Often in my profession, the easy answer to the question “So, what do you do for a living?” is to say “I am a leadership/management trainer”. It’s easy, it’s lazy and it’s wrong!
Now there’s a pretty odd statement to make, so perhaps I ought to explain what I am thinking.
It’s easy, lazy and wrong because of the implications (linguistics wallahs would say “complex equivalences”) of several of the words in the sentence.
Let’s take it step by step:
- leadership/management – these are disciplines and I work with people, so in my slightly less lazy moments I say that “I train managers and leaders”
- trainer – well, I have argued that you cannot train anyone to do anything, all you can do is provide the environment in which it is easier for them to learn. You can’t even train a dog – all you do is let its brain associate rewards (or, if you are that way inclined) punishment with particular behaviours, it soon learns to behave in your (and so its’) preferred way. “I help managers and leaders to learn”
Now let’s go deeper:
Managers/leaders, at least the ones I work with, are functionally adults and how we go about helping them to learn is fundamentally important. School teachers learn about pedagogy. Now pedagogy generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction. The word is derived from the ancient Greek paidagogeo, literally ‘to lead the child’. In ancient Greece, the paidagogos was a slave who supervised the education of his master’s son. So pedagogy is about children and whether or not we accept that the child’s brain is a tabula rasa it’s certainly clear that they are very open to new experiences and ‘being told what to do and how to do it’.
Adults are different, we have created our own map of the world and constantly seek/notice reaffirmation of that map; we have our own value set (whether or not we are aware of them!) that drives our decisions; we are more aware of socio-cultural issues, etc. So why do so many organisations and individuals who take on adult learners treat them as children, not least by using pedagogical principles? Because they don’t know ay better!
Well, there is another approach to learning, specifically targetted at adults, usually labelled andragogy, that has a very different set of principles, most clearly expounded by Knowles.
Knowles’ theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning (thank you Wikipedia):
- Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know)
- Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation).
- Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept).
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives (Readiness).
- Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation).
- Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators (Motivation).
Now this is the world I like to inhabit. The one where participants volunteer themselves to a learning experience because they see the advantage for themselves, the one where there is immediate relevance between the learning environment and the day-job, the one where the learning becomes a collaborative and active process and the one where we all go away having learned something and get on applying that learning.
This is not about Powerpoint (although it has its place) or ‘sit attentively and listen to me the Expert (although that has its place) or even ‘this is how you do it’ (because their context is likely to be different. It’s about understanding their motivations, challenge, doing things, making mistakes, eliciting the application of the learning, having the participants co-design both content and process and much more.
…and we won’t even delve deeper into the “I am…” statement at the beginning of my original lazy and wrong statement, that issue of Identity is for another time.
So, next time I am asked, I will say that “I design and deliver/facilitate processes that help adults learn to become more effective”. That might get a question in response – just what good adult learning is about!
Well said Geoff! I think your initial ‘elevator pitch’ needs to intrigue people so they want to know more. I once told someone at a networking event I was a paranormal investigator (we’d been to 3 events that day and were bored) – his response….”Oh right, where are you based?”
So it’s not easy to get through, but it’s worth saying something that piques interest and leads to an exploratory question.
My business card describes me as a Catalyst.
It’s a not strictly accurate throwback to my days as an analytical chemist – a catalyst if there to help/accelerate a chemical process, so by analogy I help others to change/grow/learn more effectively, more quickly. Where the analogy breaks down is that a chemical catalyst emerges unchanged, whereas I generally emerge form an intervention having learned something myself. Indeed, a good question to any trainer/learning facilitator might be “What did you learn as a consequence of the last intervention you made?”