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.

Unaccustomed as I am...

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been flying to and from Scotland, increasing the size of my carbon footprint so I could talk to people about communicating the importance of sustainable lifestyles. It’s been an interesting project and they’ve all been really great groups to work with. Plus, there’s been the added bonus of hanging around university campuses, where the energy and enthusiasm of the students has just been infectious.

A couple of key bits of feedback kept coming up as I was watching the presentations delegates were making and so I thought I’d share them with you. Bear these points in mind, next time you have to talk to a group of people:

Know what you’re trying to achieve

Surprising, but often the speakers didn’t really know why they were talking to the group – they hadn’t worked out, in their minds, what the purpose of their presentation was. Getting this clear in your mind guides everything else in the presentation. Think carefully about what you want your audience to do, know and feel at the end of your talk and then gear your talk to these objectives.

Use signposting and headings

Talking to a group is like giving someone a huge block of text to read, with no paragraphs, no spacing and no headings. Pretty soon, readers get bored and switch off – the same is true of your audience if you don’t structure your talk. The old cliché with speakers is to use the three Ts – first, tell your audience what you’re going to tell them; secondly, tell them what you want to tell them; thirdly, tell them what you just told them. Audiences drift in and out and if you say something only once, there’s no guarantee that people will hear it. If it’s a particularly important point and you want the group to remember it, don’t be afraid to signpost it for your listeners and tell them that it’s an important point.

Know your “in” and your “out”

To be fair to them, most of the speakers I saw knew their “in” – that is, they knew how they were going to start their presentation. If you can find a way of doing this that’s funny, attention grabbing and memorable, so much the better. However, very few speakers knew their “out” – that is, what to do at the other end of the talk. So instead of ending, the talk/presentation just “fizzled out” and left the audience with a negative impression. As part of your planning, know what your concluding point is and end your talk with something other than “and, er, that’s it...”

If you Google “top ten fears” you’ll find that public speaking features in most, if not all, of the lists. There’s no question that most people find speaking to groups to be a very painful experience; with a few simple techniques, it doesn’t have to be a painful experience for your group, too.

How do you treat your waiter?

One of the great things about this job is that I get to meet and work with lots of people – I must have met and trained thousands – and a couple of workshops over the last couple of weeks have reminded me of the best and the worst aspects of working with people.

The measure of someone’s character is how they treat people they don’t “have” to be polite to. Watching the way someone speaks to a waiter or a cleaner can give you quite an insight into the way they think. Those who speak pleasantly to them tend to be good people; those who are rude and dismissive tend to have a fixed hierarchy in their minds and the way they behave will depend on where others fit into that hierarchy – nice to the people above, nasty to the people below. This isn’t a class thing and I don’t mean to be condescending by mentioning waiters and cleaners because I include trainers/facilitators in that group, too.

Most delegates understand I have a job to do and they cheerfully co-operate. A significant minority really throw themselves into the workshop and everyone in the group benefits from their attitude. They’re the people who make my job an absolute pleasure – they ask questions, they contribute examples, they engage with the material. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of groups from one particular organisation who have all been like that – I was genuinely sorry to leave because we’d had so much fun together. They were brilliant and I wish I could name the organisation because they’re clearly doing a wonderful job.

A minority of delegates, however, take a different approach and I had one of those groups recently, too, from a different organisation. They thought it was okay to be rude, arrogant and obnoxious. They didn’t want to be in the room and weren’t shy about showing it; for some reason, they thought I was responsible for forcing them to be on the workshop and so took it out on me, in the same way that some diners take out their frustration with their food on waiters.

I’m not complaining about delegates; that would be like a sailor complaining about the sea. Someone told me, early in my training career, that my two duties were to love my delegates and to serve the course objectives and I’ve tried to stick to that. I love meeting people in this way and, as I said, the vast majority are lovely.

When I was a teenager, I went on a school trip to the local theatre to see a production of King Lear. Being teenagers, we were undisciplined and noisy and at one point, the actors onstage stopped the performance and addressed us directly, basically asking us to shut up or leave. That was thirty years ago and I’ve never forgotten the shock of realising that the theatre wasn’t like TV – the actors were real people who could see and hear me and who had feelings about what I did. It’s the same with some delegates; I’m sure they think that we can’t see them reading newspapers, checking emails or sending texts, yawning, looking out the window or picking their nose at the back of the room (yes, honestly).

So the next time you’re on a course or a workshop, spare a thought for the man or woman at the front. If you don’t want to be there, take some responsibility and do something about it but remember: we’re not the ones forcing you to be there and we have feelings too. You don’t have to be pleasant to us and it says something quite fundamental about you if you’re not.

Training isn't working - part three

Having spent the last couple of weeks trying to convince you that training doesn’t work, this week it’s time to turn our attention to the things you can do to make sure that it does. The good news, with which I teased you last week, is that there are some relatively simple things you can do to greatly improve the chances of seeing real, on-the-job application of the things delegates learn on workshops.

This diagram shows how training and development should work, at an organisational level. It starts on the left, with the identification of a business need. What is it that the company or team needs to achieve? What is the goal the individual is working towards? What, in other words, is the purpose of the training – what is it designed to achieve and how does this help the individual, the team or the company?

Moving into the middle box, in order to achieve this goal, the company, team or individual needs to start doing something – it’s only natural to assume that, in order to achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, someone somewhere needs to start doing something they’ve never done before. What is that “something”?

This then drives the right-hand box; to do this “something”, what kind of training do people need. This is when the training intervention can be put together – safe in the knowledge that the workshop (or whatever it is) is designed specifically to achieve business-relevant results.

The picture shows a shaded area around the behaviour box – this is the environment within which the delegates will be trying to apply what they’ve learned. That environment can be destructive and unhelpful, as we’ve covered previously, or it can be supportive and helpful. If you’re a manager, you can make all the difference.

Talk to your people before they go on the workshop. Ask them questions like:

• As a result of this training, what will you do differently?
• When will I see you doing it?
• What help do you need to put what you’ve learned into practice?

Keep in touch with them and use the trainer that you hire – any good trainer worth his or her salt with provide after-workshop support of some kind, so make sure you or the delegates make the most of it. What goes on at work, the messages you give to the people who’ve been on training, the support you offer, the encouragement you give, will make all the difference. And, of course, I’m honour bound to point out that if you want to make big changes – get inspired!

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.

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.

Killing the goose

You've probably heard Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden egg: a poor farmer finds that his goose lays solid gold eggs, producing a new gold egg every day. The farmer becomes very rich but also very greedy and decides that he doesn't want to wait for an egg a day - he wants all of the eggs, right now. So he takes an axe, lops off the goose's head, reaches down its neck to get the eggs and finds... nothing but goose guts! Next day, what does he find next to the goose? Nothing: the farmer has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I've told that story to hundreds of people and we can all chuckle at the farmer's greed and stupidity. When I ask people what they would do if they were the farmer, they say they would take care of it, on the basis that if they take care of it, it will continue to produce the eggs. We can see the stupidity of doing anything else - like, for instance, treating it badly or not feeding it enough. Yet businesses all over the country are in danger of doing just that – they're actively considering trying to kill, or at least injure, the goose that lays their golden eggs. Why is this so?

The primary "goose" for all businesses is its employees. Without employees, businesses cannot produce their golden eggs – their products, their services, their profits. It's easy to forget, when looking at spreadsheet and company accounts, that employees are people. So often, businesses trumpet the line that people are their greatest asset but where, in their accounts, are employees listed? In the liabilities column - assets are things like plant, machinery, buildings. While they say people are their greatest asset, they treat them as a liability, as their biggest cost and costs are there to be cut.

Employees, like the goose in Aesop’s fable, need looking after in order to perform at their best. This includes ongoing investment in them as people, providing them with ongoing training and development, and a sense that the company sees a long-term future with them. When businesses face tough times, such as now, it's only natural that they look for opportunities to reduce their spend and save money in some way. While no one knows when the current credit crunch will end, everyone knows one thing - it will eventually end. The question for businesses is what shape they will be in when it does. Treating your employees as expendable things – opportunities to cut costs, luxuries to have only when you can afford them – won't help them compete in a global market; it won't help them give of their best to your business.

If you treat people as expendable things, they will inevitably withdraw their commitment, passion and enthusiasm. After all – don't you do the same when you're treated like a thing and not like a human being? They might do what you tell them but will they do it well? Will they do just what you tell them and nothing more? Will they effectively retire on the job, each day doing as little as possible just to get through another day? And in order to compete with and beat your competition, don't you need them to be volunteering their best efforts, their commitment, passion and enthusiasm?

There's no doubt that the current economic climate is tough, but ultimately it is a short-term situation. Taking a short-term view in your approach to it might give you short-term benefits but won't pay off longer term. Smart farmers know that starving your goose might save you money in the short term but it won't help you get more golden eggs in the long term.

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.

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.