Monthly Archives: May 2014

Training and development of employees for improved performance


It’s extremely important for business owners and leaders to recognize the importance of training and development of their employees and to take a proactive approach.

Every company has competition, whether local or global. Even if you don’t have competition because your product is so unique and new, you are probably competing with yourself and against time and money. You can only develop a product so long before you run out of both.

Training and Developmentthursday-full

Training and development is more important than ever for your organization to stay competitive and survive. Training and development challenges employees to grow and improve. We all have untapped potential that is waiting to be unleashed, and this can be directed towards activities that will have a high impact on the performance of the organization.

Employees who do not receive training and development may become resistant to change and become stagnant. This can really have a negative impact on performance since technology is driving so many changes in work methods.

Being Proactive

Taking a proactive approach to employee training and development is best done by first setting goals for the organization and department. This will help you to determine where current skill levels of employees may be challenged towards achieving these goals and thus you can develop a training plan for the department an individual.

Hard and Soft Skills

When developing a training plan is important to look at the total person. We often breaks skills and to types, hard and soft. Hard skills are those that permit us to complete a task or activity, such as running a computer program operating machine, etc. A soft skill is a behavior that determines how an employee will approach a task and interact with others. This is often neglected when looking at training needs, but is extremely important for employee and team performance.

Teamworkoffice group in discussion

If you want to develop teamwork in your organization and department people must learn specific interpersonal skills so that discussions can take place on how to improve things towards goal achievement. Highly evolved teams can become autonomous in problem-solving, and continuously improving work processes on their own.

Ch49 CutoverOne good example are the telephone companies here in Canada. Over the years, most of them have trained their employees on better customer service habits and on selling. I’ve noticed when calling the administrative department about a billing issue that the person handling my issue always try to upsell me to an additional service. This is obviously a behavior that was learned from a proactive organization.

We’ve all had the experience of going into a store or restaurant and were served by staff members. The other ones who create a better customer experience by how they treat you the customer. Of course hiring the right person with the right attitude and personality is fundamental, but training people on the operations and how you expect them to behave is equally as important.

Aging Workforce

older workerAs the working population gets older is extremely important for organizations to continuously train and develop their employees in order for people to remain flexible, open positive and creative. This will allow the organization to meet its growth objectives and retain skilled talent.

Initiative

One of the key benefits from the training and development of employees is increased self-confidence and self-esteem. When people feel they are better equipped to tackle new tasks and use more of their abilities, they feel more confident.

People with higher self-confidence and self-esteem take more risks, make more decisions and solve problems on their own. This leads to greater initiative and thus saves the manager time to focus on growth and improvement opportunities.

Stephen Goldberg

The 4 Stages of Learning to Develop a New Skill or Behaviour

Learning a new skill or making a change in behavior as a result of a training workshop or learning program does not happen just from your participation in the activity.

Real learning happens when the desired outcome of the training actually manifests itself in the performance of your activities or of the way you behave.

Unconscious Incompetence

To achieve real change requires that we go through four stages of learning. The first stage is making us aware of what we don’t already know. This is called the unconscious incompetence stage. We must first become aware of the things we need to learn and what we don’t already know in order to be open to the new material and to make the effort to put it into practice.

Conscious Incompetence

This leads us to the next level of learning, which is called conscious incompetence. Now we know what we didn’t know and are more open to learning, but we still cannot perform the new skill or behavior.

Conscious Competence

Once we start putting the skill or behavior into practice through guided instruction, we now go through the next stage of learning, which is conscious competence. This means that we can perform the skill or behavior, but we need to be thinking of what we’re doing and still be guided and corrected.

Unconscious Competence

The more we practiced the new skill or behavior. We gradually become better at it until it is fully learned and we reach the next stage, which is called unconscious competence. This is the goal of every training program were ultimately the new skill or behavior becomes a habit and second nature. We no longer need to think about how to perform each step we just do it naturally.

A good analogy is learning how to drive a car. The first step was to learn the theory behind driving in a classroom before we even went out on the road. The next step was to get behind the wheel with an instructor and to learn the different controls and operations.

Once we were comfortable with that, we started to practice driving perhaps in a parking lot and slowly went out on the road with the instructor who gave us feedback and made corrections.

As we practiced more and more we became confident based on the results and the feedback from the instructor until the point that we were doing things automatically.

When you drive to work next time, look at the faces of people driving the other cars. Most of the time people are thinking about something other than driving the car itself, but we all somehow show up to work safely. This is a good example of unconscious competence.

This process is more difficult for a behavioral change as compared to learning a mechanical skill, such as learning to operate a computer program or machine. A behavioral change is linked to beliefs and attitudes and thus requires greater awareness of your thoughts and reactions to people and situations in order to consciously put into practice the new behaviors.

Stephen Goldberg

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Responsibility, The Key to Employee Performance Management

How responsible are you and your employees?

responsibleResponsibility is key to creating excellence in personal and organizational performance.

Responsibility is a key factor in determining how well an organization performs. Organizations are made up of people and when people take responsibility for their actions and behaviors things get done on time and the right way. Highly responsible people are actually response able. In other words, they are able to respond to people and situations more appropriately. They function at a higher level in every way, intellectually, emotionally and physically. They don’t make excuses and blame others.

Of course, nothing is perfect and things don’t always go as planned. But responsible people will take action when there are problems that stand in the way from expected results. They will communicate with those involved, so everyone knows what the problem is and how it is being dealt with.

responsbilitiy2Responsible people not only get more things done with higher-quality, but they also take responsibility for how they interact and behave with others. This applies to everyone they communicate with, customers, suppliers and coworkers.

Attitude

Responsible people demonstrate a more positive and mature attitude toward situations and people. They’re better able to respond to challenges and to sensitive issues.

Can responsibility be taught?

We cannot change people, but we can teach people to be more responsible and accountable. How difficult is this? It all depends on the person and the culture of the organization. Responsibility is linked to someone’s personal beliefs, values and attitudes. It is also a reflection of their intellectual and emotional maturity and this can grow through personal development.

Of course it’s best to hire people with the right attitudes to start with. But sometimes we make mistakes or people develop bad attitudes for various reasons. Situations that occur with coworkers can cause people to become disengaged in their work and take less responsibility.

Leaders of organizations need to define their personal and organizational values in order to create a culture that supports responsibility. These values can be translated into expected behaviors that the organization wants to see from its employees. These must be communicated as part of job expectations.

Personal development training, such as leadership and team development must contain components of attitude development towards becoming more responsible and accountable. Teams cannot grow. If there is a lack of responsibility amongst team members.

Training

responsbilitiy3Even with personal development training people do not always get the message and make the effort to change their attitude and become more responsible.

One good analogy is the high school dance. Those who had great attitudes and participated in extra curriculum school activities, such as the dance were so excited about it that they helped organize the event. They also were the first ones to get up on the dance floor. They would also encourage others to participate and dance. Those who were less self-assured and perhaps shy, would come to the event, but take time to get up the nerve to ask somebody to dance, if they did at all. But they weren’t the problem ones because at least they showed up and made an effort. It was those that found a way to sneak in and stayed only long enough to put the whole thing down before they went to the pool hall to drink, smoke and talk down on everyone who was still at the dance.

These are the people who are very hard to change, and if they don’t show a willingness after some time and encouragement, then it is time to have them move on.

It’s the responsibility of the leaders of organizations to ensure that they hire develop and retain highly responsible people who will drive a culture of excellence, continuous improvement and innovation. This is the only way to survive and thrive in an ever competitive global economy.

Stephen Goldberg