Business Training

Ageing, as you’ll know from following Sir Terry Wogan’s career, can be a cruel business and the most terrible symptoms, apart my very specific problem that I seem to resemble fellow knight Salman Rushdie a bit more every day, are increased grumpiness and a tendency to repeat oneself.

Looking over my recent work, I seem to be exhibiting these side-effects most intensely when it comes to business training, having moaned, variously, about: (i) those silly teambuilding courses in kendo, horse whispering and totem pole carving, which aren’t really about business, or building team spirit, but simply a way of using company money to indulge in a manager’s preferred hobby; (ii) those babyish ice breakers that require trainees to fall back on to each other, relate quirky facts about themselves, and so on; (iii) those mindless personal development courses that include sessions on “how to listen” (“you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion”); and (iv) the painfully slow pace at which most courses progress, with trainers assuming trainees have the intellectual capabilities of chicken feed.

Indeed, reflecting upon all this moaning, and the upset I have caused individual training professionals, I feel a certain degree of guilt…

Read atTimes Online