THE 70 PERCENT RULE

Shame on us communicators and advertisers and content developers (ad nauseum).

Our learning and development colleagues know this principle of knowledge acquisition by heart:  10 percent relies on actual training, 20 percent, from others.  And the 70 percent?  From on-the-job experiences.

Recently, the experiential part of learning has been ramped up. 

Thanks in no small part to start-ups and tech businesses, blackboard-painted walls and tables on wheels act as inspiration and experience vehicles. 

Software developers, eager to understand why clients do what they do and what they want, hold what’s been called ‘participatory market research.’ 

And august institutions such as Harvard regularly conduct hands-on courses, from a prison studies project learning about criminal justice (in tandem) with prison inmates to re-engineering medical devises with doctors close at hand.

Why don’t we practice first-hand learning?  In other words, when there’s an issue that demands not just awareness but also the action to do something, communicators and colleagues need to seriously consider increasing the do-it-yourselves and how-tos. 

Take performance management, for instance.  A number of today’s more progressive organizations are killing the old ranking system and mid and year-end talks, replacing both with ongoing dialogues between boss and individual, team and individual.  At the same time, our high-tech reliance means many employees aren’t accustomed to conversations, with many preferring text, Instagram, Twitter, and email over traditional face to face.

The solution?  Show them how to talk, to handle difficult encounters, and to really listen and hear and learn.  It’s as much our goal as it is our L&D colleagues.

SCHOOL DAZE

Every year, Bloomberg Businessweek devotes one issue to MBAs and the schools that love them.

In the latest, a sidebar shows the survey results from 1,320 corporate recruiters who were asked to identify most valued job skills and score each institution for delivery of those skills. The charts revealed what industries want, skills employers value, and where schools succeed. 

Oddly enough (tongue firmly in cheek), the skill on almost every industry’s list was … communication.  Of the 11 industry sectors, from chemicals to transportation, only one – consumer products – didn’t mention communication in its top three ‘most wanted’ skills.  Six of the 11 industry reps ranked communication skills as number one; 68 percent of recruiters say it’s one of the five most important skills.

Then the disconnect begins. 

Of the top ten full-time MBA programs (as ranked by the magazine), from Duke’s Fugua to Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper – including the usual Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, and Northwestern – guess how many scored super high on communication skills?

None.

Therefore, since business schools don’t do a superb job of training its grads on communication, it seems to be the responsibility of industry to do just that.  And sure, corporate courses available through Open Sesame, SkillSoft, Harvard’s ManageMentor do an average kind of job teaching communications.  But why couldn’t it be the province of the communications department and its siblings (like marketing) to supplement the standard learning?  Why couldn’t the function set up a mentoring program to coach managers, early talent, hi-pos, and the like on the ins and outs of communications?

No budget is no excuse.  What is?

THINK. THANK. THUNK.

Almost every client and colleague, no matter the size of the company or type of department, agrees on their biggest talent issue:  The lack of critical thinking among young professionals.

Statistics, of course, back them up:  When Harris Interactive last year polled employers and about-to-enter-the-workforce employees about the state of preparedness of grads, the disconnect was drastic.  Nearly 70 percent of millennials said they were ready to work, while fewer than half of employers concurred.

The next obvious question (and its add-ons):  How do you teach critical thinking – and how can you identify and measure it?

No easy answers:  Recruiters rely on take-home exercises and behavioral interviewing to assess a candidate’s capabilities.  So, too, managers might opt for a series of conversations about process and open-mindedness, two attributes so important to making good decisions.  Or simply by learning on the job, with practicums and examples pulled from everyday challenges.

Another option from our across-the-ocean counterparts:  U.K. students can select “resolution of dilemmas” and “critical reasoning” courses.

All well and good.  Yet it still leaves many of us needing to train staff on thoughtful and reasoned considerations, the art of good decision making. 

What’s your solution?  Hand out books?  Walk through workshops?  Assign case histories?  Or announce, as did U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, that “you know it when you see it.”

WHAT HARVARD LEARNED FROM US

As communicators, we feel vindicated.  Big time.

In a summer 2014 issue of Fast Company, no less an intellectual celebrity than the current president of Harvard, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, admitted she was bewildered and challenged by communicating messages in a large organization.  Her solution?  Say them again and again and again.

We wonder, though, if the good Doctor truly embraced the concept of different repetitions.  Training gurus will tell you to communicate the same thing six different ways – through pictures, spoken and written word, demonstrations, teaching, and activities, for example – for stickiness.  Plus they’ll also point out the difference between learning and mastering repetition.  Think of a nascent marathoner who’s figuring out, with help, the right ways to run.  That’s the learning part of the equation.  Then contrast that with a seasoned miler who’s perfecting his/her technique to win that race.  Voila:  Mastery!

With us, though, the issue with repetition is boredom.  It’s an imperative of our and any business that, with new information, strategies, benefits, changes, we better understand it in order to spread the messages.  Invariably, though, we get fatigued, tired of the same-old, same-old and yearn for the novel.  So we quit, perhaps earlier than the sixth iteration.

The same thing sometimes occurs with our advertising brethren.  The client or the agency or whomever decides that ‘enough is enough’ and shifts the campaign, even though it might just have started to work.  Even though not enough eyes and ears have been exposed.  And so on+.

Guess we’re becoming Walt Whitman:  “Do I repeat myself?  Very well then, I repeat myself.”