Imagine a pilot who’s read an instruction manual about flying and aced the written test. He can tell you exactly how to fly a jet, but he’s spent very little time in the simulator. Would you fly with this person on his first day in the cockpit?
Nothing takes the place of repetitive skill practice to prepare people to perform their jobs effectively. At most companies, the skills that we want our employees to demonstrate in their jobs have been well defined. We know exactly how we want our sales people to behave with customers, how customer service representatives should handle calls, and how we’d like our managers to effectively coach employees. As a rule, we’re successful at defining what good looks like. But there’s almost always a gap between ideal behavior and reality. The only way to bridge that gap is through repetitive skill practice. It’s what makes the difference between just knowing about something and being able to do it. It’s why even the most experienced pilots are required to routinely practice take-offs and landings, why astronauts repeatedly practice their missions before they’re in outer space, why top major league hitters still take batting practice, and why the army is constantly training, even in times of peace. There’s no way around it. No matter what skill you want demonstrated, repetition is the key to mastering it. Practice makes perfect.
The challenge facing corporate trainers is how to engage employees in repetitively practicing their specific skills. When it comes to a myriad of business interactions—sales calls, customer service response, employee coaching, to name just a few—the answer is role play.
Role play originated in the 1920s with Viennese Psychiatrist Jacob Moreno
Role play originated in the 1920s with a Viennese psychiatrist named Jacob Moreno, who found that his patients improved much faster when they acted out their problems in a controlled environment rather than just talking about them. By the 1940s, role play was being used in business training. In business role play, employees practice their interactions with each other to prepare themselves for real world application with their customers, clients, or subordinates. Over the past 60 years, the use of role play as a training method has expanded into many different professional fields. Role play works. But it also has its challenges.
If you’ve ever facilitated a traditional role play exercise (or participated in one, for that matter) the following turn of events will probably sound familiar. When the facilitator says that it’s time to role play, there are ubiquitous eye rolls and a collective groan from participants. A palpable tension pervades the room as employees anticipate being put on the spot in front of their peers. After the role play activity begins, at the first opportunity, participants slip out of actual role play and begin talking about what they would say in a situation, rather than actually saying it. While these theoretical best practice conversations are valuable, they’re not role play. Going back to our original analogy, the pilot can talk all day long about how he should or would fly the jet, but until he practices that behavior repetitively, he’s not fit to fly the plane.
When it’s time to role play, a palpable tension pervades the room as employees anticipate being put on the spot in front of their peers.
In our experience, about eight to ten minutes into a traditional role play exercise, participants sink into socializing or digress into talking about last night’s football game or their plans for dinner. I sincerely empathize. There was a time in my life when I was a regular participant in a variety of sales training workshops. I confess that I was guilty of squirming out of role play at the first opportunity. If you reflect back on some of your own experiences as a trainee, I bet that you can relate, too. This issue is less about employees’ attitudes or commitment to excelling at their jobs, and more about our responsibility as training leaders to offer role-play exercises that are engaging and effective. The challenge is ours.
Not only do we have a responsibility to participants, we also have a fiscal responsibility to our respective companies to ensure that time dedicated to role play is not wasted. Please consider the following example. Your company’s 1,500-member sales force is participating in local district meetings. According to the agenda and curriculum that have been provided to local managers, one hour should be dedicated to a traditional role-play exercise. But on average, participants are actually engaged in practicing their sales skills for only eleven minutes of that hour; the rest of the time they’re either talking about what they would say, discussing related topics, or avoiding the activity altogether.
Assuming the sales representative’s average annual compensation is $75,000, the value of the time that’s been wasted is more than $40,000! And that doesn’t even begin to quantify the value of the lost productivity that results when participants’ fail to practice their job skills repetitively before interacting with real customers and/or colleagues.
The role-play challenges above assume that you still have the luxury of training your employees in a live, in-person forum. But in today’s environment, it’s not always an option to get all of your participants together in the same room. It can be especially difficult when you consider tightened budgets, reductions in travel expenditures, and the pressure to keep employees on the job, versus in a classroom.
As a training industry, we’ve been blessed for many years with a wide variety of creative and effective e-learning programs that help transfer information and test knowledge. Historically, however, there have been few e-learning options for skill practice, especially the repetitive skill practice that’s required to make people proficient in their jobs.
There are some internet-based programs that use voice-recognition, do-it-yourself role play. Employees practice by themselves and aren’t allowed to advance in the training process until the computer recognizes that they’ve spoken certain key words or phrases. Although effective for reinforcing those key words or phrases, these programs lack the personal, one on one feedback that employees get when they’re actively engaged in role-playing with each other.
There are also programs which incorporate webcam technology. Participants practice their skills on their own and record themselves once they feel they’re ready. Then the video is reviewed by a manager in another location who provides feedback to the employee. While this solution adds the valuable component of human feedback, it does not provide real-time interaction or discussion.
The simplest, least expensive method for facilitating role play remotely is for a local manager or trainer to lead a conference call or web meeting during which she facilitates role play and leads a related debrief discussion. The challenges with this plan are the same universal challenges with all conference calls and web meetings. First, no matter how effective the facilitator is, these meetings can be boring for participants. Particularly because everyone is remote, it’s easy to, shall we say, “multi-task”, during the call rather than staying focused and engaged. It’s difficult enough to keep employees engaged in active role play in person, and it’s an even greater challenge with remote meetings.
Since we know that role play is effective, our job as training leaders is to provide the best experience possible—one that engages employees and inspires them to fully participate in repetitive skill practice for extended periods of time. This is the best (if not only) way that employees can become fluent in the skills that are vital to performing their jobs effectively. Meeting this challenge has been my life’s work.
