Unlocking knowledge is not the same as handing it to someone.
Unlocking knowledge is not the same because it works.
Handing knowledge to someone doesn’t work.
You know this because you a teenager once, and advice you readily accept today—now that you unlocked why it’s important for yourself—sounded downright asinine to you back then when your parents tried giving it to you.
Unfortunately for people who work, “telling people something” is a measurable event, whereas “unlocking knowledge” is not. So when it comes to professional development, companies emphasize “telling people things,” which they dub “training,” and which doesn’t work.
Which is why corporate training programs are so aggravating to so many managers: managers need people with actual knowledge. They need their people taught. But what their companies deliver are often vapid (but measurable!) training events where people sit at computers or in classrooms and get told stuff.
(If the program is fancy, the person gets told knowledge through a multi-modal format that includes visual, aural, and written formats. Because you know, getting lectured at is really more effective when the lecture is interrupted six different times with a variety of colorful multiple choice questions!)
For the 10 years I’ve been doing training and teaching of one form or another, I’ve tried to hold this question in my head: Am I here to train? Or am I here to teach?
When I’m in front of a group, that question keeps me attuned to those subtle clues that let me know if people are engaged… or not. When the clues signal that they’re not engaged, I adapt.
Let me repeat that:
I adapt.
Because if I don’t adapt and they stay disengaged, then I’m not teaching, I’m telling. I’m training. And training doesn’t work when it comes to professional development.
How good is your company at teaching? How about your mentor? And as a learner, how do you adjust so that you can glean as much as you can from suboptimal “professional training” events?
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I had a question come to me via Twitter: “Isn’t training teaching someone to do or improve a skill as apposed to just telling?”
Admittedly, I’d be playing a bit of a semantic game here with the words training and teaching if I addressed this question directly, so let me put it this way:
-When companies use the word “training,” on a practical level, they are using the term to mean one of two things: on the job training (aka learning by osmosis), or classroom training. I’m focused on the latter.
-You can’t learn leadership skills in a classroom any more than you can learn to swim in a classroom. But you can get good “smile sheet” ratings and you can measure the number of butts you have in seats, which makes classroom training look more appealing to a metrics-focused organization than more immersive programs that will have greater impact but that undoubtedly will receive more checkered feedback.
More on the problem with metrics here.
Bottom line: training works great if we’re talking about how to calculate a P/E ratio or some other skill the development of which is easy to validate. Not so much with leadership, communication, and career-development, though.