Lift Up Your Hearts!

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

Reading, for me, is not a luxury but a necessity, like eating.  Ideally, meals should be eaten slowly, savored, and appreciated, preferably in the company of good companions and interesting conversation.  So it also should be with books.  All too often, however, under the pressures of the day, we gulp a hasty meal and move on. Alas, I have not done justice to The One Thing You Need to Know, but when I read about it on the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog, I knew I had to grab what I could from it now, and hope to give it a better reading later.

Still, I can't resist giving you a few high points, and in this post I'll begin with his insightful classification of learning styles, and I'll quote almost directly quite a bit because he says it so well.  His caveat:  I am not suggesting that these three styles are mutually exclusive.  Certain [people] may rely on a combination of two or perhaps even all three styles.  Nonetheless, keep your ear attuned to each of these three styles and you should be able to focus your coaching with greater accuracy.

Analyzing Analyzers understand a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece.  And since in their eyes, every single piece is important, they crave information.  They need to know all there is to know about a subject before they can begin to feel comfortable with it.

If they don't feel they have enough information they will dig and push until they get it.  They will read the assigned reading.  They will attend the required classes.  They will take good notes.  They will practice.

The best way to teach an Analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom.  Role-play with her.  Post-mortem with her.  Break her performance down into its component parts so that she can then carefully build it back up into a total performance.  Always allow her time to prepare.

Remember, the Analyzer hates mistakes.  A cliché about learning is that "mistakes fuel learning," but for the Analyzer this just isn't true.  In fact the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes.  So whatever you do, don't expect her to learn much by throwing her into the middle of a new situation and telling her to wing it.

Doing  In direct contrast to the Analyzer, the absolute best way to teach a Doer is to throw him in the middle of a new situation and tell him to wing it.  The most powerful learning moments for the Analyzer occur prior to the actual perforrmance, whereas for the Doer they occur during the performance.  The dead ends, the trials and the errors are all integral parts of his learning process.

The Doer learns most in the act of figuring things out for himself.  For him preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity.  Only the task inself, with its inherent possibility of real failure or real success, is intense enough to get him to concentrate and to apply himself.

If you want a Doer to learn, do not ask him to role-play with you.  Role-playing is fake and therefore uninteresting to him.  Instead pick a task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and then get out of his way.  Once he has figured out how to complete this simple task, gradually increase the level of each task's complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role.  Sure, he may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the Doer, mistakes are indeed the raw material for learning.

In one sense Doers can be frustating students because they won't give your advice much credence.  They have to experience a bad or good outcome themselves before they believe that it's true.  But in another sense, they are wonderful to have around.  They will always be the first to jump into a new challenge and attack it with spirit. 

Watching  Watchers won't learn much if you break a task down into its component parts and ask them to practice each part or if you ask them to role-play with you.  Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, Watchers are often viewed as rather poor students.

They may be poor students, but they aren't necessarily poor learners.  Watchers can learn a great deal, but only when they are given the chance to see the total performance.  Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph.  For them what's important is the context of each pixel, its position relative to all the others, and they can see this, they can "get" this, only when they view the completed picture.

If you're trying to teach a Watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom, take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers. 

As with all such categorizations, nothing is 100% for anyone I know, but it's clear to me that Porter is an Analyzer, making all the more amazing how well he has adapted to IBM's continually throwing him into new situations where he must "wing it."  And Janet, who favors "learning to swim by drowning," has plenty of Doer characteristics.  I see Heather and myself as a less obvious mixture of all three.

[Note: Despite Janet's chosen phrase describing her learning preferences, she did not learn to swim by drowning.  Before she was 18 month old she was as joyful, confident, and competent in the water as a porpoise, but the YMCA program under which she (and Heather) learned to swim was as gentle and enjoyable as can be.  We did not drown nor even scare the kids!  Just in case someone from Child Protective Services is listening....]

I hope this post generates some comments, as I think there's a fair amount of value in Buckingham's analysis.