Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D. — Common Ground Institute
Okay. Ted is the coach of a tennis team. He wants each member of his team to play well. So, he sends them off to tennis school. There, the team attends lectures on how to serve, how to perform a backhand volley or an overhead smash. The instructor lectures on how to anticipate where one’s opponent will hit the ball, how to return the ball, and so forth.
Now, the team comes back from tennis school and is ready to put their skills into action. How will it go?
Not very well.
Why?
Because you don’t learn tennis in a lecture hall. You learn tennis by playing tennis. This seems obvious. Yet many organizations continue to send employees to the equivalent of “tennis school” and expect meaningful changes in performance.
To teach employees new skills, we often remove them from their everyday activities. We ask them to take courses (usually online), attend trainings and workshops, watch instructional videos, complete modules, and pass quizzes. We then assume that what they learned will automatically show up in their daily work.
But it rarely works that way.
Why not?
Because learning is not simply the acquisition of information. Learning is the development of skilled action. We learn by actively engaging with people, problems, and situations. More specifically, we learn what we do — with others — in the middle of everything.
Let’s unpack that.
Learning Is Active
When people attend lectures, they do not simply absorb information. They actively interpret what they hear through the lens of what they already know. As a result, different people often learn different things from the very same experience.
Learning is not the transfer of knowledge from one mind to another. It is the process of using what we already know to make sense of new experiences.
This means that employees do not necessarily learn what is being taught. They learn their own understanding of what is being taught.
A person taking an online course may learn how to pass the quiz at the end. Someone attending a workshop may learn a new way to think about a problem. Another may learn very little at all. What matters is not what information was presented. What matters is how the learner actively engages with that information.
Learning Occurs with Others
Although people can learn on their own through reading, observation, trial and error, and self-reflection, there are limits to solitary learning.
We often develop most effectively when guided by more experienced others.
Think again about tennis. A player improves more quickly when practicing with a skilled coach than when practicing alone. The coach sees mistakes the player cannot see, provides feedback, demonstrates alternatives, and helps the player improve through guided practice.
The same principle applies in organizations.
Employees grow when supervisors, mentors, colleagues, and coaches help them tackle real challenges, reflect on mistakes, and refine their performance. Learning is not merely an individual process. It is often a relational process.
Learning Occurs in Context
Organizations often assume that if an employee learns something in a workshop, they will naturally apply it back at work.
Unfortunately, learning doesn’t work that way.
One of the most difficult challenges in education and training is transfer— the ability to apply knowledge and skills learned in one setting to a different setting.
An employee may leave a workshop understanding the principles of running an effective meeting. Yet understanding how to run a meeting and actually running one effectively are very different things.
Skills learned in one context do not automatically generalize to another. They must be adapted, practiced, refined, and integrated into the situations in which they will be used.
This is why leadership cannot simply be taught in a classroom.
A person may learn aboutleadership in a course. But leadership itself develops through leading real people in real situations.
We learn to lead when we make decisions, encounter problems, receive feedback, reflect on outcomes, adjust our approach, and try again. Leadership develops through cycles of action and reflection that occur in the flow of everyday work.
In other words, we learn in the middle of everything.
What This Means for Your Company
The lesson is not that courses, workshops, and training programs are useless. They can introduce new ideas, provide useful frameworks, and help people acquire important knowledge. However, training alone rarely produces lasting changes in performance.
Development occurs when learning becomes part of the work itself.
If you want employees, managers, and leaders to grow, treat them less like students sitting in a classroom and more like developing athletes or apprentices.
Here are some ways to do that:
- Be a coach, not just a boss. Give employees regular feedback while they are engaged in real work. Help them identify mistakes, refine their skills, and celebrate improvement.
- Create developmental relationships. Encourage experienced employees to mentor less experienced ones. Build a culture in which people help each other learn.
- Use formative assessment. Assess performance during the process of learning and doing, not simply afterward. Use assessment as a tool for growth rather than merely evaluation.
- Make development part of the job. Help employees identify areas for improvement, set goals, monitor progress, and reflect on their growth over time.
- Cultivate belonging and trust. People are more willing to invest in their own growth when they feel respected, valued, supported, and connected to the organization.
The best tennis players do not become skilled by attending lectures about tennis. They become skilled by practicing with coaches, teammates, and competitors who help them improve over time.
Employees are no different.
If we want people to grow, we must stop treating learning as the transfer of information and start treating it as the development of skilled action — with others, in real situations, in the middle of everything.