Training Rationale

In the early 1980s, when debates such as whether leaders were born or made raged, there was an emerging realisation that so called “soft skills” required development and enhancement, and that leaving people to their own ”genetic” capability was flawed.

Unfortunately, about the same time, there was also an emerging technology that would supplant soft skills training for over 20 years; the computer.  In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, computer related training became the largest single area of formal training in the Western world.  In 2004, the US Bureau of Labour found that job skills training accounted for 67% of the total training hours and 48% of total training participants. Computer training took up 20% of the total training hours, the largest share of any training type.

Computer training was easy to deliver, had tangible outcomes and is considered an essential skill.  Soft skills on the other hand were more difficult to deliver well, had nebulous outcomes and were considered a desirable skill. Soft skills and their associated training were relegated to the “personal development” bucket. Today, basic computer skills are assumed for most professional occupations and whilst there is still a large part of the adult education sector devoted to them, it is in decline, due mostly to better user interfaces, easily accessible on-line packages and the high computer literacy of school leavers entering the workforce. This evolution has once again seen learning and development time and budgets devoted to training other than computers and in an environment where personal interaction is becoming more and more critical, soft skills, such as leadership, are again becoming relevant.

Most people remember the outstanding leaders in their high school or university. They were not only recognised as leaders but somehow seemed destined for ultimate success in the adult world. However, years later, encountering these same people we find that many of these "born leaders" never reached their apparent potential. Many may also recall those classmates and friends who seemed lost during their early years. On face value they would have never been picked to reach leadership positions in any field yet many turn out to be extraordinarily successful leaders. These examples illustrate a heated debate in management and behavioural science — are leaders born or made?

So, what's the answer? While there is no definitive agreement among the experts as to a single answer, agreement is strongest that it is a function of both nature and nurture. IQ and aptitude, which are largely innate, may determine the field that one enters, but not necessarily one's success in that field. A growing body of research suggests that effective leadership and personal success are due largely to our experiences, our self-awareness, and our perspective. All of these factors can be learned and enhanced, pointing to the belief that leaders are largely made, not born. This is a position that is supported by the thousands of attendees of leadership training programs every year proving that not only can leadership be taught, but it is considered important enough that millions of dollars are spent annually trying to learn it.

But leadership is not the only skill presumed to be innate that is increasingly being regarded as essential by executives, managers, supervisors and staff. Decision making, establishing relationships of trust, reading people, dealing with emotion and emotional situations, and influencing and persuading others are skills that define a genuine capability to deal with humans. However, as was the case in the early stages of leadership training development, these skills are considered innate and unable to be taught or learned. There is good reason for this belief: contemporary training methods have proven inadequate when confronted with a need to deal with such personal and complex subjects. In fact the same criticism could be made of many adult education programs which revolve around soft skills. Anecdotally there is a significant level of dissatisfaction with contemporary adult education born out of an apparent lack of behaviour modification upon return to the workplace.  People attend courses and return to work to do things essentially the same way they did them before they attended such training.  At best they may implement a small fraction of the overall content but there is no sustained behavioural change and therefore no real improvement in performance.

In his dual role as Professor of Psychology at the San Francisco State University and Director of Development for USA Judo, David Matsumoto discovered that this very same problem was contributing to the performance of US Olympic Judo competitors. In training he observed that elite judo athletes would practise moves over and over until they performed them reflexively and perfectly every time, relying on sports psychology and image generation to invoke the feeling of success.  However, he found that when they were placed into competition they did not perform as well; they failed to perform optimally under pressure and one of the main reasons for this was emotion. He and his colleagues examined the connection between emotion and stress in dynamic situations, one of the most significant of which is any human interaction under pressure.  They identified the “zone of optimal stress” and offered methods for training to deal with this and other issues ensuring behavioural and cognitive modification during training.  In other words they discovered how to train an individual so that when they were in circumstances identical or very similar to those in which they were required to perform, they could do so without any significant detriment to performance.

In essence what Professor Matsumoto and his team had achieved was behavioural modification, a significant, sustainable, lasting change to the manner in which an individual acted under circumstances that were unfamiliar, stressful or even pressured.  They achieved this through changing the way the athletes thought.

Most mental health professionals know that to change behaviour you must first change thought patterns.  This manifests itself in various programs for recovering substance abusers, sufferers of depression, personality disorders, and so on.  Unfortunately, many contemporary adult education programs fail to take this key factor into account.  Whilst generic principles such as student-centred learning, activity based interaction, provision of a relaxed environment and content reinforcement will work for some types of training, they tend to fall well short for soft skills.  Adults require high stimulus, context, ownership, critical analysis and commitment in order to truly change their cognitions and therefore their behaviour.

Many of the intuitive or innate skills of humans have been learned or derived during their childhood and enhanced or modified during puberty and into adulthood.  As people learn what works for them in day to day interactions, they tend to become reliant on those same techniques, even when situations call for different responses. The longer these thoughts and resulting behaviours persist unchallenged, the more entrenched they become. Accordingly, as thinking patterns become increasingly entrenched there is an accompanying increase in certainty and confidence, regardless of whether those patterns are appropriate or correct. These thoughts for most people become the barrier to change.

In terms of training, the adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” carries some weight for some very good reasons.  Firstly, everyone knows that you can teach a young dog pretty much anything and so the older the student, the harder it becomes to change their behaviour because it becomes more difficult to change how they think due to the level of unlearning that in some cases needs to occur.  Secondly, a trick, as the term implies is trivial in nature and something that is viewed as trivial tends to fail to force behavioural change because it fails to modify cognition.

There are certain circumstances under which behaviour can be modified. Often behavioural change results from extreme or unique situations. For example stories abound of illness or a brush with death being the trigger for a radical move from a busy corporate lifestyle to a stay at home family carer.  In nearly all cases such as these the individual reports a significant shift in their thinking, “as if a light went on”, “it became so clear to me”, “it was an epiphany”. They claim to understand situations, relationships, themselves and others more clearly; they can identify and relate to factors that previously were complex, difficult or hidden to see. It seems as if they have a new perspective, a new capability, a new intelligence.

Cognitive modification along with the accompanying behavioural change is also difficult to achieve because of human capacity.  Generally speaking the human brain has limited capacity to take in information, let alone process it.  Again, drawing on the techniques of psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors, the most successful behavioural modification programs have a number of steps.  Typically these steps tend to start where change is easiest to achieve and move forward, with each step building on the previous combining to form a stable platform for change. Bearing this mind, New Intelligence has developed the Behavioural Intelligence Model (BIM).