I used to feel a little uncomfortable as a trainer, and also as a leader, when someone said that at the end of a training or a joint discussion. Did I really not offer anything new? Was I not inspiring or thought-provoking enough?
But – it’s one of the best compliments you’ll hear: “That was a good reminder!”
Leadership is not about finding new solutions full of new knowledge. Most of the time, the answers are already there – somewhere in the deeper layers of unthought-through experience, learning, intuition and gut feeling. The question is how to find them and bring them out.
Most of the time we have all the information we need, but the daily routine and the pressure to deliver buries it all. We know things, but perhaps we don’t always fully understand them and therefore don’t use them, and the daily grind tends to focus on knowing-doing rather than understanding. It takes time to understand, to look beyond oneself and to realise that, in fact, I have everything. Sometimes forgotten in the very distant past.
This is why managers need to develop their understanding of the training environment rather than new knowledge. For example, one manager said after a training: “I know I should be more in dialogue with my team, not giving them answers…. But during the day-to-day editing, I’m going to tell the boss the way ahead to move faster”
It was not a problem of ignorance. Change required nothing more than the courage to take an honest look at yourself. Leadership is not just about tools and methods. It’s about having the courage to look at your own automatic patterns. He also had a wall of understanding ahead of him, because his mother had always rushed him back when he wanted to socialise with friends, and he still had this belief that he had to get things done quickly rather than take the time to have a quality conversation. Perhaps there are very often different walls between knowing and understanding, and the first thing to do is to break them down. You can take them down when you see them.
I don’t come to the training as a trainer to “teach something”. My role is to create spaces and situations where leaders can remind themselves of the important things and create an understanding of, for example, why what is already known is not actually being applied.
So the next time you hear someone say: “That was a good reminder,” it’s a great compliment, because it means that something important has just woken up and started to live again, and you’ve been able to create space for it. We don’t need new information and knowledge, we need space and time to create understanding.
