The Undutchables

Recently, in fact last Friday, I gave a workshop called "The Undutchables". It was a workshop for a Dutch audience introducing them to German and British business styles.

The agenda:
1. Stereotypes
2. Geert Hofstede's Dimensions of Culture
3. Patterns of Multicultural Business Behaviours
4. Group Work: Business Styles
5. Group Work: Entertainment
6. The English Class System
7. Language Barriers

The workshop lasted from 14.00 to 19.00 and there were 14 people present. The audience were Dutch management consultants; their company wants to go abroad and the target was to sensitise them for foreign ways of behaviour.

Concrete Heads in Austria

My first project as a freshly baked trainer was in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. The location was about an hour south of Vienna in the most rural part of the Burgenland. The client was a local producer of concrete, the people working there were most stubborn and did not talk a lot.

The project manager was a pushy Dutchman with insufficient German language knowledge (not good in rural Austria), the full-time consultant was brandnew with no experience whatsoever, and there was I, the part-time inexperienced trainer who had 2 projects at the same time.

To say it bluntly, the project was an utter disaster. The client's management team absolutely hated us. They arrived to my workshops sitting there with their arms folded telling me that this training was a complete waste of their time and that they did not intend to participate.

I did the training anyway as good as I could. I remember vaguely that they tried to plot against me by telling lies of what I said in the workshops to get me out of there. They did not only block the training but mainly the operations department's efforts. They rebelled till the owner was forced to close the project prematurely. What a nice start of my career as trainer!

I DO NOT WANT TO DISCREDIT MY CLIENT AS I DO NOT MENTION THEIR NAME, I ONLY TRY TO EXPLAIN FROM A CONSULTANT POINT OF VIEW AND A PERSONAL ONE WHAT IT MEANS TO DEAL WITH DIFFICULT CLIENTS.

Training, Training, Training

After I survived that training camp and returned to Europe I also switched from the operations to the training department and kept on doing training till I quit my job with that company 2 1/2 years later. For myself but also within the company guidelines I established a couple of rules. Below a few:

- Training can only be to accompany the implementation of changes and management tools by the operations consultants (remember, I was one when I did that purchasing department),
- Apart from team building events, I like training to be on site and not in some fancy location. Training is all about applying new management tools, and for that one needs to be surrounded by reality,
- Training should be around 2 to 3 hours every 2 weeks or so. In between every training session each participant must get a 1-2-1 coaching session of about an hour,
- Till week 10 of the project at least 3 sessions should have been held in order to ensure the desired behaviour change,
- Training has to be interactive and is not to be mixed up with teaching. Tasks will be given after every workshop and those tasks are the foundation for the personal coaching session.

In those years as trainer I led 200 to 300 workshops, coached around 200 clients in ca 1000 coaching sessions.