It’s been said the only constant in life is change, and at the Business Expansion and Retention general membership meeting on February 16 it was the topic of discussion.

“Today we are going to present a program to you that combines training and change, a kind of train the trainers program,” said Robert Powell the presenter and also an instructor at USU Eastern. “It’s about leading positive change.”

Powell talked about how when training people they face change at their workplace and that it is essential in today’s business and government operations. However sometimes, we get so busy trying to train people that we get kind of glazed over as to what we are actually doing, and don’t concentrate on the right things.

He gave the example of spending so much time planning a wedding, which he and his wife recently did for two of their daughters.

“Sometimes we are so busy planning a wedding that we forget about the fact we are starting a marriage,” he stated. “That kind of thing is comparable to training in a business setting. We may get some training done, and put it in place, but we forget that training is a process, and not just a onetime event, similar to a wedding.”

He also said that besides realizing that training is not just a onetime event, it also isn’t the answer to every problem in the workplace and that just because people are trained they will change their behavior.

Powell then turned to change, which comes along with training people. Often, we need to train because our businesses or organizations need to change. Sometimes people just won’t change.

“I am talking about a slow death in business,” he said. “We abandon awareness and the process of making change. We decide we don’t need to change, so we focus on incremental problems, small things, instead of the real problems with the business. We are in denial.”

Powell was there with a team of people, graduate students like him, learning and working on training and change. Price resident Nataliya King then took over to talk about how change and training can fail so simply.

“Often these kinds of programs fail because leaders don’t get involved in the process,” she said. “They go about their daily routine without entering into the process and others see that and they are not inspired to change themselves.”

She also discussed the “Why” of training.

“There are three parts of why,” she said. “It is the purpose, the process and the result. The purpose includes the belief that something needs to change because of some reason and that reason must be clear. The process is the action that is taken by the person or the leadership to help trainees to realize the why of what is being done. In the final form, it would be the realization that the proof shows it has succeeded.”

Another member of the group, Karen Nye, talked about the steps to change. She pointed out how easy it is to continue doing the same thing day after day. And she said one of the roadblocks was leadership that had little or a distorted vision for change.

“Some may want training to be implemented but see it as the end, and don’t want to spend more money on trainers or on time to make it work,” she pointed out. “They want it to be a onetime thing. There is a 90 percent failure rate for training if you only go this far. It takes active effort to apply to the next step to increase performance. Often people who go to outside training come back and are not supported in what they have learned to affect change. The role of positive emotion is important. A good attitude about the training and change can carry you forward.”

She said that leadership has a lot to do with the transfer of learning. Accepting responsibility is important and training is everyones job. It is the trainers job, the business owners (or managers job) and also the employees job to move things forward. To do this an organization must invest in structure, support, and accountability.

In the hour they presented the group used some of the training techniques they talked about working with the group including an exercise that graduate student Jeremy Johnson used to demonstrate how important it is to take a break every 20 minutes or so to review and think about what is being taught.

As Powell pointed out at the beginning of the program, training and change can take place any time and any place, sometimes even making it so that people don’t realize they are going through it.

“My father taught me a lot about life while I was holding a fishing pole,” said Powell. “And I didn’t even know I was being trained at the time.”