It’s exciting and gratifying to sit in the background and watch some pros at work. That is part of the allure of professional sports, professionals in the arts, and experts in different fields. This past week, I got a chance to sit and watch some true professionals in executive education in two programs this week.
We worked this past week with two groups of very senior executives. Part of the challenge of the work was asking the pros to condense their work into a more compressed timeframe, while at the same time giving the senior executives time to apply and discuss the key learning outcomes in their areas of expertise. While I wasn’t surprised by these pros being able to do this, it was still impressive to watch as the pros outlined their key points in their individual sessions and then step back and ask questions like “to what extent is this happening in your organization?” These pros then stepped to the side and moved effortlessly from the instructor to more of a “tour guide” (as one of the pros described the process for that particular session), stopping at some areas, while zipping through others that the senior executives did not find as useful or relevant.
I’ve seen some incredible researchers who were terrible in front of clients. They claim that the client wants to hear them pontificate and tell all about their particular area of expertise, reading the slides, boring slide after boring slide with 40 words on each slide.
I’ve seen slick presenters who have a slick multimedia presentation that looks good at first, but then, people wonder where the substance is. They dazzle you with smoke and mirrors, they mouth platitudes, they fill up their entire time so that they don’t have time for questions, and then they leave immediately because they are afraid that someone may ask them a question that they cannot answer.
This past week, I was once again privy to sitting and watching pros who had deep technical content knowledge, the wisdom to know how to help the clients best understand the main learning objectives, and were flexible and confident enough in their abilities and expertise to allow the client to take the initiative on what they wanted to accomplish during the session.
I’ve seen a number of them and I don’t take the time to recognize them for their talents. Hats off this week to (in alphabetical order) Sridhar Balasubramanian, Peter Brews, Lisa Jones-Christenson, Jeff Edwards, Alison Fragale, Dave Hofmann, Atul Nerkar, and Al Segars.
Chris
Posted by yourexecutiveedge 
