Training using snippets

- We know that good training and mentoring make a difference in job performance. Let me share some numbers with you. 75% of millennials believe that their organizations could do more to develop future leaders. Of millennials intending to stay with their organization for more than five years, they were twice as likely to have a mentor. When you as the manager get personally involved in training and mentoring, your employee becomes more successful and more emotionally engaged in their job. But the challenge is, how do you train people when you barely have enough time to do your own job? Here's a few things you can do. Number one, let the experts do the work for you. You don't have to be the sole source of information. If you want your employ to learn something, assign them a video. Give them a course, or a book, or a book abstract or a TED talk. Put the responsibility on them. Let them do the work and then summarize it for you, and ask them, how will you use this on your job? The second thing you can do is just train in micro skills. Instead of trying to train someone on your entire ordering system, just do one little part, something that takes five minutes, and then do five minutes more the next day. If you wait until you have a two-hour block, you'll never get around to it, so just break things up into little micro chunks. A third thing is show them what good looks like. Don't just tell them. Provide them with a really concrete specific example, and it doesn't even have to be someone from your own company. You can tell them, I want you to do this the way that people at Disney do it and make sure they can watch what that looks like. Fourth, instead of thinking about what you want them to know, decide what do you want them to do. Have them practice for you, because you see, here's something a lot of people don't realize. When someone is struggling to practice a new skill, their brain is building a new neural pathway. The learning actually resides in that persistent, consistent difficult practice, and the last thing is, and this is so important, make sure you provide context. See, you may know all about how all the various aspects of your business fit together. But your employee doesn't. So one of the things I always recommend and you can do this when you're training anyone on anything is you draw out your business on a big piece of paper and you say, here are our customers, here's our supply chain, here's who pays us, here's what matters to them. That every single person in your company ought to be able to look at that and describe here's how we make money. Here's what matters to our customers and this spot right here, this is my role in bringing that to life. You see, when you take the time for training, even when you do it in snippet, it pays off in job performance and employee retention.