Note to my friends in Learning & Development: No one, and I mean no one, like role playing during training. Let me rephrase that — employees hate it.
I know, you were taught in your pedagogy class that experiential learning imprints the lesson. Lemme let you in a little secret — forget that. Employees cringe when they see there’s role playing during training.
Ahhh yes… Role playing… Managers and management types simply adore it. They find it so much more interesting than actual practical experience. After all, why let you learn on the floor what you can learn pretending to be a customer?
I work in the cellular business, specifically on the wholesale side of it, but my company has a retail division as well and for years we’ve used role playing as a teaching tool. You can almost see the eyes roll back into peoples’ heads when they see it on any of the meeting agendas.
Role-playing, as a rule, is a complete waste of time. Forcing people to pretend to be in a certain situation is no match for actual learning or, gasp, actual teaching. In fact, when I see “role-playing” on an agenda, it says one thing to me: “The person teaching this doesn’t know it well enough to teach it, so they’re hoping that some situation will organically develop in role playing so that they can pretend they’re ahead of the curve.”
I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. In fact, the people I often see leading role-playing sessions are the ones that stand in front of a projection screen reading their crappy Powerpoint presentation to you as if you didn’t have the ability to read it yourself.
As Frank says, if you know your subject, teach it. Don’t act it out, and don’t expect people to want to spend time during their day doing pretend-play. Make it engaging, and interesting, and do more than stand and recite bullet points off a presentation you made 20 minutes before the meeting, but please stop wasting everyone’s time with role-playing exercises and leave the acting to the improv classes people take on their personal time.