Training myths (pt three)

Last week, we looked at our second myth of training, the idea that the effectiveness of training is all down to the performance of the trainer. So myth-buster number two is: I’m good but I ain’t that good (nobody is) - training is a partnership. It’s a partnership between the trainer and the company who wants the training done. And you’d better believe it’s a partnership of equals - don’t think you can fob it all off on the trainer to solve your problems. If you’re commissioning training, you have some work to do and you’d better be prepared to do it - otherwise the training isn’t going to work.

The temptation often is for clients to identify a problem and then hand it over to the trainer to solve. Essentially, to “fix” the people on the workshop. But a moment’s thought will make anyone realise that human beings don’t learn that way. Training cannot be isolated events, divorced from the “real world” of the delegates’ jobs. It makes me smile sadly when delegates talk about training and use a phrase like “it’s better than working” because it’s another symptom of this mindset. If training is isolated from the day job it means that the delegates can safely ignore anything and everything that they’re taught or shown.

Bringing training into the day job requires time and thought and, most importantly, it requires input from the client. Only the client, the person identifying the training need and commissioning the work to meet that need can support the trainer. If you’re serious about growing crops, you don’t just chuck seeds anywhere, you ensure you have the right seeds, you carefully prepare the ground beforehand and then you nurture the crops while it grows. Training people is the same.

In their excellent book “Training on Trial,” Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick talk about the need for clients and trainers to identify the drivers and necessities of success for a training programme. Drivers are the processes and systems that “reinforce, monitor, encourage or reward” the delegates for applying what they have learned, while the necessities are the “items, events, conditions or communications that help to head off problems before they can reduce the impact” of the training. Crudely put, the necessities are the things that have to be in place before the training while the drivers take over afterwards.

Training doesn’t happen in a bubble - it is (or it should be) deeply connected with the role that delegates play in their organisation. Isolating training leads to wasting everyone’s time, money and effort. Regardless of how good the trainer is, everything he or she says can be overridden by the culture of the organisation to which the delegate returns - those commissioning training forget that at their peril and I’ll say more about that next week.

Training myths (pt two)

Last week, I introduced the first of our training myths so this week, let’s introduce our first myth-buster: no one needs training. That’s probably an unusual statement for a training provider to make, so let me explain what I mean by that. What people need is not training but better outcomes - training is not an end in itself, it’s merely the route to get to that end. There should be a reason for training: within a business context, the purpose of learning is not knowledge but action. You might want more or less of something; you may want something to improve; you may want it done quicker, cheaper, at higher quality - whatever it is, there is a reason for the training.

Now, if that’s the mindset, that’s going to drive a whole different set of behaviours. For the person commissioning the training, it means they’re going to have to do some thinking about what they actually need; for the trainer it means they’re going to have to think about how they meet that need, rather than which box of tricks they can sell the client. Either way, it extends the training out of the training room - which is a very significant point and leads on to myth number two: the success of any training is down to the trainer.

This is probably the most common and most pernicious myth of all. You can tell that many companies - and trainers - have this mindset because for most workshops the only evaluation that’s ever done is at Kirkpatrick Level One, otherwise known as the happy sheet that delegates at the end of the workshop. All anyone is interested in is how the day went and whether the trainer did a good job, in the eyes of the delegates.

Now, I have nothing against being evaluated. I believe I’m a good performer in the room and plenty of people have agreed with me. But, as we’re all friends here, let’s be honest: the happy sheets measure the wrong things when it comes to workshop success, can easily be manipulated and are therefore pretty much worthless. There; I said it.

What do the sheets ask? Whether you enjoyed the day or not and whether you think that trainer did a good job. Fundamentally, did you have a good time and did you like the trainer. I’m not being cynical but if I give you lots of chocolate, tell you lots of jokes, give you an easy time and finish the workshop early, I’m pretty much guaranteed a good score. Does that mean I did a good job? Far from it and, while we’re on the subject, what does a “good job” actually mean in this context? When do the sheets get completed? Usually the last thing on the day - they’re often the only thing standing between the delegates and the door, so they get rushed; tick a box, circle a number and get out of there. Write down considered and thoughtful feedback in the space provided? I don’t think so!

But the happy sheets are only one aspect of this mindset. You can see the other aspect a few weeks or months after the workshop. Let’s say you commissioned a time-management workshop. It was delivered, the delegates enjoyed it, according to the happy sheets, but you cant help but notice that nothing’s really changed. So what do you think? The training can’t have been up to much after all, so best get another trainer in to do a proper job this time - after all, clearly whatever that last trainer did didn’t work; he probably just told jokes and fed them chocolate...

Training myths (pt one)

I sometimes wonder why people read this blog. Don’t get me wrong - I’m very flattered that people do and I hope they find it of some use but there are, as you might have noticed, very few comments ever posted so I’m not exactly clear on what people get from it, so I have to guess at their motives. If you’re reading this blog I think it’s likely that you have at least some interest in the subject of development. Perhaps you’re interested in your own development or perhaps you’re responsible for the development of others. Whichever it may be, over the next few weeks I want to think about the idea of work-place training and development and to expose a few of the myths that have grown up around it - myths that are harming the ability of trainers to get their work done and that are resulting in businesses commissioning training that doesn’t work and which just wastes their money.

The first myth is a common one amongst businesses and that is that training is an end in and of itself. We know from previous articles that the way we see the world, drives what we do which, in turn, determines the results that we get, so let’s think about that mindset for a moment or two. If you have the mindset that training is an end in itself, what are you likely to do - how are you likely to behave? Well, for both trainers and those commissioning the training, you’re likely to believe that your job ends much sooner than it actually does. If you’re the commissioner of the training, you’ll think your job is done when you’ve signed up the trainer and told him or her what you want them to do. If you’re the trainer it means you’ll think your job is done when the last delegate leaves the room.

This is often how businesses and trainers work. I had an experience recently where I tried to question a company about the training they wanted. I was trying to understand why they felt they wanted the training, so that I could directly address the needs they had. Perhaps it was my fault but it did not go well. They had already decided which workshop they wanted and the conversation effectively ended with them asking whether I wanted their money or not. To be frank with you, I didn’t; clients like that are very often difficult to deal with and this sort of thinking inevitably ends with the trainer being blamed when the training is unsuccessful. I try, whenever I can, to avoid that kind of situation but times are hard so I smiled and took the job. That was wrong of me but needs must when the devil drives, as Shakespeare put it. However, that kind of behaviour reinforces the myth that training is an end in itself.

Next week, we’ll take a look at our first myth-buster and the second myth of training. In the meantime, if you have any comments, please do let me know.

Are you managing?

Many years ago, I spent about six months or so as a manager. In common with many managers, it wasn’t a role that I had particularly coveted or even particularly wanted but, in order for my career to progress, management was the next step. And, to be honest, management looked pretty easy. I was going to be managing the team of which I was currently a member, so there were no problems there – I knew them and they knew me. I knew the job they did, so I wouldn’t have to learn anything about that. About the only difference I could see was that I’d be earning a bit more money and I’d have a new job title.

Of course, I know now that I was in the learning phase that development experts call “unconscious incompetence” – in other words, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Of course management looked easy – I didn’t know the first thing about it. Sadly, this state of blissful ignorance didn’t last very long and reality hit me like a bucket of cold water. Within the first day, I was brought face to face with a whole bunch of things that I didn’t know about management and I learned very quickly that I had a great deal to learn.

This is the phase that development professionals call “conscious incompetence” and it’s painful. It’s that point in development when you are suddenly confronted with the depths of your own ignorance. You’re suddenly painfully aware of just how much the job involves and how much you have to learn.

For me, that pain lasted for about six months; I tried to learn more about management on-the-job but the company I worked for at the time wasn’t particularly enlightened on the subject and so I was left to fend for myself. I was wholly unprepared and I failed: I was eventually put out of my misery and mercifully removed from the role.

It wasn’t a total failure, however, because it taught me a few lessons that have stayed with me. First and foremost, it taught me that management is actually a lot harder than it looks and people who do it well have a real skill and my undying respect. Secondly, it taught me that there often isn’t a lot of support out there for people who move into the role and that support is the one thing that can make a real difference. If I’d been able to find someone to support me through, to teach me what I needed to know and help me avoid a lot of the mistakes I was making, the transition might have been quicker and easier; it might even have been successful.

Since then, I’ve spoken to a lot of managers about the lessons they’ve learned and the mistakes they make and two consistent themes seem to come out. Consistently, managers berate themselves for not listening and for micro-managing. The odds are, if you’re a manager, you make these mistakes too, so over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at these two common mistakes and suggest some ways in which you could avoid them.

Telling your story

Before I get to the subject of this week’s blog, I’d like to ask you to do me a favour. To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen and you’ll also need to pay very close attention to your mind. I’m going to give you a word and I’d like you to write down the first word you think of when you see the word I’m going to give you. It can be any word you like, whatever pops into your head but, as I said, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your mind.

Are you ready? The word is: choice. Write down the word you associate with choice and we’ll come back to it in a while.

I was working with a group this week, helping them work out what they wanted to do with their lives and careers. This obviously involves some goal setting and that goal can be very general or it can be very specific. To use a journey as an analogy, your destination could be as general as London or as specific as a particular address. Neither is better than the other but, in order to set off in any meaningful way, you’ll probably need at least a general idea of where you’re going.

One of the delegates was completely unable to do this. She had, she claimed, absolutely no idea of where she was going. Not only that, she was sceptical about the whole process. There were too many other things that could happen in the future – including the old cliché of falling under a bus tomorrow (I checked: she didn’t) – and for her that made planning or goal setting pointless and impossible.

We spent some time thinking about the journey she had already made in her life and it occurred to me that we can tell our life stories in one of three ways. It can be a story of chance – luck, coincidences and random happenings. It can be a story of destiny – you were fated to marry that person, born to do that job. Or it can be a story of choice – where you are today is a result of the choices you made yesterday and the day before and the day before that. All of those three options, it seems to me, are equally valid; it’s your autobiography and you can tell it any way you choose. However, only one of those options allows you to have any part in building your future, and that’s choice.

Go back to the word you wrote. Some people write negative words – burden, difficulty, overwhelming; some write positive words – freedom, autonomy, excitement. I wonder what you wrote. And I wonder how much the word you associate with choice will determine the way you tell your autobiography – and the extent to which you write your own future.

Training isn't working - part two

Last week, I think we covered enough statistics to convince even the hardiest sceptic that training isn’t working. The question this week, is why does this happen and the answer lies, in research by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995), who found that 80% of performance problems relate to factors within the work environment. In other words, what happens outside of the training room gets in the way of application.

In my experience, three scenarios occur repeatedly, and make application difficult, if not impossible:

Training for no reason

I’m working with a multinational company training sixty of their managers, at great cost, simply because they haven’t had any training for a couple of years and the company thought some training might be a nice idea. Training is supposed to be performance enhancing: it's the bridge that takes you from point A to point B. If there isn’t a point B, why do it?

There is a reason – the delegates just don't know what it is

There is an idea that training can “fix” people. A manager has a member of staff with performance or behavioural issues; they don’t want to confront the issue directly, so they send the member of staff on a training course, in the hope that they’ll learn something and change. It’s not always that extreme, though: so many times, I see delegates who’ve had no conversation with their managers in advance of the workshop – they’ve just been sent there. What does that do to their willingness to learn?

Nothing happens afterwards

What happens after the workshop is crucial – if on-the-job reinforcement is missing, there's no reason or incentive to do anything. It’s difficult to sustain changes in behaviour and often we need help and support; if that’s not forthcoming, most of what we learn is gradually forgotten.

Of course, a fourth reason is that sometimes the training's just bad. A poor workshop or a poor trainer (and, lets face it, some are terrible) won’t generate any kind of change or application at all – but that’s a topic for another day!

So what’s the solution? There’s a great quote, attributed to both Einstein and Woody Guthrie (it’s easy to get them confused): “Any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” The inspired philosophy is simple things, done well, repeatedly: the good news is, for all of these problems there some very simple solutions and we’ll look at them next week.

Training isn't working

Have you ever engaged a training company? What differences did you see as a result of the training? If the answer to that is “very little” then I’m not surprised because training, it seems, just isn’t working.

Plato said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. When I say working, I mean there is a noticeable transfer of learning to the business: what happens in the training room doesn't stay in the training room but it leaks out into the business. That's important because it's one of Donald Kirkpatrick’s four key measures for training:

• Level one – Evaluation (did they like it?)
• Level two – Recollection (did they remember it?)
• Level three – Application (did they do anything with it?)
• Level four – Impact (did it make a difference?)

Level one (evaluation) tends to be done most but produces data of the least value. Data at Application and Impact levels is harder to come by but what information is about paints a depressing picture.

In 1985, John Newstrom studied the perceptions held by members of the ASTD and there was a commonly held belief amongst them that training was not effectively transferred to the workplace. They believed that:

• Only 40% of the training content was applied to the job by the learner immediately following training.
• Only 25% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after six months.
• Only 15% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after one year.

Remember, this is perception and not necessarily reality but it is supported by other figures. Baldwin and Ford (1988) conducted a survey of the academic literature of the time on training effectiveness, and concluded, “Not more than 10% of the estimated $100 billion spent each year on training by the American industries actually resulted in transfer to the job”. Although doubt has been cast on the validity of this statement, in terms of the exact percentage and the estimated spend, it’s very similar to studies carried out by USA Today and by Ford and Weissbein (1997).

In 1992, Tannenbaum and Yukl conducted a review of the available literature, and concluded that the transfer of learning to job performance was generally low. They reported that relatively few learners, as low as 5%, actually applied in the workplace what they had learned in the training room, figures similar to those found subsequently by Stolovich (2000).

Have I convinced you – or merely bored you with a whole bunch of figures? The fact is, as Stolovich concluded, “Training alone is not effective in achieving on-job application of knowledge”. Next week we’ll look at why that is and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.

A guide on the side? (Part Two)

Last week, I was talking about the degree to which groups can – or can’t – trust their trainer. In the past, I’ve always joked with groups that you can’t trust a trainer; what I’ve meant by that is that no one in a training session should just take everything I say for granted – they have to think about it, test it against what they already know to be true about the world. One of the best things a group can have is healthy scepticism, by which I mean an openness to learn but the attitude of mind that they question what they learn in order to understand it. My intention, in the training room, is to develop a form of Socratic debate and get the group involved in a two-way discussion about the material, rather than being in a passive, more didactic style session where the trainer teaches the material and the group “learns” it.

In order to create that type of debate, two things must happen and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether they are – to an extent, at least – mutually exclusive. The first is that the group has to trust that it’s okay or “safe” for them to disagree with the material or, at the very least, to question it. Secondly, for the sake of the argument and in order to stimulate or move the debate forward, I might have to take on positions with which I don’t necessarily agree. So, on the one hand the group has to trust me whilst on the other I might occasionally need to mislead the group.

That tension must, on some level at least, be confusing for groups and could get in the way of the workshop material. I can imagine that, as a delegate, it would be very easy to be suspicious of any question that I ask because, at the back of your mind, there’s always the suspicion of my motives in asking it – am I trying to catch you out? Am I, in other words, not to be trusted?

I don’t have any pat answers to these questions – just a much longer series of questions that they raise in my mind. But I’d love to know what you think about it – what’s your view on what happens in the training room? Do you trust trainers?

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.

Confidence tricks

I’ve talked in the past about the importance of asking yourself those simple – but crucial – questions and when it come to workshops, one of the questions I like to encourage delegates to ask themselves is “what do I want?” I’m not surprised that the most common answer is that, almost regardless of the topic of the workshop, delegates want more confidence. It seems like a reasonable request: who couldn’t use a little more confidence? Who wouldn’t find their life enhanced if they had more confidence? Who wouldn’t live the life they wanted if they had more confidence? But what is confidence and where does it come from?

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms, so let’s look at how confidence is defined in the dictionary: “belief in own abilities; self assurance or a belief in your ability to succeed”. The thing that strikes me about that definition is that it contains the word “belief” twice, so we can be relatively confident that confidence is a belief although we usually take it to be a feeling. This is important; we can create our own beliefs and change them when we need to.

The second thing to bear in mind about confidence is that we often get it the wrong way round. How many times have you said to yourself; if I had more confidence, I would… (insert dream/task/objective here)? But where does a belief in our own abilities come from? Is it going to arise, magically, before we attempt the things we want to do or does it arise afterwards, from reflection and hindsight, from learning from experience?

I knew someone once who was adamant that people don’t change but she’s wrong because it’s a fundamental part of being human – the ability to take action, experience the consequences, learn from them and behave differently in future. That’s where confidence comes from – reflecting back on our experiences and learning from them that we are able to succeed; because either we did succeed or because, having failed in the past, we have learned what it takes to succeed.

It’s also important to remember that having confidence doesn’t mean not feeling scared or apprehensive or worried: I’m not pretending that confidence is easy. I would love to have some magical injection or form of words that would give anyone more confidence but the truth is that confidence arises from inside, from our experiences. From grasping the nettle and taking chances; from risking failure and achieving success; from daring and reflecting. Confidence is a result, an outcome of a task or an experience, not a tool to tackle the task in the first place.

A change is as good as a rest...

If you had been born in a different country, would you have been a different person? It’s a deceptively simple question and one that has been nagging at me over the last few weeks, as I’ve been pondering the subject of change. I’m in the change business, to a degree; I ask people, encourage people and help people to make changes to their behaviour. Recently I’ve started to wonder whether changes to behaviour actually lead us to become different people.

A river flows the way it does because of certain fixed points – the depth of the riverbed, the rainfall, the angle of the ground, the rocks and other obstructions around which it must flow. Change any of those fixed points and the river will flow differently. So it is with the flow of our lives. If you had been born in a different country, you would still be you – but a different you: the influences to which you were exposed, the culture in which you developed would all have been different. Even using a different language can change the way we think. Perhaps some fundamentals would remain, something genetically programmed into you or something inherently “you” but otherwise, you would be a different person.

Most of the time, for most people, change brings with it feelings of discomfort; often our efforts are directed towards keeping things fundamentally the same as they are now. But we all come to points in our lives when we look around ourselves and actively desire change – we reach a point when we realise that things cannot go on as they were. At this point, many people will turn inwards – to self-help books or to counselling or therapy of some kind – to make the changes they feel necessary.

This isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do – much sustainable change begins from the inside out and I’m a great advocate for it. It strikes me, however, that a quicker way to change is to change the fixed points in our lives. If you lived in a different town, if you had different friends, if you took up different hobbies, watched different films, read different books, the flow of your life would be different. All of these things are in our control – after all, we decide where we live, the job we do, the hobbies in which we partake and we can change these things, if we so choose. Making that choice would mean that to an extent, over time, you would come to be a different person.

A game of inches

There’s great excitement at the inspired offices because this weekend marks the start of the new season for both Formula 1 and the IRL (F1’s American equivalent). Before you switch off, thinking that this entry is going to be petrol-head heaven, it struck me as I watched the F1 practice session this morning that there are a lot of good business lessons to learn from the physics of motor racing.

It takes about five months to design and build a Formula 1 car and the costs run into the millions, per car – even the wheel nuts have to be specially designed and built and cost in the range of £300 each! Many clever people work long and hard on the aerodynamics of the car, finding the most efficient shape that allows the car to move cleanly through the air; they work on the engine, finding ways of squeezing the maximum speed from it; they work on the tyres, finding exactly the right formula for the rubber. The driver himself (or herself, in the case of IRL) trains hard in order to improve his/her reaction times and ability to cope with the huge g-forces they experience.

All of that time, effort and money relies just one thing; that tiny area of the tyres which is touching the track at any given moment. Called the contact patch, all of those untold millions of pounds, dollars and hours rest on an area roughly equivalent to an A5 sized piece of paper. Introduce anything into that contact patch between the tyre and the track – water, gravel, bits of worn rubber – and all that time, effort and money will count for nothing. The most powerful engine in the world won’t be able to move the car if the tyres can’t convert that energy to forward motion.

So what’s the relevance to business, you ask? How many times have you been on a workshop and had time at the end to do some action planning? So often, I’ve seen delegates just take it as an opportunity to call a taxi, arrange their bags, pack up their stuff, have a cup of coffee or an extra break – anything, in fact, except what they’ve been asked to do: their action planning. And yet that little action planning session is the most important part of the day, the equivalent of the contact patch – the whole value of the workshop rests on that session, where you work out how best you can convert what you’ve learned into new behaviour at work. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? The purpose of learning is not knowledge – it’s action.

I once heard someone describe yacht racing as a game of inches. I suspect that’s the same for all sports and for business, too – the tiniest of things can make the biggest difference. Most people don’t recognise the importance of those tiny things but the best sportsmen/women and businessmen/women do. That tiny session, that brief period of time when the trainer asks you to do some action planning, is one of those moments – use it wisely.

Happy New Year

I don’t want to start 2010 on a depressing note but I wonder how many people have already failed their new year’s resolutions? If they have, they’re in good company – according to a recent report, around 80% of people won’t succeed in keeping their resolutions. If you’ve set yourself some goals or resolutions for 2010, I’d like to offer some practical advice on goal setting and, more importantly, goal achievement.

Whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’ll need three basic things to succeed. Firstly, of course, you need to know what you’re trying to do. This is where all that “SMART” stuff comes in handy – you need to make the goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. The more you can phrase your goal using these guidelines, the clearer the goal is likely to be and clarity helps you both achieve and monitor achievement.

Secondly, you need to know how to do it. There are simple things you can do that dramatically increase your chances of success: breaking the goal down into smaller, interim, steps; telling other people what you’re trying to achieve; keeping a record of your progress. All these things will help keep you going, as will understanding that you will sometimes slip back into your old habits. It’s important not to beat yourself up for this; keep visualising the positive results that come from achieving your goal or keeping your resolution.

Often, we know what to do and we think we know how to do it although sometimes how we go about achieving our goals sabotages our attempts. That’s certainly the thrust of the research I quoted earlier. But those of you who have children – or who have ever been children – will recognise that there is a third, crucial element. You can know very clearly what to do; you can understand explicitly how to do it but if you don’t want to do it then nothing will happen.

I start my time management workshops off by asking people to list all the things they know about time management. They list the stuff you’d expect: keep lists, prioritise, say no, focus on important not urgent and so on. So I asked every group, “If you did these things, would they help you manage your time?” – they would all say yes. Then I would ask, “Do you do these things?” and they would all say no. Ultimately, they didn't do them because they didn't really want to.

People often talk about not being sufficiently motivated to do things and it’s true that motivation is important. But all too often, lack of motivation is just a code for a lack of discipline. Sometimes, the things we want to achieve are hard – they involve sacrifice or hard work. It’s at those times, the times when you don’t feel like it, when discipline – mind over mattress – is what you need. But ultimately, whatever goal you set for yourself, whatever your resolution, it has to be something that you actually want to achieve. Don’t set a goal because you think you should achieve it – spend your time, energy and effort achieving something you actually want.

Have a very happy, prosperous and peaceful New Year.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

What is it that makes a barrel? Is it the wood, the staves? The metal hoops? The shape? Of course, all of those things are vital but they are not what make a barrel. Interestingly, when you stop to think about it, the thing that actually makes a barrel is the thing that isn’t there – the void inside it. If the barrel wasn’t shaped to contain a void it would be useless; it wouldn’t be a barrel. Likewise, an empty barrel serves no purpose – it is just wood containing a space until you fill that space with something. Then it becomes useful and serves its purpose. The barrel itself, if it is constructed correctly and doesn’t leak, then becomes of secondary importance – what matters is what it contains.

What does all this have to do with training? Well, training is the equivalent of the wood and metal in the barrel; fitted together correctly they contain a void. In the same way that the usefulness of barrel is the void it contains, the usefulness of training and development are the void that they contain – the practical application of what delegates learn back at the workplace. Without that practical application, training workshops or programmes are like empty barrels – pretty to look at, perhaps, but serving no useful purpose and just taking up space.

So what makes training useful is the application. This is an interesting way of looking at the issue and should, perhaps, make those who commission training think more about the application of what delegates learn. However, if this is also the mindset of the development consultant, then it will drive a new set of behaviours.

Just as barrels have evolved into more elaborate and efficient packaging solutions, so too must training evolve. When development consultants are constructing their barrel, they should be thinking very carefully about the space they are seeking to contain and how best to surround that space to the greatest effect. In effect, thinking first about the application of the learning before constructing the workshop to teach that learning. Different shapes require different packages; different applications will require different methods. This focus on application should keep both consultant and commissioner focused on the real purpose of training – to use what you have learned. Sadly, too many training companies are fashioning beautiful and elaborate barrels which remain empty and, therefore, useless.

Learning to Lead

If you’ve ever spent time in a training room, you’ll have heard a trainer use the phrase “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.” I know it’s supposed to be supportive and encouraging but now and again I like to take it as a challenge and see if I can’t find some really stupid questions to ask. You know the sort – the kind of questions that five year olds ask and which parents find so difficult to answer: things like “why is the sky blue?” or “where does the sun go at night” or “is it actually possible to teach someone to be a leader?”

Many years ago, people who thought about this type of thing believed that leaders were born, not made. Leadership was a quality you were born with and the idea was known as the “great man” theory. The difficulty with this theory (leaving aside the obvious sexism) is that, followed to its natural conclusion, if you were born with this leadership quality you’d be a leader even if you never got out of bed. That led to a second series of ideas (known as behavioural theories) that involved what leaders actually did. Of course, anyone who’s been a leader knows that what you do usually depends on the circumstances, which led to a whole new set of ideas, known as contingency (or, “it depends”) theories.

Since the 1990s, leadership theory has fractured into a host of different schools: exchange and path led; charismatic and visionary; transformational; post-transformational, distributed and on and on. However, after people moved away from the “great man” theories, the idea that leadership could actually be taught was never much questioned: leadership was reduced to a series of tasks or activities, leading to the belief that leadership itself could be taught. But what if it can’t?

This is obviously a question that people in my position don’t really like to ask very often – after all, pretty much everything we do is predicated on the belief that it can. But I suspect that there is actually very little – including leadership – that can be taught. Instead, these things have to be learned.

That’s not just semantics. All learning involves change and psychologists say that in order to change, we need three things:

• understanding (knowing and appreciating the need to change);
• motivation (the desire to change);
• resources (the tools or environment to help them change).

As a trainer, I can only provide some of the resources and perhaps help with some of the understanding. The rest has to come from the individual. I was struck by this as I read a very interesting essay on leadership by Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento; their assertion is that the most important thing leaders can learn is not how to create a vision, or to communicate or how to build trust. Instead, the best thing that leaders can learn to do is learn. I think they’re onto something.

Mehrabian Madness and the Lazy Trainer

If I showed you a pie chart with three slices, labelled 55%, 38% and 7%, the chances are you’d tell me it had something to do with communication. If I pushed you a little bit harder, you might (as a group did recently) tell me it means that when we communicate, 55% of our message is transmitted by the way we look, 38% by the way we sound and 7% by the words we use. You may be nodding as you read this, congratulating yourself on knowing that little statistic.

But think about it for a moment: if that was actually true, what would be the point of subtitles in foreign films? You’d be able to get 93% of the movie just by looking and listening. And why would you bother learning another language? You’d be able to get the vast majority of your message across just by looking and sounding right. This interpretation is such staggering nonsense that I’m constantly amazed that intelligent people are prepared to believe it. Not that I blame them, you understand: I blame the lazy trainer that told them in the first place.

The statistic comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian. He found that when talking about attitudes and feelings, the speaker’s body language tended to count for more than the words used when there was incongruence between them (ie, the words said one thing but the body language said something else). The application of the findings to other areas of communication is, to say the least, disputed and even Mehrabian himself doubts that they’re valid when the topic under discussion is anything other than the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

So why is it that groups are still given a misleading (or, let’s be honest, a downright wrong) interpretation of the research? I’m afraid to say it’s because some trainers just don’t think about what they’re teaching groups and, for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I love my job and I take it seriously; without wanting to be precious about it, it’s a privilege to help people and make a difference in some small way. It frustrates me that some trainers seem to take their job so lightly as to repeat, parrot-fashion, such palpable rubbish – it’s their obligation to ensure that what they teach is correct. It’s vital that trainers engage with the material they teach and think deeply about it, at least as much as the delegates do, if not more. Anything less than that and they shouldn’t be doing the job.

Learning is a process

Clients often ask me about arranging a training event. It’s nice to be asked but I’m always slightly nervous; the language gives me a hint of potential problems later down the line because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of learning. An event, by definition, is a one-off, something different or out of the ordinary. Seminars, meetings, presentations are all events – discrete occurrences, usually used to communicate some kind of information; they stand alone, in isolation. Learning is different.

Learning – and, more importantly, the application of that learning – takes place as part of a process and it’s a respect for that process which is often lacking. The process begins with the delegate and their manager having an open and honest conversation about the need for learning. The delegate must be aware of why they’re attending the workshop and how it will help them to do their job better. This also requires that the manager consider carefully how the application of learning is intended to impact upon business results; if it does, measures should be put in place to record the return on investment of the training. If it doesn’t, the manager should think very carefully about the need for training. After the workshop, the manager must pay attention to the delegate’s attempts to apply their learning and support and encourage them as they do so.

In short, managers must be an integral part of the process of learning and organisations, if they truly want the people they train to apply what they’ve learned, must support this process. All of these aspects of the process must in place to give maximum support to the delegates in their learning and application. In the business environment, learning cannot afford to be an event – it has to be deeply embedded within the workplace and directly linked to the objectives of the individual, team and business. Seeing training or learning as an event is to isolate it – essentially, it is to tell the delegates that what they are learning is separate to what they do as part of their day job. And as soon as you give people that impression, you’re asking them to prioritise between what they learn on this event and what they do for a living. It’s no surprise, therefore, that training events tend not to produce any great or lasting change in behaviour. Consequently, nor is it any great surprise that when budgets tighten, the first things to get cut are budgets for training events.