Practice

Is Experience the Best Teacher?

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Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock
Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock

We have often heard the expression ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ when someone wants to relay how a certain experience has affected them.  Usually, the experience was unpleasant, challenging, or just very difficult and we want to have someone else understand how we felt.  Why?  Sometimes, when we experience a difficult situation we want to talk about it just to complain,  but we also talk about our negative experiences because we don’t want to go through that experience the same way, again.  Having a negative experience, especially one that causes us discomfort, is certainly a key factor in changing our behaviour in order to avoid repeating the same experience in the future.  One hopes that what we learn for ourselves, we might help others with as well.

Listening to someone’s negative experience is very different from living through the actual experience itself. A very effective training design technique which implements experiential learning, is being used at the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences.  An “aging simulation suit’ is being used to train future healthcare practitioners.  The suit is designed in such a way that it literally allows someone to walk in the shoes of an aging person and to learn, through personal experience, what it physically feels like to be a patient or a client in a healthcare setting.

Click here to read the article and watch a video

Discussion Questions:

  1. Besides healthcare, what types of industries would benefit from having this type of sensory aging & mobility training provided to their employees?
  2. Have you changed something in your own work style because of how you felt someone treated you? What did you change and why did you make that change?
  3. From a customer service perspective, what other types of training tools could be used to relay the experience of aging?
  4. Why is this type of experiential training effective?

Who Says Management Training Can’t Be Fun?

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What a great time it is to be a leader!  There are so many different training techniques and programs for management and leadership development.  Where once there were only traditional management programs focusing on the serious, hard side of business leadership, now the menu of options includes unconventional approaches for much needed leadership development of soft skills.

Source: Kues/Shutterstock
Source: Kues/Shutterstock

A fresh approach on the scene is improvisational training for organizational managers and leaders.

Click here to read the article.

One of the more intriguing leadership tools that this type of training promotes is the practice of saying ‘yes, and’ instead of ‘yes, but’, which is, according to the article, just ‘no, in a tuxedo’.  When leaders  promote a ‘yes’ approach it opens the door to possibilities and opportunities. Does this mean that a leader needs to agree by saying yes to everything that is put in front of them?  Probably not.  What it does mean, is that it is important for leaders to learn how to shape their reactions in a positive way instead of just shutting ideas, and the people with those ideas, down.  This skill takes a lot of development and practice.

Management training should offer the opportunity to develop  positive reactive and responsive skills for effective organizational leadership.  Improv training might be an effective way to get this done.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How would you benefit from improv training in a leadership role?
  2. From all of the management and leadership training programs discussed in your course of study, which one would be the most effective?
  3. Do you think improv training is just a trend or is it a program that will find a sustainable future?
  4. If you had to recommend a particular manager for improv training, who would that be and why would you recommend them?

 

Leaders Loving Learning!

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Off-the-job training is not just for those at the start of their careers.  Recently, the Queen’s School of Business and FEI Canada implemented a program for senior financial executives called the Leadership Beyond Finance Program.

Source: StockPhotosLV/Shutterstock
Source: StockPhotosLV/Shutterstock

Click here to read about the Leadership Beyond Finance Program.

Even though the program is one that falls into the ‘off-the-job’ training category, it calls upon real-life situations and shared learning taken from ‘on-the-job’ leadership experiences.  All too often leaders have to go through very painful and public work related experiences that, if not handled correctly, will lead to disastrous results.  We have all seen or heard of organizational leaders who are put to the test in unsafe and unwelcoming waters with little opportunity to go back and fix mistakes made along the way.

This program offers a wonderful opportunity to share those painfully learned lessons through the experiences of others and, hopefully, alter the leadership approach for those leaders in the program to achieve better results.

In our studies about employee training and development, it is evident that the best learning takes place in safe, welcoming environments that provide an opportunity to practice what is learned before it is applied.

Effective leadership is definitely something that requires lots of practice and will continue to offer multiple learning opportunities along the way!

Discussion Questions:

  1. Identify three traditional off the job training techniques described in the article.
  2. Why do leaders need to learn to listen?
  3. How would Human Resources Professionals benefit from this type of leadership program?
  4. Identify one personal leadership skill that you wish you had an opportunity to practice before having to use it in a workplace setting.