I am looking for ways to coach employees in how to present themselves in a professional manner, including professional attire, speaking with clients one-on-one, and conducting oneself in meetings. Any thoughts on either outside sources of such training or training materials that could be used, in-house, to coach staff members?

Lanne, I'm not going to suggest training resources (or how to train others) on this. You may be absolutely right about the need to do this work. But from a performance improvement perspective, let me offer a few suggestions:

1. First you need to identify a performance gap and a cause(s) to that gap. Professional attire and behavior is not a gap. We need to look at outcomes. A simplistic example would be:
--sales rep "A" has a 30% close rate (and the rest of the staff have 50% close rates).
--the cause of this 20% gap is that rep "A" is perceived as unprofessional in meetings.
--the root cause of this "perception of unprofessional in meetings" is that rep "A" fails to wear ties to work because he doesn't know how to tie them.
Okay, if that were true, then we should expect that by teaching "A" how to tie a tie knot, his sales will go up 20%. But I seriously doubt that's the case here. What I suspect is the case is that someone looks at performers and basically concludes "this people don't behave professionally--we need to change their appearance/behavior and in doing so, they'll get better results." And that's the thinking behind the vast majority of failed training (or other interventions).

2. Training works ONLY if people lack the knowledge and skills to do something. For instance, if I know how to dress professionally but I'm not motivated to do so, then sending me to training will fail. We tend to fall back on training anytime we want to change behavior when in the vast majority of cases, the behavior issues are NOT due to lack of knowledge or skills. I personally do not wear ties. It's not due to knowledge or skills, it's because I hate wearing them and can count on one hand the number of days I wore a tie last year (and 3 of those days involved funerals). So sending me to a class on dressing professionally won't get me to start wearing ties.

3. Taking a performance improvement perspective on this issue, you'd start with a business outcome that is generating poor results (such as: customer retention is down, or sales are down). You'd then identify the factors that have the most impact on the retention or sales. You'd then identify the causes of those factors. And then you'd move to address them.

Lanne,

It sometimes useful to remember that "The customer defines your business for you". What do your customers say about the image of your staff??

Nero

Hi Lanna:

You might be interested in the book How People Evaluate Others in Organizations, Edited by Manuel London

It has some interesting informaiton about how you are evaluated and what you can do to influence impressions.

Good luck!

Cj

Hi Lanne
I am probably too late for this post however if you were interested (or anyone else who might find it of use) - I have a 1 page exercise to help individuals focus in on the first impressions they make in a business meeting/interacrtion - the way they look, the voice, the body language etc. Very happy to email it to you.