About Corporate Trainings

I went last week to a corporate training and here is how it went. The general idea about these kinds of trainings is that they are company’s way to make you work harder for them. So what annoys people is the fact that the company is trying to influence them. My question: what’s wrong with that?

I know that no one likes to have his freedom restricted or to be obliged to do something against his will, but I do not see anything wrong with influence.

We are being influenced constantly by our environment, by advertising in mass media and by mass media in general.  And most of all we influence each other. If you think that you are making all your decisions rationally, as a free man (or woman) with no external influence, think again. This is not because we are not capable of making such decisions, but because in our times we are faced with so many of them and there is so much information to analyze before making the decisions that we would need to spend our entire time searching for information and finding the best decision (not to mention that we would go insane). Instead we make our decisions unconsciously. Why? It seems that we are built for it.

Let me give more details on this subject.

As I mentioned in a previous post, our unconscious brain is much more evolved than our conscious brain. We have inherited our unconscious brain from our ancestors (animals have it too) so it has been around for millions of years and there was plenty of time for it to evolve. Instead, our conscious brain is quite new by comparison (it’s estimated that it appeared about 30 000 years ago). Scientists say that this is the reason why we already have computers that do mathematical computations better and faster than the human mind, but we do not have yet a machine that walks as well as a human. So what happens is that we are constantly gathering information using our five senses, but only a small fraction can be processed by our conscious brain while the unconscious gathers, processes and stores much more. When we are faced with a decision, we call the information stored in our subconscious, we combine it with the one stored in our conscious brain and we make the decision using all existing information. As we have no control over the information stored in our subconscious we do not know what’s in there and what makes us decide one way or another. And this is how influence works.

Now, let’s come back to the corporate trainings. If we know that we are influenced every day, what is wrong with a training during which you are consciously influenced and you can filter what you learn and what you discard? If during the corporate training you learn something interesting and beneficial then it can be considered a personal development training the kind we usually like and enjoy.

For instance, I enjoyed my corporate training for two reasons:

One is that I met a lot of interesting people from abroad which share my vision on management. I was feeling a bit like the lonely wolf in my company before and it is always nice to find that you are not alone.

And, the second, I found out that the company’s values coincide with my own values. And this is important because I think that no one can ever be happy and make performance in his professional life if his own values are not aligned with the values generally accepted in the company he works for. I am not at all saying that one should change his or hers values to coincide with the company ones, but rather to find a company that shares the same values. So if you see that you do not fit well in a company this is probably the reason.

From the company’s point of view, the reason for these corporate trainings is this: if you have a large group of people that you need to lead to a certain goal, as a leader, you have to ensure that they behave like an army, that everybody understands what is the goal and everybody is going in the same direction. Now, with a non military institution, you can (and should) give the freedom to the individual to chose his own way of making his contribution, but you need to establish the rules of the game: the values of the company. I see these corporate trainings as a necessary tool when you are leading a big company.

So if you are working in a corporation and you participate to this kind of training, try to enjoy it as much as you can and also try to make the best of it.