Mentor your employees. Formal training is not very successful without the mentoring. Many times, formal training only gives us a language, which we’re both working in to be able to discuss these things. A lot of the actual training comes in real-life experiences.
Both parties have to be fully engaged. It cannot be something you’re going to do when there’s time left over, and it can’t be something that you’re going to do just by happenstance. You have to be thoughtful about it, and you have to (plan) it, and you have to make sure you’re really making the investment in time — both parties.
For example, in the sales relationship, we put junior salespeople with senior salespeople, and those people are the mentors for the junior sales rep. They go out on calls with them, they understand how to enter orders, they get involved in pricing.
They do it as peer-to-peer relationship, not as a management-level person to someone else in the organization.
Once you’ve done some mentoring, you give them a chance to go work on their own. You see how they handle their mistakes and answer their own questions. When they’re able to kind of ride that bicycle without the training wheels, then they’re ready. But it’s a judgment call. You have to eventually allow them to take a risk and let them go.
Encourage risk-taking. The second component has more to do with the person that has decided to empower another individual. I think the leader that has decided to empower another employee in his business has to be willing to take a little bit of risk, because if they don’t, it’s really not empowerment, it’s micromanagement.
We talk a lot in training in our management group here about not micromanaging. Set large goals, set large metrics and measure those, but don’t measure the minutiae. There’s a lot more learning that goes on when you allow people to solve problems on their own instead of constantly checking in.
If you’ve done the proper training and the proper preparation, then you’ve got to be willing to let them make mistakes as they try new things. Let them learn, and help them learn from those mistakes.
It’s OK to take risks and make mistakes because that’s how we learn from them. You can say that all day long. You can state it in your values, but you also have to demonstrate that. When someone makes a mistake, you can’t then go in and punish them.
You should go in and work with them, and help them learn why the mistake was made and so on. But it should be done in a very constructive manner, in helping them build and learn, not in a punitive manner.
How to reach: McCoy Inc., (713) 862-4600 or www.mccoyinc.com
