The 2012 Pfeiffer Annual

Training

Elaine Biech, Elaine Biech

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118124628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Consultoría

The Leader in Resources for Training & HR Professionals for the Past Four Decades

For 40 years, The Pfeiffer Annuals have helped professionals in the workplace learning and performance field to stay ahead of their organizations' needs. The 2012 Pfeiffer Training Annual is no exception. It offers a hands-on guide to the latest thinking and approaches to training and development. To address the more-need-less-time dilemma, the Annual presents a "Learning in the Moment" theme, with valuable information on such practical topics as teamwork, communication, leadership, and emotional intelligence.

ELAs are presented as complete, ready-to-use training designs. This year we are honored to have ELAs from training leaders you have come to depend on: Julie O'Mara, M.K. Key, Dennis Gilbert, Lou Russell, and Robert Alan Black. In the Instruments section Jean Barbazette shares an instructor skills survey that you will want to put to use immediately.

Use the articles section for your own professional development or as a lecture resource within your training sessions. Must-haves in this section include articles by Homer Johnson, Zane Berge, and Gary Wise. The highlight of this Annual is Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick's article about how the Four Levels of Evaluation came about. You will be intrigued to learn how evaluation fits with the theme, identifying more than a dozen ways to evaluate learning in the moment.

With the depth and breadth of resources, Annual content is entirely new each year, ensuring a steady stream of contemporary knowledge and tools. Use the Annual to stay on top of developments within the profession, dip into the content for a contribution that targets a specific performance need or to develop a complete program, and learn how others in the field are tackling the ever-increasing challenges of developing a capable, productive workforce.

Discover more at www.pfeiffer.com

Articles and Discussion Resources

Introduction

to the Articles and Discussion Resources Section

The Articles and Discussion Resources Section is a collection of materials useful to every facilitator. The theories, background information, models, and methods will challenge facilitators’ thinking, enrich their professional development, and assist their internal and external clients with productive change. These articles may be used as a basis for lecturettes, as handouts in training sessions, or as background reading material. This section will provide you with a variety of useful ideas, theoretical opinions, teachable models, practical strategies, and proven intervention methods. The articles will add richness and depth to your training and consulting knowledge and skills. They will challenge you to think differently, explore new concepts, and experiment with new interventions. The articles will continue to add a fresh perspective to your work.

The 2012 Pfeiffer Annual: Training features twelve articles, including six that focus on this year’s theme of Learning in the Moment.

The following categories are represented:

Individual Development: Personal Growth

a One-Minute Learning Through Reflective Practice, by Homer H. Johnson and Anne H. Reilly

Communication: Coaching and Encouraging

a Questioning the Teachable Moment, by Brittany Ashby

Communication: Technology

b aOpportunities and Risks of Incorporating User-Created Content in an Organizational Training Strategy, by Christine Hipple and Zane L. Berge

Problem Solving: Models, Methods, and Techniques

Building Bridges Between Psychology and Conflict Resolution: Implications for Mediator Learning, by Kenneth Cloke

Problem Solving: Change and Change Agents

How to Avoid Change Management Workshops That Fail, by Rick Maurer

Groups and Teams: Techniques to Use with Groups

Mistakes That Trainers Make—And How to Avoid Them, by Deborah Spring Laurel

Consulting/Training: Strategies and Techniques

b aAdopting a Learning Continuum: The Urgency to Reinvent Training Organizations, by Gary G. Wise

Strategies and Technologies for Posting Training Presentations Online, by Tom Bunzel

Facilitating: Theories and Models

Online Learning 101: Using a Framework to Consider and Select e-Learning Tools, by Susan Landay

Facilitating: Techniques and Strategies

a Using Playbooks: A Unique Strategy in Technical Oversight of Highly Hazardous Operations, by James L. Gary and Michele L. Summers

Facilitating in the Virtual Classroom: How to Compensate for the Lack of Body Language, by Darlene B. Christopher

Facilitating: Evaluation

a The Story of the Kirkpatrick Four Levels: Evaluating in the Moment, by Don Kirkpatrick with Elaine Biech

As with previous Annuals, this volume covers a wide variety of topics. The range of articles presented encourages thought-provoking discussion about the present and future of HRD. We have done our best to categorize the articles for easy reference; however, many of the articles encompass a range of topics, disciplines, and applications. If you do not find what you are looking for under one category, check a related category. In some cases we may place an article in the “Training” Annual that also has implications for “Consulting” and vice versa. As the field of HRD continues to grow and develop, there is more and more crossover between training and consulting. Explore all the contents of both volumes of the Annual in order to realize the full potential for learning and development that each offers.

a Learning in the Moment Topics

b Cutting-Edge Topics

One-Minute Learning Through Reflective Practice

Homer H. Johnsona and Anne H. Reillyb

Summary

While the evidence is quite convincing that managers and leaders have their primary managerial learning experience on the job, a related key question is how they can best maximize their on-the-job learning. This article describes a reflective technique that is designed to be used immediately after challenging work events. Labeled “One-Minute Reflective Learning” and using the four R’s—Replay, Reevaluate, Rethink, and Rehearse—this simple technique can enhance learning on the job, often within one minute.

How and where do people learn the important skills and behaviors that allow them to be successful at work and in life? Much of the authors’ past research has focused on the learning of leadership skills (Johnson, 2008, 2009), and the results in this area are very clear: leadership development comes through experiences, particularly challenging experiences, coupled with reflecting on and learning from these experiences. Moreover, evidence now suggests that successful leaders are those who learn best from these experiences and who focus on adapting their behavior to better meet the demands of further complex and challenging situations.

McCall and his associates at the Center for Creative Leadership (Lindsey, Holmes, & McCall, 1987; McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison, 1998) were among the first to systematically explore where and how leaders learn. In a series of studies, successful executives were asked to list their most significant leadership learning experiences in an effort to determine where and how these effective leaders learned to lead. The results were quite consistent: The two highest ranking types of significant learning experiences were “hardships” and “challenging experiences.” “Hardships” included business failures, failure to obtain an expected promotion, and being fired. Interestingly enough, also included in this category were personal traumas such as divorce and a death in the family. The other highly ranked category, “challenging experiences,” included items from building an operation from scratch, managing a turnaround operation, or being part of a task force to being given increased responsibility in terms of people or functions.

However, simply to have significant experiences is not enough. There must be a further step that encourages the leader to learn from the experiences. As an illustration, Ready (1994) asked leaders to identify their main learning experiences. Job assignments, projects, and task forces were ranked at the top—very similar to the “challenging experiences” described. Ready concluded that “to develop leadership capacity one must be presented with challenging opportunity and must be ready and capable of acting on it. The lessons gained from this opportunity will be leveraged considerably when the individual is offered honest, thoughtful, and timely feedback on his or her performance. In addition to opportunity and feedback, the person must have the time and capacity to reflect on this feedback, to internalize it, and to transfer the lessons learned to day-to-day behaviors” (p. 27). Note that Ready explicitly adds the steps of reflecting, internalizing, and transferring those lessons learned to future experiences.

Using a slightly different approach, Leslie and Velsor (1996) examined why executives derail. These researchers found that the most important factor for the success of their sample of successful executives was the leaders’ ability to adapt and develop. Respondents described effective leaders as “growing” and “maturing over time” as the job or the organization expanded; they were also characterized as capable of “learning from mistakes” and “learning from direct feedback.” In contrast, the leading cause of executive derailment (executives who were fired or demoted) among their sample of unsuccessful executives was their failure to adapt and change their management styles. Thus, while both successful and unsuccessful executives encountered plenty of difficult events, the unsuccessful executives were unable to learn from these challenging experiences.

These studies strongly suggest that one key component in the development of effective leaders is the opportunity to experience “stretch” job assignments and duties. But the second crucial component is that these leaders or potential leaders must be able to learn from these experiences. The difficult opportunities in themselves are not enough to foster leader development, as is evident from the number of leaders who were unable to learn from what they were doing and thus “derailed.” Learning from these experiences seems to be equally critical for the development of leadership. Important questions include: How can we help leaders better learn from their experiences? What do leaders need to do to take charge of their own learning? This article describes one such learning opportunity: brief reflection about an event immediately after it occurs. Such focused reflection, which we have labeled “One-Minute Reflective Learning,” can be a powerful learning technique for leaders and potential leaders.

One-Minute Learning: The Key Is Reflective Practice

While people will learn in a wide variety of settings and through a broad range of means, one of the most important learning moments is immediately after a challenging event occurs. For example, a salesperson has a difficult encounter with a customer. As she is walking out of the meeting, she starts thinking immediately about how she could have handled the encounter differently. Or a parent reprimanding a child will often immediately rethink how he or she could have better helped the child without scolding.

These types of brief, focused learning opportunities are the topic of this article. “Learning moments” are very powerful experie...