It is frustrating to bring state-of-the-art ideas to the job, only to find that your department prefers to remain in a state of arrested development. You are experiencing one of the most common problems in job training, namely the failure of new material to transfer to the job itself.
On the one hand, you can throw your hands up in the air and claim that the training has been a waste of time, but that's a waste of time. Even if your manager never applies any of the information or techniques that you learned, you have still increased your knowledge, skills, and managerial potential, whether at this company or elsewhere.
Rather than simply trying to apply what you learned, which might be somewhat threatening to your manager, try to take more of a teaching role. Think about meeting with your manager and training him on the materials you have learned. It will be very helpful for him to understand these newer approaches, and for him to play a key role in implementing them with you. By taking this approach, his resistance is likely to drop as he becomes part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
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