Episode #82: BE, DO, GET

As professionals how do we grow in our business careers? Academic studies usually form the platform to which we add: on the job experience; books, articles, blogs and websites; mentors showing us the short cuts; cleverer colleagues providing insights and continuing professional development through training. One of the issues with the training component is the effectiveness of what is being offered. The classic brand name University residencies for executives are limited to the chosen few. What about the majority of our teams – how can we get liftoff across the whole organisation?

In-house training, either delivered internally or externally and attendance at publically offered training, as well as on-line training, are the main provenance of corporate skill building. On-line training is relatively inexpensive, easily accessible and in most cases rather passive in its approach. The completion rates for this format are also extremely low, at around 10%, for self-directed learning.

Classroom delivery led by instructors is still the main stay for corporate training. Sadly, it is predominantly ineffective. Our teams are sent off to training, HR ticks the job well done “completed” box and we all move on. What has been retained from the training? Even more importantly, what has been implemented after the training? What are the subsequent performance outcomes from the injection of training? John Wanamaker was famously quoted as saying half of his advertising spend was wasted but he didn’t know which half. For training if it was only 50%, we should be popping the corks and celebrating.

In most cases, training fails at three points. The pre-training briefing between supervisor and staff is a key intervention to set up the learning experience. In Japan this hardly ever occurs, so staff turn up at training venues either bewildered or skeptical, or both. The second breakdown point is the delivery in the training room by the instructor. I will elaborate on the sins of instructors in a moment. The post-training follow up is the third area, where refresh and reinforcement takes place. In Japan, there is usually no follow-up.

Instructors in Japan are often not highly skilled. The company’s own internal instructors are usually the worst, because they are not given much opportunity to further develop themselves. They operate in a vacuum and the train-the-trainer experience, which supposedly sets them up as professionals, is often a thin and weak gruel. They have a captive audience, the price is usually zero and so they do not have to face the rigours of the marketplace. Internal politics within the organization is often the biggest factor in determining their career progression.

External trainers operate in a crowded, competitive mart. The barriers to entry, however, to set up your own training shop are basically almost non-existent. Anyone can emerge from the chrysalis, butterfly like, and become a trainer at whim. In Japan, there is a trainer bias toward following the university model of instruction, which is to lecture. Consequently, the usual Japanese local domestic trainer methodology is very much one-way traffic - I talk, you listen.

In our modern internet-driven world, access to information is a given and the lecture driven format is basically bankrupt. Overseas Universities are finally working this out for themselves and changing how they deliver their classes. Japanese Government bureaucrats will probably catch up with this need for varsity revision sometime in 22AD, but business can’t wait that long. Some more advanced local instructors may have worked out that there is this thing called two-way traffic and may be inviting the classroom participants to discuss ideas in small groups and may be even share those ideas with the whole group. Wow…. breathtaking innovations!

With the most wonderful intentions in the world, they are doing their best but honestly, in this age, it is just not good enough. The BE + DO = GET formula takes a more sophisticated approach. The “BE” part focuses on who we are. This type of training aims at something much more ambitious than what is usually offered.

Here we shoot for emotional change in the participant. This is achieved by introspection about our self-awareness around the basis for our thinking, opinions, beliefs, emotions and insights. The instructor’s skill level must be very high to foster participant self-discovery, such that they really own the breakthroughs they achieve. Lecture is easy, but this level of depth is seriously hard work and that partly explains why most trainers can’t do it.

A further level of sophistication is achieved when we start linking the “BE” to our Vision. I know, alarm bells go off when we start throwing around a word like Vision. It was all the rage in the late 20th century, such that it was substantially oversold, dissolving into a cliché almost. In our “BE” context, Vision simply means having a view into the possible better you, a state achieved at a point in the not too distant future. The harnessing of dual introspection around where we want to be and who we really are, is a powerful formula for creating the desire to move forward with our careers.

Once we have established that chemical change in the brain, through our emotional commitment to doing something new or different, we can move to “DO”. The object here is to engender behavior change in the “what we do”. Obviously, if we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results. Einstein noted that doing the same thing every time and expecting a different outcome, was the definition of insanity. If he were around, I am sure Einstein would judge many organisation’s HR directed training decisions as insane!

Achieving “behaviour change” is easy to say, but the post training “blues” set in and the participants return to their workplaces, going straight back to what they have always done. The reality is that, especially in Japan, there is very little post training behavior change achieved. We might ask, well then, what was the point of the training, apart from ticking the “completed” box for HR?

The reason there is no or little transmission of the new insights into application is because the training did not address the tactical nuclear weapon in the room – getting the participants to break out from their Comfort Zones. We are in our Comfort Zones because we have eliminated risk, by not doing anything innovative or new. Consequently, if all we are receiving is the download of data and information, then typically, it sails through one ear and rapidly out the other. The insight application stickiness is not there.

The course design and the delivery need to have the ability to lift participants out of their Comfort Zone and give them the wherewithal to change their actions, interactions, communication and behavior to something more effective. Take a good look at how the training is being delivered – once you understand the seriousness of this Comfort Zone issue, you will be severely dissatisfied with what is currently being rolling out.

The “GET” are things like the results, influence, leadership, deeper relationships, higher engagement – the “performance change”. Importantly, taking the knowledge out of our head and getting it into our bodies through practice and repetition, is the key to installing better and permanent methodologies in our teams. Lecture and data dump, can’t deliver these outcomes.

The very concept of BE, DO, GET is relatively unknown in a Japan awash in pontification and lecture. Knowing the concept is only the starting point though. The skill of the instructor to create these “emotional changes” through leading the participants to higher self-awareness and then to drive the implementation of the new insights, requires advanced skill levels, that few training organisations can understand, let alone aspire to.