When entering into a training situation, it is quite easy to fall prey to doing enough to "get by" than to challenge yourself to reach deeper to do more. In a conversation with a dear colleague, we discussed the team dynamic of proactive approaches vs. reactive survival. When you are working with a population of people, it is really easy to become a manifestation of that population. If you are working with professional people, the push is to become as professional as possible in your approach, delivery and prep time. If you are working with population of people that are more "challenging" (i.e lack certain education, have various employment boundaries, mental health issues or potentially socially deviant behaviors) the push becomes to lower the standard of excellence to settle for "whatever".
This is the challenge that I am currently having on our training team. We have phenomenal curriculum, top rated information and NOW some technical tools to make that transition to professional more feasable, however, we don't have the internal drive from our leadership to make this a priority.
The masses can only excel as far as the leadership is willing to go to make it a reality. If leadership does not deem the materials and the strategies in the classroom as crucial to the manifestion of career oriented and focused customers, then the likelihood of that becoming a reality is lost. You can never afford to be mediocre when you are facilitating a process or training the next level of new professionals. Demanding more of you as an individual and catalyst for change in the lives of people is a neccesity not an option. Knowing that you have the power in the information you share with others to kill dreams, fuel them or stall them is never a light thing and should never be considered as such!
Demand more of you so that mediocrity has no where to dwell. The cost is too high.
Monica,
ReplyDeleteYou make a keen observation about how people tend to work together. There's a sports analogy that is often used in the business world called "playing up." When you play a sport -- tennis, e.g. -- with someone better than you, you are likely to play better. But when you play with someone worse than you, your game will likely suffer. The same is often true in organizations. So the charge you make to your supervisor is an insightful one -- give people a standard to "play up" to in order to motivate them.
Is that how you see this issue? One of motivation? I'm wondering if you can point to the concepts from the reading you connected to this scenario with which you're struggling. I'd like to understand more about the thought process you went through to move from the reading to this entry. I definitely see issues of motivation at work here -- of both you the trainers and the learners you work with. It is clear that you yourself are very intrinsically motivated, but you're astute to point out that not everyone is; and even if they are, it is important to have higher standards to model and work toward.
Thank you for continuing the conversation about how the concepts from this class work into your everyday training. I hope it's helping you!
Allison