Empowering employees starts with giving them the right tools to succeed, says Stan Bunting.
“Empowerment is always a concept people are readily willing to say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ But you can’t empower someone just by giving them new responsibilities and not spend the time to prepare them,” Bunting says.
As president, CEO and majority owner of McCoy Inc., Bunting says there’s a two-step process to empowering employees. First, you train them. Second, you have to allow them to learn by making mistakes.
Bunting has put those steps in place at McCoy, with many of his 350 employees going through in-house training courses or mentoring programs. Annual performance appraisals allow the office furniture company to put employees with management promise on a career training path, learning finance and leadership skills. Newer employees learn the ropes next to their own mentor.
By both formal and informal training, Bunting essentially grows his own employees at McCoy, which posted 2008 revenue of $121 million.
Smart Business spoke with Bunting about training employees to meet your company’s needs.
Carve out time for training. The person that is being given greater latitude, whether it’s greater latitude in their job function or decision-making or whatever, really should be told that’s what is happening. There is a process, and there should be a certain amount of training and preparation prior to greater empowerment.
There’s formal training, where there are very specific steps involved, and then there is the softer side of training that is more of a mentor relationship between the person who is growing in their job responsibilities and the person who is allowing them to grow.
If you’re going to build curriculum, you have to get experts that understand how to build a curriculum. We used an outside service.
I have taught those classes to begin training in soft skills. We sent six of our leaders here to training. It was a ‘train the trainer’ kind of an approach. Then, we came back, and with a cross-section of the population, we would go through formal training classes.
Most companies are working at a very efficient level, which means your people don’t have a lot of extra time to go to training classes. If all you do is add this on top of everything else that they have to do, it’s going to be very difficult for them to get it done.
You’ve got to give them the time to go to training and apply some of the things that must be applied. You’ve got to block it out for them. You’ve got to take them out of the work pool for a certain amount of time to give them time to go to training. It’s not a nights-and-weekends type thing; it’s not fair.
