Education
We offer education, rather than training. Training is about telling people what to do. Education is about enabling people to learn and develop - in their way.
Improving management skills in your organisations:
- increases productivity
- reduces cost and increases sales = increased profits
- encourages more motivated staff and reduces attrition
- creates a happier working environment
- empowers your staff to make better and faster decisions
- helps build supportive communicative relationships from ‘top to bottom’
- leads to better customer service
- accelerates growth
- ensures greater flexibility and ability to cope with change
Management education is ever more vital and ever more expensive, in money terms but more importantly in time. The attempts made by e-learning to plug this gap have been unsuccessful, primarily because such e-learning is still little more than programmed learning. As such, it appeals to and works with a small percentage of the target population. Thus, The Working Manager was set up to be 'NOT e-learning'.
Blended learning
As far as blended learning goes, the differences between The Working Manager and the old traditional e-learning are that we are flexible (to meet a learner’s preferences and a trainer’s content needs), fast (because we do not spend time creating expensive and wasteful programmed texts) and motivational (because participants can complete the pre-work in their own way.)
Programmed learning
The early claims for e-learning - that it can replace the human trainer - have long since been abandoned. Traditional e-learning is not a lot different from the old programmed learning, first available in book form and later on cd-rom. Programmed learning has a basic form. It presents learning in tiny chunks, tests for acquisition of one chunk and then moves on the next. Typically, a ‘fact’ is presented and then the reader is asked to select from alternative statements about the ‘fact’. The correct answer is ‘rewarded’ and the reader proceeds onward. An incorrect answer results in an explanation and a representation of the alternatives.
The problem with such programmed learning is that it bores most people within a few minutes. Why? Because only about 20% of people learn in this ‘serial’ manner. The rest find it dull, slow and often intellectually patronising. They give up fairly quickly.
We have known for many years now that people learn in different ways - that they have different learning strategies and preferences. Traditional e-learning satisfies only one set of learning strategies and this set is preferred by only about 20% of the population.
The main value of trainers
Trainers spend some 60% of their time in face-to-face training, transmitting knowledge. This is neither an effective use of their time, nor the trainer’s main value. In fact, we know that ‘lecturing’ - which still forms part of most face-to-face training - has fairly minimal results. Research indicates a rule of thumb that 6 weeks after a lecture, the audience remembers 6% of what was said.
The major value of trainers lies in their facilitation of a learning group when it comes to knowledge transfer, is in enabling people to discuss a ‘fact’, understand it, ask questions, disagree and explore the subject. More than this, the value of the human trainer lies in managing practice and giving one-to-one feedback. Traditional e-learning is very poor at this. In fact, such feedback is impossible for traditional e-learning and thus it cannot replace the trainer.
Combining the two
Blended learning is therefore an attempt to combine the claimed strengths of e-learning and the human trainer and overcome the weaknesses of both.
|
Strengths |
Weaknesses |
|
|
Trainer |
Feedback, facilitation |
Knowledge delivery |
|
E-learning |
Knowledge delivery |
Feedback, facilitation |
The aim is for knowledge to be pre-delivered by e-learning so that the trainer can spend his or her (limited) time on the inter-personal aspects of their role. If it works, then 60% of the trainer’s time is either saved or used for more in-depth feedback and facilitation. Indeed, studies we have carried out for clients indicate that blended learning can realise savings of between 30% and 50% of a company’s training costs. With all training budgets under pressure, this can make all the difference between delivering quality management training and not. But ...
Will it work?
While blended learning appears to overcome both its component’s individual weaknesses, the drawbacks to traditional e-learning remain and indeed others are created.
Traditional e-learning is still suitable for only 20% of the population so that 80% of a trainer’s target population will either resist doing the pre-work or do it poorly. Getting pre-work completion prior to a training programme is the trainer’s constant nightmare. This is usually because participants give themselves the excuse that ‘they do not have time’ but ...
... if 80% are actively put off by the nature of the pre-work, then the problem is massively compounded.
If pre-work is not completed properly, then the trainer is forced to supply the knowledge that the pre-work should have already delivered. This cannot work. Firstly, if the trainer is relying on pre-work having been completed, he or she is unlikely to be prepared to deliver a lecture and secondly, if the length of the programme is predicated on pre-work, there will be not time to both deliver the knowledge and fulfil the original objectives of the face-to-face training.
If the figures are correct, then only 1 in 5 participants will have found the pre-work (delivered by traditional e-learning) approachable and acceptable. Thus, 4 in 5 will have completed the pre-work either poorly or not at all. Moreover, there can be incipient ‘rebellion’ caused in some of the participants who will arrive at the programme in a poor frame of mind. (One must also remember that 1 in 5 will have completed the pre-work properly and thus will be bored by the trainer’s attempt to repeat the knowledge delivery.)
Essentially, boredom arises - caused both by the pre-work being unsuitable for most participants’ learning preferences and by some people having to sit through an unprepared lecture on what they know already. Instead of curing the trainer’s problems, blended learning based on traditional e-learning makes them a lot worse.
Trainers are human
Management is not a science. Indeed, as Peter Drucker says:
“Management is ... what tradition used to call a liberal art – ‘liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; ‘art’ because it is also concerned with practice and application. Managers draw on all the knowledges and insights of the humanities and the social sciences – on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on ethics – as well as the physical sciences. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results …”
Essentially, management is a human activity and there are few theories or ‘facts and figures’ which all managers either accept or live by. Despite traditional e-learning pretence that there are key 'facts' that can be taught in chunks, management is interpreted by human beings who essentially manage with only one resource - themselves. Learning is more about debate, disagreement and exploration - and this is especially true of learning about management.
Trainers are human too! What’s more, in training they are not only managing but also enabling the participants in their programmes to become better managers - better exponents of a liberal art that has no fixed rules, theories or even routines. Trainers thus interpret their material in their own way and the truth is that the better they are at doing this, the better trainers they are. This causes two major problems with blended learning.
Content
Firstly, trainers frequently do not agree with the content of a programmed learning (traditional e-learning) element - either in whole, part or emphasis. However, the content of such programmes is fixed and it has to be used as a whole whether the trainer likes it or not. Of course, e-learning can be customised for a specific organisation (or even trainer) but this is remarkably expensive. (Even if it can be afforded, updates and changes are rarely made because of further expense.)
Secondly, trainers (good ones anyway) like to customise their work to the specific needs of the time, the participants and the organisational culture. They need to be able to call upon a range of possible learning inputs - one that are under their control - rather than be restricted by one pre-set pattern. They like to raise debate, enourage disagreement and thus discussion. To force a trainer (at this level) to teach one specific way because that is what the programmed texts demands, is to materially reduce the value of the trainer - and probably to increase trainer attrition or turnover.
The Working Manager and blended learning
We have sought to keep away from traditional e-learning. Our work is built upon the insights of Professor David A Kolb and his Learning Styles analysis. Thus, we do not have serial chunks of learning that everyone is expected to work through. We strive to capture the interest and to motivate a larger range of people - those who like to experiment, those who like to work fast, those who want to ponder upon an issue or theory, as well as those who like to follow a guided pathway.
With The Working Manager, the trainer can offer people approaches to the pre-work which will satisfy their learning preferences. He or she can request that specific elements of the Academy are studied and can test for completion – but, at the same time, can allow people to explore around the topic if they wish, to be guided through the material if they wish or indeed just to leap in, complete the requirements and move on.
This way, the trainer has a higher chance of walking into the training room to meet participants who (a) have completed the pre-work (b) are expectant rather than bored and perhaps even more important (c) who have questions to ask, points to make and disagreements to air.
Trainer's choice
Moreover, the Academy’s structure means that the trainer can select from it for his or her pre-work, not being constrained by an existing and ‘virtually-impossible-to-change’ programmed learning module. The Working Manager makes material readily available, simple to select and easy to combine with face-to-face training. We can work with a trainer to create a ‘Learning Pathway’, help the trainer create their own, produce specific learning content on unique needs, competencies or cultures or just advise which content seems most suitable - all in a far more speedy and cost effective way than traditional e-learning. What is more, an Academy offers a range of views on any topic. Sure, we offer the 'standard received wisdom’ but we also offer thoughtful alternatives to it - as well as radical disagreement with it.
What is more, the Academy is always there and always has more content than any training course can handle. It is updated 10 times a year. The trainer can use it to encourage participants to continue and expand their learning, to follow interests that could not be handled during a face-to-face programme - and to return to the Academy to learn more, prompted perhaps by a newsletter concerning an update.