Can you create a recipe for employee training based on your best employees? It seems that is what the restaurant chain the Cheese Factory does to improve employee training and performance.
It appears to work the Cheesecake Factory, but will it work for you? Watch the video to learn more.
The Manager’s Role in Training Employees to Work as a Team
The manager is responsible to train employees to work as team. The manager cannot take it for granted that assembling talented people in the department will result in teamwork. There are essential skills that team members need to learn and develop for the team to move through the four stages of team development.
The purpose of teamwork is for teams to function more autonomously and take on higher level responsibilities such as problem solving, process improvement, innovation and even certain management functions such as hiring new team members.
The manager must give the training or work with internal or external resources to provide the training. The four clusters where team members require training are:
The manager or supervisor needs to provide the training for the skills described above, otherwise the team cannot continue to evolve and engage in taking more initiative and becoming more autonomous.
The seven steps to highly effective employee training was explained in detail in my last article and video.
To help you plan your next employee training or coaching session using the seven steps, I created a worksheet. You can download it from the forms and worksheets section of my website.
You can download my forms and worksheets through this link.
The Seven Steps for Training & Coaching Employees
Follow these seven steps for training and coaching employees and dramatically improve the effectiveness of your training and coaching, and ultimately the performance of employees.
More than ever, ongoing training and development and coaching of employees is essential for organizational and business growth and success.
It’s the responsibility of the manager or supervisor to ensure that employees are being trained properly. If the task of training is being delegated to an employee, then that employee needs to be taught the seven steps.
I’ve created a worksheet that you can use to plan out the seven steps. It helps when you write things down rather than trying to think it through. Writing it down makes it a commitment and clarifies what needs to be done.
Here are the seven steps:
In our training program Style of Leadership & Team Development we teach the participants how to tie a fire underwriters knot. If this is done incorrectly on a construction site it could result in a fire and it would undermine the insurance policy. Thus, explaining the objective and importance of the task puts it in the proper perspective.
You can use written instructions as an aid and the reference for after the training. When we teach how to tie the knot we handout instruction sheet, but most people can’t figure it out just from reading and following the instructions. We also handout a diagram and still people have difficulty succeeding in tying the knot correctly.
Demonstrating correctly how to perform the task is an essential step in having the employee then perform it themselves.
Have the person perform the task and observe them.
Reinforce what the person is doing well and recognize success. Continue coaching until the person gets it right.
People have varied levels of confidence when learning a new task. Express your confidence according to the needs of each person.
Follow-up essential to ensure that the task or skill is being applied properly on the job. You can go through all the previous steps and fail in the training follow-up is not done.
Anyone can follow these steps and map out a training plan whether it be for a manual task, technical skill or even a behavioral training such as active listening.
It’s great to follow these steps when delegating a new task or responsibility to somebody. Delegation is different than simply assigning tasks to someone. Delegation involves new levels of responsibility or skill development and thus training should always be considered for successful delegation.
She was a task or skill that you want to train somebody on, download the worksheet and start planning your next training.