What's a training pilot look like? Or first, what is it? You take the course materials you've been creating and improving and you teach them to the audience they're intended for.
What it looks like is three weeks of standing in a windowless room for eight hours a day, fielding questions that you may or may not know the answer to. It nearly always requires four to six hours of preparation between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. I'm not complaining, just reporting. As to what happens, you aim to hit the target: participants grow confident using new skills and generally have a good feeling about the experience. You want to know how close to center of the target you struck. The first requires learning objectives (for you training types out there). The second requires evaluation.
In practice, the success of a pilot depends to some extent on the facilitator. When materials aren't quite right, the pace is slow, the activity crashes and burns, you want someone in front of the room who can pull a rabbit out of his or her ... hat. Our pilot went well. We saw our share of rabbits. Most lived through the experience of being yanked by the ears.
I mentioned internal political ructions in my last post. They continued, but aren't worth mentioning now. On that note, a truism: everyone chooses to involve themselves with co-workers based on a set of pre-requisites: commitment (how much do I respect this person), pragmatism (how will this help or hurt a relationship that may be tested in similar ways in the future), and neurosis (You can't push me around, I'm afraid of conflict, She got this attitude, etc. Insert yours here.). Here's my litmus-test question before giving feedback: Are we going to work together again and do I want it to work better next time? And that's all I need to say about that.
With one week left to go before my Rapture-by-jetliner, one thing I feel strongly as I look back over ten months is that people have been individually very warm to me. I'm grateful. Working with the same people all the time provides a lot of social support, even when it leads to conflict. And once you've earned a little respect, you begin to have the power of influence. Always less than you'd hope. But it's real. I have an undying hope to do good, make people better for having had to do with me. It's a little crazy (See above, re: neurosis). I'm very grateful for genuine kindness I've been offered here. I hope that my influence and the genuine kindness I returned totes up in the "good effect" column.
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