Good teachers always consider the point of need for when their instruction will be most impactful.

• What a seller‐as‐teacher can do …

Consider “glance media” as a way to instruct, knowing the intended audience may only give fractions of a second of initial attention to the message you are sending. Think of a billboard (Duarte, 2018) and how it can get a memorable message across with simple wording, clean design, and a specific purpose. Now consider an email and the way your audience might receive it. What do you put in the subject line so that it “stands out” among all the other inbound messages that people receive? Furthermore, in only a few words, how do you also signal that your message is coming from a real person and isn't generic? Here's an easy one: try using the possessive adjective “our” to describe any shared interactions (e.g., “following up on our conversation,”“looking forward to our meeting”).

• What a trainer‐as‐teacher can do …

Think of how esoteric, procedural instructions can be accessed by those who need them at the point of time when they need them (Tufte, 2018). Consider the washing instructions on the label of a piece of clothing (e.g., dry‐clean only) or the lines on a measuring cup (mL and cups). The latter is an example of information that is not worth memorizing or developing the perfect skills around (i.e., to pour exactly 1¼ cups of water without measuring). Or think of receipts that have suggested tips at the bottom to give you a ballpark range of amounts. Now think of your meeting invitations: when sending a meeting invitation for a training, make sure the instructions for arriving at, or connecting to, the training are located in the meeting invitation itself and are easy to locate within the message.

• What a service professional–as‐teacher can do …

“Explainability is about trust. It's important to know why our self‐driving car decided to slam on the breaks, or maybe in the future why the IRS auto‐audit bots decide it's your turn. [Whether a] good or bad decision, it's important to have visibility into how they were made, so that we can bring the human expectation more in line with how the algorithm actually behaves” (McTole, 2017). Whenever you are helping a customer solve a problem or address a known service need, you can foster trust by not only explaining the behaviors that the customer is experiencing, but also providing that information at the time that the service is being performed. If you work on site (or lead a team of people who work on site), use pictures and videos to document what you are seeing and what you will be doing. You are the expert – otherwise the customers would not have needed you there. Teaching them will not give away your secret formula (even if they become more competent at solving that particular issue in the future). It will instead give them trust that you will be able to solve novel problems in the future, making you a trusted advisor.

• What a leader‐as‐teacher can do …

The next time you are leading a team or committee and are facing an “either/or” decision, with some members of the group fervently defending one position and the rest on the side of the other, introduce the concept of the polarity map (Johnson, 1998; Kise, 2012). The goal is to list the gains and limitations of both sides of the argument, while simultaneously creating space for strong position holders to empathize with and understand the others. This exercise in immediacy helps move a group from “either/or” to “both/and” solutions.