Leadership Mentoring Dovetails With Training

Training is the key to an organisations growth.

Think about it for a second…

If you recruit people and they perform to the best of their ability they will reach a plateau.

That plateau will allow them to continue to do the job. However, there can be no further improvement without training.

Because if you already knew what you had to do the likelihood is that you’d be doing it.

So training is the key element that grows an organisation.

There are two extremes in training, and I’ve been in company’s that practice one or the other.

Throw Training At Them And Hope It Sticks

This type of approach involves either the Human Resources department assessing all the training that everyone in the company would benefit from and then simply sending everyone on it.

Or the company employing a consultant to say the same thing and the net result is the same thing.

This is never a good way of running training.

For example I was in a company that sent everyone to time management over a period of a few months. However, when the initial batch of trained employees returned to base they had to deal with people who hadn’t been trained and so didn’t really implement the time management process effectively.

Then when subsequent batches of course attendees returned they already “knew” that the time management process didn’t work! An expensive waste of time and money.

Also sending someone on a course well before they use the new skill means they’ll lose most of the skill. So again a waste of time and money.

I also worked at a company who tried to implement a vast library of training courses that could be accessed online. People could choose their own courses. The only problem?

Employees didn’t really look upon them as a set of proper courses and didn’t give them the attention they deserved.

So simply throwing unfocused training at an organisation is not the way forward.

Let Them Learn From Nellie

At the other end of the scale is the unwillingness for a company to invest in training their staff. The reason may not be financial, they may believe they’re unable to manage without the member of staff for the duration of the course.

So the next best thing to training is to stick the employee with Nellie, who “knows” all the ropes and can train them in what to do.

The problem with this approach is that Nellie may not give all the information required to do the job. Or Nellie might not even have discovered the best way to do the job herself. Remember she’s unlikely to have had training herself. Or Nellie, without even knowing, may send someone in completely the wrong direction for the company’s purpose.

So the problem for the organisation is that Nellie becomes a focus for everyone who isn’t sure about what to do and her productivity declines until the skill has been transferred. Even when it’s been transferred she may still get further queries from time to time.

How Does Training Work For Leaders?

You’re a leader.

How often have you been on a course that you identified you should go on?

What about the executives that work with you? When did you sit down with them all and identify what aspects of their skill set should be built up with training?

How often have you put a new manager, or executive with “Nellie” to learn the ropes, rather than take the time your self – because you’re too busy?

And yet there are 12 key skills that I’ve talked about before in this blog that really make an enormous difference. Improving just those 12 skills will power a business forward. And applying them to the leaders to begin with is the best strategy for a company.

Once the leaders have begun to practice the core skills they need to be mentored by an outside agent who can be trusted to hold them responsible for improvement.  Then the skills improvement can be applied to the other employees in the organisation.

Whatever you do formalise the improvement of those 12 key skills to take you business to the next level.

You do want to get your business to the next level?