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Why You Should Introduce Negativity Into Your Training

July 16, 2012

If we listened to pop psychology adages, we would never introduce negativity into team training.

For example, a famous phrase of self-development leader Tony Robbins is “You are what you focus on.”

And in the big picture, he is right.

If you spend your time worrying about all the ways your team can drop the ball with a customer instead of how you are going to come together to deliver a great customer experience, guess what? You’re going to drop the ball.

If you spend your time focusing on everything that’s wrong with your life instead of what’s right, guess what? You’re going to be a miserable person.

Focus. Matters.

Negativity In Training | Smiley Face, Positive Side of Negativity

While some have stretched the psychology of focus far beyond its boundaries and created the snake oil of “attraction,” the basic principle of focus is sound — for the most part, focus begets outcomes.

However, it is not only “The Secret” and its ilk who have taken focus too far. In the realm of training, the idea of focusing on positive outcomes has been used to create almost exclusively positive frameworks. Training programs often focus on good decisions and fail to address the many bad decisions that have been made in past situations or are likely to be made in future situations.

As the research below demonstrates, this strategy is not optimal.

From the book Yes!:

“Behavioral researcher Wendy Joung and her colleagues were interested in examining whether certain types of training programs would be more effective than others at minimizing errors in judgment on the job. Specifically, they wanted to know whether focusing the training on past errors that others have made would provide better training than focusing the trainees on how others had made good decisions in the past. They thought that training that focused more on others’ errors would be more effective for several reasons, including increased attention to the training and a more memorable training experience.

The researchers aimed to test their hypothesis on a group of people whose decision-making skills under stress were vital, and whose decisions carried important consequences; it’s not surprising that they chose firefighters.

In the study a training and development session that included several case studies was presented to the firefighters. However, the nature of the case studies differed between two groups of participants. One group learned from case studies that described real life situations in which other firefighters made poor decisions that led to negative consequences. The other group learned from case studies in which firefighters avoided negative consequences through good decision-making.

Joung and her colleagues found that firefighters who underwent the error-based training showed improved judgment and were able to think more adaptively than those who underwent the error-free training.

Despite the extensive behavioral research documenting the irrationality of human decision making, people still do possess critical thinking skills that enable them to learn from situations, and they can be better equipped to do so by being exposed to a range of possible decisions, both good and bad.

As much as we might want it to be, real-life customer service is not all unicorns and rainbows. Focusing our training not only on how to make good decisions but also on how others have made bad decisions is a winning combination for training customer facing reps who are prepared for the challenges of the real world.

What was the best training you ever received? Did it include both what should go right and what could go wrong?

5 thoughts on “Why You Should Introduce Negativity Into Your Training”

  1. I like that winning combination. What I do know is that, if we focus on the negative without showing how to correct that behaviour, there’s little benefit to showing or exposing people to the “wrong” way.

    In athletics, we deal with all possible exigencies. For example, in a gymnastics routine…what if the lights go out, the music stops, a loud noise erupts from the crowd. Looking at “negative” possibilities allow for plan B…and C…and D…

    Same in business, which I call the “what if” game. What if this happens? What if that happens? What could the person have done when this failed?

    So yes…learning from mistakes, and not repeating them, is powerful indeed. Cheers! Kaarina

    1. I always love the perspective you bring from your athletic coaching days. Most people understand the need for contingency planning but often forget about contingency training. Making sure when bad decisions are made, the person has seen it before. The “what if” as you say.

  2. The best training I ever received was the US Army. I taught me very quickly what I did NOT want to be doing the rest of my working life, which subsequently led me down the path to what I did want to be doing.

    Customer service is not all Pollyanna behavior, and as I’ve expressed before, sometimes by learning from the bad situations and even possibly turning them into a wow event, is some of the best training you can get.

    Still ready to rock-n-roll on Sunday morn; I have a person who wants to join us.

    1. Funny. My first “real job” out of college did the same thing — it taught me what I did not want to do! Customer service is like anything else I think in this area, you can either learn from your mistakes or those of others, but learning from mistakes is important either way.

      As for Sun… sounds good! We’ll talk.

  3. Pingback: Are you Xenodochial? – The Alphabet Series continues with Letter X

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