Knowing something to be able to do it are two very different things. Totally. Basically, what I learned is how to develop this capability in others. I’m drawing from how I was trained to get better at driving a race car, how I used to train national level martial arts fighters back in the early ’90s. It’s always about we’ve got to recreate the conditions that they’re going to be in the real world during the training environment or the coaching environment. Most of the people in my field, they don’t do that. Leadership development worldwide is a $60 billion industry. This is just corporate leadership development. Instead, the jury is pretty much in on it. It is not producing any significant improvement in organizational effectiveness and business performance. The reason largely is, if you believe Michael Beere, who’s this change guru, Harvard as a school professor, is because soon after these programs are over, people revert back to their old ways of behaving. I don’t think that’s actually even true, because if they weren’t changed during the program, there’s nothing to revert back to. The fact is, when you go through most leadership development programs or sales training programs, you’re not seeing any evidence that people could produce these new behaviors under pressure in the room.
Why should you confident they could do it in real life under real life pressure? That’s what we figured out, how to recreate the situations very realistically. Then when they then attempt to have the conversation with this, We play the customer, we play the client. We play the person on their team. We play their manager, whomever. We play their colleague. The moment they fall in this trap, we don’t just sit back, Josh. Five minutes later, take some notes, clap, and everybody sits down, because that’s not going to make you better. The moment somebody falls in this trip, we’re going to go, Hey, Josh, you know what? You jump to action too quickly here. You’re offering a solution, but there’s been no agreement on the problem. Do you see that? You’re like, Oh, yeah, shit. I do see that. Okay, so what’s your view of the problem? It’s this. Okay, say that. Restart the role play. So we’re doing helping people catch and convert their behavior in the context of these realistically recreated situations. And so what happens to people is they get very clear on how they need to handle this conversation. They’re very confident that they can handle it well.
But the repetition of putting them in situations that are very close to what they’re going to face in reality with very hands-on coaching in the moment actually helps them short-circuit their old patterns and replace them a new, more effective patterns. That’s how you develop real competence. You close this knowing, doing gap under real-life pressure by recreating the pressure in the room.
