Thursday, March 20, 2014

Major League Baseball's Spring Training vs Corporate Training... 
                                                                   Get your tickets here!

As technology creeps into our lives and workplaces affecting our communication pathways and corporate training, isn’t it nice to know something as simple and technology free as Baseball is still there for us to enjoy.
Baseball can also teach us something about how to communicate with our employees/subordinates, to support and effectively assimilate corporate training and e-learning.

Every spring the most talented baseball players in the world fly to warm locations in the southern States to participate in their boss’ training & development programs (wouldn’t that be nice for the rest of us). After their educational meetings and knowledge transfer exercises they get to practice what they’ve been taught on the field with role-play and behaviour modeling[1]  (Ohhh, to role-play a home run). Once the educational session is over they depart the training facility (Florida, Arizona… poor guys) and go to work like the rest of us after a corporate training session. There is one thing that they do differently though, and have done so for a lot longer than the vast majority of businesses and organizations around the world. That is, they bring their instructors with them to coach[2] their daily duties after completion of their training classes.
They do it this way because they inherently know that it is the only way to reinforce lessons learned during the (spring) training session. The coach can reward the players (your employees) for new practices well done and even better a coach can continue the player’s development in a natural holistic way that caters to the employee’s (and the companies) individual needs on a daily basis if necessary, As an added bonus, when it comes to performance review time you are ahead of the game because much of the required information is readily available from the recorded coaching conversations. 

MLB team owners who certainly value the ROI on their multi-million dollar players have evolved from one or two coaches to many full-time ones, Spring training, as with corporate training, has also become more focused to improve and hone the player's skill sets, but without effective coaching to assimilate lessons learned in training up to 87 cents on the training investment is wasted, [2] On the job coaching practices, well done, ensure maximum benefit from all training processes and helps your employees to grow, to become the best that they can be and consequently the best that your organization can be.


E-learning and classroom training can transfer information and knowledge, but when it comes to further developing and actually applying training learned, follow-up coaching is absolutely necessary for your organization to achieve its full potential.

Baseballs’ humanity and focused simplicity exemplified by people assisting people to grow, that is coaching, has had it right for a long long time…

Peanuts & Crackerjack anyone?


Wayne Pajunen

Wayne is an HR consultant, political affairs columnist and former employee of Canada’s House of Commons and the Liberal Party of Canada. His work also appears in The Hill Times, The News Lens, Taipei Times and AMCHAM Business Topics magazine.


[1] Arnold P. Goldstein, Melvín Sorcher Pergamon Press, 1973 

[2] Neil Rackham, The Coaching Controversy, Training and Development Journal, November 1979, Richard E. Kopelman, Executive coaching as a transfer of training tool: effects on productivity in a public agency, Public Personnel Management, Winter 1997, and


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