Training Motivation

I heard a very interesting discussion on the radio recently about management and motivation. I am not a big fan of motivational or management books, but this definitely caught my attention. It was part of a public radio show on the science of motivation, and the guest was the author of a book called Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. The main discussion had to do with how money is often used as a carrot used to persuade people to behave in some desired way. The catch, says the author, Daniel Pink, is that often, money is actually a disincentive for many people. Engagement, and the challenge and satisfaction that comes from solving problems, is often a better motivator. Once money gets involved, activities that otherwise would be fun and exhilarating, can become, well, work.

So, what does this have to do with teaching legal research? Listening to that interview, I kept thinking about how difficult it is to get people to come to training. One of the show's callers talked about how, as a military commander, she needed to learn how to let the lowest level officers take charge of decisions at their level, and that delegating in that way was a difficult, non-intuitive concept for her, but it made everything work better in her units. The guest, Daniel Pink, responded by saying something like, "Yes, management, in what has become its traditional sense, is good for compliance, but talking with your employees and determining together where it works to give them autonomy is what encourages engagement."

People are generally not much engaged in their experiences of being taught legal research. For one, the new attorneys I have worked with have mainly just finished with several years of schooling. They are thinking to themselves that they are done - what can a librarian at a law firm (who, in my case, doesn't even have a legal degree) teach them that they don't already know?  The challenge for us it to persuade them of the benefit of training and to engage them in the process.

Many times what happens instead, and this is in the best case scenario, is that we are managing their experience toward compliance. We seek top down support from managing partners or department heads to "strongly encourage" attendance at training sessions and orientations, or to make them outright mandatory.


Another of the callers was a college professor. Her challenge was to ensure that her students did the required reading before class so that discussion, the bulk of class time, could be interesting, lively and productive. I think she had ended up giving quizzes at the beginning of every class to ensure compliance, but she was interested in finding a better way to get her students engaged in reading for the sake of the reading itself. Pink asked her if class discussions improved with the quizzes, and she responded yes, though one can imagine that no one much enjoyed those quizzes. Pink asked her if she had tried talking to her students, explaining to them the importance of the class discussion, and how it hinges on them having done the reading. While she didn't outright say, "Yes, but that didn't work," as a listener, I was left with that impression. Pink didn't have much further to suggest, beyond that if her quizzes were working, even though they fell on the side of stick rather than carrot as a motivator, she might just as well go ahead and continue to use them.

So, if "strongly encouraging" attendance is working for you, that's great, but I have heard from many law librarians that support from higher-ups often isn't an option for one reason or another. I am sure there must be some better way to help attorneys and other trainees discover the value of training and give them some involvement and autonomy in the process. Certainly, I used to spend some of my time working with new associates in explaining the benefits of training, but maybe not enough, or maybe not in the best way, in retrospect. And I can only think of a couple of instances where I did it in any way that made them feel engaged in the process.  

On that point of explaining benefits, a classic sales mantra is to tell your customers (clients, patrons, users) the benefit of the product you want to persuade them they need, not to spend your time belaboring its features. It doesn't matter from the trainees' perspective that they will know three more ways to get at X information at the end of your session. It matters that they will be able to _fill in the blank with benefit here_. Now I can guess that some benefits that might be persuasive to a new attorney would be to save time, save money, bill more clients, look good in front of the senior partner and have more confidence in their results because they learned those three new ways to find that information, but it would just be a guess.

And we know they already have plenty of reasons not to come to training:

• They need to be able to bill X hours, and training takes away from time they can bill to a client.
• As mentioned above, they think they already know what they need to know and that training will be a boring waste of their time.
• Related to that, they also don't know what they are missing. An attorney, like anyone else, does the training needed to do what they don't know how to do, but need to get done. At the point of need, they will figure it out. If they don't see the need, they won't take the time.
• Their short term schedule wins out over a long term payoff, every time.
• More senior people often don't like the idea of showing that they need training - they are the experienced ones that everyone else comes to, and they don't like to visibly lack knowledge or a skill. Their time is literally valued more highly too, so they feel that the time they spend in training is a bigger loss than the same time spent by a new associate.

So what can we do to get past those obstacles to attendance, and any others that may come up? How can we persuade them of training benefits? How can we get them to be more engaged and understand why what we are offering is valuable?

Having listened to Pink, I am thinking we should be spending more time talking to them and asking them what would get them there. I used to do that, sort of, those times I mentioned above where I made an effort to engage my attorneys in the process of training, though I wasn't thinking of it that way. I did a regular survey of incoming associates to gauge what they knew already and what they didn't, and when we went over the results with them and could make clear that that, sure enough, there were some things they didn't know yet, I got some buy in. I also did a follow up survey at the end of our series of training session to ask them what was valuable, and I used that to modify my program. Both those got at some areas of need, and some perceived benefits. I think I got a little closer when I asked more senior associates, people who had been through my program but who had a little more experience and perspective, what things they knew now that they wished they had know as a first year.

It's not easy to get time with attorneys, even to ask them what they need. And I have even run into some trouble in asking people to do evaluation surveys because other departments were also asking for feedback and there was some concern that so many surveys going out may mean terrible response rates coming back in. Given that, we go back to the strategies suggested by Barry Strauss that I mentioned in a previous post: we have to be able to make a case that we are adding value by doing this training and persuade them that it is in their best interest to work with us by answering our questions and becoming engaged in the process to make that training as valuable as it can be.

If you'd like to listen to the discussion, an audio recording of it is available, or you can read a little more about it here. Pink was also featured on Morning Edition recently. He is making the rounds promoting his book and has links to some of his other appearances on his site.

What have you done to engage your trainees? What strategies or examples have you used successfully? Has hearing a little about engagement vs. compliance made you re-think your approach to training or marketing training?

Please let me know in the comments, and if you have materials you want to share (training plans, lists of training benefits, flyers, etc.), please link to them in the comments or send them to me at cindy . carlson @ thomsonreuters . com (spaces added to thwart spammers).

Looking forward to hearing from you.