Perhaps you’ve had this experience.

You’re sitting in a workshop, webinar, or conference session. The presenter steps to the microphone, fires up the slide deck, and proceeds to bury you with information. Content, content, and even more content. Because there’s so much to know!

This impulse comes from a positive place. The teacher has useful knowledge and wants to share it. Indeed, there’s seldom enough time to cover everything, which leads to over-stuffing the presentation.

In the worst cases, the trainer wants to be seen as the smartest person in the room. How? By talking and talking and talking. 

A colleague calls this “making love to your material.” If that sounds embarrassing, well, yeah … it is embarrassing. 

It’s not about what you know

If you facilitate workshops or provide training, consider this: your expertise, while useful, is not the point. Rather, your goal is to equip participants with the tools to use what they’ve learned from you.

Classroom teachers think about this a lot. To better engage students, they’ve developed a helpful shortcut for lesson planning and design, using the acronym KSA.

Knowledge: What do the students know as a result of the lesson?

Skills: How can they implement what they’ve learned?

Attitude: How do they feel about the material? Do they have the confidence to use it?

Let’s take a look at each one.

Knowledge

As noted above, the tendency of most trainers is to focus on information: “To be good at ____, here’s what you need to know.” Indeed, they might focus their prep time on content – which slides do I include? – rather than participant engagement and empowerment. 

This knowledge-first approach leads to several challenges.

• Matching the material to the participants, especially if you’re training a group with varying levels of experience and expertise.
• Challenging people with compelling information – without overwhelming them.
• Given time limits, choosing what to include and what to leave out.
• Leaving space to respond to the needs of the group, rather than prioritizing (and rushing through) all the content you’ve prepared.

To be clear: in most training situations, knowledge transfer is essential. However, if participants don’t feel competent (skills) and confident (attitude), then the workshop is a waste of time – because they won’t actually use what they’ve allegedly learned.

Skills

In most cases, the goal of teaching and learning is to change behavior by implementing new knowledge. A few examples from my world:

• Once people learn about fundraising, they go out and raise money.
• Having studied meeting design and facilitation, nonprofit boards create more productive, inclusive meetings.
• After learning about change management tools, leaders skillfully navigate organizational change.

In each of these cases, knowledge alone is inadequate. As a trainer, I try to create opportunities for people to practice their skills, in real time, during the workshop. 

That might mean including fundraising role plays, or using small groups to design the agenda for an upcoming board meeting, or pairing up peers to discuss upcoming changes facing their respective nonprofits.

If you don’t build skills through practice – and I mean immediately! – much of that new knowledge will be lost.

Attitude 

How people feel about what they know might be more important than what they know. As a trainer, teacher, consultant, or facilitator, your job is not only sharing knowledge and building skills, but also helping participants develop positive, productive attitudes. Some benchmarks:

• Confidence. Yes, I can do this. 
• Fearlessness. I am willing to try new stuff.
• Forgiveness. I will do this imperfectly, and that’s OK. 
• Curiosity. What else can I learn? What other skills can I develop?

In my experience, without hands-on participation – actively engaging with the material, testing it out, building skills – it’s almost impossible to shift attitudes and perspectives. This shift happens through positive messaging from the trainer – “Yes, you can do this!” – and structured, thoughtful opportunities to practice.

Beyond the slide deck

If you work with groups – and you have lots of information to share – here’s my challenge to you.

How will you help people use that knowledge to build their skills? How will you support the growth of their confidence, fearlessness, forgiveness, and curiosity?

Here’s a hint: Step out from behind the slide deck, engage the group, and give them work to do.