the person next to you and share that one sentence.” Now you’re forcing all this information to go through people’s heads, getting synthesized, condensed down into a sentence, and shared with somebody else.
That’s a practical example. There are hundreds more. Want to try techniques like this with your team? Download my free Field Guide to The Contribution Method right here.
Stop Watching Examples and Start Doing
If you want to just do it, and you want to stop just listening to examples, come to the Connectors Summit that I host this December. It is all designed with The Contribution Method. There will be no slides at the summit. You will pick up an immense amount of practical inspiration alongside being connected and paired with a whole bunch of people who are actively working to break down presentations and redesign the room for contribution, thereby creating a whole heap more impact in their own context.
I’m Chad Littlefield. If this is the first time we’re meeting, I happen to have written some books and created some tools that help make this really easy. You can find free access to a lot of that at weand.me/tools.
Want to go deeper? Register your interest for The Contribution Method this spring, a live masterclass where you’ll learn to design sessions people actually want to be in.
