There is a corporate belief that a formal class on a subject is the best way to improve employee performance. Donald Clark, elearning speaker, blogger, and entrepreneur, writes:
How many training departments have an informal training strategy? Very few, despite the evidence that the majority of what we learn is not through courses, but informally from our colleagues and other sources. Almost all of the budget, in many cases almost every last penny, is spent on formal courses, despite the known fact that the majority of our learning is informal.
Informal teaching and self-directed learning are the clear trends in business toward best practices – meaning most effective approaches – and yet I believe we are unlikely to see this trend adopted by established institutions any time soon. Why not? There are naturally many causes, including an entrenched and lucrative training market, and a lack of good institutional examples (beginning in grade school), but I suggest that the most subtle and controlling cause is corporate fear that an informally educated and self-taught employee might threaten the company by challenging, questioning, and changing how things are done.
There may be some validity to that fear; open and self-directed learning is often dangerous to an institution. But the corporation that attempts to limit employee learning to what is narrowly relevant will lose – or fail to create – employees who can look farther and perform past current boundaries.
The institutional costs of an employee who does not fit into the box is more obvious than the costs to the institution of having all employees fit in the same box. The latter cost is usually much higher, but takes place much more quietly and over a longer span of time. It is often hard for an institution to perceive its own best interests when it is more a collection of traditions and processes than a collection of observant people. And so formal training persists and informal training is neither taught nor modeled.
In my view informal training is got nothing to do with a company actually. Without any planning and any strategy how can anybody make it a success. So formal training will give better results than informal. And what you have discussed above is absolutely true.
Interesting. One of my primary responsibilities has been mentoring/coaching/on-the-spot-correction. But I have never seen anyone suggest that a formal strategy be created around the idea. One of the big differences is that it is very hard to teach creativity in a formal setting. With the chaos of real life there are far more opportunities to model (not always time to teach in a crisis) how to create new solutions.
Interesting to think how a strategy could be formally adopted and spelled out that would satisfy the needs of a liability-fearful management; promote creativity; and not stifle the people doing the teaching.
Much to ruminate on here. Thank you.
I enjoyed the post as well. If I look at the “company” or “institution” as myself, I realize how unsettling out-of-the-box ideas can be. I think it’s why there are so many self-help books out there. The same fears a company has are the same fears I have when I look to make changes. When I am faced with doing something new or better, it brings up the fear that what I was doing was not the best I could do. It’s easier to go with what we know.
jhonyparker, informal training crosses from business to education in many ways. For example, one of the most powerful ways to help a child learn a subject is to have them teach another child, but few institutions allow let alone support this. Indeed, I have seen it actively discouraged with corrections such as “eyes on your own work!”. The problem with corporations is less that formal programs can be measured better than informal ones – because informal teaching/mentoring programs can also be measured – but that most corporations don’t see the value in training their employees to be better at informal training. I believe this results in many lost opportunities for both the corporations and the people they employ.
Rory, why not have a formal strategy for teaching informal mentoring/coaching? It is entirely possible to teach mentors and coaches who do on-the-spot correction to be more effective. At very least, we can do what you yourself mention: model the behavior. We can say: “Rory will be your coach out there from time to time. That is, he’ll be watching you to see if he can — on-the-spot or later — give you advice on doing what you do so you can do it better. Some day, you’ll be called on to do the same thing, to teach someone else, so you might want to watch how he does it.” That is teaching, too.
Ben, well and succinctly put. On the one hand we talk about constant improvement but on the other is the fear you point out, that if we do something new and it works better, we might have previously been less than perfect and not doing the best possible job. This fear is powerful and pervasive and not particularly conscious, and I think it often stops us hard. In corporations there is the added and intense pressure of performance-based compensation; if our performance improves today, what does that say about yesterday? It is indeed easier to go with what we know and what has been shown to work, however it might yet be improved upon. Thank you for this insightful comment.