21

Beyond the Relationship

Ensuring the Transfer of Learning

Learn as though you would never be able to master it; hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it.

Confucius (sixth century BC)

There are many advantages to being raised on a farm. You learn a lot about how nature really works. Instead of watching milk come pouring out of a carton, you get to see it come squirting out of a cow.

Before high-tech milking machines, milk made its way to your glass the long way around. It was the product of the bribery of a bag of feed, special squeezes on a reluctant udder, numerous restarts after the milk pail was kicked over or a tail in pursuit of a fly was deposited inside, slow straining through cheesecloth, plus careful skimming and cooling. All the pictures in some citified textbook could not adequately tell the tale of milk making like a seat on a three-legged stool in a smelly barn with an impatient cow.

Mentoring can be an exhilarating but ineffective experience if mentors talk like a textbook and fail to offer a seat on the stool. Mentoring does not end with advice, feedback, and instruction. The goal of mentoring is not simply learning. The goal of mentoring is to foster betterment … better performance, greater productivity, higher effectiveness. Granted, there is merit in learning for learning’s sake. But in today’s business world with its razor-thin margins, learning must be for result’s sake. Mentors don’t have the luxury of helping protégés increase their knowledge but not their use of that knowledge.

Transfer of learning has been the challenge for all learning facilitators—be they teachers, professors, trainers, or mentors. The argument often posited is “Once they leave my tutelage, it is up to them to put it to use.” Great mentors know, however, that the experiment isn’t over until the learner has tried it out in the laboratory of life. And there are all sorts of actions that help ensure that what is learned in the relationship actually “takes.”