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TRAIN THE TRAINER
AL LOCK
A few days ago, I was in Asia Books looking at some of the new books that have come in and I noticed one called The Ten Laws of Leadership. I picked it up and looked through it. It seemed to have some good ideas, but I found myself not buying it because of the title and the blurb on the cover. Why? Because leadership is a very personal thing. What works for one person may not work for another. There aren't rules, there are results.
Over the years, I've noticed a lot of books that cater to a market that wants a quick fix, to know the secret to success or to change or to learning English or to making presentations. The secret is that there isn't a quick fix. Mastering a skill, changing behaviour, success in life, love or business all take long-term work in order to happen.
When I worked in the language-training business, there was a standing joke among the teachers that students were often looking for the teacher to have a magic wand. Wave the wand over the students' heads and "poof", they would be able to speak English. Of course, that isn't realistic. Learning a language for most people requires a lot of hard work by the student, and no magic from the teacher.
In the same way, building leaders is not subject to quick fixes, or magic creation. For someone to learn to be a leader takes time and experience. Each person who becomes a leader will find his or her own way, although they may have guidance from mentors, teachers, etc, and may adopt techniques from others.
Does that mean there is no value to the various books about leadership on the market? No, it does not. Although no book will make a leader, books can provide ideas that we incorporate in conjunction with our own experiences.
Does that mean there is no value to short-term training programmes? No, it does not. Seminars may expose people to ideas or knowledge that they then can apply in their own lives. The application will require long-term work, but the initial exposure can be done quickly. In addition, specific skills can be learned in a short-term training programme, but they will only be retained if the participant applies them consistently after the programme.
Let me give you an example that I have observed and know that it works. Presentation training is typically run from a workshop approach. If the training is conducted in an active training format (meaning that the participants give presentations, not just listen to someone tell them about giving presentations), the programme should result in visible improvement in every participant's skills, and with the participants having the ability to continue to improve through applying what they have learned and practising. If after the programme, the participant doesn't apply what he or she have learned, doesn't practice, the lessons learned in that short programme will quickly be forgotten.
When considering training programmes, it is important that the person responsible for the programme keep this in mind. It is a waste of training budget to train people in a skill that they won't have the opportunity to use after the training. They aren't going to retain the skills they learn. Of course, this is why the most successful programmes will have built-in post-programme tasks in order to make sure that such opportunities do exist.
It is also important to consider the training materials for the programme and how well they suit the participants. There is no quick fix here, either. Many times, I have seen training materials that were crammed full of things that were of no value to the participants in the programme. Business English books are often written by people who obviously have not worked in business recently. Team-building activity books may have a lot of good activities, but the activities should be taken as a starting point, modified to more closely match the goals of the programme ("team-building" being a very, very wide scope of activities).
A few months ago, I delivered a team-building training activity to a group of senior managers from a multinational company that needed them to work as a team, even when separated by significant distances. The activity we chose involved having the team split into two, on opposite sides of a wall. They could communicate only by written messages and had a budget split between them for the items they could purchase to assist them in getting a package from one team to the other. In addition, each part of the team had a portion of the budget, so its planning process had to take into account the real business concern of resource and budget management.
The original activity, as it might be found in a team-building activity book, did not include the communication by written messages (simulating e-mail) or budget portions, but we felt those additions were appropriate for this group of managers and helped to simulate the issues they face daily.
With training activities that are appropriately designed for specific goals, it is possible to get some good results out of short programmes. Even more can be accomplished with a series of short programmes that have pre-training and post-training tasks incorporated into the programme design. But first and foremost, the participants must take responsibility for their learning and be willing to make the commitment and effort needed to learn. There is no quick fix.
Do you have a training question or issue that you would like to see addressed here? Please e-mail me and I'll see what we can do.
Al Lock is the Business Development and Marketing Consultant for t+b solutions ltd. He can be contacted at al@tandbsolutions.com.
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