| Before I go on with our business update this week let me just take a moment to welcome a new member to out consulting staff. His name is Sean Griffith and he is a new Senior Business Consultant with the SBA Network. Sean is also an attorney and Financial Consultant. Don’t hold that against him. With over 10 years of experience he has been helping clients to achieve their goals. Send him an e-mail and introduce yourself. |  |
Companies spend over $375 billion every year on training and even more on coaching. Yet according to the American Society for Training and Development about “42 percent of the knowledge that professionals use to get their jobs done actually comes from their co-workers. This is called prairie-dogging–workers pop out of their cubicles to solicit information from the local expert. When a worker is consulting another worker, both workers lose productivity.”
We won’t even address the fact that many of these “company experts” are actually spreading the incorrect methods or techniques and that just adds to the dysfunctions that permeate many organizations today.
What if you could provide the skills that workers need to increase their performance without adversely impacting productivity?
There is. It can be accomplished by combining training with coaching.
It is easy to confuse the purpose of training and coaching. I suppose misconceptions arise due to the need for change in performance and the fact that each of these disciplines can discretely increase performance. To demonstrate the difference in a more concrete way, let’s take a look at the intent of training vs. coaching in most applications:
- Training
- Satisfies the knowledge gap
- Typically performed in a group setting
- Learning can occur from other participants
- A forum for harnessing enthusiasm and team motivation
- Content is based on a specified single topic
- Delivers instruction of methods and techniques
- Established period of time
- Classroom-based
- Pre-established pacing
- Coaching
- Satisfies the skills gap
- One-to-one interactivity
- Typically Learning cannot occur from other participants
- A forum for harnessing enthusiasm and team motivation
- Content can be based on varying topics
- Assists participant to put methods and techniques into action
- Varying period of time
- On-the-job
- Flexible pacing
There are probably many other advantages of training or coaching when viewed as separate disciplines, yet consider the combination of providing training with coaching. When these forces are combined we are able to create an environment where habits can be changed much more rapidly.
We deliver the methods and techniques in a training environment and then ensure that they are put into practice with on-going coaching. The coaching allows team members to adapt their training experience to their specific challenges on the job. This supports effective skill-building, increases confidence and solidifies habitual change.
I am proud to say that our organization has been associated with Dale Carnegie Training for over 15 years and we have seen first-hand what combined training and coaching can do to increase the performance within an organization. You can find out more about our coaching programs at http://www.sbanetwork.org
Have a great week!
–Mark Deo