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Think Training’s Expensive? Have You Priced Ignorance Lately?
By Richard Hadden and Bill Catlette
How much training could it possibly take for a Starbucks barista (that's Italian for person that serves coffee) to learn to take the counter at one of the coffee chain's growing number of cafes? Would you believe 50? To pour coffee?! No! Who goes to Starbucks and just orders a cup of coffee?
Baristas have to learn to prepare a "for-here, double-tall decaf, non-fat, no-whip amaretto mocha", or any of the other dozens of permutations and combinations on the menu. They take lessons to 'call' the order with precise syntax, brew the beans, pull shots of espresso, and steam milk with varying fat content.
Never knew it was that complicated? Well, it is. And if you pride yourself, as Starbucks does, on providing an exceptional experience for the customer, you can increase your chances for success by providing exceptional training for those on the front-line.
And yet, if you've been working long enough to know what a dry erase marker is, you know that when the chips are down, training is the first victim of the inevitable cuts. I've got a question for you. If you think training is expensive, have you priced ignorance lately?
When we looked at successful companies, those who used training as a strategic weapon, we found four elements in common. If you want to compete with them, make sure you learn these lessons:
1. Treat all your employees as professionals. Just like hospitals treat their doctors, law firms their lawyers, and airlines their pilots.
Justine, a nice kid in my local drugstore, was near tears because she didn't know what to do when my beat-up credit card wouldn't "swipe". Somebody should have beat up her manager for putting her on the front line without 2 minutes of training on punching in a credit card sale. "I'm sorry. This is my first day," she pleaded. How'd you like to hear that coming from your dental hygeinist, pick-axe in hand? So what if Justine's not a nuclear physicist..yet? She deserved better than she got, and so did I.
2. Hold trainers accountable for training, and learners accountable for learning and using the skills the trainers have taught. Lose the smiley sheet evaluations you pass out at the end of a training session. They don't measure the training's effectiveness. If anything, they tell you how much people liked the trainer.
Do your trainers give participants a grade? Funny, we used to do something like that in school, and it worked for me. But I don't see much of that in corporate training programs. How come nobody ever flunks a company seminar? Are trainers, and students really that good?
One of our clients has implemented a simple but effective means to encourage accountability. The CEO writes every attendee a letter and says essentially, "Hey, this stuff is important, or we wouldn't have spent money on it. I'd like you to write up something between a paragraph and two pages telling me what you learned." And he reads every one. He's the CEO. That's his job.
3. Shred the sign-up sheets. In successful organizations, training's not optional. When you get on a 737 to fly to Dallas in the summer, how comfortable would you feel knowing the pilot and first officer had simply "opted out" of the "Landing in a Thunderstorm" Workshop?
4. Get rid of the executive parking places for training. Visibility counts. I once conducted a Coaching Skills Workshop for a group of utility plant managers. The Vice President who brought me in was in the class, too. The veep's presence and participation was lost on no one.
A few months later, he asked me to back to train another group. He wanted to be there that morning to endorse the program. Unfortunately, he had an important budget meeting 100 miles from the training site. So he got up at 4:30 in the morning, took a company helicopter to a field near the classroom, ran in, made his pitch, and then drove with a colleague back to headquarters for his meeting.
He made a 200-mile round trip to issue this 10-minute message: "This is important. It's so important that I went through it before you did. I'm using it, and I expect you to do the same."
Most of the folks working for you desperately want to do a good job. Those that don't - get rid of them! Those that do - train them to be their best. Ken Francis, President of McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace-West said "The extent to which we are able to give our employees access to their highest levels of achievement is a significant measure of our success in business." That starts with knowing how to do your job. And that starts with training.
Get off the low road that abandons training as soon as earnings stray from the high road. Leave that ploy to your competitors, and you'll beat the pants, widgets, or whatever-you-make off them.
Please print the following attribution for this article: Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, help clients clobber the competition by having a focused, fired up, and capably led workforce. They deliver powerful conference keynotes and leadership training. They can be reached at 800-940-7006 (+1-904-720-0870 from outside North America) or www.ContentedCows.com.