Do your own homework
There tends to be a lot of cynicism when it comes to things like leadership training or personal growth or development courses. But Lindsey says you shouldn’t expect to learn everything there is to know about being a better person from one course or one experience.
“I’m very challenged by someone who can sit through a training program that was put together by smart people and say, ‘I can’t pull anything from it,’” Lindsey says. “The problem is in the student. … Never underestimate the power of one good idea.”
If you find that your employees walk away from personal growth opportunities feeling as though they didn’t gain anything to help them on the job, ask them to not try looking so hard.
“Sometimes, we go on these things and we want 20 good ideas,” Lindsey says. “If we can get one good idea a month, that should be enough to hold us over. You go to a four-hour meeting and you get one good idea, you should be happy.”
You can help ensure your employees are getting useful advice from training workshops by
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tting yourself through the material beforehand. When you show that you’re interested, it can only help do the same with your people.
“Know the material and be a believer in it yourself,” Lindsey says. “Go through the training so you know that there are nuggets in there to be found. If you’ve done that and you know there are nuggets there and now you’re sharing them with your people, it should be a natural process. If you have good learners, then they are going to get it.”
If you’re still having trouble, try adding breaks to your training sessions and including short reviews before going on to the next topic.
“We’ll have an insight page, and we’ll write down insights every time we take a break,” Lindsey says. “You gather them at each break instead of after the whole thing at the end of the day and you’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, what did I learn? What am I going to do?’ Do it throughout the day.”
You can also engage your people by putting them in a position to lead some of the training sessions.
“Some of the best learning occurs as we teach others,” Lindsey says. “The best way to learn math or to try to learn a sport is to try to teach it to someone else. I do that with my son. He can say he knows the answers to his math problems, but if he has to sit down and tell his second-grade sister how to do it, he really learns it. You’re teaching yourself and you’re just getting a mind that works that way. It’s participating and staying engaged.”
If it’s you that is doing the teaching, you gain that extra benefit. If it’s your employees being given the opportunity, then their growth is furthered that much more.
“It’s an understanding that the real roots of success are not the better widget or the better plan, but it’s the better person,” Lindsey says.
Giving people experience through training will help down the road. In addition to their expertise in a certain area, they will also bring some knowledge of teaching to the sessions.
“It used to be the technician manager starts writing the training program,” Lindsey says. “A salesperson is going to write the program like a salesperson would write it. Maybe that isn’t appealing to all five senses and all the different ways we learn. Now we have people that are skilled in writing training programs writing all our training programs.
“Personal growth is the solution to most, if not all of our challenges. We need to model that and instill that and look for others that believe the same thing.”
Trying to create an environment of continuing education in the workplace can seem like a daunting task. But Lindsey says it’s not if you focus on small steps.
“We talk about that 1 percent better,” Lindsey says. “Can your organization get 1 percent better every week? This is a journey, not a destination. It does take time. You’re going to have to spend some time early on pushing and those pushes early on might be hiring or firing people. It might be building programs or doing things. It’s just like working out or any kind of exercise. The healthier you get, the easier it gets to work out.”
How to reach: DEFENDER Direct Inc., (317) 810-4720 or www.defenderdirect.com