Youve just received yet another flyer in the mail from a seminar mill touting a class geared to teaching you and your staff: How To Deal With Difficult People.

It has all of the right topics listed, including listening skills, when to escalate conversations, how to be poised under pressure, and how to leave work without a knot in your tummy.

And you sign-up, you attend, and everybody leaves feeling happy and fulfilled, and the seminar firm is a wee bit richer.

Then, the next day, you and your team hit the phones, the real world of customer exchanges.

How many, if any, of those tips that you heard the day before are put into practice, and with what results?

If your experience is like most, that pail full of information that you carried back to your site is empty by the next day because there are holes in the bottom of it. Very little of the wisdom you heard is translated into ACTION.

How come?

There are several reasons:

(1) Most seminars are attended with a cafeteria consciousness. There are numerous ideas displayed, and the tacit idea is to pick and choose the ones that appeal to you.

(2) There is no specific plan going into the programs to leave with a blueprint, a new protocol for managing conversations.

(3) Youve probably heard 90% of the tips already, so the tendency is to think its 100% redundant. I knew that! is what we believe, and we tune out what is truly novel, and especially worthwhile.

(4) There is no commitment to refining or changing work practices.

(5) There are no rewards in place, and no management procedures in place for assuring that mere ideas and tips will translate into BEHAVIORS.

(6) Seminars need to be accompanied by one-on-one coaching to become effective.

(7) Attending a seminar is perceived, at least unconsciously, as tantamount to sitting in a college class, for general self-improvement and for personal growth. It isnt perceived as JOB TRAINING.

(8) Most public seminars arent designed as job training, either. Theyre designed for EDU-TAINMENT.

If you want to give your folks a reward, a paid day off, and a chance to escape the grind of the office, a seminar is a nice perk, and it may do the trick.

If you want a chance to network with people from other companies to compare practices with them, thats also a rationale for attending.

But if you want results that can be monitored, measured and managed, youll need a better training model for that.