After reading this story, I believe it will change the way you understand training and instill in you a renewed determination to teach leadership skills properly.
I worked in the retail industry for many years and one of the things we hoped to do was promote from within. Obviously, this is a good policy because we already know the person we’re promoting: their personality, work ethic, how quickly they learn, etc. In the retail company where I worked, we would have coordinators or leads. The coordinators were responsible for doing most of the physical labor and then taking on some management responsibilities as they grew with the company. When one did an exceptional job and had a desire to be promoted to a management position, we often promoted them to an assistant manager. Our training program consisted of training the newly promoted coordinator in management responsibility as opposed to management skills.
Why were they trained in this manner? It’s easy to see why the coordinator was promoted: they worked hard, they cared about the store, they performed well and had a good grasp of their responsibilities. So, whether it was conscious or subconscious, the training programs chose not to teach skills because it was difficult to teach the newly promoted person that they had to change. Their perspective was that they were the hardest workers in the store and got promoted because of this, so it follows that they must also be the hardest working manager; however, this thinking leads to failure.
No one ever sat down with them, even during the promotion process, and told them they would have to change their way of thinking about their performance.
When you promote a person, especially a person that has a new dynamic in their job responsibilities, they deserve a training program that first communicates to them that they will have to change what made them successful in their last assignment in order to be successful in their new assignment.
And you will have to change your training program to make sure you’re training skills first and responsibilities second.
Says easy, doesn’t do so easy!
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