Rat-tling Home the Message!

We were running a training program in Antwerp with an engineering crew from a large pharmaceutical company.  The program covered leadership, emotional intelligence, team building and personal branding. Additional key strands involved solving 2 key business challenges, personal coaching and career insights from the company’s own leaders. All good stuff.  Question: could we do something more?

Rat-Light District: When working in cities, we like to get some ‘local flavour.’ Participants, having flown half way around the world, need to see something more than the inside of a training room. One suggestion –  to visit the (fully legal) red light district – got shot down pretty quickly. An organised ‘brothel-spotting’ trip is hardly a decision that any large public company with a diverse executive team wants to be associated with. While some participants might decide to go AWOL after hours, we couldn’t encourage it.

Underground Sewers: Turns out that there was a dramatic alternative. Some European cities e.g. Paris – have a working network of sewers that can be visited. We donned rubber boots along with a full protective clothing suit. Then took a 1.5 kilometre walk through an underground labyrinth of tunnels – guided by one man and his flashlight. It was slippy underfoot and we also had to avoid deep channels of ‘water.’ There were rats everywhere, running past our feet and along ledges at head height. Oh, did I mention that the place was also full of spiders? It was magnificent. A construction marvel which the engineers loved (for reporting balance: not everyone was crazy about the rats).

Boring Events: Let’s face it.  A lot of training is boring. Some weeks previously I was working in North America. The trainer in the room next door (paper-thin walls) was teaching leadership and empowerment. She started speaking (really loudly) at 9am. She paused to take a breadth about every 27 minutes. The only ‘empowerment’ was when the audience was asked if they agreed/disagreed with her (people who ‘disagreed’ got short shift). It was the most top-down day I’d witnessed since being in junior infants. The ‘Lecturer’ obviously didn’t understand irony i.e. the fact that the topic was empowerment. 

Experiential Learning: Learning by doing is hardly a new concept. A Chinese saying, thousands of years old, neatly captures this: ‘I hear & forget; I see & remember; I do & understand.’ You can’t lecture people into acquiring new skills. It’s boring. It’s disempowering. And it doesn’t work. Give participants the money for a holiday in Marbella. At least they might come back refreshed and with a suntan! To embed learning – you need to take participants beyond ‘hearing’. Doing something powerful and emotionally engaging works. If you can wrap some fun around this (like that sewer tour) this makes it truly memorable.

Mama Mia: On a previous mission in Sweden, I’d re-written the lyrics of 3 ABBA songs. One of the guys on the course was called Fernando – so that song choice was low hanging fruit. I bought 4 ABBA wigs and costumes from a dress-up shop opposite the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and recruited one of the male participants (a great guitarist) and  two of the woman to sing. When the ‘band’ got changed and we emerged from the disabled toilet, it generate a lot of fun. We handed out the reworked lyrics and had a Karaoke session that’s was, arguably, more memorable than most of the stuff I’d been teaching. Creating strong team working across a global network was a key goal of the programme; so, that box was ticked.

Don’t just run training programmes for your people. Make your events memorable. Otherwise, those events (and you) will be soon forgotten.

Paul 

PS Lighter Moments:

An Irish guy, Mick, drinks in his local pub. Every time he goes to the bar he buys 3 pints of Guinness, then he sits down, drinks them, and goes back for three more. One day, I asked him why he buys three at a time. He said:

“Well, it’s like this. Me brother Paddy is in Australia and my other brother Walt is over in New York. Years ago, we made a pact that no matter how far away from each other we are, we always buy a pint for the other two, so it’s like we’re drinking together.”

It was a touching story. Then I became concerned when, yesterday, I saw Mick in the pub getting only two pints of Guinness each time he went to the bar. So I asked him if his brothers were both okay.

“For sure,” he replied. “My brothers are fine, but I’m on antibiotics so I’m not drinking this week.”