Ep224: Elements of Human Transformation (First Friday)

What does it really take for leadership training to stick? In this episode of the Humanergy Leadership Podcast, Jim Marshall explores the deeper dynamics of personal and professional growth - what works, what doesn’t, and why. Drawing on decades of experience, Jim introduces two powerful frameworks: the Four Stages of Competence and the Growth Chain. Through vivid real-world stories (like a training session that didn’t land... until it finally did), Jim unpacks why “aha” moments, repetition, and accountability are essential for lasting transformation. Whether you lead teams, facilitate training, or simply want to build better habits, this episode offers actionable insight for creating real change, not just one-time lessons.

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Transcript

David Wheatley (00:10)
I'm David Wheatley. You’re at Humanergy's First Friday session. We host these the first Friday of every month, apart from a couple of months in the summer. They’re always free, and feel free to invite anybody you think would get some value from doing this kind of work with us.

My colleague Jim Marshall is going to be doing our presentation today. Today's topic is — and Jim was saying this sounds a little academic — The Elements of Human Transformation.

You’re all going to be wowed by the depth of it, and it’s going to be a lot simpler than it sounds in its introduction.

Jim Marshall (00:42)
Thank you, David. Appreciate that.

The title of today's topic is Elements of Human Transformation. And as David kind of alluded to, it sounds a little academic. But this is something I can say I’ve spent a lifetime in — the world of training, development, learning — thinking about how and when people grow and when they transform.

What happens? How does that come to be? What works and what doesn’t work?

I put this slide up here — “Love, Hate, Succeeds, Fails” — because I want to say, by and large, people love to learn and people love to grow.

When we come across something that we don’t know how to do, I think in many circumstances there’s a natural curiosity — How can I learn this?

So we often seek out training.

Now, that’s not always true. I’ve had mandatory training that I didn’t want to go to, or training that I felt wasn’t effective or a good use of my time.

But if you ask, What’s the want? — people want to learn and grow.

So, what’s the problem? What gets in the way?

The problem is that training doesn’t always work.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Have you ever had to re-explain something to someone that you’d already sat down with, spent time showing them — and then the next day they show up and say, “Can you show me how to do that again?”

I remember an IT team where I was working. They implemented Salesforce as their customer relationship management software. Those folks had the patience of saints. They held training after training after training, and then they were on-call support, re-explaining how to generate a lead, how to run a report, all the different things.

I remember thinking about that project and asking the question, Why are we retraining people over and over again? What’s going wrong?

So I have another story — one of the most vivid examples that probably brings me here today.

I was doing a Humanergy High Performance Leadership Program. That means we were working with a group of leaders. When we went on-site once a month, we coached individually — about eight to ten different leaders — and then we spent a half day doing group coaching and leadership training.

Month one, we did leadership training on a tool in Humanergy’s arsenal called the Delegation Tool. I love this tool. I loved it when I first encountered it and I’ve used it myself over and over again.

So, month one: four hours in a room, going over the Delegation Tool.

Fast forward to month two. I come back a month later and sit down with this one leader — I’ll just call him Fred.

Fred’s talking about hiring a new employee. He’s saying, “How do I launch them? How do I set them up for success? How do I make sure they have a good experience and get off on the right foot?”

I said, “Hey Fred, have you thought about using the Delegation Tool?”

And the most disappointing answer ever came next. He said, “What delegation tool?”

I tried to keep my poker face instead of bursting into tears because I thought, How could we have spent four hours with you and now you’re saying, ‘What delegation tool?’

So rather than any of that, I pull up the document, we run through the tool — the six steps — and we have a good conversation.

Now, what I remember — and this was a long time ago — is it wasn’t like he was wildly enthusiastic. He was just kind of nodding his head, “This is good. This will help me. I’ll use this next week when so-and-so starts in this new job role.”

Fast forward to the third month. I’m walking into his office to sit down for our one-on-one.

First words out of his mouth: “Hey, that Delegation Tool — that thing is sweet. I’m using it everywhere. I use it at home with my kids. I’m using it when I send an email to my boss because I need something, or to my colleagues. I’m just using it all over the place. I really love that thing.”

What that set up for me was this: I sometimes introduce this story as the time when I fell out of love with my own voice.

Because I realized that as a trainer, I can go and do my very best to explain something — to give away the content or the knowledge that someone needs — and that isn’t sufficient to create the kind of learning or transformation that I really want.

That realization set me on the path of thinking about, Well, what is it that really creates transformation?

With that as an opening and a preamble, I want to set up what I call the elements of human transformation.

I’ve got two tools I want to leave you with today that have been really helpful to me — both in thinking about what I need when I’m trying to go from one level of ability to another, and in working with colleagues or clients when we’re writing proposals or designing projects.

We don’t want to miss these elements of human transformation.

The first tool is called The Four Stages of Competence.

You can see this has been around since the 1960s. Some academics came up with it.

What it basically says is that at any point when I’m going from not knowing to knowing something, I start at unconscious incompetence.

Now that sounds a little hard to compute, but what it means is: I don’t know that I’m not very good at something.

Then I move to conscious incompetence — now I know or I’m aware that I’m not very good at it. Usually there’s an “aha” moment — a piece of feedback, an experience that leads to the lightbulb moment.

From stage two, I move to conscious competence — I try to begin to do the thing very consciously and practice doing the best practice, if you will.

If I stay at stage three and do it over and over again, then I have a chance to eventually move to stage four — unconscious competence — meaning I don’t need to think about doing the best practice.

You can see the words on the slide there: mastery or second nature.

Or, in other words — habit.

Habit is another good word to add to our conversation today.

Because I like to say with my clients these days: The goal of training is habit.

It’s not just that you learn something and try it once. It’s that you get to the point where you automatically do the thing that works every time you have an opportunity.

It’s like Fred — you recognize every opportunity to use the Delegation Tool and you put it into practice automatically.

So that’s one tool.

The second tool we call The Growth Chain.

This is adapted from PDI — they called it a “pipeline” — but I like the metaphor of a chain. You need every link in the chain in order to create transformation in someone’s life.

It starts out on the left at Aha — is someone aware that they need to grow? Do they have the insight that they’re not very good at something? You can see how that relates to stages one and two of the Four Stages of Competence.

Then there’s Motivation. And I appreciated someone in the early chat saying, “When training works, what makes it work?” Someone immediately said, “It’s motivation. It’s desire. It’s the person wanting to learn.”

So that’s a key ingredient to transformation.

Then the middle stage of the Growth Chain is Know-How. Do they have the knowledge and skills?

If I’m aware that I don’t know how to change the oil in a car, and David does know how, and I want to learn — and David spends an afternoon showing me — that lines up the first three links of the chain.

But that doesn’t make me a master mechanic.

The fourth link is Repetition. Does a person repeatedly practice the skill or knowledge they acquired at the know-how stage?

And then the final link is Accountability. Do we have the structure or support required?

I think of this one as preventing me from slipping back to old habits — creating a way where it’s easier to do the best practice than to fall back into the old one.

Put all these things together, and you start to see what happens when transformation — when training — actually works.

You’ve got all these elements in place.

Let’s talk about some common missteps.

The first one: we give away the know-how, but we don’t develop the aha or the want to.

That’s what went wrong with Fred. Somehow we missed the lightbulb moment. Fred was in the training for a half day, he learned the Delegation Tool, practiced a few examples — but the light didn’t go on.

The second misstep: we stop at know-how but don’t move on to repetition and accountability.

So yeah, I got the training, but six months later, the materials are in a file folder in my cabinet, and I haven’t looked at them.

There are plenty of leaders who say, “We have this issue in our organization. Let’s train our people.”

But if you’re keeping in mind the Four Stages of Competence or the Growth Chain, just working in the know-how link of the chain isn’t enough to create true impact or transformation.

The last thing I want to do is bring together a number of tools in the Humanergy arsenal.

My colleague Quay, last month, was talking about FACET and how, when we’re holding people accountable, we need to use FACET.

So how do these come together?

I put them together on the Growth Chain.

I start at unconscious incompetence. Then I have an aha moment — I become aware that I’m not very good at something. That aha may or may not lead to want to.

Then comes the know-how — the learning event, the learning experience — that moves me into conscious competence.

As I begin to repeatedly practice, that’s where FACET comes in. I bring focus. I find people who are going to help me learn and grow — give me feedback — the N, C, E, and T of the FACET tool — to create a habit.

And as I do that more and more, I reach unconscious competence. It’s coming naturally to me.

At that point, I want to think about accountability in terms of:

Do I have KPIs and metrics? Do I have team meetings where we’re repeatedly asking how people are using this tool or sharing insights and opportunities to learn?

I hope you find this helpful as you think about sculpting your own life — going from one level of ability to another — or as you work with others around you, whether it’s your children, your direct reports, or if you have the opportunity to design learning or training programs in your organization.