An ingaged, top-performing organization is like a beautiful, fast, and responsive automobile. If you design, build, and maintain it carefully, it will take you anywhere, quickly. If you don’t, it will lack direction and can end up anywhere. More often than not, it will fail.
To carry the automotive analogy a few steps further, let’s ask these questions…
- Who is steering the car, and how? Is it only the top management team, or many capable individuals within the organization? If employees at certain levels don’t know your biggest goals or have a difficult time being heard, you can be sure you are not tracking toward your most important goals.
- Are the people in your company trained well enough to be the good drivers who will safely guide you to the right destinations? You wouldn’t entrust a beautiful new car to an untrained driver. Why should you let novice drivers steer your enterprise?
- Who will give you directions if you become lost? In other words, are you gathering the intelligence and information you need to continue growing and stay competitive? Or are you living with outdated or incorrect information that will lead you astray?
- When should you speed up and when should you slow down? There are times to move quickly to grow, and other times when a more considered pace is more productive. How do you know and decide?
- How will you know when your beautiful company needs repairs, a rebuild, or just a simple tune-up so it can continue to operate smoothly and efficiently? Only smart, well-informed employees can help you understand.
If you consider those questions, you start to see that well-trained employees steer your organization best. They need an education that goes well beyond teaching basic skills. What are the hallmarks of that kind of training? Let’s take a closer look.
Training Should Help Employees Learn Your Mission and Vision
Where do you want your company to be in five years, 10 years, or beyond? As one smart leader once explained it, “Do you want to become a mighty oak or just a bigger acorn?”
For that reason, good leaders look ahead and frame their company vision in big, compelling ways. Do you want your company to become the preeminent maker of products in your sector? Do you want to become a world leader in technology, “doing good in the world,” or offering the best customer service anywhere?
When you think big and define higher goals like those, you take an important step toward building a great company. And after you define them, make them part of your training for new and ongoing employees.
Training Should Be Deeply About Your Brand
If you want to build not just workers but brand disciples, your training for new employees especially should tell the story of your company, its founders, and your deeper values.
Think for a moment about companies that have the strongest, most enduring brands. L.L. Bean is still anchored in its founder’s belief that 100 percent customer satisfaction is guaranteed. Apple is all about Steve Jobs’ belief that good products must be both technologically innovative and beautiful. What is your company’s core brand promise and belief? When you define it and discuss it during training for new employees, you position your company for durable success.
Training Should Set the Tone for Ongoing Open Communication
During training sessions, have open discussions about where your new hires believe your company should go and what it should be trying to achieve in the marketplace. New hires, after all, often bring fresh perspectives about your competitors and how your company is positioned in the marketplace. When you start to hear their ideas right there and stress that their input will be heard and valued for as long as they are in your employ, you create an ingaged organization that performs better. Let employees know you will continue to hold ongoing, open forums in the future where employees at all levels are encouraged to contribute their best ideas—and that those ideas will be heard.
Compare that to the many organizations where employees can only bring ideas to their immediate managers to be heard, considered, and either promoted or killed. If those managers sit on employees’ ideas and do not communicate them upward to company leaders, you are creating a company where employees become frustrated, withhold their best ideas, and start to look for jobs elsewhere.
Again, training is the place to establish that your company is open to new ideas—and that it is a place to contribute ideas, belong, and grow.
Training is about skills. But also about much more. It is the place and time where good employees embark on the path toward becoming great. Will you afford them that opportunity? If your vision is to become the best you can be, doing so is not only a nice thing to do. It is imperative.
This article is adapted from the book, “Ingaged Leadership: 21 Steps to Elevate Your Business” by Evan Hackel.
Evan Hackel is the creator of the concept of Ingaged Leadership. Hackel is a business and franchise expert and consultant. He is also a professional speaker and author. He is principal and founder of Ingage Consulting, a consulting firm headquartered in Woburn, MA. Hackel also serves as CEO of Tortal Training, a Charlotte NC-based firm that specializes in developing and implementing interactive training solutions for companies in all sectors. To learn more about Ingage Consulting and Hackel’s book, “Ingaging Leadership,” visit Ingage.net. Follow @ehackel.
