Rookie Mistakes: Inflexibility with Different Learning Styles

January 11, 2025

Training a new recruit in the way they prefer is fastest way to get someone to be a thriving, productive member of your team.

The rookie mistake in this video is to refuse to meet people on their level, and to not adapt your leadership or training methods to different learning styles. In the animation industry, we are working with adults in a creative industry. We all have our habits and don’t have to conform like when we were kids in school.

The animation industry in Vancouver is constantly growing, changing, shifting, and so we are constantly all training and adapting to make the latest and greatest shows. For Production staff, a key part of our role is to not only train other Production staff but to train our artists.

Meeting people on their level also helps you get to know them, and as I have said many times before in A Course In Production, you are only as good as you know your team.

Andrew Hill and John Wooden say in Be Quick - But Don’t Hurry!

Too many coaches adopt a single style of interaction with their players and expect them all to flourish. That simply doesn’t take into account the basic fact of human nature that people are different. A coach needs to be a little bit like a jockey, and to adjust to the horse he’s riding. Knowing what type of horse you’re on is only have the battle; the other half is recognizing that you need to make the adjustments.
- from Be Quick - But Don’t Hurry!: Finding Success in the Teachings of a Lifetime by Andrew Hill with John Wooden

For our artists, we are certainly not training them on creative or technical things per se, though we often help them with certain file transfer programs, tricks for navigating Shotgrid/Flow, even helping to manage emails and calendars. We can also lead by example by being good role models for our teams for professional conduct and good workplace habits.

Another renowned basketball coach, Coach K speaks of adapting to different learning styles in a teamwork environment in his book, Leading with the Heart saying,

“[...] every team I’ve had in my coaching Career, I’ve coached differently. That’s because each year brings with it a new team, with new people who have different personalities and different skills. If I hope to get the most out of these players as a group, I have to coach them differently than previous teams.”
- from Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life by Mike Krzyzewski with Donald T. Phillips

A couple key things I would encourage you to keep in mind with training someone include cultural differences (even cultural differences between, say, VFX houses and animation studios) and generational differences. This may inform how you train someone, particularly with existing documentation and materials in the case that you are not training them directly in a call or beside them at the studio.

For example, I personally prefer written documentation with screen caps, ironically, I do not like watching videos. Others, however, thrive from screen share recordings as you complete task. This difference in how we absorb information and learn things is literally built into Shotgrid/Flow, it is why you can choose to have your data presented in pie charts or bar graphs.

Always ask the person you are training what their learning style is and what they prefer, and be flexible and prepared to adjust your approach accordingly.

After all, you want the person you are training to do well in their role and set them up for success. Training them in the way they prefer, and meeting them on their level as best you can, is fastest way to get someone to be a thriving, productive member of your team.

Animation is an inherently creative business. Rigidity and inflexibility when working with someone and encountering different learning styles is not only unwelcoming, it is the opposite of what we need in a creative environment.