There is a dark side of training.
A few years back there was an article in The Wall Street Journal about corporate training.
It said flat-out that training without follow-up coaching doesn’t work. It’s a waste of time and money.
In 2011, the last time data was gathered, American companies had spent a hundred and fifty six billion dollars on executive education and had little to show for it.
I’ve been an executive coach since 1989, and I know from my own experience that soft skills like public speaking, presenting and sales skills challenge us intellectually, emotionally, and even physically.
Developing new, more effective behaviors is really a mind-body activity. It takes time to implement and master new skills. But here’s the thing–when you’re working on soft skills, you can’t treat intelligent, sophisticated, highly educated people like animals.
But the word training implies that we do just that!
We train horses, dogs, monkeys and rats, but we don’t need to train people! We need to teach, instruct, educate, elevate, inspire, coach, motivate, engage and mentor.
Any one of those words is better than trainer!
What was hard for you to learn when you were a kid? Riding a bike? It took me weeks! It was a bruising and terrifying experience balancing on two wheels.
How about the first time skiing? That was just crazy! The frustration it takes to ski when you’re a young person–it took forever.
And what about giving a speech? I’m up all night in the office. I spend all weekend practicing over and over and over again until I can say it in my sleep.
It takes time to master these skills!
I am a speech coach. I am in the experience business. I strive to give my clients an experience of themselves that will blow their minds, and then I want them to turn around and blow the minds of their listeners.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize psychologist, says acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
That’s the kind of coach I want to be–the kind that does follow-up coaching…the kind who gets the job done.