The late Peter Drucker once commented, "I never predict. I simply
look out the window and see what is visible but not yet seen."
In the spirit of Peter's remark, Lisa Shannon - associate publisher
at Pfeiffer, a Wiley Imprint - and I sat down in the Wiley offices
in San Francisco and looked out the window at the world of training
and development. Here are some of the sights we seeand you may,
too.
- Practice, Practice, Practice. For the last couple
of years, I've been ranting about how talent is not the key to
unlocking excellence in leadershipor anything else for that
matter. What truly differentiates the expert performers from the
good performers is hours of practice. I first learned this from
Anders Ericsson, a Florida State University professor and a noted
authority on expertise. His research shows that it takes hard work
to become the best. It sure doesn't happen from a weekend course or
episodic participation in workshops. It has to be daily and
sustained. Research by my co-author Barry Posner and colleague
Lillas Brown supports this work. Popular authors, such as
Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell, are now writing and
speaking about this, too, and we expect to be hearing more about it
in the coming years. Training and development strategies will start
focusing more on what people must do on the job to practice their
new knowledge, skills, and abilities - much like what musicians and
athletes have to do - and not just on the methods and designs we
use in the classroom.
- Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. A piece of the
emphasis on deliberate practice is the growing demand for more
post-training follow-up. Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan wrote
in an article in Strategy+Business that "time and time
again, one variable emerged as central to the achievement of
positive long-term change: the participants' ongoing interaction
and follow-up with colleagues." The improvement in those who didn't
follow-up "barely exceeded random chance." The Fort Hill Company, a
New Jersey-based training and development company, makes learning
transfer the focus of its business because founder Cal Wick
discovered that only one in six participants actually put a program
into practice. Recent research by a doctoral student I work with
found that just telling people you were going to follow-up with
them three weeks after a class increased significantly the number
of actions students put into practice. This is not surprising or
news to anyone in training and development, but our sense is that
every development effort in the near future will have to include
plans for how coaches and facilitators are going to support
follow-up and implementation. Without those steps, it is going to
be hard to justify spending the money.
- Just-in-time learning and performance support. A
decade or so ago, there was a clear shift away from four- and
five-day training programs, to one- and two-day sessions. It's not
that shorter is better - see trend one above - but people are
feeling more and more squeezed for time and resources. The
recession has only made this more apparent. There's also a
recognition that classroom learning needs to be accompanied by
learning that is there when I need it - learning that helps me deal
with a real problem at the time I am experiencing it or prepares me
for something that I am going to be doing in the next hour or
couple of days. I need help designing a meeting I am going to
conduct, I need to rehearse for a presentation, and I need some
coaching around a performance review I'm going to be doing
tomorrow. Our learning needs are continuous and daily, and so
should be our learning opportunities. We all know that learning is
more likely to be useful and to stick when it is needed. We could
go off to a course and learn information well in advance of a
problem, but if the need isn't immediate, it's less likely to be
immediately applied. Look for more and more solutions to this
problem.
- Mobility. The good news is that new social media
technologies support this. Mobile devices such as the iPhone,
Droid, iPad, and other PDAs enable follow-up. You can tweet, text,
and email people wherever they are and check in to see how folks
are doing. You can send out notices about what other people are
doing, set up learning groups on Ning or LinkedIn, and create
conversation threads that continue learning anytime, anywhere.
Facebook and other social media sites are no longer just places for
friends to swap pictures and stories about their personal lives.
They are now serious venues for learning. While there is danger of
overload and distraction, training is now part of the digital age,
and we need to include mobile devices in our learning designs.
Mobility facilitates just-in-time learning and performance support,
and we envision a time when many inviting options will be just a
click away.
- Informal learning. Part of the growing awareness
that learning is something that should, and does, go on daily and
is not linked to events, is the understanding that we learn a lot
from the casual conversation, the brief encounter in the hallway,
and the face-to-face meeting with a colleague. Learning isn't about
events; it's about process. We need to find ways to enable learning
on the fly, and in informal ways. Again, social media supports
informal learning, and we need to find ways to take advantage of
their power to promote it. Perhaps the focus of training and
development should be as much about - and here we're reaching back
decades; what's old is new again - learning how to learn as it
should be about learning specific content.
These aren't all the sights out the window, and I'm hoping you'll
share yours. What do you see as trends in training and development?
What are the implications? What are you doing that to make them
more visible in your organization? I'm curious to know what you
see.
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Jim Kouzes is co-author of The Leadership
Challenge and The Truth About Leadership, which has more than
1.8 million copies sold. He's also the Dean's Executive Professor
of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara
University;jim@kouzes.com.