For over 30 years, clients have been applying The Bob Pike Group's Participant-Centered instructional system to build their learning organizations, to strengthen retention and to enrich desired results. Now, The Bob Pike Group Institute is offering an advanced training professional credential to share its expertise and experience and establish a valuable professional benchmark within the training community.

When management finds that staff is not engaging in work behaviors desired by the organization, they often turn to training as the response for "fixing" the problem. But training frequently isn't the answer. Here are five situations that won't be resolved by training:

A seminar participant in our Bob Pike Group Boot Camp told me recently that a manager had asked her to do some training on time management. "I've got people showing up late for work, and I thought they could use some training in time management," he said. The absurdity of this statement was not lost on the other trainers in the room - we all agreed that all too often, managers look to training to "fix" all their performance problems, when training is not the right answer. This article is a preview in an occasional series of articles on coaching. From Bob Pike's Performance Solutions Cube, we teach that there are at least five other solutions to performance problems that should precede training. And one of those solutions is coaching. Here are ten tips for Coaching Excellence, taken from our Coaching for Success program.

After recently attending a two-day Boot Camp with trainer Becky Pluth, MaryClaire Rocheleau emailed her boss: Thank you! The class I attended this week was phenomenal. The content was not only appropriate to my current level of knowledge but provided me with at least 20 tangible ideas that I can put into immediate use for the PMPI Training. I continue to appreciate your allowing me to step out of my “paid role” to explore what I am finding to be my passion. I aspire to be like the trainer who facilitated this session Again, thank you! I am truly lucky to have such a supportive and encouraging boss and do want you to know how much I appreciate you. She then followed up with us to relate how the Boot Camp had been implemented—in some rather unexpected ways!

Bob Pike recently interviewed Ken Blanchard highlighting questions asked by those participating in the teleseminar as well as current projects Ken is involved in. Here are a few highlights from that interview.

When most people think of the word “COACH,” they immediately imagine someone on the sidelines screaming at their players to do a better job. That may be true in certain sports situations, but in business, a coach needs to have a completely different approach in order to help employees improve performance. Let’s have a look at the role of a manager/coach and how that integrates with employee development. Where does traditional training come in? How does training relate to coaching? And what are the differences between training, coaching and counseling?

Training must be a process rather than a stand alone event in order to create long term impact. The Bob Pike Group has taught this for years and it’s a philosophy shared by the Ken Blanchard Companies. At the 2008 BPG Training and Performance Solutions Conference, M.J. Coulson of the Ken Blanchard Companies will present a session on sustaining learning’s impact long after the training is over. “Our process ensures that we secure top management buy in, create strategic integration between training and your business issues, set the context and create relevance for the training to take hold, and spend considerable time on follow up and reinforcement in order to cement new behaviors and skills,” said a Blanchard spokesperson. “We believe that organizations must spend 10 times more energy on follow up than they do on the delivery of training. So we..."

If you are reading this in North America, chances are you’ve been buffeted by some unusually forceful weather in recent weeks and months. Early snows, flooding rains, overflowing rivers, and blizzard-blocked highways – extreme weather seems to have become the norm this winter. It seems too much at times. How much can we be expected to stand, after all? The answer to that question: As much as we are given. Bad weather, after all, is something that happens, something we have to expect. Not only are we unable to prevent it, often we can’t even get out of its way when we see it coming.

Repeated studies over the past 70 years have challenged the impact of training. When tragedy hits, training’s budget is one of the first to go! Yet, knowing that competitive advantage depends on human productivity, innovation and pursuit of excellence, there is a better way. In its 2003 State of the Industry Report, The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) revealed challenges for the performance improvement industry include controlling costs, evaluating training and understanding return on investment (ROI). The integrated model described here addresses this serious need and applies an inductively logical, visible, repeatable process to design training with the business need in mind. Over 85 percent of benchmark organizations surveyed by ASTD in its 2002 State of the Industry Report evaluate training with...

In ancient Greece, Odysseus entrusted his friend Mentor with the education of his son. Since that time, mentoring has become the art of sharing of ourselves and being open to the wisdom of others. As a trainer, it is often our charge to “impart knowledge” or new skills. But as trainers, if we are to be the guide on the side and not the sage on the stage, mentoring can play a key role in how we perceive ourselves. In the book, Mentoring: The Tao of Giving and Receiving Wisdom, Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch show us how the concept of mentoring is an essential tool in all our relationships. This is an interactive process based on the balanced give and take so that we can both teach and learn from one another. In the participant-centered classroom, this dynamic interaction is fostered and encouraged. In a lecture-based classroom, there is only one way communication. The teacher has little opportunity to learn from the participants.