Episode #29: You Need To Be Be More Self Aware

If we want to improve we need to change. We can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and expect an improved outcome. Einstein defined that as “crazy”. This means we have to institute some behaviour change. Not easy. If it was easy, none of us would be overweight. We would all be able to simply alter our lifestyles and become more healthy. We have to change our thinking about the results we want and how we can achieve them.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately. Japan’s sogo shosha or big trading houses are enjoying their best profits in six years. They are scouting out investments to employ those profits. They have over 50 billion US dollar or 5.3billion yen to unleash on global commodity supply chain networks, gas fields in Australia and oil in Iraq as well as copper and coal assets. What a lot of people don’t realize is that these trading companies are also big banks. They provide importers with long payment terms to fight off price competition. You might be a rival importer and your product may be better priced than what it sells for in Japan, but the trading companies can give buyers 120 days or more to pay. The item can be imported, clear customers, go into the distribution system and be sold before the trading house needs to get their money. If you are a domestic importer and trading house client, it is a no brainer. This is very hard to compere against when you are the little guy from overseas trying to break into the market here.

This is episode number 29 and we are talking about how to Be More Self Aware.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

As professionals, how do we grow in our business careers? Academic studies at varsity usually form the platform to which are added other things. 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 additional learning 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? We can’t ship everyone off to Harvard for a week. What can we do that is more realistic?

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 training is relatively inexpensive, easily accessible and in most cases rather passive in its approach. The completion rates for typical self-paced learning formats are also extremely low, at around 10%. It is just a bit dull really, so people drop out and lose interest.

Classroom delivery led by instructors is still the main stay for corporate training. Sadly, it is predominantly ineffective in Japan. The team are sent off to training, the HR team ticks the job well done “completed” box and everyone moves on. Well what has been retained from the training? Even more importantly, what has been implemented by the participants after the training? What are the consequent performance outcomes from the injection of the new skills picked up at the 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% that was being wasted, we would be popping the corks and celebrating.

In most cases corporate training for adults fails at three points. 1. The set-up. 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. We know because we get them in our classes all the time and they have no idea why they are there, because no one has briefed them. 2. Poor quality delivery. The second breakdown point is the delivery in the training room by the instructor. I will elaborate on the sins of most instructors in a moment. 3. The sustainment phase. The post-training follow up is the third area, where refresh and reinforcement tales place. In Japan, there is usually no follow-up. If anything was picked up from the training, it wasn’t properly reinforced and imbedded into the new way of doing things.

Training 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, tasteless and weak gruel on which to thrive. They can facilitate the training manual content, just. They have no idea how to get behavior change in the class participants and probably never will because they have never seen that done before.

They have a captive internal audience, so they do not have to face the rigours of the competition in the marketplace. They can be incredibly mediocre, but there is no comparison with real professionals, so the sham is allowed to continue. Japanese staff expectations of training are also abysmally low to start off with, so the expectation factor is already very, very low anyway. Internal politics within the organization are often the biggest factor in determining the trainer’s career progression.

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

In our modern internet driven world, access to information is a given and the lecture driven format is basically bankrupt. 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 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 thinking!

So can we do about fixing this broken model?

Let’s look at how we can get our training really working for us properly. With the best intentions in the world, these half baked trainers are doing their best, but honestly, in this day and age, it is just not good enough.

The BE + DO = GET formula takes a different approach. The “BE” focuses on who we are. We need to strip away all the layers we have built up to mask who we really are and face that reality. 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. Sounds easy but how many people do you know who you could describe as “self-aware”? The instructors skill level must be very high to foster participant self-discovery, so that they own the breakthroughs they achieve. Lecture by comparison is easy – this breakthrough achievement goal however is seriously hard work.

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”. We need to create new habits, fresh ways of working, more depth around our self-awareness about what is possible for us.

If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results. Einstein noted that doing this and expecting a different outcome, was the definition of insanity. Einstein would judge many organisation’s decisions about training as insane! They keep doing the same things hoping for improved outcomes.

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. What was the point of the training, apart from ticking the “completed” box back at HR? The improved outcomes don’t arrive. The improved skill sets don’t appear. The time and money have been spent with no results in evidence.

The reason there is no or little transmission of the new insights into work application is because the training did not address the tactical nuclear weapon in the room – individuals breaking out from their Comfort Zones. 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. Take a good look at how the training is being delivered – once you understand this Comfort Zone issue, you will be dissatisfied with what is rolling out. Sitting there and being spoken at by the instructor isn’t going to expand your Comfort Zone at all. Look at the training delivery very closely and ask yourself, where is the Comfort Zone expansion piece of this delivery?

The “GET” pieces of the puzzle 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 learning 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. That is why most training in Japan is totally ineffective and a waste of time. Sad really, but it doesn’t have to be like that.