Train Like a Champion Team
In chatting with business owners about whether they should provide training for their employees, I often reply back with: “It is not whether you should or should not, it is a question of how much you provide.”
Sometimes they come back to me with, “What happens if I train them up and they leave? All that time and energy is wasted!” I then respond with, “Well what happens if you don’t train them and they stay?”
Most business owners would love their employees to be working together, consistently and can often share a comment such as “It would be great if they just worked and jelled like a well-oiled machine. No hassles. Just do the job right the first time!”
My question back to them is, “Well how often does a professional football team train in comparison to how much they play a game?”
Obviously a professional football team trains several days per week and they often practice the fundamentals over, over, over and over again.
When I first started in the coaching space, a mentor of mine said, “Don’t practice till you get it right, practice till you can’t get it wrong!”
This profound statement has stuck with me through the years and it is what I would suggest to every business owner, particularly with those skills that are critical to the success of your business. This could be:
- Answering customer enquiries
- Certain ‘on the tools’ skills
- Meeting a customer/scoping out a job
- Pricing
- Handling a difficult customer
So a question for you, when is game day in business? The reality is every day is game day in business. Are you allowing your team to practice on the customer that you have worked so hard to get, or are they well-rehearsed so that when customer communication or contact occurs they know exactly what to do in every conceivable situation.
There is no doubt that a champion team is cohesive, more productive, engaged, and ultimately more profitable. A team that is not cohesive has continual communication breakdowns, customer hassles, defaults in the quality of work, ultimately a challenging place to be as well as struggling to be profitable long term.
So the questions to answer are:
- What do I train my team in?
- When and how often should I conduct training?
- Who should facilitate the training?
Mix up the training between on-site and off-site. Keep in mind that the team out onsite deal with different challenges to the administration team at the back end.
However they both depend on each other to succeed.
So how much training is enough?
Your team want to perform well and be acknowledged for it. Provide them with the resources and practice to help them do it!
Written by Jon Mailer
CEO Of PROTRADE United
