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Growing bit by bit
I usually don't go for gimmicks. But Alan Weiss caught my attention with his One Percent Solution®.
Weiss was the lead instructor last year at the American Press Institute's first "Train the Trainer" program. He asked whether we could improve by 1 percent tomorrow if we really worked hard at it. Everyone said yes. Then he asked if we could do it again the next day. Again, we nodded. And how about the next? Keep improving by just 1 percent each day, he said, and you'll be twice as good a journalist in just 70 days (I did the math; it works like compounding interest).
I'm not saying I was twice as good after 70 days, or even a year. But I have grown and learned as much in the past year as I did in any of the first 32 years of my career. I'm growing by choosing skills to improve, one at a time, a bit at a time, about 1 percent at a time.
After the swift growth early in your career when everything is new, growth doesn't come as easily. You tend to set sweeping, distant goals: You want to become the metro editor or the design director or a narrative writer. You grow here and there as you learn from experience, but you also might slip into bad habits or battle burnout.
You should have those distant goals. But meaningful growth comes more often by setting immediate goals. Identify a single skill you want to improve and decide how to work on it this week. By concentrating on one skill in an immediate story (or photo or graphic or headline), you can almost always see results. Those results don't vanish on the next assignment, even if you're concentrating on something else.
When I heard Weiss' challenge, I thought I was a pretty good trainer. Journalists around the world sought my advice online. Organizations around North America scheduled my workshops regularly. I was proud and confident in my training skills.
In the same program, Weiss emphasized the value of exercises in training programs. I've long known that exercises help participants learn and practice the lessons of a workshop. But a couple of my strongest workshops, both dealing with interviews, didn't include exercises. In fact, just a few weeks before, someone had queried the Newscoach e-mail discussion list (http://talk.poynter.org/newscoach/) of newsroom trainers asking if anyone knew of helpful exercises for workshops on interviewing. I responded with a discouraging answer, saying that interviewing exercises in a workshop setting were too contrived to be effective.
As I listened to Weiss, I knew what needed to be my next 1-percent improvement. By coincidence, I was scheduled to present one of my interviewing workshops just a couple weeks after "Train the Trainers."
I pulled out a legal pad for the flight home from API and started scribbling down some ideas for an exercise on interviewing that would work despite the contrived setting of a workshop.
I passed out index cards early in the workshop and told everyone to write down a sentence about something in their lives that they would feel uncomfortable discussing with a reporter. It had to be something they would discuss under the right circumstances. For examples, I mentioned uncomfortable topics in my past: getting fired, having cancer, an unpleasant work situation. Then I proceeded with the workshop as I always have, discussing the various interviewing techniques.
Toward the end of the workshop, I told the participants to pair off. They exchanged cards and interviewed each other for a few minutes about the uncomfortable topic (four or five minutes each way works well). Then we discussed their observations about those interviews.
The contrived setting underscored the value of interviewing a character in her own setting and of building rapport by talking about other matters instead of jumping right to the touchy subject. But the participants also talked about the importance of listening and empathy and about people's willingness to discuss uncomfortable subjects.
By challenging myself to improve in this one area I already considered a strength, I improved one of my best workshops. And since then I've improved my exercises in other workshops. One percent at a time.
Link of the week:
If you're involved in journalism training, "Train the Trainer"
presents an excellent opportunity. After two successful rounds of the
program last year, API received a new $225,000 grant from the John S.
and James L. Knight Foundation to offer a third program Oct. 24-27 and
then two more in 2005. Deadline to apply for this fall's program is July
1. More information: http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/4279.cfm
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