There’s a famous scene in Father of the Bride, in which George Banks (played by Steve Martin) tells his daughter that it’s cold outside and she should get a jacket. She replies “I’ll be fine it’s not too cold.” Then her fiancé says “you know honey is is a little chilly” to which she replies “you know you’re right, I’ll get my jacket.”
Sometimes we hear things differently from people who play different roles in our lives. There’s a great deal of conversation around outsourcing across many sectors. In the leadership, learning and development space this conversation is critical.
So what should our guideposts be when deciding between building a robust learning and development program to build leaders? What should we consider when weighing internal and external training programs and assets. Regularly, factors like scalability, resource investment, and ease of management are the focus. Often though one of the most critical factors that we should be considering is left out: pedagogy.
Pedagogy is the art and science of teaching. For adult learners, the term Andragogy is an even better word, as pedagogy literally refers to the teaching of children. People learn in many different ways, and sitting in a room with a group, or sitting at your work computer having slides read to you fits very few learning styles.
As you consider all the various factors for building a learning development team internally or working with the consultant or forming in blended partnership, pedagogy and andragogy should be significant portions of the conversation.
In my working life, I have most certainly completed some online modules in a learning management system, or even in-person training sessions; but a week later forgotten much of the content. Yet, I vividly remember learning that was interactive, engaging, and sequences with intentionality. Little did I know that the difference was pedagogy.
Educators often start with learning outcomes in mind and then build a syllabus, a lesson plan, assignments, and experiential learning activities to drive the learners towards the learning goals. I spent years working in experiential leadership education, where I borrowed regularly from the methods and pedagogy used by people in the high ropes and low ropes industries. I was always amazed at the guides who run these programs can take a seemingly mundane activity like taking a group across a 10 foot gap between two logs, and shortly thereafter, by asking the right kinds of reflective questions, get participants to some really deep learning outcomes. I’ve adopted so much of what educators and outdoor educators do in my practice doing leadership development and am indebted to their generosity as they have shared their tips and tricks.
So how can pedagogy play a role in how we understand the balance between internal-led trainings and engaging with leadership development consultants and trainers? First establish clear learning outcomes. These should be SMART goals that are well defined. Second, consider who your learners are (executives, mid level managers, emerging leaders). Think about level of education, culture, gender, race, and all the things that make teams unique. Third, find a leadership trainer to engage in this conversation. The best leadership trainers understand that organizations that really want to foster intentional and transformative learning, often use a both-and approach. But what’s important is that the both-and approach is built around how people learn and how to get the learning to stick.
If you think back to the opening example I shared about George Banks, the “father of the bride” and his daughter‘s fiancé, they were both sharing a similar message; she was receptive to one more than the other, even though her father had probably been a trusted source of advice for most of her growing up years. If we can lay aside the paternalistic overtones of this scene for a moment, we can think of George Banks as the internal Learning and Development team, and the finance as a trusted leadership training partner. Organizations that choose to be intentional about when they bring in fresh new external voices and how to sequence those voices and stagger them with a strong internal learning and development team have a better chance of getting the learning to stick.
Training sessions should not an information dump on a series of slides, they ought to be rich, experiential, and engaging in ways that meet multiple learners where they are. Find a partner in the leadership development space who understands how they can use their fresh new voice for your teams in ways that are pedagogically appropriate to make the learning stick, and ones who understand how to partner with internal teams to reinforce that learning over time.
By following the three phases above, you keep your learning and training goals clear, but then you also are being intentional about how to make sure you get the people to learn what you hope they do. There is a great deal of psychology involved in how we learn and finding the right training partner to guide you through that is powerful not only for reaching your learning goals, but also in helping you shape organizational culture. Organizations often end up wasting considerable investments by facilitating trainings with those internal teams and with external partners because they do not keep focused on what their teams need to learn, and even more importantly how we can get that learning to stick in a transformational way.
