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.

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?

What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.

Training isn't working - post script

As regular readers will know, over the last few weeks the blog has been looking at why it seems that training doesn’t work and what you can do, as managers and the people commissioning training, to change that. This week, I’d like to return to the topic for last look and to share with you something that I found whilst researching the topic.

Let me being by asking you a question. If you were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness but could avoid it by changing your behaviour, would you change your behaviour? If you said something like “yes, of course” you’re like most other people that I’ve asked that question. And, like most other people, you’re probably wrong: the sad fact is, statistically, you’re highly unlikely to change your behaviour.

Think about it this way. Healthcare in the US costs around $1.8trillion a year – the overwhelming majority of that is spent on illnesses caused by five behavioural issues: too much smoking, too much drinking, too much eating, stress, and not enough exercise. All of those things can be prevented or avoided by behavioural changes – but aren’t.

The most shocking example of this that I found was a quote from Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world. He was talking about patients with heart disease so severe that they have to undergo surgery, a traumatic and very expensive operation that can cost more than $100,000. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. These operations temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives - about half the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this are complex. Sometimes it’s a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself but most patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery – not to mention stop a disease that could kill them – by adopting healthier lifestyles. But very few actually do.

Says Dr Miller, "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Change is not hard to do – change can happen in an instant. We can all change things – and things can change for us – in a heartbeat. But, in the words of the Japanese proverb with which I started this blog, nearly a year ago, beginning is easy, continuing is hard. Studies in the US find that what doctors often do is try to motivate people to change with fear – they confront their patients with the ultimatum, change or die. The surprising thing is that people get used to anything: even the fear of death as a motivator stops working as we get used to the idea that we’re going to die. Now, doctors are changing to a more positive message: change and live consistently proves to be more motivating. People can change – we just need a positive reason.

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.