By Renya Larson

Renya Larson

Renya is a specialist with PHI’s Training and Organizational Development team.

Strong communication and problem-solving skills are the bedrock of healthy relationships among staff and between staff and the individuals they assist.

What does it take for staff to adopt these skills? The first step is certainly training- but not just any training. Successful workplace training uses an adult learner-centered approach, emphasizing interactive training methods such as small group discussions, case scenarios, and role plays. These teaching methods create opportunities for staff to share their ideas and experiences with each other, and also to practice the new communication skills they are learning in a supportive environment. They also create a training environment that is conducive to learning (meaning fun, interesting, appropriately challenging, collaborative, supportive).

Sustained Behavioral Change

Yet even the best training is unlikely to lead most staff to sustained behavioral change. Ample research over many decades (beginning with the pioneering work of James Mosel in 1957) demonstrates that skill mastery also requires a workplace environment that encourages the use of new skills. Without this, the available literature indicates that the transfer of learning to job performance is generally significantly lower than desired (Tannenbaum and Yukl, 1992).

We believe that this is because behavioral change is a complex process, and one which continues long after the training ends and participants have returned to their day-to-day work. In order for staff to master new skills they have learned in training, our experience indicates that they will need:

• Modeling. Seeing the skills they have learned modeled by others provides evidence that “this stuff really works,” and can awaken the desire to change. Research also indicates that modeling by managers is perhaps the most important factor in determining the degree to which staff will adopt new behaviors that they learned in training. This is a primary reason why PHI’s suite of trainings and consultation services are geared to reach all levels within an organization—from frontline staff to senior managers and leaders.
• Practice. The training itself can provide some initial practice in a safe, low-risk environment. When staff begin to practice new skills in “real time” on the job, most will initially do so sporadically, and default to old behaviors when under pressure or in times of stress. At this stage, staff need an environment that encourages experimentation and tolerates imperfection.
• Feedback and support. The more that staff can talk about their successes and challenges in adopting new behaviors, the more confidence and competence they will gain. With ongoing feedback and support, ultimately the new behaviors can become the unconscious “default mode”—the stage of mastery.

PHI encourages the organizations that implement its training programs to invest significant time and effort in ensuring that the workplace environment is conducive to the desired behavioral change.

Partners in Care, one organization that has implemented the PHI Coaching Supervision℠ training, has subsequently developed robust support systems for trained supervisors. These supports are called “Boosters” (pdf) at Partners in Care. As a result, Partners in Care has ensured that coaching skills have indeed been practiced and increasingly mastered by supervisors throughout the organization.

Today, two and a half years after Partners in Care began participating in PHI trainings, President and CEO Marki Flannery sees the positive effects taking hold. She believes that the relationship-centered approach—and the specific communication and coaching skills that her staff has learned—have begun to shift the organization’s culture.

Staff, she notes, feel much more empowered. “If you walked in here now, you would see that they are respectful to each other. Lots of work is getting done without rush, noise, and anxiety,” Flannery says. “There’s a real difference in tone. Antagonistic interactions have become rare.”