Link: Management Craft: The Aim of Management Training.
Lisa Hanenberg has a leadership and management blog, Management Craft, that I like a lot. It's funny, true, insightful and practical. I especially resonated with this post (linked above) about why companies do management training. Lisa opines that companies tend to favor the least important of all the possible outcomes from management training, and the least useful competencies in management trainers.
I completely agree, and we (my colleagues at Proteus and I) have been working for many years to address this. Rather than just trying to teach a "canned" lesson, we develop management learning experiences that provide managers with a clear pathway: we focus on what management is, why it's important, and how to do it. Our goal is for participants to see what's in it for them to behave differently, to be personally motivated to do so - and then to teach them the skills required. We even have a name for this: we call it LearningPath. It's the basic premise behind my book, as well.
We also have an instructor quality framework that addresses the main deficiencies in most trainer development. As Lisa says, most companies look for "trainers who can present materials" -- an almost pure focus on content knowledge. And, as most of us know from our own school experience, a person's intellectual grasp of a body of knowledge is nearly irrelevant to his or her effectiveness as a teacher!
In contrast, our Proteus instructor development approach focuses on three core elements of the trainer's job, not just one: we focus on content knowledge, but perhaps even more important, we focus on process skills and mindset.
Process skill are the "how" of learning. For instance: Can the instructor listen? Is he or she capable of creating a conversation with the learners? Can the instructor demonstrate the skills being taught so the participants can see what they're trying to learn? Does he or she know how to troubleshoot when things in the classroom don't go as expected?
Mindset is what the instructor believes about learning. We've found this is often the most important element, in terms of impact on the learners' experience and their outcomes. For instance, does the instructor believe that she is the source of learning, or does she believe that learning happens within the learner and that her job is simply to help catalyze that learning? (We think the latter is a more useful mindset for a trainer.) Does the instructor believe that it's his responsiblity to convince the learners that what he's saying is true, or does he believe that all he can reasonably do is offer what he knows? (Again, the latter tends to create a much better learning dynamic -- have you ever been in a workshop where a trainer gets stuck on trying to talk somebody into "buying" what he's trying to "sell"? Yikes - no fun.)
When we work with trainers, we assess them in these three areas, help them assess themselves, and then we work with them to develop in the needed areas.
It makes me proud to be able to say: Lisa, we agree with the problem, and we're offering a solution!
