During an interview this morning with Agatha Gilmore from Chief Learning Officer magazine, I reiterated my view that managers need to think like trainers because instructing others is such a vital part of their duties. Too often managers say ‘I showed you how to do it, how come you can’t do it?’ Yet showing someone how to perform a task is not training!

Agatha agreed, saying nobody would like a school teacher who does that, yet that’s how many managers train.

Her analogy was powerful. Imagine a math teacher going up to the board, working through a quadratic equation (an equation in which the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square), and then getting upset with you because you didn’t “get it” after you watched it being done.

Imagine an astronomy professor showing you how to set up a telescope and locate a particular star, and then saying “Okay, now you do it!” If you’ve never used a telescope before, you’d be fumbling around with many unanswered questions.

Obviously, we wouldn’t consider these teachers to be very good. Unfortunately, way too many managers train this way.

In my book Creating Passion-Driven Teams, I point out that many managers shy away from their training responsibilities because nobody ever taught them how to train others. But training others IS a manager’s responsibility, and if a company hasn’t equipped its managers with this skill, I think it’s incumbent upon managers to learn it on their own.

(At this point, I can’t help but plug a new online training program I’m creating that will teach managers how to train — at their own pace. Get more details here)

At the beginning of my Train-the-Trainer workshops, I always say the same thing:

It’s when managers and leaders start to think like trainers that the workplace emerges as the thriving hub of productivity it wants to be.

A huge hat tip to Agatha over at Chief Learning Officer. I’m hoping her analogy helps managers understand — they must learn how to be a good teacher/trainer.

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Filed in Training, Motivation, Management, Workplace, Train the Trainer, E-Learning