.
When the student has begun hitting the ball reliably for a while, Gallwey starts giving her tasks to do that involve focusing attention on the ball. One is to describe the sound the ball makes when it hits her raquet. Another–not captured in the video–is to ask the learners to call out fhow far each shot lands from the base line of the court.Gallwey assures the learner that it doesn’t matter where the shots land—he just wants an accurate distance estimate. But an interesting thing happens: the shots start landing closer and closer to the baseline, without the learner making any conscious effort to get them closer.
I’ve seen this video several times and I’m always amazed by it. Even knowing what I know about learning, I’m still surprised to see that Gallwey’s technique works as well as it does.
I believe that Gallwey’s key points—to de-emphasize ego and technique, and to emphasize focus on outcomes—have been incorporated to a significant extent into modern tennis lessons, and that they are the central reasons why these lessons are much more effective than the ones I took.
This is my eighth and final blog in the eight-blog series that we called “The View is Worth the Climb.” I’ve talked about the problems with corporate training today, the fact that we have this broken investment value equation, and the need to fix that broken equation. I’ve discussed the mandate or imperative for transformation and the fact that we shouldn’t be waiting for someone to tell us to do it, that we should be ahead of that and making the kinds of changes and improving our situation greatly so that we are adding more value. I’ve discussed how “Running Training Like a Business” is an appropriate methodology for organizations to utilize to begin the transformation process, and I’ve laid out why outsourcing is a tool that organizations should seriously consider in their pursuit of transformation.
What I haven’t talked about, something that I believe in my heart is that at the end of the day, it’s not about training, it really is about results. We can be doing the best training in the world, developing the best classes, bringing the best instructors, and having the best content, but if it doesn’t make a difference for the business, then it really is irrelevant.
I often tell people about benchmarking, because benchmarking is a great tool that almost all training organizations use at one time or another. You may look at a benchmarking report and say, “Wow, the average company in my industry spends $800 dollars per employee per year and I’m only spending $400. So, I must be under-spending and I should be going to my management and showing them this benchmarking report and making the case for doubling the budget.” And what I would say is if you’re spending $400 and your benchmarks are spending $800 and you’re getting no value for the $400 you’re investing, you’re probably overspending; you’re overinvesting. On the other hand, if you’re getting $30 back for every dollar you invest, you probably ought to quadruple that investment, not just double it. So when we do benchmarking, we have to make certain that we do it in the context of value creation. And that’s why I say it’s not about training, it’s about results.
So let me just shut this down with one final observation. There’s something Ronald Regan use to say all the time, “This tide raises all ships.” And I think that’s the case for training and what happens when we transform ourselves from a functional orientation to a value creating machine that in fact this tide does raise all ships. For the training organization, it means that the people in that organization are doing work that makes a difference for the company they work for and that they leave at the end of the day saying they’ve made an impact and feeling like they’ve made an impact. I’m not certain that everybody can say that today.
The second thing is for the employees of those companies where we’re doing really terrific training on important business issues. The employees find that their work is more rewarding, it allows them to do things th