There are an awful lot of people in my line of work (i.e., speakers) who offer training and/or expertise.
I am all for getting training and advice when I’m doing something new and different, but here’s the problem: if I stand up in front of a group of people and present myself as an expert or as a trainer of some sort, there is an oh so subtle implication that you, the audience, are lacking something. And in fact, many of the people who market training and expertise very subtly stick this knife in you and imply that you are defective in your current state. A perfect example: there are people who send me e-mails every day and hint at (note, they never actually guarantee) making me into a "million-dollar speaker." While this all looks good on the surface, there’s an oh-so-subtle implication in such a vague promise that being a mere $350,000 a year speaker is somehow shameful and defective. (Insert sound of delete key being hit.)
While offering expertise and training always sounds like a great idea on the surface, and may very well be an effective sales approach to the event owner/gatekeeper in front of you, you have to be very careful when you do such things to the actual audience, because you risk insulting people by implying that they don’t know how to do what they have devoted their professional lives to doing. Oy.
Since so many people have spent so many hours of their life in a classroom, it’s understandable that they would have little resistance to the idea of going back into a classroom, and immediately accept the idea that this is a way to improve things. But here is a little insight into this from one professional bass player:
I played for a lot of conductors in my professional playing career, and most of them saw themselves as trainers, instructors, teachers, or experts. It’s understandable why they would think this. The teacher preaching to classroom management model is ubiquitous. And the vast majority of orchestras are either student or amateur, and in those environments, yes the conductor is a sort of expert/teacher.
But when dealing with a major orchestra, this approach was always a disaster. When you walk out in front of a whole bunch of people who are already extremely qualified and experienced at what they do, if you fail to recognize and appreciate that, you will get you a passive aggressive negative response that will sink you.
The great conductors never did this. They never presented themselves as teachers, trainers, or experts. Consistently they were all about appreciating what we brought to the preceding. If they had any suggestions (and this was very much the exception, not the rule), they would present them in oh so humble terms. Respect was way more important than expertise. And if a conductor failed to show proper respect for our collective skill and experience, we would eat them alive.
Now you might say, "well that’s fine when you have people of that level of expertise." But in fact, I occasionally saw these great conductors work with lesser orchestras and even student orchestras, and they consistently got fabulous results, even with these supposedly "lesser" players.
I don’t think it’s that much of a reach to convert this to a corporate environment. If you’re having some sort of issue with your employees, before bringing in someone to "train them," take a good look at what’s going on right now. What is the "respect level" of your management team and policies? Are you making your priorities clear? Are people forced to waste time on things that they themselves don’t consider to be important? Is sucking up to you a major part of everyone’s job description? Do you appreciate the work that they are doing for you (both in terms of money paid and management’s appreciation/awareness)? Did you hire or promote your brother-in-law ahead of someone who was more competent? (And if you did, do you really think no one reassessed your commitment to quality and service?)
Anyway…
There are a lot of people out there who preach that schooling is the answer to everything. Interestingly enough, most of the people who preach this (surprise surprise) offer training, or they work for a school. What they offer has some value I suppose, but I have to say, when I stepped into a professional playing environment, virtually nothing that I learned in school had any application for me. It was a major sink or swim situation, and I just barely survived the first year, as there was no "training" available for this highly specialized work, except the act of doing it.
I feel very much the same way about my work as a speaker. If I take everyone’s training classes, how will this turn me into a unique entity? I think that I will stick with my preferred system.
I never train my audiences. I discover them. Hopefully that will lead to you discovering me.
© Justin Locke
*PS the title of this post is a phrase we used to jokingly say to eachother when I was a freshman at music school. No matter which way you turned, we were informed that everything we knew was wrong, we were all misguided ignorant nobodies, and we had to learn everything from scratch from our instructors.
