By day, I'm a mild-mannered e-learning product marketing manager, but at night, I'm a... well, still fairly mild-mannered volunteer docent at the Columbus Zoo. The zoo has a new director, Jeff Swanagan, who spoke to the docents this week. Jeff had a central message for us and the zoo as a whole: "Touch the heart to teach the mind."
His point for the zoo is that we shouldn't discount the valuable things people take home about the importance of animals and conservation just by sharing wide smiles with their families over a neat zoo experience. It got me thinking about how it also applies to corporate training.
We don't have automatic smile-makers like cute, fuzzy animals when we need to teach a bunch of coworkers or colleagues. On the other hand, no one (except a zookeeper) ever furthered their career or made more money by going to the zoo.
Here's my proposal for touching the heart to teach the mind in our training programs: too often, we hold the benefits to be gained from completing training as self-evident. Both the creation of the training and the people who take the training can benefit if, right along with (and maybe instead of) stating the objectives for training, we should be stating WHY those objectives will make our students' lives better, more productive, and further their careers.
In productivity/organization systems, we "begin with the end in mind." Planning a successful project means envisioning exactly what the end result will look like, then building all the steps it will take to reach that. In our e-learning, classroom training, and knowledge management of all types, let's be sure to make that end involve how our training will impact everyday work lives and careers.
Not just...
"You'll learn how to manage projects"
But...
"Your projects will be completed in less time and with fewer glitches."
Not just...
"You'll learn how to make a pivot chart in Excel."
But...
"You'll present the data you gather in a way that will knock people's socks off."
It's two ways of saying the same thing, but the second way is what will touch the heart to teach the mind.
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