One of the biggest problems in the market for management skills training and coaching services is that we easily confuse entertainment with growth. Not only clients, but even the trainers themselves confuse the art of growing as a person and as a leader with the enormous fun of playing personality tests. Do you grow or are you entertained?
Let's look at some examples of entertainment. The first and most typical is the lecturer. A steering committee wants to do teambuilding without getting too many blisters. We are talking about men and women who have been living and working on the defensive for years in order to avoid the problems they cannot solve and to maximise the results of their work. They are sceptical of anything that is not expressed in numbers, let's say.
HR hires a terrific speaker who tells exactly the same story everywhere he goes. It's a nice, intellectually stimulating line, peppered with just the right amount of neuroscience experiments and Harvard studies, and told with grace and a radio announcer's voice. Very good. Executives listen raptly to a bunch of truths that are still pure common sense, and if they get bored they check emails on their phone or send whatsapps during the conference.
It doesn't really matter whether or not they listen to the speaker. The speaker loves to hear their own voice. Nobody puts them on the spot to answer a personal question, and at most they are asked to discuss a third person or a "business case", so they risk nothing and can offer opinions happily without consequence. Then they have an opulent dinner, hug and say a few nice things to each other after a few wines, and everyone goes home. Nothing has really changed in this team. They still talk to each other with strategic words to avoid getting into the history of problems and bad blood that hovers like a ghost over the boardroom ceiling. But they have fulfilled the task of skills training and can take this duty off their to-do list.
Another example of entertainment is the dozens of US-style licensed surveys.The manager answers 200 questions in order to receive a cool report full of colours and graphics telling him/her that he/she is a certain type of person, or a player profile, or other intellectualised and sophisticated versions of what amounts to a personality test like the ones in the women's magazines of all times.
What a sacrilege I just said - with the decades of academic research that justifies the hefty licensing fees to be paid every time an executive fills out this survey! It's very entertaining because it's full of data, colours and graphs. But it doesn't change behaviour. At best it points to a trend that we should think about changing. How to change it, they don't know how to tell us anymore.
And well, in the last ten years everyone has become an expert in neuroscience and can set up a most sophisticated circuit of questions, exercises and intellectual amusements based on the conclusions of studies that are still unable to explain the mysteries of the human mind. More entertainment.
I'm not saying it's not of high quality, and I don't doubt that it's fun and a good time is had doing these training activities. What I am saying is that entertainment is not growth. And without growth, there is no real and lasting behavioural change.
A client recently told me that the first time I had taken him and his team to the mountain and asked them to talk about what was going on in their meetings they had felt practically violated. He is a very joking client and totally exaggerates with the expression, but he is pointing to a very uncomfortable feeling that you don't get when you are playing at entertainment.
Growth is an irreversible change of perception. A shift to more, so that you begin to see things you didn't see before. And once you see them, you can't stop seeing them. And just by seeing them, you start to change things in the way you behave. In the case of this client, I had pointed out to them that the team's interaction dynamics were strikingly aggressive. With jokes, irony and double entendres, daggers were flying at each other. But they didn't realise it because they had always done it.
When I took the same team back to do another programme two years later, this aggression had completely disappeared. The jokes, ironies and double entendres still animated their conversations, but they had learned to dump the frustration and conflicts in safe places so that they did not affect the climate of the team. Nor the climate of the teams they each led in turn.
"I realised that before I..."
There is absolutely nothing entertaining about the moment when an expert like me comes to tell a grown-up gentleman that he observes a vice, or an excess or lack in his behaviour. It's the kind of feedback that disrupts our mindsets and makes us feel very vulnerable. And the more the expert is right, the more it hurts to hear it, because as the words fall into our minds, all the past situations in which we have done things worse than we thought we had done are lined up before us.
"I realised that before I..." is the kind of reflection that comes out of a training action that has generated real growth. This is the change in perception that opens the door to progressive improvements in behaviour in the following months. And this way of formulating it demonstrates a taking of responsibility for how we did things before and how we will start doing them now.
If you are realising that you have been doing a lot of fun trainings that did not generate discomfort or changes of perception in your mind, you probably just understood the huge difference between doing personal growth and enjoying executive entertainment.
And when you learn to do personal growth all entertainment starts to bore you because you become addicted to the mystery that is your own mind and the challenge of reinterpreting your own story to challenge your destiny.
Growing as a person is an adventurous journey that reveals the unnamed hero hidden within ourselves, and no self-respecting leader should settle for anything less, however entertaining it may be.
Pino Bethencourt
Coach and founder of Club Comprometidos