How to Aim Your Talent in the Right Direction
This article reveals seven ways you can help your personnel grow and become your "co-visionaries"..
When businesses invest in their personnel, they’re
taking a far-sighted view of success. Continually increasing the expertise
of your staff can help your enterprise remain flexible, energized, and
profitable.
By aiming their talents in the right direction you enable your employees to:
Turn their strongest aptitudes into their most valuable expertise
Understand cause-and-effect relationships in the business, and..
Learn to use highly effective performance-building techniques
In good, plentiful times, it may seem reasonable to “hire and forget” —
either when gaining new employees or utilizing contract help. With this
approach, you would hire or contract someone to fill a particular need,
apply a dollop of orientation and maybe a dab of training, send them into
action, and presto! Problem solved! Or is it?
Certainly, a short-term advantage of a “hire and forget” philosophy is that
it’s a fairly fast and convenient way to plug a human being into a socket of
temporary need. But with this perspective, you’re not considering the
negative effects of high turnover.
When significant turnover or downsizing occurs, it means that many of the
company’s intellectual assets — people with precious, even priceless
knowledge and expertise — are simply walking out the door, perhaps never to
return. Some organizations don’t recover from such losses, and suffer the
painful consequences.
A More Proactive Approach
Rather than depending on assumptions about whether your labor supply will
remain plentiful, you can adopt a more insightful position. You can realize
that conditions in existence today can evaporate tomorrow.
You can also recognize that the invaluable assets you have in the form of
personnel can best serve the company’s goals when their talents are
nurtured. The key is to aim these talents along each individual’s greatest
strengths, since these will provide the ultimate benefit to the company.
Indeed, assuming that your organization can survive and thrive without a
program to bring out the best in its people can have long-term ripple
effects. And personnel can include both regular employees and contract
workers recruited to fill fluctuating needs.
Therefore, obtaining the payoff you desire from your people, products, and
services may depend on considering the needs of the entire staffing picture.
Companies sometimes fret about whether to invest in training their
personnel, since those people might later leave with their newly acquired
skills. I heard Rick Barrera, author of Overpromise & Over deliver: The
Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty, propose the following rebuttal. He
said:
"Some companies worry, ‘What if we train people, and they leave?’ The more
important question should be, ‘What if we don’t train people and they stay?"
Here are options for encouraging the development of expertise in your
organization:
1. Career assessments to match people's talents and greatest strengths with
enterprise needs. These might be administered in-house or through outside
consulting services.
2. Formal instruction, such as through degree or certificate programs. These
could be offered at local schools or through online learning venues.
3. All forms of training, including classroom training, online learning, and
self-paced tutorials. And although training is not a cure-all for every
achievement deficit, when used correctly to impart missing knowledge, it's
an extremely powerful tool.
4. On-the-job learning through workplace apprenticeships, opportunities for
supervised practice, various types of work-study arrangements, and
one-on-one mentoring.
5. Team learning through problem-solving, researching industry trends and
benchmarks, designing experiments, and related skill development. These
learning experiences can extend from novice to advanced levels.
6. Personnel cross-training and rotation of related job functions.
Individual departments or work groups may take the lead on designing
cross-learning opportunities, which also depend on good procedural
documentation.
7. Electronic support systems that help people perform various tasks on the
job, and also provide just-in-time, context-specific instruction. These
systems can reduce the need for extensive training by supplying task-level
support.
Your personnel comprise your greatest intellectual
assets, and you can nurture their strengths into potent specializations
using a variety of learning resources and support systems. In this fashion,
your staff can become a formidable force capable of catapulting your
business far beyond your competition.
In conclusion, your staff will be much more productive and your customers
more satisfied when you apply far-sighted personnel development instead of
short-sighted luck.