In this video, I offer a simple 3-step guideline on what small business owners should keep in mind when planning to train and develop their team—and to get them to work for you so that you can grow your business.
For a business to grow, we need to work with the resources that we have access to in order to achieve growth. One of the key resources in any business is the people working in the business—your team. You are dependent on them for the success of your business, as much as they are dependent on you for leadership and guidance. For growth to happen, everyone should have the right skills and the right attitude towards growth—training is one of the factors that will help ensure this.
Why train? When we stop learning, we stop growing. This is why it is important to continue training everyone in the business. Here are three important steps that I think small business owners should consider seriously when discussing employee training and development for company growth.
Step one: Identify learning gaps
What does your team need to learn? Categorize these gaps into short-term, medium-term, and long-term gaps. Look into them and fill accordingly.
What skills or knowledge do your employees need to learn immediately—perhaps in the next 6 to 12 months? What skills or knowledge would they need in the next 12 to 18 months or the medium-term to long-term?
What kind of skills do they need to learn? Are these hard or soft skills? Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities that can be defined and measured, such as the ability to use software programs that you may be using in your business. By contrast, soft skills are less tangible and harder to quantify skill sets, such as customer service or leadership skills.
Step two: Identify an approach
The next step is to identify how you will address these gaps. How will you train your employees for the skills and knowledge that they need to learn immediately? Will they learn on the job? Will someone be mentoring them? Will you be their mentor or will you be bringing someone from the outside to mentor them? Will they be shadowing someone already performing a similar task or process? Or will you be expanding their knowledge and skills through cross-training?
Does your organisation have someone in-house who can teach such skills? Or do you need to find a third-party provider for their training? Or maybe enrol them in an online course?
It is interesting to note at this point that while formal courses offered by many educational institutions seem ideal, some studies have shown that employees tend to learn more from their peers, particularly on skills and knowledge that already exist within your team. Furthermore, by teaching each other on the job, employees learn important leadership and management skills required for their position.
How will you tackle employee training and development in the medium- to long-term? Will you have an organisation-wide professional development plan? Some organisations assign a training and development champion—one who is held accountable for helping the organisation identify learning gaps and find an appropriate approach to achieve the organisatino’s professional development goals.
Step three: Identify accountability
How do you sustain your medium- to long-term learning goals? While the first two steps refers to actions or activities that the organisation should perform, this last step aims to ensure that any plans formulated and carried out in the short term will be implemented sustainably for years to come. This makes sure that the skills and knowledge of your staff grow with your goals.
A more important question to ask at this point is: who ensures that the development goals are carried out? I mentioned earlier about assigning a training champion. But keep in mind that the training champion only helps identify new or persistent learning gaps, and helps business owners find ways to address these. Having only one person accountable for everyone’s training and development is not enough.
In Deutsche Knowledge Services, Inc., the financial management back office of Deutsche Bank offices worldwide, every employee is held accountable for their professional development. They are all required to fulfill at least 60 hours of training every year. The company offers an exhaustive list of hard skills and soft skills in-house training, but employees are also encouraged to take out formal courses online or in formal institutions should the in-house training be insufficient. While the human resources department is considered as the training champion, every single employee is also called on to champion their own learning and development.
Obviously, Deutsche Bank is a massive organisation—and small businesses do not have the resources to roll out a professional development plan such as theirs. But we can take a page from their practice by focusing on what they wanted to achieve: hold employees accountable for learning by requiring them to be very active in their own development within the organisation.
What can small businesses do?
One regular practice in some organisations is weekly catch ups with the immediate superior. Managers spend 15 minutes, usually at the end of the week, to chat with their team members. This can be a form of mentoring. You can also introduce cross-training, where members of your team are assigned a different task or to a different team at regular rotational intervals. The key, however, is to keep your team accountable for their learning is to ask them what they need and what they intend to learn, and get their insight on how they themselves addressing the learning gaps.
Remember, as your team grows, they will be better prepared to handle the changes that come with the growth of your company.
If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.
