I just spent a couple recent Saturdays with about 40 education trainer hopefuls. Witnessing talent in motion is a beautiful thing.
I've been doing these tryouts for a decade now, and there are three basic groupings of people who attend them: (1) people who are naturally talented group communicators; (2) people who have the desire but not acceptable talent; (3) people somewhere in the middle - either not as talented and/or lacking some sort of desire to really throw themselves into the requirements of being a group communicator.
These three groupings are general, and could be broken down more regarding skills, knowledge, rate of learning, creativity, humor and all kinds of areas, but it seems that there are always about 1 in 3 applicants who are naturally gifted for facilitation and presentation work. The big question that continues to arise is How do you know?
How do you know when someone is a great facilitator? What makes them great? How much is subjective and style preference? Is success quantifiable? Testable? Why do some people see a non-talented group communicator and think he is good, while others vehemently disagree?
Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Friday, November 16, 2007
Judge Me
One topic that frequently arises amongst my colleagues and me is how to evaluate facilitator / public speaker talent.
I came across an article in Scientific American from a couple years ago that was about how we judge people - specifically, how we can more accurately judge them based on 'blink'-like observations. Although much of the article is based on a person's environmental choices (like how they keep their house), the study provides some fascinating pieces of information.
One point is that a person's appearance has little to no validity on intellectual abilities, but we all have mental models (filters with which we see the world) that change how we judge others based on their appearance. To truly get an accurate intellectual picture of a person, Peter Borkenau's studies show that we need to listen to someone read out loud for only three minutes to construct a rather accurate image of his or her mental capacities. (I assume this means standard academic intelligence areas such as linguistic and verbal capacities.)
I wonder how other successful companies who hire presenter and facilitator talent hire.
I came across an article in Scientific American from a couple years ago that was about how we judge people - specifically, how we can more accurately judge them based on 'blink'-like observations. Although much of the article is based on a person's environmental choices (like how they keep their house), the study provides some fascinating pieces of information.
One point is that a person's appearance has little to no validity on intellectual abilities, but we all have mental models (filters with which we see the world) that change how we judge others based on their appearance. To truly get an accurate intellectual picture of a person, Peter Borkenau's studies show that we need to listen to someone read out loud for only three minutes to construct a rather accurate image of his or her mental capacities. (I assume this means standard academic intelligence areas such as linguistic and verbal capacities.)
I wonder how other successful companies who hire presenter and facilitator talent hire.
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