Employees are expected to keep current by learning on the job. In order to acquire and practice new skills, these folks not only need support and encouragement from management, but from their peers as well.

The superior-subordinate relationship is the most obvious one to be concerned about. But what isn’t so obvious, and can sometimes be a big cause for concern, is how coworkers react to each other during the “experimental” period associated with learning. 

Let’s say for example you send one of your people to a training program and he brings back some new ideas, but when he tries them out nobody responds to them. His coworkers expect that he’s had a nice time away and should start to work on the stack of business they put on his station while he was absent. 

Co-workers have greater expectations for peers because jobs at that level are so affected if one person is not pulling her weight. Fellow employees are more resistant to personal change than are most bosses. Peers at work want their fellow employees to stay the way they are. It’s taken them a long time to get to know each other and to learn how to get along with everyone so they don’t like it when one of their own wants to change. 

Lower level workers have far more contact with peers than they do with bosses, so potentially there is room for more discomfort when someone changes. By trying to improve their performance, they run the risk of being called a brown nose and getting themselves ostracized by coworkers. 

One of the failings of the psychotherapy model is that it has always pointed out the harm that parents (authority figures) do. What was rarely dealt with was the impact that siblings (coworkers) can have on another sibling’s (coworker’s) self-image. 

The consequences of negative peer pressure can neutralize the best efforts and bring any well-intentioned change to a rapid halt.

Management’s role

As a manager you have an important role to play when people in your charge are in training or acquiring new skills. Performing your role well will ensure that these folks not only survive, but also come through the transition feeling better about themselves and their ability to learn new skills.

Realign people – Use your positional authority to realign negatively disposed employees, so that a positive attitude is maintained within each work unit. It only takes a couple of negatively disposed employees with big mouths to dampen the spirits of the entire team. If the nay sayers can’t be convinced of the merits of learning new skills then they should be moved to a unit where their pessimistic attitude won’t slow down the learning process. 

Separate problems – Learn to sort out the training problems from the discipline issues before you apply either one.There’s a difference between saying, “Something’s gone wrong here, who’s responsible?” and saying, “X has been the result of last week’s work, how did we get to X?” The difference is in personalizing the mistakes and looking for actual root causes of the deviation without assigning blame. It’s important to determine whether the mistake was made because the employee was resistive to change or because the employee was trying something new and just didn’t do it right. The former may be cause for discipline, while the latter is better handled by individual coaching or additional training.

Encourage complaints – Encourage subordinates to openly express their criticisms of what’s not working together with their suggestions for how the problem might be fixed. Carefully separate the legitimate work-centered complaints that are current from those that happened prior to entering the learning state. Resist the temptation to adjudicate past inequities or injustices. This is about learning not fixing—learning is about making things better not putting a Band-Aid on an old wound. Fixing has no limits, it’s like a black hole that sucks everything into it and you never get anywhere.

Instill confidence – Focus on what employees are doing right. Redesign assessments and status reports to reflect minimal positive gains. Publicly recognize any signs of improvement and attribute those gains to the employee(s) responsible. Don’t let even the slightest upward movement in productivity or performance slip by unnoticed. Your subordinates will be watching to see if management is aware of and pleased by their progress. 

After people discover what they didn’t know and have learned how to do what they didn’t know how to do before, they’ll be ready to take on something new.