Reinforce New Skills and Measure Results

When you engage Mandel as your communication skills-building partner, you will receive consistent and continuous positive feedback about Mandel from your participants.

Clients regularly tell us that Mandel receives higher scores from participants than any other training or coaching organization working within their company.

We do not feel, however, that our responsibilities end with the successful conclusion of a training or coaching engagement.

When it fits with your goals, we will work with you to help your organization inculcate, strengthen, and continually profit from the new skills that your participants developed during their experience with Mandel.

Our strategic goals for you are three-fold. You can count on us to help assure that: 

1. The new skills that your participants learn and practice with Mandel will pay off handsomely for them and for your organization year after year.
2. Those new skills will strengthen and grow in value through active use over time.
3. The use of the new skills will become a positive habit and a living competitive advantage for your organization, particularly when the stakes are high.

We recognize that organizations have varying degrees of appetite and bandwidth for formalized skills reinforcement activities.

When you are ready, however, we are fully prepared to help you gain the highest possible long-term return from your investment with Mandel.

Working together, we can help you make our work pay off for your organization in uncommonly powerful ways. Here are just a few of the methods available:

Before the skills-building experience–

We can help find the best ways – tailored specifically to your culture and norms – to set expectations with your participants for performance-based skill use back on the job and to establish practical methods for tracking results.

Often this means helping the participants' managers play an active role in setting skill use expectations with participants.

In organizations most committed to fast results back on the job, managers often hold skill-specific performance improvement discussions with the participants before the skill development work with Mandel begins.

Executives, too, can play a powerful role by: (1) communicating and demonstrating their personal interest in the participants' skills-building work and by (2) emphasizing their personal expectations for on-the-job results from the participants' use of new skills.

Such expressions of management and executive-level interest and commitment are not just one-time or two-time events. Rather, they are sustained and demonstrated at appropriate impromptu moments and scheduled occasions over time.

Mandel’s work also begins by setting skill-use and performance improvement expectations with participants before the skills-building experience. This is part of our efforts to tailor our work to the participants' real-world communication challenges, previous training, business objectives, organizational culture, and management expectations.

Our written and conversational interviews with participants before their work with Mandel can be highly focused on setting expectations with them for the practical, immediate application of new skills back on the job.

During the Mandel skills-building experience itself–

Because we tailor our content and processes to fit their world, your participants see immediately how the new skills apply to their daily work and will quickly recognize how much practical value is to be gained.

Practice, practice, and more practice. Participants practice their newly acquired skills extensively during their fast-paced time with Mandel. There is no passive learning here.

Our learn-by-doing process gets rapid results by coupling numerous, practical participant practices with immediate individualized, in-the-moment coaching and feedback from expert Mandel trainers/coaches.

Your participants' progress is further accelerated by having them watch frequent video-recorded playbacks of their practices to see how their skill levels are growing and where more attention is needed.

When participants complete their work with Mandel, they are ready to use their new skills on the job. Practice is over. The real game begins, and they are ready.

Mandel trainers and coaches also encourage participants to contact us informally after their skills-development experience to get telephone and email coaching when needed with on-the-job skill application issues.

After the formal skill-building experience is completed–

To achieve maximum return on investment, a skills-development process needs to continue as an integral part of the participants' everyday work.

That means being held accountable by management for using the new skills immediately and getting improved results through that use.

Accountability becomes an undeniable and inescapable reality when a portion of the work performance discussions (formal and informal) held between the participants and their managers is regularly devoted to a skill-development progress review.

The focus is on reviewing the participant's use of his or her new skills and the business results that are being gained from the use of those new skills.

These discussions usually include identification of results, performance improvement coaching, positive reinforcement, constructive feedback, and a plan for next steps. That plan sets out clear expectations and steps for continued skill usage, skill growth, and heightened business results.

Information and data on skills usage and results – both quantitative and qualitative – are highly useful for keeping attention and energy focused on the process of increased skill use over time. Collectively and individually, it helps identify what’s working well and what needs more attention.

Of vital importance, the attention paid by all stakeholders to reinforcing the use of the new skills needs to be sustained over time.

As we all know from life experience, it takes strong commitment and on-going attention to replace grooved habits (no matter how unproductive they have become) with better approaches (no matter how promising).

That's true in all human endeavors, and business is not excluded.

Fortunately, ongoing encouragement, positive recognition, and constructive feedback given to participants by their managers and executives are “free” for all practical purposes. The issue is making these skill reinforcements a priority.

Although free, experience shows that such management and senior-level reinforcements are worth their weight in gold.

They can have an exponential impact on the level of new skills that will be acquired by participants, used to advance the business, and turned into corporate and personal assets.

Mandel also can help with reinforcement by providing advanced skill development training and personalized coaching to broaden the use of new skills and elevate skill levels even further.

Also available from Mandel are on-the-job skill application tools and job aids.

One of the most advanced is Mandel's on-the-desktop software platform, the vBlueprint^®.

The vBlueprint^® helps participants become efficient, listener-centric content and message creators, who are better able to win in high-stakes presentations and crucial conversations. This software tool also promotes the easy sharing of successful content and messaging with others who need it across the organization. (For a client's sales force, the vBlueprint^® can become an integrated part of its Customer Relationship Management system.)

Mandel, as needed, works with managers to help them say and do the most productive and efficient things to keep the participants' new skills growing and returning increasing value.

We are delighted that our skills "stick," and we want to strengthen that result for our clients in every way possible.

If maximizing skill-development ROI is the goal, when can the organization's stakeholders safely abandon reinforcement activities and take newly acquired skills for granted?

Not until the skills are being demonstrated at nearly every significant opportunity to use them, have become habits requiring little special attention, and are creating business results that meet or exceed expectations.

Please call on Mandel when you want a great training and coaching experience that will get rave reviews in the moment and have immediate practical application.

Also call on Mandel when you want to deploy a new level of communication professionalism and effectiveness within your organization and make it pay off – inside and outside of your organization – for years to come.

It would be our pleasure to work with you throughout the entire process.