Could you stop training your people? You are losing your time and money. I don’t have any problem with training, however, I fully believe that training is not what your employees need from you today.
Let’s do an exercise:
1. Write down the skill that you guess your employees need to be trained on. I wrote “sales skill”.
2. Let’s go to Google and search for “sales training”. Please replace “sales” for your word in step 1.
3. I got hundreds and hundreds of training courses from around the world, 100% online, on-site or off site. And you?
Now, let me know how many of those training courses include your culture, your vision for the next 5 years, your client/customer behaviors, your values, and all those things you really need today to be “different” in this competitive market. Probably, you would come to “zero” of them that would take care of that.
Do you see the difference now? I guess yes, in my opinion and with today’s market context do less training and more education. Training is important, don’t take this in the wrong way. However, this is the easy part. You saw it, Google was able to give a lot of information about training courses.
There are probably web sites such as “Coursera” or “Udemy” that have free programs for your employees. If this is not the case, maybe you can get very good training online or near your business. However, “EDUCATE” your people with your culture, your way to see the market as an organization, how you really need to treat your clients/customers to accomplish your vision in 5/10 years, and your values are not outside “courses”. You should do it. Your employees need it and they want it. They want to be successful like you; however, they need all the tools. Education is one of them, it is not free and organizations sometimes miss it.
Please think about it, for a while stop sending people to training sessions. You should evaluate the benefits of educating people with the organizational culture, vision and values. Maybe you have the best salesman, or the best programmer, but if he/she does not have access to the organizational culture, vision, and values education, I am sure that he/she is not preforming to his/her 100%.
If he/she is not able to learn about your culture, vision, and values, as manager/CEO/Director, it is time to change and seize your responsibility on this!
What do you think? Feel free to share your point of view or experience.
Thanks,
Omar