Zig Ziglar rightly said, “What’s worse than training your workers and losing them? Not training them and keeping them!” But most conventional training programs are a waste of time and energy.
Failure to train and failure to train well have the same effect. Research shows that poor training leads to higher employee turnover and weaker job performance. The Society for Human Resource Management researched the effectiveness of 36 different initiatives aimed at decreasing staff turnover. “Training and development opportunities” ranked as the 9th most effective initiative in keeping employees. [i]
How Can a Business Owner Train Their Employees Well?
One key part of any strong training program is understanding conation. While skills can be taught and personalities can change, conative instincts are hardwired. Through a 20-minute Kolbe A assessment, you will identify the striving instincts an individual uses to solve problems and accomplish their best work.
But how do striving instincts affect your training methods?
You can spend hours teaching content. But if you do not deliver that content in a way that resonates with your employees, you might as well not train them at all. Because people take action in a myriad of ways, adjusting training practices to match their instinctive actions imbeds learning in a more meaningful way. This not only expedites the training process, but it makes learning more proficient and lasting.
Including Conation in Training Programs
In our Training Accelerator program, we help business owners use conation to improve their training programs with these four steps:
- Identify Instinctive Strengths of the Leader or Training Manager.
The first step is learning the leader or manager’s conative strengths through a Kolbe A assessment. This self-awareness about how the leader approaches their work is key when trying to train others.
- Identify Instinctive Strengths of each Team Member.
Likewise, each team member should learn their unique conative strengths. Like leaders, it is valuable for each employee to know how they instinctively approach their work.
- Understand the Differences.
Now that the leader and employees know their conative strengths, they can learn more about how each other’s strengths interact in an A-to-A Comparison Report. In this report, both parties get personalized recommendations on how to communicate – and work better – together.
- Customize Your Communication and Training Approach.
Finally, a leader would be remiss to not tailor how they deliver content to best communicate with their employees. The best way to do this is through a Coaching Report. This report is a tool that gives specific guidance and recommendations to the leader about how to present data and organize its structure to best train others.
Through this report, leaders learn whether to:
- Provide generous details, or just the most important take-aways
- Go through the information in a methodical, step-by-step approach, or work through the material quickly and out of order
- Set a few goals at a time with short deadlines to keep them engaged, or give them a longer list of prioritized goals for them to work through at their own pace
- Provide information about how a process works, or give them hands-on learning opportunities
- Explain how the equipment works, or stick to what the equipment does
Any of these methods will work to communicate content, but they differ tremendously in how well your content is received.
One size does not fit all when delivering content. Whether you are training employees on how to handle complex equipment, what safety procedures to follow, or how to protect client data, taking the time to tailor your delivery of content to maximize retention will protect your employees, your clients, and your business.
If you would like more information or would like to learn more about our Training Accelerator program, contact us today at illuminateba.com or email us at team@illuminateba.com.