Training - The Dark Side!

Training is the process of imparting skills – it is about developing competencies that can be used on the job. This statement also implies that a training program would usually relate to transactions between two adults – the trainer and the trainee! Touché! Ask the trainers! How often it happens that the trainees takes training as an opportunity to awaken the little child asleep within them…how often the trainers find themselves worrying about the true age of those they address…and how seldom the trainers find themselves wondering why the principles of andragogy disappear in the training hall?

Most trainers will acknowledge the existence of a not-so-adult behavior of the adult trainee in the training programs. This is not to say that all trainees unleash their younger selves and set them upon the trainer – but to draw your attention to those who do. These members of the audience are recognized as hecklers or disruptive participants. These are the participants who form the trainers’ worst nightmares! Let us review these participants and their reasons for becoming hecklers, in the light of instructional design. I am confident that we will discover some useful ways to recycle their energy towards enhancing the trainings instead of destroying them.

As always, we will try to determine if instructional design enables us to first find what irks these participants and why. We will then rationally proceed to identify possible ways of dealing with them and bringing them into the mainstream discussions.

Let us begin with the heckler. In most training programs, the heckler is usually the unwilling participant. This individual, in all probability did not want to be in the training. The reasons behind the unwillingness to participate could be varied.

Consider the following:

• Rhea feels that she already knows enough. She doesn’t require this training. Yet she’s been asked to participate! Now she will have to spend her evenings in the office and complete her project.
• Piyush has already attended four trainings on the subject. He has developed a belief that trainings cannot help you acquire a skill; all they can do is provide you knowledge of the concepts. He feels he has already acquired enough knowledge through the web and the earlier trainings, and all he needs is time to apply them – He believes in learn-on-the-job.
• Joan finds all training and trainers boring. All trainings follow the same pattern – there is the boring icebreaker (Well! It is supposed to gain your attention – Right!); then there is short warm up – Prior information recall…and so on! She smirks when the icebreaker is announced…she knows the routine.
• Alex has been the star programmer of his organization. He is a college dropout who feels that all those who’ve been able to complete college are not geniuses…and a non-genius trainer cannot train a genius programmer! But now that Alex has been forced to undergo this training – he will make sure that everyone is able to see through the trainer!
  

The above list is the proverbial tip of the iceberg! The iceberg that is hidden beneath the heckler’s veneer is much bigger and more dangerous; if ignored.

Let us try to understand the hecklers’ mindsets by probing into their reasons for being the way they are (Not withstanding the reason that the trainer isn’t good enough – If you are reading this article, you must be a good trainer for only good trainers worry about the hecklers and about bringing them in the mainstream discussions.)

A heckler is a heckler for one of the following reasons:

The heckler:

• seeks amusement as a payback for the time to be spent in the training.
• seeks to derive this amusement by embarrassing the trainer if possible.
• also seeks attention for self, by diverting the attention of the group from the trainer.
• is obsessed with the belief that the training is useless.
• suffers from professional insecurity and feels that the training (if successful) will undermine the heckler’s position in the organization.
• is not the person who has paid for the training; heckling is more common in corporate trainings.

If we review the entry behavior of the heckler, it may have the following characteristics:

At the Skills Front:

• The heckler may already have some or more competencies that the training program promises to achieve at its end.

At the Attitude/Beliefs Front:

• The heckler may have developed a negative attitude towards the function of training, through repeated negative experiences.
• The heckler may also have a negative attitude towards the trainer’s capabilities (The trainer looks young! I was expecting someone who looked more mature! What? The trainer has worked in the construction industry for 10 years – what does he know of our industry?)
• The heckler may be disgusted at having to attend a training program that coincides with the goals of the organization, but not with his or her individual goals. (I don’t want to be a graphic designer. Why should I attend a media-training program?)

Unfortunately, in most of the corporate training programs, the audience is so diverse that it is almost impossible to detail out the skills and the attitude of individual audiences before the training begins. Only upon entering the training room does the trainer experience the heckler’s wrath! The heckler can easily be identified through their body language.

The following are the heckler’s identification marks.

• Sports a critical look on the face, a little smirk, eyes looking askance at the trainer as well as at the other members of the audience.
• Leans back in the chair; allows hands to dangle.
• Doodles.
• Either arrives too early or too late.
• Tries to distract those sitting around by passing notes/talking in whispers.
• Has too many context-irrelevant queries.
• Provides illogical arguments to sustain discussion.
• Ends discussions with a seemingly dissatisfied shrug.

In the event of having successfully identified a heckler in your training program, your first object should be to determine what could have caused the heckling problem. Of course, you cannot ask the heckler why he or she is so irksome! You need to wheedle the information through carefully crafted questions. For example, you may ask the object of your irritation, a question about the person’s current routine (to find whether the training is cutting into the person’s project time) or about his or her background (to determine whether the participant has some skills that the training is supposed to address.)

Now that you have some idea of what motivates your particular heckler, try to steer your heckler’s attention in the positive direction.

For example:
If you deduce that the heckler already has some competencies that the training program promises to achieve at its end, try to enlist his/her help to enhance the activities. Allow this knowledgeable participant to answer some of the questions that other participants pose. When you want to begin a topic by activating the audience’s schema, ask for the heckler’s views first. These solutions work in both directions – if the heckler really knows, recognition follows – recognition helps the heckler mellow down – now he or she has a reputation to sustain. On the other hand, if the feeling of “already possessing the competencies” is a chimera; the heckler will withdraw the weapons that were trained on you, for the fear of exposure.)

Similarly, an entry attitude that the trainer is not capable can be remedied by listing the scope of the training and the relevant competencies of the trainer. Though this may look very foolish if done without provocation; try to build an opportunity for the heckler to be provocative by directly or indirectly implying that he or she doesn’t believe in your capabilities. This will set the stage for a formal introduction of your competencies as a trainer.

Our discussion has focused on bringing the heckler into the mainstream discussions in any training program. We have tried to outline a process where we’ve tried to reduce the heckler’s affective dissonance through some cognitive measures. It is important to remember that most hecklers are hecklers because of an issue that relates to the affective domain. The only way the affective domain can be handled with speed is through the process of cognitive reasoning.

At this point, I would like to note that though some profess that what works best with hecklers is to give them warnings and then have them leave the training. I don’t think that in most cases, it works positively. It is true that once in a while you may find yourself dealing with an incorrigible heckler, but in most cases, they are individuals who have developed a belief or an attitude on the basis of their previous experiences. They are just exhibiting adult learning behavior but carrying it to ludicrously childish extremes. They have to be handled with a mix of andragogical and pedagogical responses. They have to be given rational explanations that should make them question their beliefs; and at the same time they have to be controlled so that their influence doesn’t turn detrimental to the entire training.

The method is simple to understand yet its implementation could be difficult due to the intervention of our own attitudes. If we begin with the attitude that a heckler cannot be salvaged; we would never be able to create a harmonious environment in our training programs. If we wish to make the trainings enjoyable, we should try to identify the heckler (or hecklers – if Saturn rules our trainings! Sigh!) Then we must systematically go about applying instructional design to decide the cause of heckling. We should then take the issue head-on and try to win another positive participant over…from the dark side!

Author: Shafali R. Anand