Management Training Tips: Developing Talent

By James A. Baker
Houston, Texas
Management Training Institute
June 2009

No project plan or organizational chart is perfect. Business situations can change quickly, and for that reason goals and skills must be updated and improved to flex with new realities. Therefore, it is not enough to just lay out a set of goals for the quarter and let things ride. It is great to have manageable goals in place, and it is important to monitor performance and receive regular updates on progress. However, if managers want all this effort to pay off, they will also need to provide regular input and support so that employees may continue to grow in their abilities, develop their skills and achieve their goals.

This is similar to developing an exercise routine and meeting with a personal trainer. The first time you meet with a trainer, they will want to get an idea of your goals and what you ultimately want to accomplish (lose weight, build muscle, etc). The good trainers will make you write down your goals. You will also establish a routine for your personal trainer to get continuous updates on your progress so you won’t fall behind and so they can coach you to reach your goals. And finally, your trainer will need to help you develop your skills– how to use the dumbbells, the treadmill, and how to do those abdominal crunches, etc. – so you can perform at your best at all times.

As a manager, you are essentially a personal trainer to your employees. You have established their goals and written them down. You have set up regular progress reviews to make sure they are on track. Now you need to increase their capacity to perform. This doesn’t mean doing the work for them, but rather you must provide them with further support to help them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. You can help them improve their effectiveness on the job by either teaching/refining new skills or by giving them higher levels of responsibility. This involves training, coaching and regular feedback to help your employees grow in their ability to do the job with excellence.

Training: The systematic process of education and practice an employee goes through to acquire a new skill or set of skills to do a particular job within the company.
Coaching: A focused combination of attention, advice and support a manager provides to an employee to help them polish or advance in a skill for which they have been previously trained.
Feedback: Constructive input that a manager provides to an employee during the daily course of doing the job to help the employee refine their skills and gain a greater sense of confidence in their responsibilities.

If you are going to accomplish this important process of development, begin by asking yourself these three simple questions:

In your department right now, when and how does training take place?
In your department right now, when and how does coaching take place?
In your department right now, when and how does feedback take place?

I continue to be astonished when I hear managers answer these questions with, "I’m not exactly sure." The sad fact is that, aside from a brief employee orientation, most companies do not provide regular, intentional, ongoing training or coaching of any kind. If the manager is lucky, he will be blessed with resourceful employees who know how to train themselves. If the situation is more typical, the manager must either suffer with poor employee performance or terminate the employee and start all over (wasting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in the process).

If managers would devote as much time to training, coaching and providing feedback as they do to cleaning up employee mistakes and constantly reorganizing the team, productivity and morale would both go up, frustration and mistakes would go down, and the entire organization would be more responsive and nimble when it is time to adjust to changing market conditions. Spend time today making sure you have good solutions to the three questions above. It will make a big difference where you need it most: in your bottom line.

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