HOW TO TEACH EXECUTIVES. INTERVIEW WITH E. SIDORENKO

SSE: It is probably difficult for a top manager, as well as for any adult, to change himself, his habits. How do you work with executives to make them really learn something new?

Elena Sidorenko: On this point I am close to Miles Downey’s position expressed in his book about coaching. He wrote: “You cannot teach a person anything. It is only possible to learn. Only the person himself can learn”
Therefore, I believe that an adult can learn something only if he does something here, tries it. I usually interrupt the discussion if I hear people saying that something may not work. Well, this may not work in a number of cases. Let’s decide now how it works. Let's do an experiment. Because it is a waste of time to spout about that something might not work somewhere. Adults, by the way, are eager to play. Because people basically have no place in their lives where they can play, frolic. They play, they discover something for themselves. I remember at the Stockholm School of Economics during the Business Zoom program it was the discovery for Funky people that Soft people can suffer to the point of tears because of some carelessly dropped words.
The aim is to simulate, to model life, a real life case, more or less realistically, from complete metaphor to complete realism, in more or less safe conditions. This way people can learn something and make important conclusions for themselves. Whether they learn or not depends only on them. As you know, in order to master something you have to repeat it 21 times. It is not that it's necessary to repeat a phrase like a mantra, but an action must be repeated 21 times to become a skill. Generally at least, it is considered to be the case.

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