Episode #40: Super Self Awareness

As professionals how do we grow in our business careers? Academic studies usually form the platform to which are added: 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 are the usual solutions. One of the issues with the training component is the effectiveness of what is being offered. The classic brand name University week long 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 mass corporate skill building. On-line video 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%. Just watching talking heads on a little screen, with a slide deck is pretty boring.

Classroom delivery led by instructors is still the main stay for corporate training. Sadly, it is predominantly ineffective. The team 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 consequent 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 venue 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 tales place. In Japan, there is usually no follow-up.

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

External trainers have to compete in a crowded mart. The barriers to entry, however, to set up your own training shop are basically zero. Anyone can emerge from the chrysalis, butterfly like and become a trainer at whim. For whatever reason, in Japan, there is a bias toward following the university model of instruction, which is to lecture. Consequently, the majority of trainer’s methodology is very much one-way traffic.

With the best 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 different approach. The “BE” focuses on who we are. This type of training aims at something much more ambitious than is usually offered - it shoots for emotional change in the participant. This is achieved by focusing on our self-awareness about the basis for our thinking, opinions, beliefs, emotions and insights.

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”. If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results.

Behaviour change is easy to say but the post training blues set in and the participants return to their workplace and go back to what they have always done. He reality is that, especially in Japan, there is no behavior change achieved.

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 – breaking out from the Comfort Zone. 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 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.

The “GET” are the results, influence, leadership, deeper relationships, higher engagement – the performance change. 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 is 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 elaborate skill levels, that few training organisations can understand, let alone aspire to.