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Training Room: Coaching better than telling
1 Mar, 2007 By: Bill Hoopes Landscape ManagementIt takes eight times longer to break than form a habit.
Attention managers. Reorder your priorities, now. Get in the field with your people and be a hands-on coach. If your business is predominantly landscaping, I don't have to tell you now is a critical time with your crews. What they do and how they do it is entirely controllable but not with memos and 'tailgate' training session. You have to be there.
Transferring learning to desired behavior and the right habits is accomplished through timely repetition and positive reinforcement. Adults learn as a result of processing what they're convinced is logical, sensible and reasonable instruction. You can talk all you want in a classroom, but until the learning is reinforced in the field, you have basically been stopping at first base.
Let's go through the coaching process:
1. Manager delivers training instruction. It must make sense for adults to accept and to support the instruction. So, seeing it work is vital.
2. Manager becomes a coach. He/she provides regular reinforcement on the job.
3. With coach observing, employee carries out the task.
4. Manager critiques and demonstrates corrections as necessary.
5. Employee repeats task.
6. Manager confirms proper process and applauds.
Here is an easy way to remember the basic moves; I call it the AC/DC process.
- Activity performed
- Critique provided
- Demonstration of any corrections
- Critic of activity repeated
Is this what you do, or do you get new hires through the classroom portion of the training process, show them the ropes in the shop and then turn them over to a veteran to train in the field?
Far too many of us allow the latter option to become our habit. We tell ourselves, "There is simply not enough time to get out with my people. But I sure wish I could."
For now, do whatever you have to do to join your crews in the field, and do it on a regular schedule.
A couple of rules we all need to recognize:
1. Timely repetition of the proper process is the process by which we learn.
2. Proper performance, reinforced quickly and often after initial training modifies behavior and builds habits.
3. A failure to reinforce satisfactory performance for any length of time leads to what psychologists call "extinction," which means all the time you spent teaching the right procedures is dismissed as unimportant and replaced by whatever learning has occurred most recently.
4. It takes eight times longer to break than form a habit. The right habits, if reinforced vigorously and often, stick for a long, long time.
— The author is founder of Grass Roots Training in Delaware, OH. Contact him at
hoopes@columbus.rr.com
or visit
www.grassroots-training.com.
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