In the last couple of weeks, I’ve run two courses involving persuasion, influence and negotiation skills.
On both courses I used a range of activities to practise the skills, some were work – related and some weren’t. You might think that work – related examples would always be preferable, but they’re not always the best option – sometimes you get better results by using situations which have nothing to do with people’s actual worklife.
When you choose a training activity, you have to be very clear about why you’re using it and what you expect it to achieve. You also have to be clear about any possible pitfalls.
One pitfall of any activity is that someone will say, ” it’s not realistic “. Sometimes they say that as an excuse, because they don’t want to bother taking part or because they didn’t perform very well and they don’t want to take responsibility ( ooh, I can be harsh when I want to ).
So, when you choose your activity, you want to reduce the chances of someone using that criticism.
Now, you might think that this is a great argument for using work – related activities because they would be more realistic. But the problem there is that you have to design them so they really are true to life. If there are any inconsistencies, you leave yourself open to complaints such as, ” In real life, we would have more information than this ” or, ” A real client wouldn’t behave like that ” or, ” We would have longer to prepare for a real meeting “.
Yes, all of these are comments I’ve heard myself over the years.
You would hope that, using a work – related scenario, participants could use their own experience to improvise a bit or fill in any gaps, and many do, but not all will.
Another potential problem of using work – related examples is that people can easily fall back into their usual ways of working through habit. They have a ” normal ” way of approaching situations and their usual instincts kick in and dictate the way they approach the activity.
Of course, you can use this as a learning point, showing someone how they did this, reverted to habit, and didn’t apply the skills you’ve been talking about. But, either way, it becomes an issue you have to deal with.
For these reasons, it can sometimes be helpful to use activities or scenarios which are completely divorced from work situations.
An advantage of these is that they don’t pretend to reflect real working life and so can’t be criticised for not being entirely accurate. Also, the participants won’t fall into their usual ” work mode ” because it’s a different situation. They will often be more creative and imaginative faced with a situation which is outside their usual experience.
What you’re doing is isolating the skills they need to practise and deliberately taking them out of their normal environment.
The challenge you have then is to help them transfer the skills back to their working life because, unless they can do that, the exercise has been pointless. So you do need, at some stage, to bring them back to reality and encourage them to consider how to use what they have learned.
The most effective approach may be to use a mixture of the two, as I did. Use non – related examples to illustrate the key skills, then use work – related ones to put them into context.
But, when you use the work – related ones, make sure you do understand the work the people do and the situations they will face. If you’re an external trainer, as I am, you will rely on internal people to give you information about this if you’re working in a sector where you don’t have personal experience.
You can get people from the organisation to write the scenarios for you or to describe in detail the sort of situations the participants will come across in their work.
Or you can get the participants themselves to write the examples for you. Tell them that you are going to help them practise their skills in realistic situations ( note that I have studiously avoided using the term ” role play ” so far! ) and get one group to write a detailed brief for another group, reflecting a typical situation they would deal with.
That way, you should get the accuracy you need and you will cut down the opportunities for some people to criticise the exercise as being unrealistic.
So, in summary, do use work – related situations for your activities but not exclusively. There is a good case for using some examples which are far removed from the workplace, to isolate the skills you want to focus on, and then introducing work – related ones to help people transfer the learning. But be aware of the potential pitfalls of using work – based scenarios and be careful with their design to avoid these.
