I confess I have been hesitant in the past about using web conferencing in this way. I came up through the training ranks when we would take a group of new supervisors at a bank off-site for five days to a fancy resort, then train them within an inch of their lives. With that mental model, the underlying fallacy is that you can stuff someone's brain full of communication techniques, human resource policies and practices, and practical case studies, and when they return to work they are officially "trained".

As technology has evolved, my thinking has evolved. First, we embraced shorter classroom training sessions with learning delivered and practiced in bite-sized chunks. (Each NetSpeed module is about 3-hours in length.) Then we paired instructor-led classroom training with practical, post-class reinforcement tools, and finally we built in a level III assessment tool to make it easy to gather data about how people are using what they learned on the job.

The move to web conferencing took several years for me to make. We began by using a web conference platform tool as way to bring groups of people together across the country, whether they were our own consultant partners, prospective clients, or new clients who needed to learn how to apply our tools.

This week we launched the NetSpeed Leadership Webinar Subscription Series. I'm excited because I think this program is going to meet the needs of many organizations that have new managers and supervisors who just don't have the time to attend training delivered in off-site, all day sessions. We've combined 11, 90-minute webinars with 2 coaching sessions, our web-based reinforcement tools, and a personal needs assessment. Please contact me if you are interested in learning more about this dynamic approach to training your supervisors and managers.