Delegating and Coaching

Another day, another training course – so it goes. Whereas the Understanding Data course was flawed mainly in the level it was pitched at, the Coaching and Delegation course ground my gears for other reasons. Early signs weren’t good: the trainer used an iPod in a speaker dock during plenary sessions. I expect that training organisations can claim that the iPod and the dock are business-critical expenditure, and get it tax-free. I’d seen that before, at some training that I’d found excruciating that was run by the Dale Carnegie organisation. I don’t think that playing music in the background is in itself a bad thing, but my experience of the Dale Carnegie course wasn’t great.

Dale who? Allow me… Dale Carnegie, author of the worldwide bestselling self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is probably the most famous self-help book of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Carnegie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People

You’ve heard of the Carnegie Hall, New York New York, right? Well, it’s a different Carnegie. Well, after a fashion, at least. You see, plain old Dale Carnegey changed his name to Carnegie in 1919 to increase the chance that people would associate him with contemporary philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, he of the Hall. Such shape-shifting may be seen as innovative in the eyes of some, but to me that’s just downright sneaky. This weasel of man left an empire of self-help and training organisations worldwide. Winning friends and influencing people the Dale Carnegie way amounts to, insincerity, language trickery and sliminess. It trades in Barnum Statements, in cold reading and in bullshit. That approach is totally at odds to my system of values.

One of the factors that affect the impact of the Forer Effect is the perceived authority of the speaker. Whereas a regular con-artist might need to earn the trust of his audience with a false title or exotic setting, a trainer on a work-related course is automatically placed into a position of authority – our organisation, to whom we are subordinate hierarchically and moreover who knows best for us, has chosen this trainer, to whom we are implicitly subordinate in knowledge, to drag us out of a technical gutter, and to show us how to improve. And so we’ll swallow any shit.

“… and we all know that some departments are poorly managed, aren’t they?”

How vague. How inclusive. How fuzzy. If ever you’ve felt your department was poorly managed, you’d feel like that comment was directed right at you. How sly – making the impersonal seem personal. There’s a weird sort of power in being able to get a class full of people to say “yes,” repeatedly – and it’s more than just asking obvious and leading questions too. There’s a technique in playing the class in such a way that makes them think that they knew the answers all along, and the just didn’t realise that they knew. Saying “Yes, and what else?” is an excellent way of disguising the phrase, “That’s not what I was after, try again.” There’s a skill involved in being able to laugh off a difficult question in such a way as to not answer it without any – many – of the class realising that you’ve sidestepped the issue with a grin. And when what you’re selling is a way of selling – find out what will your delegated person get out of the extra work you’re giving them, and then sell it to them – then who could blame the audience for getting sold.

I gave the trainer eight out of ten. I didn’t much like her methods, but she knew them inside out. I wish we wouldn’t get that kind of training bought in, but that’s an issue with commissioning, rather than with the trainer.

The course started with this slide:



“You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to learn.”

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.”

The second statement holds merit as an introduction to the ideal (and idealised) notion that increasing self-reliance through education in process-based solutions is superior to increasing dependency through end-based solutions, particularly around aid. Although clichéd, and flawed in its detail (one can only catch fish if there are fish in the lake to be caught, however proficient one’s rod-handling or netsmanship, for example), its principle is sound, and its usage harmless.

The first statement really angers me. It’s tautologous. It’s a mis-quotation of the phrase – “You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find out for himself” – and it’s misquoted in such a way that the essential element of the original is removed, and so is its crucial point. The emphasis in the original is on the importance of pupil participation in successful education. That is not the same as “helping someone to learn.”

Consider too the logical incompatibility of the two statements. It makes no sense to declare a process – teaching – to be deficient in one breath, and then to praise the lasting impact of that same process in the following breath. This is broadly symptomatic of the course as a whole – lots of killer soundbites that impress in isolation, but don’t hang together as a cohesive whole.