I wonder how many times a day/week/month/year we as a parent or child have recited or heard those infamous words: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Over the annals of the family unit, it’s probably been said more times than we possibly could imagine. The thinking being, perhaps, if we “teach” well enough with our words, we will not have to bother with leading by example.
Since the earliest days of civilization, philosophers in some form or another, characterize life as a continual learning process and they were right, it is. Learning takes place from the moment that we emerge from our mother’s womb, right up to when we take our last breath.
Whether consciously or subconsciously, our surrounding environment is changing constantly. In order for us to adapt, we must always learn from those changes, take what we have learned and apply it accordingly. That is the basic component to survival of the fittest – learning to adapt to a changing environment. Ignorance and failure to do so will result in extinction.
Observe and Learn
Learning and survival, however, are not exclusive to the human genome or philosophies of life. They are also applicative to how and why we chose to learn.
In addition to learning and surviving, thriving in the workplace is also predicated by our ability to observe and learn.
Twentieth century psychologist Albert Bandura developed a theory concerning how we learn and accordingly model ourselves through observation as reciprocal determinism.
With reciprocal determinism, Bandura theorized that a person’s environment causes a behavior. True, but a person’s behavior causes an environment as well, or more aptly put by his own words: “The world and a person’s behavior cause each other.”
Thinking about Bandura’s words of how the world and a person’s behavior cause one another, there are distinct similarities in how this also applies to learning and modeling which can be observed in on the job training, or OJT. OJT, however, has its own application in the lexicon of training and development through another of Bandura’s highly regarded theories: Social Learning Theory or SLT.
In the context of organizational learning, SLT best describes how learning involves observation, extraction of information from those observations and making decisions about the performance of a task (observational learning or modeling).
In the social strata of an organization, learning and modeling behavior through observation involves the processes of attention, retention, reproduction and motivation, and is also reciprocal as the observations and decision making about the performance of a task passes on from person to person.
Attention
Attention is a primal part of learning and SLT. If you want to learn, you are going to have to pay attention. Likewise, if you want someone to pay attention, the task or behavior that you wish for him or her to observe has to also keep his or her attention.
Tedium and distractions can put a damper on the attention span of an individual who is trying to observe and learn. This can be somewhat mitigated, however, by demonstrating a modicum of competence and enthusiasm in the task or behavior that is being observed.
Next in SLT, a person must be able to retain or remember what they have hopefully been paying attention to. This is where the skills of imagery and language come into play.
People will retain what they have observed and model doing it in the form of mental images or verbal descriptions. Using imagery and language, one can later “bring up” the image or description, and imitate it with their own behavior.
Now it’s time to translate and reproduce the SLT images or descriptions into actual behavior. Contrary to what your Mom may have said, this time it is: “Don’t do as I say, but do as I do.”
Just as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, with practice, so, too, is the ability to improve on the imagery and descriptions we have observed. We can fine-tune our abilities when we just imagine ourselves performing.
A star athlete like Michael Jordan will do this by imagining the basketball going through the bottom of the net before even taking the shot.
Avoid Backfires
All of the observation and learning in the world can unfortunately backfire unless something causes a person to want to imitate an observed behavior or task. This is where motivation enters into the SLT equation.
For many, their survival instincts of sustenance are a sufficient motivation to learn. However, there are other motivating factors in avoidance of a negative outcome, such as losing their job or standing within the organizational social strata. This is where the backfire can occur.
Forcing someone to pay attention, retain information and reproduce a behavior or task through fear and intimidation is a part of SLT that is doomed to failure. The objective in motivating is to give cause for someone to learn and observe, not to coerce them toward the same objective.
The Precipice
So, here we are at the precipice of deciding whether Mom (or Dad) were right or wrong in their laments of: “Do as I say, not as I do.” In all actuality, it is mutually exclusive to the concepts of learning and modeling by observing.
In one context, Mom is trying to curb a behavior that was observed – like catching Mom or Dad eating a cookie when they told us we should be eating carrot sticks. The other is in causing a behavior.
Regardless of the context, learning by observing is a critical component of organizational learning and is not mutually exclusive to survive and thrive within the workplace.
