In small business, it’s often difficult for those who started the business to hand off critical processes, areas of expertise, and duties to others – even if they are too busy to do it all and they have someone who can take over. Why? If you’re too busy to do anything well, doesn’t it make sense to hand things off? The issue is usually trust, and it can be difficult to believe that someone else is going to execute to the standard you hold yourself to. This is also where training comes in.
We have a tendency to overlook training as a strategic measure because it seems simple – just decide how you’re going to do something and tell everyone – but also requires a lot from everyone involved. It requires time, effort, yes – but it requires trust and willingness to change things that need to change. If you are unwilling to trust people to learn and you are unwilling to change, your training program, however exhaustive, will not get you very far.
Training is actually one of the best ways to set your company up for sustainable growth. How do you produce predictable results? Training! How do you give people understanding about what really matters? Training! How do you capture the hearts of your people? Training!
If you’re in a position right now where you are working to batten down the hatches for a wild ride ahead, you might consider investing in your training programs. If you are a small business, start up, or a solopreneur looking to grow, it’s likely that your training programs are skeletal at best. This is nothing to be ashamed of – in fact, it’s completely normal. As your company grows, your employees rely on tribal knowledge to make sure mistakes are avoided. The problem with this in the long term is threefold:
- You have little to no control over the standard to which the work is being performed.
- You are relying on the consistency of human beings, who are notoriously inconsistent, to produce consistent results.
- You have zero documentation of changes to processes and standards as they are made and implemented.
To use a perhaps over-used metaphor, let’s consider the art of physically preparing for an athletic event. If it’s a competitive event – and sometimes even if it’s not – you have to prepare your body so that it knows what to do and so that it can keep doing it even when every other part of you is desperate to give up.
The purpose of training is not to bore people – and a good training is never boring. Training exists to prepare people for the moment of chaos when instinct must kick in, and you do things according to what “feels” right – whether it actually is or not. Do you want to be relying on each person’s varied understanding of what that is in the moment? Or do you want each person to know deep in the core of their being what the expected standard is and take measures to execute in a predictable way? This is how we develop organizations strong in fire prevention rather than fire-fighting.
Activity: Consider the training you underwent for your current role. Was there training? Was it comprehensive? Can you confidently say that you fulfill your duties under the auspices of that training? If you were to hire someone to take over your job, how would you train that person?