A guide on the side?

When I was about fourteen, my school organised a trip to the theatre to see a production of Macbeth. It was, for most of us, our first time in a theatre and we behaved badly – so badly, in fact, that at one point the actors stopped and addressed the audience directly, telling us to be quiet. Until then, my only experience of performance had been on TV or at the cinema and I vividly remember my surprise when the actors stepped out of the play and spoke to us directly - in my experience, actors just didn't (couldn't) do that.

This memory came back to me the other week when I was in the training room with a group. We’d had a good couple of days and I’d really enjoyed my time with them. They were pretty much what, as a trainer, you’d hope of a group – engaged, engaging, funny and prepared to ask questions. The workshop was about leadership and trust and towards the end of the second day they asked a question which, I felt, was fairly typical of a particular attitude towards trust that I thought I’d seen throughout the workshop. It seemed like an appropriate time to step out of the session plan and talk to them about what was happening, using the workshop material as a guide to explore this real-life, real-time experience. The group’s response reminded me of my youthful theatre experience and it started me thinking about the role of the trainer in the workshop.

Trainers tend to go through three stages in their development. They begin as newsreaders – they have a script and they need to stick to it. Eventually, they memorise the script and the trainer enters the next stage – performer. It can be fun to have a group watching you, doing what you ask them to and so the workshop becomes all about the trainer. Many trainers, I’m afraid to say, get stuck in this phase and never move onto the third stage – facilitator, what a colleague of mine calls “a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage”. If they get to this point, the trainer/facilitator can truly work with the material and listen to what the group are saying.

My guess is that the group I was working with mostly had experience of the newsreaders or performers – having a trainer step outside of the material in the way I did gave them an experience similar to my watching the actors step outside of the play. But it also started me thinking, given that trust was the subject matter of the workshop: does the way trainers behave actually get in the way of learning and development and make it harder for groups to trust them? Do trainers make it harder for groups to learn? Was I, in essence, reaping what I had sown previously with that group?

It’s a question I’ll be exploring further next week but, in the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences of trainers – please do add your comments below or drop me a line at the website or on Twitter.