Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership. This is going to be podcast number 16. Today we’re talking about training through the lens of your culture. It’s going to be about training and sustaining your culture. At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, we spend a ton of time working with business leaders. Helping them not only develop their culture but also being able to sustain it on a daily basis. This is one of the key things that can be very difficult especially when a business owner gets their brain and gets their hands all the way down into the daily details. We can forget about the importance of maintaining and training and sustaining our culture.
Catch this. According to the Harvard Business Review, only 10% of the population has, what is called, a learning mindset. This means people who seek out and enjoy learning. The other 90% will not look to improve their skills unless they have to do it as a part of their job requirements. In other words, they won’t learn unless they are forced to learn. There’s also an author who wrote a book about this called The learning mindset. Her name is Carol Dweck and she’s a professor at Stanford University. She came out with these findings that were just amazing. That only 10% of the population has what is called a learning mindset. I toss this out with the idea of training and only 10% of the population has a learning mindset. I think this makes sense all of a sudden when we begin to think about the last time that you went to a training. It might have been really good but when you came back to your office, when you came back to your desk, that training, the information that you learn kind of leaked right out, you went right back to what you’ve always done before. Business Speaker Tulsa
At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, this is something that we seek to overcome with business leaders across the country. If you want to move in a certain direction, catch this, if you want to move in a certain direction, you must have a map. You must map out that direction and continue to point to it over and over again. This is the purpose of training. Keep in mind training is not just a one-time orientation or one-time introduction to your culture. This is the classic mistake that “a teacher” makes, “I told you the information. Why don’t you just do what I told you to do?” I was a school teacher for 15 years. I get this idea, this difference between a trainer versus a teacher. A teacher likes to say, “I gave you the information. Now you need to spit it back out on the test.” This sets up a one-way communication system between the teacher and the student and it stunts the growth because it’s only one-way communication.
At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, we want to help trainers become developed more and more and more out of the mindset of just being a teacher, “I told you once. Now go do it.” Usually, there’s some kind of unsaid limit as to how many times you’re willing to say it before you just get totally frustrated with the person and kick them out or no longer spend time with them. There’s a classic business model that we use that it’s set up in several different books. But at Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, we use this model right here. First of all, we set the standard, number one. Number two, once we have set the standard and written the standard down, then we teach and train that standard. After we have taught and trained, we move to number three, which is modeling the standard. Number 4 is to now expect the standard. Number five is to daily inspect the standard. Business Speaker Tulsa
You probably heard that phrase before, If you don’t inspect what you expect, then people won’t respect what you’re trying to do. We want to make sure that a teacher or manager, as we look at this whole thing of training, a teacher or manager may look at this five-step model and say, “Who has the time for that? I don’t have time. I don’t have time.” This is a complaint that I get all the time, as I’m working with clients as Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership we find over and over that people just don’t have the time to do proper training. The people I hire have to pick it up quickly because I don’t have time to ‘hold their hand’, as a comment that I get quite a bit. I need to hire people that are already there. Man, that is a difficult difficult spot for us to be because it hurts so few people that are already there. Business Speaker Tulsa
Some manager see training is getting in the way of the real work that needs to be done on a daily basis. That makes sense. I get that mindset. When they look at this model, they say, “This model doesn’t fit into my thinking. It doesn’t fit into my paradigm because I am a manager and when I look at this idea of the things that we need to train, I look at is it as a checklist, something to be done. Check-check-check-check. They did it, now it’s time to move on. However, this model allows a visionary. If we can stick to this, this model will allow a visionary to reproduce the vision in the hearts and minds of many many people. This is how a culture is developed. But it has to involve training more than just teaching. Once again, I want to emphasize that. It involves more of the training than just the teaching. Business Speaker Tulsa
But remember that 90% of people are not natural learners. Why would sending in just a teacher be the answer? Because again, 90% of the population aren’t going to be able to learn. They need to be trained. Training is much more personal and deliberate and requires a trainer’s mindset, not just a teacher’s mindset. A teacher will get into that here in a moment. The difference between the teacher and the trainer mindset. Get this, if I hire a personal trainer, I’m not going to be happy with someone that just tells me to read the chapter and do what it says at the end of the chapter. Then they begin to bark at me when I don’t do the things or if I do something wrong. No, I’m looking for someone that will spend time with me. That will teach me, that will train me, that will evaluate me as we go along and make necessary changes along the way.
This is what we do at Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership with our entrepreneurs and our business leaders. It’s more training than it is just teaching. Managers that are not interested in training their staff or that adopt the mindset of, “I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have time to train.” They will soon find that the quality of their company is beginning to decline. It’s a great trap, the tyranny of the urgent. I know you know what I’m talking about. This thing of every day, “I’ve just got to get into the details and there’s fires that I have to put out every single day.” Constantly feeling like you’re putting out all these fires and continue to pop up every single day and you just don’t have time for the bigger picture. This cycle always leads to the stress to survive and will definitely rob you of your vision to thrive. Business Speaker Tulsa
In my research with groups that I’ve done across the country, I’ve found that not having enough time, catch this, not having enough time continues to be one of the two highest stressors in the lives of business owners and business managers. I don’t have time. The idea here is that not every personality lends itself naturally to being a trainer. Again, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to be a trainer. But a business owner, get this, a business owner may not be the best trainer, but they must know and embrace the value of quality training for their company and ensure that the best person is in place to empower the workforce. Again, if we’re not careful, we’ll just grab a person, “I did that last time. You have to do it this time.” Or we just look for someone that is available to go train the new people and if we’re not careful, we’ll send in a person that does not have a trainer mindset. They just have a teacher. Again, what a teacher does is just gives information. A teacher gives information. They don’t look for understanding. They don’t ask many questions. They just give information.
You can see that in this type of trainer mentality, when you look at companies like Chick-fil-A that become a leader in their industry. Kathy Truett, the founder of Chick-fil-A, obviously, he’s a businessman, okay? He is in the business to create profits, all right? He’s not just there to make chicken. He is in the business to create profits. His business decisions are based on creating profits for the company. However, he sees the value of well-trained employees and creating a positive culture in his stores. I know that you have experienced this before. How many chicken places will you pass by on the way to Chick-fil-A? This cultural training gives him a great advantage over his competitors. While his competitors are struggling with stress to survive, he is at rest with his vision to thrive. You can feel the culture of Chick-fil-A as soon as you walk in the door. It’s very pleasant, it’s very inviting. That doesn’t happen by accident. The same concept is at play at Starbucks, places like Starbucks, places like Quick Trip, if they’re in your neck of the woods. Also, Best Buy, Southwest Airlines. Again, their owners are making decisions based on revenues. However, they haven’t blood-embraced this extreme value of training employees to create a culture that people will prefer over the competition. Once again, how many coffee shops will you drive by on your way to Starbucks? It’s important. When was the last time you showed up late at work because you got stuck in line in Starbucks? I just want to, again, encourage you here with this idea of training through the lens of culture. We need to make sure, number one, that we have the right person in place to do this training because if we’re not careful like many companies do, we get just somebody that’s available. We get someone that’s always done it. We get someone that wants to do it and we put them in place of being the trainer when they don’t have a trainer mindset. In part two of the training through the lens of culture, we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about how to set this up, the type of mindset, the type of teacher, the type of personality that we want in this position. This is Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership talking about training through the lens of culture session number one, looking forward to seeing you next session. Business Speaker Tulsa
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