This article was commissioned from me by the editor of Pig & Poultry Vet magazine.
April 2011
By Phil Christopher, BSc Agric, freelance writer
Recognition appears to be growing in the veterinary profession that social science and soft skills have a place alongside ‘proper’ science and hard evidence in the work of today’s fully rounded farm practitioner. At the 2007 British Mastitis Conference (BMC), the agenda headline for the first session of the day was ‘Motivating Change’.[1] At the 2009 Cattle Lameness Conference, the best poster presentation as voted by attending vets was about using ‘social marketing techniques’ in veterinary work with farmer clients.[2]
Of course, there is no shortage of research-proven clinical techniques and protocols with which most clients, if only they would do as they were told, could improve animal health and performance. However, in one of the BMC papers, Theo Lam from the Dutch Udder Health Centre said the vet’s problem was effective knowledge transfer to clients rather than knowing clinically how to solve the animal health problems on their farm.
He said farmers were no longer obedient to, nor impressed by, veterinary surgeons, and that explaining the clinical rationale to a piece of advice was often not enough to get it adopted. “Veterinarians need the skills to motivate farmers, to transfer knowledge, and to sell this advice as a product,” he states.
In search of answers, Lam says farmers are no different to people in other walks of life in that their ability to learn, and presumably apply that learning for their own good, can be enhanced by having information presented compatibly with their preferred learning style. Of course, any person’s preference is an unconscious, undefined concept unless they happen to have undergone learning style analysis as part of a training course or personal development programme.
His BMC paper refers to a model proposed by American social psychologist David A Kolb, whose theory is that an individual’s ability to learn will be enhanced by strategies that conform to their preferred learning styles.[3] For UK application, this was refined and published as The Manual of Learning Styles by Honey and Mumford,[4]which according to co-author Peter Honey offers four learning styles as “a convenient way of describing differences in learning preferences."
Like any categorisation, he cautions that they are a convenient over-simplification but nevertheless provide a useful starting point for discussion about how people learn, and therefore how to help other people learn more effectively.
A formal way to identify someone’s preferred learning style is using Honey & Mumford’s DIY questionnaire and score chart.[5] As far as I am aware, this model has never been used and published for a sample of UK farmers. However, according to Theo Lam’s BMC paper, a learning styles study among New Zealand beef and sheep farmers found 50% with the ‘reflector’ preference. “However, if one really wants to reach as many people as possible, all learning styles need to be given attention,” he says in the paper.
In practice, this theory may explain, for example, why farmer meetings attract what is often felt by organisers to be a disappointing response. In Honey & Mumford’s work, they describe ‘activist’ and ‘pragmatist’ preferences as gregarious and therefore more likely to attend gatherings. It also validates the use of the written word, on paper and screen, editorial and advertising, parochial and national, for reaching people with ‘reflector’ in particular, but also ‘theorist’, preferences.
With persuading clients to take a specific course of action in mind, an interesting question that arises is: What’s the difference between advising a course of action and selling it? One slightly provocative answer might be, lower and higher uptake respectively. As a receiver of advice, there’s an option to take it or leave it. When you buy an item, or buy into a concept, a higher level commitment to action is involved.
Someone with plenty experience of selling to livestock farmers is founder-principal of Precision Prospecting, Jim Williams, who uses a ‘Five Meaningful Encounters’ model in his company’s work for agri-supply companies.[6] “No matter how well they know a salesman, people rarely buy at the first time of asking,” says Jim Williams. “There has to be a warming up and courtship process and this usually takes several steps, five minimum.”
He explains that a typical sales campaign may start with an introductory personal letter accompanied by an advisory newsletter, mailed to a carefully selected group of potential users of the product or service on sale. Step two is a call a couple of days later from Precision Prospecting’s experienced, predominantly female, farming-savvy tele-sales team with the proposition. To those who agree to considering the proposition, step three is a letter or e-mail confirming it in writing and offering more persuasive detail. Step four is another phone call seeking an appointment for the client company’s representative to call and, at step five, the salesperson does their stuff and asks for the order.
The relevance of this model to veterinary practices is that an adaptation has been used successfully by the progressive pro-active livestock practice, Lambert Leonard and May (LLM), to promote the adoption of better animal health strategies to clients.[7] The focal point is a ‘commitment meeting’, usually a pub lunch, attended by a group of clients most of whom are non-users of the strategy, technique or treatment being promoted, together with one or two committed users.
Non-user clients are selected for invitation using practice records to identify that they would indeed gain from adopting the proposition. To persuade target clients to attend, bearing in mind that reflectors and theorists among them may not be habitual meeting-goers, repetition is essential. They would be invited by letter and in person by their regular vet, supported by phone contact from the office, possibly more than once in each case.
“As far as possible, we don’t leave things to chance,” says LLM partner James Allcock. “The aim is for farmer targets for each initiative to receive the same message from several different sources, which of course means getting our story aligned among practice colleagues.”
At the meeting itself, the programme includes evidence and experience of the gains to be made from adopting the proposition together with some essential theory and instruction. In addition to this, our source says there is one more compelling secret weapon: “Once you’ve persuaded clients to attend, then social pressure comes into play,” he explains. “It is human nature to want to conform and most people will fall into line with their peers.”
In practice, the process is even more effective with seven encounters than five. Many who attend these meetings need to go home and convince other participants in the farm business, so it’s important they get help with this and with countering any buyer’s remorse in the aftermath of making an important decision.
Amid the day-to-day individual consultations between veterinary surgeons and clients, often the least difficult bit of the job is identifying the problems and action needed to overcome them. The tough nut is getting action, particularly to achieve full- rather than partial-compliance. Often, clients require some education—remember Theo Lam’s knowledge transfer bottle-neck—with the vet ideally placed as personal tutor. With gregarious clients, involving them in problem-solving groups with like-minded farmers may be effective. For those who rarely attend meetings, then good old-fashioned individual consultation supported by good documentation to help theorist and reflector clients come to their own conclusions is likely to be more successful.
So how do you and practice colleagues identify different client types? (i) You could buy the Honey & Mumford materials and do a learning styles analysis with each one, but in reality…? (ii) Otherwise, it’s down to each vet’s skill in observing and reading people: Do they experiment with new ways of doing things? Are they gregarious or not? Do you see or hear evidence that they read the printed material you give them? Do they read a lot? Do they take a long time to make decisions, possibly based on seeing lots of evidence first?
There are clues on every farm, and in some respects the successful advisors of the future—vets included—will be those who can develop the soft skills involved in reading people and handling them accordingly as much as their ability to perform clinical diagnoses and prescribe effective solutions. Maybe the time is right for including more soft skills and social science in veterinary surgeons’ original training and ongoing CPD.
References
[1] British Mastitis Conference 2007. Proceedings. Institute for Animal Health, The Dairy Group, ADAS.
[2] Helen R Whay et al, 2009. Managing cattle lameness: A novel approach using social marketing techniques. Proceedings of the 2009 Cattle Lameness Conference, 25th March 2009. University of Nottingham.
[3] David A Kolb (1984). Experimental Learning. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey. Cited by Theo Lam et al (2007). Making changes in improving udder health: A veterinary perspective. Proceedings of the British Mastitis Conference 2007. Institute for Animal Health, The Dairy Group, ADAS.
[4] Peter Honey & Alan Mumford (1982). The Manual of Learning Styles. Peter Honey Publications, Maidenhead. www.peterhoney.com.
[5] Peter Honey & Alan Mumford (2000). The Learning Styles Questionnaire: 80-item version. Peter Honey Publications, Maidenhead. www.peterhoney.com.
[6] Jim Williams (2009). Personal communication. Telephone conversation/interview took place Friday 12th June 2009. Precision Prospecting, Framlingham.
[7] James Allcock (2009). Personal communication. Interview took place Friday 13th February 2009. Lambert, Leonard & May, Whitchurch.
No comments:
Post a Comment