Tip #150: What NOT to Do When Interviewing A Potential New Client:

26. be unwilling to be flexible on work expectations
27. neglect to add into a contract limitations on edits and revisions
28. neglect to add into a contract provisions for work beyond the initial scope of the project
29. forget to ask for referrals and references from the client after completion of a successful project
30. disregard your intuition that the client might not be the right fit for you
31. walk into situations where they are looking for a –fall guy” to blame
32. assume you know what the client means or wants without asking clarifying questions to make sure you are on the same page
33. accept work that is contrary to your ethics
34. talk the client out of hiring you
35. be unrealistic about workload and time commitments
36. overbook yourself rather than negotiating a more reasonable time frame
37. speak negatively about former clients or client experiences
38. go into the meeting without having all relevant experience, references, and project dates available
39. neglect to anticipate questions and prepare answers
40. neglect to anticipate and plan how to minimize or address client concerns
41. assume that larger corporations are more professional and fiscally responsible than smaller companies
42. neglect to propose follow up services as part of the project package
43. plan to work without a written contract
44. be apologetic about your fees
45. be unprepared to discuss your fees
46. rush to answer questions rather than taking time to think them through
47. assume the client needs an immediate proposal the next day rather than asking or negotiating a reasonable turnaround time
48. tell the client what they should think or do, versus what they are prepared to think or do
49. believe your business and professional credibility begin and end with the outcome of the interview
50. forget to consider each client interview situation as an interesting new learning opportunity!

Tip #149: What NOT to Do When Interviewing A Potential New Client:

1. tell them what they're doing wrong
2. push them to do more than they are ready to do
3. get lost and be late to the meeting
4. put on hand cream just before you shake their hands
5. turn the interview into a training session
6. assume that you are the only consultant being interviewed
7. firmly suggest that the client consider his or her culpability for the issue under discussion
8. terrify the client that sensitive issues will need to be discussed
9. ask the client to betray their loyalty to management, no matter how poor the management appears to be
10. exhibit a sense of humor when the client is humorless
11. lose articles of clothing or jewelry during the interview
12. flirt with the client
13. think out loud when asked about a potential approach to an issue
14. neglect to do research on the client, so that references and examples are relevant to their industry
15. do lots of work for the client in good faith prior to receiving a signed contract
16. make assumptions that the fee is understood rather than explicitly stating the fee upfront
17. bidding on work without getting a clear idea of the context and extenuating circumstances that may affect the time involved
18. take personally the personality traits of the client when under duress
19. get blindsided with additional issues or processes that the client neglected to mention and you had no reason to expect or inquire about
20. go into the situation as the crusader rabbit, ready to take on the establishment and protect the employees when you are actually hired by the establishment and have no real control over the situation
21. promise confidentiality when you have no control over what people say
22. use extreme examples to make a point, thereby distracting and derailing the client's attention and comfort level
23. humbly minimize your expertise and competence
24. neglect to check with references ahead of time, to ensure that they are willing and available to provide positive support
25. inadvertently misrepresent yourself, your expertise, or your experience

Tip #148: Teaching for the Small Business Development Center

t all began when I began to think about starting my own business. The University of Wisconsin had a Small Business Development Center that offered free counseling to individuals in my situation, so I scheduled an appointment. I was very concerned about the number of training consultants in the Madison area, feeling that the competition might be too stiff. When I met with the Director, William Pinkovitz, he assured me that there was nothing to worry about. As long as the other consultants were doing a good job., businesses would hire me for the unique capabilities that I had. The problem would arise if the other consultants were NOT doing a good job, because then the entire training industry would have a bad reputation and it would make it difficult for any of us to do business.

As we discussed my areas of expertise, he asked me if I would be willing to teach for the Small Business Development Center itself. Saying –yes” was one of the best decisions I've ever made! For years, we offered the only evening workshops in the area on personnel management and human resources topics. The Center publicized the programs throughout the region and I suddenly had their marketing expertise to promote me!!! The programs offered me immediate access to local businesses. I began to have name and face recognition as a trainer, which was an amazing gift for a new business.

In addition, when Joan Gillman joined the Center shortly after I met with Bill, she had all sorts of creative ideas for additional services to business. This included the Women's Breakfast Series on different topics, which was and continues to be wildly successful. It was a wonderful showcase that afforded access to hundreds of women at every level in business.

Not only did Joan become a good friend, she was also a marketer extraordinaire on my behalf (as well as the behalf of many other trainers). Joan promoted me as a speaker and workshop leader for every small business conference in the state. When inquiries came for onsite training from local businesses, she referred them to me. Joan nominated me for the Small Business Trainer of the Year, which gave me a monetary prize that enabled me to attend a professional conference. She was and still is my best promoter and business advisor.

If you've been reading these Tips for the past few months, you'll recognize her name. Joan not only opened doors for me locally and throughout the state of Wisconsin, she brought me to teach in Croatia. She is still the very first person to whom I refer any consultant wanting to get into training.

Over the years since, there have been many other wonderful people who have opened doors for me, pushed me in directions I never anticipated, and gave me opportunities I will always value and can never adequately repay. We absolutely do get by with more than a little help from our friends!

Tip #147: Teaching in a University Degree Program

During the years I had been teaching in the evenings for UW-Madison Extension and the Madison Area Technical College, I had held down a day job working for the State of Wisconsin in personnel management. Therefore, when I saw that Cardinal Stritch College was looking for ad hoc instructors for their Continuing Education Programs for Adults, I felt confident enough to apply. They required a Masters Degree, which I had earned at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Once my application and resume had been accepted, the next stage of the selection process was to present a ten minute program. I think I may have done mine on Win-Win Negotiation, incorporating all that I had learned from my studies with Dr. Madeline Hunter to make the training educational, interactive, and entertaining. I know I brought koosh balls and bowls of candy, as well as my colored cartoon overheads.

It was quite an education to sit in on all of the presentations. I was amazed to see how much a ten minute presentation revealed about a trainer's skills! Later, when I interviewed trainers for my own company, Laurel and Associates, Ltd. ., I remembered and used this process. From that point on, all of my skill-building training programs (in communication, presentation, facilitation, negotiation, conflict management, assertiveness, and train-the-trainer, etc.) have included skills practice for ten minutes.

I was delighted to join the ad hoc faculty to teach in the first evening continuing education program in management for adults that was offered in the Madison area. Cardinal Stritch offered an Associate Degree, a Bachelor of Science and a Masters of Science degree. The program involved four-hour sessions offered weekly for 56 weeks. The students took one course at a time, with each course lasting for four sessions. I was hired to teach two courses for the Masters of Science in Management program: the very first academic course they received, which was Personnel Management- and one of the last, which was Organizational Development. I also taught the very first session that students in all of the programs attended: Orientation.

The students were all working adults, ranging in age from their middle twenties to their late fifties. They came from all over the area, some driving more than an hour one way to attend the classes, which ran from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

I learned so much from them:

First, that they were creatures of habit. When I returned to teach the last class, they were all still seated in the same arrangement they had assumed over 50 weeks prior!

Second, because of the travel and class time, many were tired and hungry. I found that encouraging them to bring something to eat and giving them ten minute breaks every hour kept them much more alert. It wasn't until much much later that I learned that the brain gets saturated after fifty minutes and needs that time to relax and reboot.

Third, they were already living and working what we were teaching. The classes only served to give them a common vocabulary to discuss their experience. Their examples and stories brought every management principle to life.

Fourth, given the opportunity to propose questions for their examinations, they came up with questions MUCH harder than anything I would have asked!

Fifth, once they had reviewed the class and homework requirements for earning an A, a B, or a C in the course, almost every one of them contracted for an A and achieved it. They proved the power of setting goals and accepting personal responsibility for their own learning.

Sixth, they did a terrific job on their research papers, continually teaching me new information, new perspectives, and new applications.

Seventh, that four hours was a good period of time for learning.

Tip #146: Jumping In Without A Net!

After I had been an Assertiveness trainer for UW-Madison Extension for over a year, I was eager to expand my repertoire as a trainer. So I was very excited when there was an advertisement in the paper for an ad hoc instructor in Supervisory Management at the Madison Area Technical College. I submitted my resume and had a very nice interview with John Lalor, who was the Director of the Marketing Department that housed the Supervisory Management Technician associate degree program. A few weeks after that interview, I got a call in the evening from John. Apparently, an ad hoc instructor who was slated to teach a semester-long Supervisory Skills course was not able to fulfill his commitment. John needed an instructor immediately, to start the very next evening!

I was completely overwhelmed and protested that I had only taught Assertiveness- I knew nothing about Supervisory Skills!!! John was very reassuring, telling me that there was already a text book and that he knew I would do a wonderful job. I disagreed, knowing full well that this was WAY out of my league! But John persisted, even agreeing to meet with me in the early morning before I left for my day job with the state.

Although I am sure that I prepared a lesson outline and printed off materials sometime during the day, I really don't remember WHAT I did that first evening class. For the rest of the semester, I was always only one chapter ahead of my class. I also went straight to the library to find as many books as I could on the subject, liberally drawing content and activities from every likely reference source.

Luckily, the text book: The Art of Leadership, by Lin Bothwell, had terrific content and lots of activities, questionnaires, and self assessments. Its content and approach validated the use of dialogue, group activities, personal action plans, progress reports, and colored cartoon overheads to emphasize key points that had worked so well in the Assertiveness classes. I still refer to it to this day when I design supervisory training.

I found that I loved the subject and really enjoyed the students, many of whom were already in the work world. I was also stimulated by the constant challenge of coming up with creative and effective ways to teach new content and enable the students to experience and apply their new learning. Since the entire subject area was uncharted domain for me, I felt free to experiment with lots of different teaching methods.

When the semester was over, there was a need for someone to teach the next course ( I can't remember whether it was Running Effective Meetings or Active Listening Skills or Conflict Management). John asked me to do it and I said "Yes.” Although I didn't know anything about the topic, I now knew how to research content, create lesson plans, and incorporate educational as well as entertaining activities that launched the students on their own voyage of self discovery.

That began an entire second career for me. Each semester marked the need for a course on a new topic and I always said "Yes” and then made a mad dash to the library to start my research. Thus I slowly built up my repertoire of topics, as well as developed great relationships with many of the students. One of them actually became a life long friend, Teri Pickering, whom I am visiting this weekend to belatedly celebrate her birthday.

As you can see, this MATC teaching experience gave me many gifts. The key gift was the opportunity to face my very real fear of inadequacy. I gradually learned to trust that, if I did my homework and honored basic adult learning principles, the result would be mostly good. I was also forced to accept that I would always be a work in progress.

Lorraine Ortner-Blake pens the following quote on one of her beautiful art cards:

"When you come to the edge of all the light you've known, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen. There will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught how to fly.”

Tip #145: How I First Became a Trainer

People often ask me how I got into training. Well, it certainly wasn't planned. While I was working on my masters degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1972, a friend of mine (Sharon Sotsky) and I sat in on auditions for a spoken poetry night. There were a number of male students reading poetry, but almost no women. I had been writing poetry for years and had a number of poems about my experience of marriage, childbirth, separation and single motherhood. ( I was married at 20 and had my daughter, Jennifer, when I was a 22 year old junior in college. Within less than six months, I had separated from her father and by the time she was two I had moved halfway across the country to attend school and raise her alone). Sharon also had poems about her experience as a woman. So we signed up to read our poems.

The night of the poetry reading, Ed Kamarck, who was the Director of Outreach for Theatre Arts at University Extension, was in the audience. He approached us after the reading and told us if we would create a play about the woman's experience, he would provide a venue for the performance. So Sharon and I began The Apple Corps, Ltd., which was the first feminist theatre in the Midwest. Our poem play, titled –Empty Space Blues,” dealt with the way that the feminist movement affected the lives of five different women: a divorcee, a Catholic mother, a student, a model, and a feminist. During the course of the play, which is humorous on many levels, each woman experiences her own soul wrenching epiphany. We found a director and auditioned women for the roles, attracting a number of women who were willing to work on stage, sets, and publicity simply because they loved the characters and the message of the play.

True to his word, Ed arranged for us to perform on campus for several nights. After the play, the actors, director, and playwrights came out on stage to discuss their characters with the audience. The night of one of the performances, there were two professors from Family Services at the University of Wisconsin-Extension in attendance. Connie Threinen and Marian Thompson drew me aside and told me they would like to see me teach an –Assertiveness” class for Extension. I asked them what assertiveness was. They responded that was the focus of our conversation with the audience and that I should read the book The New Assertive Woman by Lynn Bloom, Karen Coburn and Joan Pearlman.

So, I read the book and created an agenda for a two session class on –Assertiveness” for Extension, based on the content of the book. They publicized the course and before I knew it, I was teaching an evening course for UW-Madison Extension. That course went well, so we expanded the next course to eight weeks- and the participants requested that we extend that further to sixteen weeks. I was officially an ad hoc instructor for UW-Extension.

That was how I first got into training! I owe it all to the creative gifts of Sharon and the first cast and director of –Empty Space Blues,” and the incredible encouragement and support of Ed Kamarck, Connie Threinen and Marian Thompson. Talk about getting by with a little help from your friends and being in the right place at the right time!

I would love to hear your story, if you are willing to share it. How did YOU first become a trainer?

Tip #144: Accelerated Learning in Croatia #5

Accelerated learning techniques include involving as many senses as possible for whole brain learning and to meet the needs of different learning styles. Color, music, touch, movement, visual stimulation, and the use of metaphor and story are all very important ingredients in an accelerated learning classroom.

After my first trip to Croatia to train trainers for the small business development centers in 1998, I returned four more times in March and July of 2000 and March and May of 2001 to work with the School of Economics at JJ Strossmeyer University in Osijek.. My assignment was to help them design the first European student-centered MBA program in Entrepreneurship and train the faculty there. My son Seth accompanied me on the first two trips, becoming a world traveler at the ripe old age of 10!

When I returned to Osijek in May, 2001, it was to be my last visit. However, this time I came as an honorary member of the faculty to co-teach a Negotiation Skills class with Ljerka. The course content was designed to meet the students'stated interests, based upon a training needs assessment. It included two days of Getting to Yes techniques, with a real-life negotiation homework assignment that walked them through the five steps. Because several of the students were seasoned negotiators, it also included two days of Getting Past No techniques, with a real-life negotiation homework assignment that walked them through the six steps.

After reviewing the nature of the negotiation situations with which the students were dealing in their homework assignments, it was clear that the last two sessions of the course needed to be focused on their issues, rather than case studies, as had been previously planned.

Consequently, the fifth session was redesigned to reinforce previously-taught concepts in order to prepare the students to successfully role play a real-life negotiation situation of their choice during Session 6. They worked in triads, with an observer providing an assessment, as well as each individual assessing his or her negotiation.

The homework assignments and in-session role play and assessments provided ample practice for the students in preparation for their course project. The project required them to complete similar negotiation planning worksheets, conduct a real-life negotiation, and then assess their performance. They submitted their completed project work to Ljerka after the class ended and she forwarded them to me by mail.

Ljerka's expertise, creativity, and perspective were essential to the success of the Negotiation Skills course. She was actively involved in the course design, organization, selection of outside resources, and implementation. During the course, she translated concepts and terminology, as well as directed, observed, and provided feedback for the small group activities and role playing. She conducted the last session's role playing activities with three students who were absent. She also collected the student projects, for transmittal to me.

The new training facilities were wonderful. The site in the old city was huge, with a beautiful sitting room and exquisite view of the river Drava and the old city. The sole drawback was that it was up three very long sets of stairs, which was a strong disincentive to any lecturer with heavy materials or audiovisual equipment!

The first generation of students in the Entrepreneurship masters degree program were extraordinary in terms of their experience, expertise, and commitment to the program.. It was clear that the lack of job and life experience of the second and third generations in the program would necessitate simplification of the current course content for Negotiation Skills.

As a result, we recommended that future Negotiation Skills courses focused in on a modified Getting to Yes content, with ample practice using each negotiation strategy in both prepared and real life negotiation exercises. We also recommended that the current Getting to Yes instructional materials be augmented with the staying calm and active listening skills exercises from the Getting Past No content.

All of the content and handout materials necessary for the redesign of the course for future generations were already in Osijek, with Ljerka. So it would be an easy matter to revise the lesson plan and create new participant materials.

After I left Osijek, I was able to read and grade the students'projects, which were all very effective and complete. They clearly understood how to apply negotiation skills in their work lives and had ample opportunity to practice them!

Although there were tentative plans for me to return again to conduct a team building session with the faculty, the occasion never arose.

I left this Croat training experience with more gifts than I can mention. The ones that jump to mind include the incredible opportunity to visit and get to know different people of varying ages, experiences, and backgrounds from throughout Croatia;

• travel to and through Europe for the very first time;

• make good friends in Croatia and in Hungary;

• see the world and the United States from the Croat perspective;

• enjoy the culture, the food, the architecture, the customs, the open markets, the art, the inland and Adriatic cities and the cosmopolitan capital, Zagreb;

• watch my son build friendships and happy experiences that spanned language differences;

• learn from the most stimulating economic marketing and entrepreneurship gurus;

• be welcomed into different homes and family lives; and

• stand in awe at the warmth, generosity, resilience, creativity, humor, and fortitude of the students, academics, and business people (and their families) I had the pleasure to meet.

And to treasure the gift of Joan's friendship, business acumen, generosity of spirit, fierce loyalty, and networking that made it all possible.