Effective Approaches to Teaching Skills

Making it clear to the learner what is really required of them, and why this is important.


There are several useful approaches to teaching skills to others. Below are some of them:

• Being prepared - Knowing ahead of time what you want the outcome of your skills training to be. This works because unless you know where you want things to go, you won't know how to conduct yourself to get there.
• Listening - Keeping communication lines open and indicating to others that their opinions are important. The key to effectively teaching a skill is often expressed by the learner, but overlooked by the manager when they fail to hear it.
• Using questions - Presenting a concept, options for applying it, and the consequences, then asking the learner what they will do. By asking rather than telling an employee how best to apply a new skill shows respect, and because it allows them to think it through for themselves, it helps them to learn faster.
• Being positive - Correcting mistakes in a positive way, not in one that is patronizing or makes others feel worthless and inferior. This helps motive the person you are teaching.
• Being honest and upfront - Making it clear to the learner what is really required of them, and why this is important.
• Setting performance targets - Indicating the acceptable level of performance you expect from those you are teaching and holding them to it.

ACTION POINT: Consider the approaches above when teaching new skills.

Teaching Skills

Successful teaching requires you to inspire others to want to cooperate with you.

When you endeavor to teach new skills to others, you are attempting to motivate specific behavior changes in them. This is more effective if you can convince those you are teaching that, by acting as you suggest, they will gain something that they value. Successful teaching requires you to inspire others to want to cooperate with you.

However, different people consider different skills to be more or less valuable to them, so you will also discover that the majority of responsibility for the learning of a new skills rest with the person you are teaching. Learners who really want to improve their skills and are willing to put in the effort will be successful.

ACTION POINT: Ensure there is value in what you are trying to teach.

Teaching Skills

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand"

As a manager, an important part of your role is to help those you are managing to develop their skills. If you can encourage the development of skills such as self-awareness, communication, and time management, you will be rewarded with a high-performing team.

People learn faster and retain more information if they have to exert some kind of active effort. The famous quote, attributed to Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand" is frequently used to support the value of learning through experience. A major implication of this notion is that new skills can be learned only through experimenting with new behaviors, observing the results, and learning from the experience. The learning of new skills is maximized when learners get the opportunity to combine watching, thinking, and doing. The experiential learning model encompasses four elements: learning new concepts (conceptualization), planning how to test the ideas (plan to test), actively applying the skill in a new experience (gaining concrete experience), and examining the consequences of the experience (reflective observation). After reflecting on the experience, the learner uses the lessons they have learned from what happened to create a refined conceptual map of the skill, and the cycle continues.

To use the experiential learning model to teach skills you need to: ensure that the learner understands the skill both conceptually and behaviorally; give them opportunities to practice it; give feedback on how well they are performing the skill; and encourage them to use the skill often enough so that it becomes integrated into their behavioral repertoire.

ACTION POINT: Teach new skills by using the following:

• Helping the learner to form a conceptual understanding of a new skill.
• Plan how the learner can test their understanding of the skill.
• Get the learner to apply the new skill in concrete experience.
• Observe what happened and discuss ways in which they can improve.