In my last post, I described an approach to talent development that’s been proven not to work: fire-hose training where an expert swoops in, tries to stuff people’s minds with knowledge for a day or two, and then moves on.
Perhaps you’ve been a victim of such training yourself. So if it doesn’t work, why do organizations keep inflicting it on people? Well, let me tell you a true story.
“The deal is off!”
That’s the message we got from a training director who was about to purchase our online sales training platform. It was a shocker because the day before, we’d conducted a live session showing 20 sales managers how to use the platform as a coaching tool. The training director told us the feedback was fantastic. The participants loved it. The next day they killed the deal.
What happened? One of the managers who’d attended was Sonny, the son of the CEO. After the session he had dinner with his dad and said something like this: “We’re sales managers and they’re trying to turn us into trainers. Let’s just hire a professional trainer to teach our reps for a couple days and then we can all get back to selling.”
Dad agreed. Deal dead. Training director furious —not only because he’d been overruled, but because he was being forced to execute a strategy that was doomed to fail.
It would be easy to dismiss Sonny’s behavior as an example of staggering ignorance. But that’s too easy. Sonny is probably an earnest manager. He faced a complex challenge that everyone who leads people struggles with: What’s the best way to train and develop the people who work for me? And what’s my role in that process?
A couple thoughts:
- Sonny made the wrong decision for the reasons I outlined in my earlier post. Fire-hose training with no follow-up is a waste of money.
- If you want to succeed as a leader, you need to develop a core competency as a talent developer. You likely got promoted because you excel at a technical skill – you’re a good salesperson, engineer, accountant or programmer. In your leadership role, you’re expected to replicate in others the knowledge, skills and attitudes that made you successful, to become what leadership expert Liz Wiseman calls a “multiplier.” If you can’t do that – if you’re a sales manager who has to intervene and save every sale, or an editor who has to rewrite everyone’s copy – you’re a skilled technician but a failed leader.
So why did Sonny do what he did? The answer is simple: Because when he confronted what it actually meant to develop people the right way, he realized it would be time consuming and take him and his managers out of their comfort zone. It hit him like a ton of bricks that developing people was going to be hard, and he wanted no part of it.
Sonny is the norm, not the exception. My company surveys learning professionals regularly and their biggest frustration is trying to get managers more involved with talent development. Like Sonny, most managers fail to become effective talent developers. Too often, they opt for the efficient but ineffective solution; they outsource this critical aspect of their job to the training department or a consultant.
So here’s the question: How can organizations make training and development easier for managers to do? Let me offer a possible solution – an approach to technology-enabled training called “single-concept learning.” The idea is to break learning up into narrowly defined topics – we call them “thin slices” – and have managers use short, online videos to teach people one concept, designed to drive one behavior change and achieve one desired result. On a continuum, this is as far from multi-concept “fire-hose training” as you can get.
In the corporate training field today there’s tremendous buzz about how “bite-size learning” is ideal for today’s short-attention-span workforce. Books like Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” have convinced many learning professionals that today’s learners want content in short, disjointed bursts that can be accessed online 24/7.
The Khan Academy is a great example. Salman Khan got started teaching math into two- to four- minute chunks. Then he expanded the idea into other fields of learning. Even when teaching non-linear topics such as art history, he invites you on a five-minute learning journey about a single concept, such as “making Greek vases” or “the art of gem carving.” To modern learners watching a video on a computer, tablet or smartphone, this approach is an irresistible alternative to the linear, logical, complete learning model we all grew up with. In his book, “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined,” Khan lays out a convincing argument for his revolutionary learning model.
If that approach works in the educational field, it’s even more applicable to the workplace. Most discussion has been about how “less-is-more” benefits adult learners. But we need to talk more about how single-concept learning can help us frame talent development in a new way for managers – repackage the challenge, if you will – and make it seem easier to do. If you’re a sales manager, for example, the idea of teaching sales reps “to sell” is overwhelming. But coaching an individual rep who’s struggling with “how to handle the first 20 seconds of a cold call,” seems doable. The idea of training supervisors “to lead” seems onerous, but coaching a manager to handle an employee with a bad attitude likewise seems doable.
From the standpoint of perception, the distinction between “training” and “coaching” is essential. For managers, “training” is something someone else does. It’s about assessing needs, building curricula, delivering formal training events and following up. It’s way outside most managers’ comfort zone. “Coaching” isn’t. It’s informal and opportunistic – when managers see someone struggling with a specific problem, they intervene and help the person work through it.
Does that take time? Sure, but when managers perceive their training and development role through the lens of “single-concept learning,” and when they see they can make a difference in 10- to 15-minute coaching interventions, they’re far more likely to embrace it, and eventually build a core competency as talent developers.
So you’re a CEO or other C-level executive at a company and you believe developing your people is important – not just urgent hard-skills training but non-urgent soft-skills training as well. Training and development is an investment and you want an ROI. The easy path – fire-hose training events – won’t get you there. You’ll only get a payoff if managers actually become “multipliers.” The secret is to package that challenge in a way that seems easy to do, not hard to do. The single-concept-learning model can help.
By the way, in that session Sonny attended, we failed to make coaching seem easy enough. We’re working on that. And you should be, too.
