By Peter Bregman
Published in Consulting Today, 1999
There are three common employee responses to training
programs - we label these responses the resistor, the scoffer, and the
enthusiast. The resistor, often a manager, protests that he is too busy
trying to manage crises and meet deadlines to miss time at the office
for a workshop. Trainers recognize resistors by their inability to pay
attention, their constant cell-phone breaks, and their obsessive creation
of to do lists (signifying everything they feel they should be doing instead
of sitting in the class).
The scoffer has the attitude that she has "Been there, done that." One
manager I know can recite a list of trainings her organization has embraced
and abandoned over the years. "We've done the Seven Habits, then it was
the One-Minute Manager, and oh yes, TQM, I sort of liked that one, but
it's out of fashion." Training for the scoffer is a treadmill of good
intentions and no follow-up. The scoffer has been burned before, so she
is not going to get excited about a new way of doing things again. She
can be recognized by her cynical questions, refusal to take notes, and
never ending stream of anecdotes demonstrating why this new technique
is either obvious or ineffective.
The enthusiast is eager and excited to learn and grow. He may sense a
personal need for the particular training, trust that the trainer has
the ability to help him, or simply be a workshop virgin who hasn't been
burned yet by post-training let-down.
How many times have you seen an enthusiast leave a training program excited
to change or improve the way he does something -- only to notice a month
later that he continued in his old routines? When the pressure is on,
people revert to their comfort zones - to their old habits. Outside the
supportive and focused setting of a training program, people forget to
apply their new skills. It is disheartening to watch a well-designed program
fail because people don't have the capability or support to follow it.
It's enough to turn this year's eager participants into next year's resisters
and scoffers.
Yet if we are to succeed in helping organizations change, we need to do
the opposite - transform resistors and scoffers into enthusiasts. If people
don't change, their organization definitely won't. Organizational change
is a lagging indicator of personal change. When enough people in an organization
do things differently in order to achieve a different result, the organization
changes. To really change, people need three things: knowledge of what
to do, desire to do it, and confidence that they can do it in increasingly
difficult and stressful situations. Organizations can and must help people
change by providing an environment in which all three are supported. Training
- the traditional engine of change - falls short because it addresses
knowledge, and if the organization is lucky, desire. Training cannot,
by definition, provide the experience of using a new skill in real life,
seeing it succeed or fail to some degree, assessing what to do differently
next time, and trying it again.
To help people change requires a new mindset and an expanded toolkit.
Each person must drive his or her own change. We need to follow up on
training in an on-going way so that people use new behaviors in real-life
situations. We need to reduce the time spent teaching and increase the
time spent applying.
Bregman Partners created a process that helps people grow and develop
while they do things differently, not before. It enables people to move
from Awareness of what needs to change, through Accountability to making
the change, to Action - actually acting in a new way. There are six stages:
Bregman Partners relies on corporate coaches to guide people through the above process. Coaches work with individuals, one-on-one and at regular intervals, to support and drive development while the individuals do the work they need to do anyway. Work time becomes development time. If a person has been to a training program, her coach builds on that person's newfound awareness. Coaches provide accountability by helping people design concrete steps in a plan to implement the changes, to actually accomplish something in a new way. Once people begin to implement changes, coaches lead them to evaluate their progress so that every relevant incident, however successful, becomes a learning opportunity. The cycle continues until the improvements are second nature.
This method directly responds to the charge that consultants can't implement. Through coaching, the intervention is the implementation. Resistors have none of their time wasted. Scoffers work hand in hand with a coach through the obstacles to implementation. Enthusiasts remain so.
Coaching works because people learn by doing what they would have done any way - just smarter, faster, better, and with support and feedback. They master new skills by applying them in increasingly challenging circumstances. When they try to apply them and fail, or when they fall back on ingrained habits in the heat of the moment, they tend to lose the motivation to continue the change process. After all, isn't the old way always faster and easier, at least at first? A coach will bolster their resolve and help them use their mistakes as opportunities for continuous learning. Coaches won't let people go back to the old way.
Executive coaches are now a staple of the business world. A large-scale coaching initiative (either in conjunction with or as an alternative to training) is an organizational change tool that, unlike most interventions, actually works during implementation because it is implementation. The coaching is integrated into the employee's current work. No time wasted sitting in class. We estimate that one hour of coaching creates as much productivity as six hours on the job.
Initially, less expensive training programs seem to be a good solution for change. But after a cost-benefit analysis, they become much more expensive in the long run. Using coaching as ongoing support during application of new skills makes the difference between a change idea and a change implementation; between a resistor or scoffer and an enthusiast.
For more information on these and other topics, call Bregman Partners, Inc., at (917)-747-4975, or email us.
