AchieveGlobal's blog

Four Generations and Social Networking, Part 1

By Jack McDaniel I’ve been fascinated with generational studies for several years since picking up the excellent book Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss. (You might recall their ground-breaking book on generational theory, the pithily named Generations.) At an AchieveGlobal event for trainers last year, we covered topics from training ROI to the latest trends. While everyone was engaged throughout, the energy spiked when we discussed options for engaging four generations of learners now in the workplace. That day sent the hamster into overdrive running the wheel inside my head. Anecdotal evidence implies a wide disparity among how different generation use social-networking tools. My father-in-law, who once watched the New York Giants play football at the Polo Grounds, has one favorite social-networking tool ... the telephone (and I don’t mean a 3G touch-screen texting machine). On the other hand, my teenage daughters give new meaning to the word connected. Some days I feel like a befuddled Arthur Dent in their hip new Ford Prefect world. So I suspected a connection, like peanut butter and chocolate, between each generation and its social-networking tools. In the spirit of crackpot science, I slapped together a totally invalidated, extemporaneous survey and forced my friends, family, co-workers, and all their friends to complete it. The survey contained very few questions, with a 1 – 5 scale for the first two (What tools do you use? And how often?). I asked participants to identify their most and least favorites, and tell me why. And, of course, I asked them to identify their generation. My arbitrary list of tools covers the most popular – at least in North America:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Skype
• LinkedIn
• Blogs
• Discussion forums
• Email
• Text messaging
• Internet messaging

Next week I’ll reveal and analyze my survey results. In the meantime, I would love to hear from anyone with an interest in this confluence of generations working and learning together. Are their differences real, or overblown? Are younger generations wired differently, or are any “delta factors” due solely to behavioral and environmental differences? Tell me what you think.

Final Thoughts: Does Training Rely Too Much on Coaching by Managers?

By Craig Perrin This is the last segment of my discussion with Kim Stafford, AchieveGlobal’s Director of International Development, on problems associated with coaching by managers. This week we return to the original question: “Does training rely too much on coaching by managers?” KIM: Craig, you say yes, we over-rely on coaching and we need to get off that drug, so to speak. At the same time, I think you agree that classroom training, which I call effective training, requires coaching if you want a return on your training investment. To reinforce that point, I’ll quote Broad and Newstrom from their classic book, Transfer of Training:

A frequently overlooked factor is management's involvement in the training process... [R]esponsibility for improving transfer of training must be shared by managers and trainees, as well as trainers.

Newstrom's research at the University of Minnesota clearly identified the manager as the most important force both before and after training to reinforce concepts and skills. As Sharon [AchieveGlobal CEO Sharon Daniels] said in her Selling Power interview, “Play chess with your people, not checkers.” To leverage the unique strengths of their people, managers will always need to coach employees as they learn and apply new skills. So, does training rely too much on coaching by managers? I think not. CRAIG: That all makes sense to me, on paper. Unless organizations start making a big effort to support regular coaching – highly unlikely in the current economic climate – we can expect coaching to remain low-priority. What’s needed is a much easier kind of change. Not of the whole organization, but of training. The pieces and also the desire for this change are already in place.  We need to make much better use of the available technologies. We need to leverage the intense social needs of younger workers – witness Facebook and MySpace among Millennials, even Linkedin among older workers. Of course people want to learn, but they want to learn in new ways. You might call it the Google-ization of corporate training: find what you need, now, use it immediately to solve a problem, and move on. These big societal and technological trends will drive training in the 21st century, with intense, continuing interaction among learners. According to AT&T, my 18-year-old sent or received 1100 text messages last month. I’m not saying that constitutes peer coaching – who knows what the heck he was talking about – but it points the direction that training needs to follow. We need to leverage all these forces, all these available technologies; we need to abandon outdated forms of training that rely on big events and follow-on coaching by managers; and, I believe, we need to stop shaming managers by lecturing them on their failure to do what their own managers don’t often do – and frankly don’t often require.