A colleague of ours was invited to run residential training events for managers in a large
manufacturing organization.The third group saw
the event as a reward for good behaviour which need not be taken too seriously
Our colleague was only able to communicate with these groups once these expectations
and assumptions had been uncovered and discussed openly.There seemed to be
at least three different reactions from different sub-groups:
Some managers looked really interested and spent the weekend frantically scribbling
notes.He came back from the first of these looking very dispirited,
and complained that he could not understand the reactions from the group of managers,
who were supposed to be very committed to personal development.When
he did this, he found that none of the managers had been explicitly told why they had been
nominated for the training - their 'commitment' was a senior management assumption.??