Get employees what they need
When it comes to developing the talent you have in your company, you need to have a plan. Employees need to have a role in figuring out what types of training programs would help them do their jobs better.
“They know what is going to make them more efficient and where they are lacking,” Dilts says.
Shiel Sexton uses an external firm to survey its employees and gather feedback about what they feel would help them in their work.
“Since we use an outside service and we’re not here conducting our own survey, we get feedback that is more honest,” Dilts says. “We take that feedback and share it with them. We act on their issues. They see it’s not just the same old, same old. … We’ve said, ‘Look, this is an issue, and we’re going to do something about it.’ We call that out and make it part of our state of the company address.”
In addition to respecting your employees’ wishes about what they feel they need to learn, you also need to respect the time they have to learn and still get their work done.
“You have to look at every position and see how much training that position and person can handle given their responsibility,” Dilts says. “We’ve broken it down in the matrix of different positions need X amount of hours per year. How much time does a project manager truly have? What is it that we need to teach them? What’s the realistic time they can spend doing it? Every level and every position in our company has a threshold of what you can learn and a threshold of how much time you have to do it.”
Shiel Sexton is using a local college professor on sabbatical to help the company do an even better job of structuring its development processes and getting its employees the knowledge they want and need.
“What we’re morphing to is to make sure we have a consistent curriculum and then you can add the new things you need on an annual basis,” Dilts says. “He is spending a year with us doing nothing but reworking our training programs and the content and looking at how we deliver it to see if that is the most efficient way to deliver it. Are the classes and the core curriculum written properly? Are we delivering this in the most effective way?”
The key is to know what your people need to know to be able to do their jobs most effectively, whether that’s using a college professor or your own people.
“Look at every project, every position and decide what you think the successful skill set is,” Dilts says. “You profile a success story with a superintendent. We know that a superintendent has certain skill sets. If they are going to be an ‘A’ superintendent, you have to have a certain skill set. You just back into what makes them an ‘A’ superintendent. Break that down into a curriculum. Back that down into the number of hours you’re able to do it.”