It is not surprising that many experienced managers are reluctant to invest their meager time in new training courses and development programs.
This apparent disinterest faces not a few of those who have the responsibility of development and training in an organization. While the junior subgroup enthusiastically accepts any opportunity the organization provides to expand their training, the senior subgroup may feel it as a waste of their valuable time.
Is this disinterest towards the whole formation or only towards a certain type? Is there something new and useful that fits the demands of experienced managers?
In philosophy two types of knowledge are distinguished: the theoretical and the practical.
The theorist is the one who brings you closer to knowing "the truth" about something: why the sun is warming or what seem to be the causes of an economic crisis. The practical allows you to behave in the "most appropriate" way possible in specific circumstances: the typical case is the use of language. When using it, even with mastery, we do not have in mind the grammatical rules that govern it. We learn to use it by using it and refining its use as we do it.
As Juan Antonio Rivera says in a fun book on philosophy, practical knowledge is based not only on emulable models, but on a history of previous exercise, along which each behavior has not been a simple machine repetition of the previous one, rather, any of these behaviors has been under the control of its consequences, which have reworked the response, fine-tuning it with each new issue, increasing its suitability.
There are certain things that demand practical knowledge that is easily acquired, for example riding a bicycle. Others, like language, are more difficult as we see when we try to learn a second language as adults.
All of the soft skills that managerial development serves are based on complex practical knowledge. For example, to develop good leadership competence, it is not the scholarly study of leadership that makes us leaders. I'm not going to be a good leader either, a conscious rational decision of the type as of Monday. And of course it is not through a couple of isolated practical exercises that we succeed.
One of the difficulties faced by those who need to select a development program to be offered to a group of managers is the confusing use of the practical term by training providers.
Almost all existing development course or program models understand practical by based on real events or a lot of action and little theory.
On the other hand, in our opinion, gaining practical knowledge about leadership (or any other soft competence) is not about practicing things or studying real cases but, following Juan A. Rivera, doing meaningful things for the participant, starting from those that reflect in a guided way, that help you to discover slight changes of whose application (in the usual context while exercising the managerial role) an improved answer arises. This response will undergo a new cycle, thus increasing the suitability in its use; in the example we have used, the use of own leadership.
Here the term discover is another key concept. In development, to be effective and truly transformative, the only one you can discover is yourself. The participant cannot delegate it to the expert. Discovering is a personal and intimate act, no one, no matter how much wisdom you recognize, can replace you in this individual act. Thus, the role of the trainer-expert cannot be other than to provide opportunities for each of the participants to make their own discoveries as they practice the learning cycle described by Juan A. Rivera.
Applying all the above, the type of course that responds to those seeking authentic true managerial development, where the meanings of practical and discovering are aligned with this objective, is one called experiential.
This type could take the form of a program of seven mornings spaced a week apart, where the expert generates the conditions and guides the participants so that, based on their own experiences, they experience leadership dimensions related to themselves and their exercise of management role. Only in this way, the manager will gain real practical knowledge about the exercise of improved leadership. You don't need to study any theory or memorize types of leadership that, as has been said, would do you very little good.
It is useless to try to replace the practical knowledge of theoretical knowledge. They are two different types of knowledge that respond to different demands and do not offer equivalent results. Whoever seeks the type of development to which we have alluded cannot satisfy it with theoretical knowledge, no matter how much practical appearance it adopts.
The number of development and training managers is growing who, in search of solutions for the development of managers and aware of the strong limitations of non-experiential practical courses, discover the experiential type. We are not surprised that among the conclusions of the last report-survey 2013 of the cipd it was said:
we need to rethink and refresh how we support training...
And, under the heading "Why learning in laboris is taking off":
There is now much more recognition that experiential learning develops skills and competencies.
Footnotes:
1. Rivera JA (2003). What Socrates would say to Woody Allen. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. (p.43)
2. Simplifying, we can find three types of design that give this meaning to the practical term.
A first type could take the form of an 8-hour seminar where an expert speaker, a professor at Harvard, beautifully outlines certain types of leadership, pros and cons of each. All animated with fun real life examples of stupendous historical figures whose leadership every would-be leader would like to resemble.
Another type is a design that structures training around a practical case based on a recognizable and successful company. A success story showing how a certain style of leadership saved the organization from impending bankruptcy and then propelled it to corporate stardom.
A third type takes the typical form of an 8-hour leadership workshop, in which the experienced teacher proposes a series of exercises to the group of participants that they carry out in fun. The exercises can be carried out in a classroom; in the field, jumping on a zip line or looking for a hidden treasure; living together on a sailing ship; doing something apparently unthinkable a priori like walking on hot coals, etc. After each exercise, the teacher draws attention to important dimensions of leadership that may have been exposed during the exercises.
3. As an expression of the development process, better than the term discover is that of building. We keep it here because, in our opinion, it is sufficiently adequate for the informative purpose of the article.
4. This is a crucial difference with respect to the third type of course described in note 2. While in the types described the participants have experiences competing in a country game, as sailors on a boat or as surprised walkers on embers, in an experiential course Participants do so as managers of a particular organization with personal experiences associated with that role.
5. cipd (2013). Learning and Talent Development. Annual Survey Report 2013, p.39. Recovered from
