CHAPTER 11

Enabled Employees Are Incredibly Well Trained

To try to build an organization against weakness frustrates the purpose of organization.

—Peter Drucker

Take a look inside the cockpit, er, flight deck, of a modern jetliner and marvel for a moment at what you see—the gauges, computers, screens, levers, dials, and everything that makes up the mind-boggling array of gizmos, every one of which serves an importance purpose. But then notice what you don’t see: namely, a supervisor or manager. Instead, there are two people who, due to the vagaries of crew scheduling, probably don’t know each other very well. But they do know exactly what their job is and how to do it.

For those who need a numbers fix about now, consider this. In terms of the ratio of worker bees per manager, commercial airline pilots are among the most productive employees you’ll find anywhere. For the major commercial carriers, the number of crew members per manager is greater than 100:1. Compare that with the span of control ratio in your (or most any other) business!

So how did they reach such high efficiency? Besides having a well-defined mission and crystal clear goals, they do what they do because they have a commitment to training that is unmatched by just about any other profession.

Mind you, it’s not that the airlines necessarily want to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money to train their aircrews to this degree of proficiency. They know they have to, because nobody in their right mind would get on the plane without it. Moreover, they are compelled by law to meet certain safety requirements. The problem with our more earthbound organizations is that we don’t have anybody or anything scaring us enough to make us do it.

Again, US Airways flight 1549 comes to mind. When we’re trying to pound home the importance of training during a speech or seminar, all we have to do is flash on the screen that familiar image of more than 100 passengers balanced precariously, but relatively unharmed, on the wings of the Airbus, floating in the Hudson River—and our point is made.

But you know the drill. Most companies fund training efforts during periods of prosperity, but inevitably reduce their training and development budget as soon as business starts to slow. Witness the reduction in training during and shortly after the great recession. According to data from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the average per person training investment of the Fortune Global 500 companies dropped by a third, from $1,616 in 2005 to $1,067 in 2010.1 Although ASTD believes (hopes?) that organizations’ commitment to training is on the upswing, incalculable damage was done during the training drought associated with those years. As a result, we now have legions of workers—and their leaders—for whom learning and development has largely been a do-it-yourself affair.

Think for a moment about the sheer stupidity of this concept: we have an earnings problem, so we’re going to work our way out of it by dumbing down the organization with less skilled, less competent people. Now the only problem will be to find customers dumb enough to purchase our goods and services, and even dumber investors to buy our stock!

Training Expands the Meaning of Professionalism

Where is it written that just because they don’t wear lab coats or epaulets or attend Harvard, a bartender, machinist, sales clerk, assembly worker, or anyone else should not be viewed and treated as a professional—with all the attendant rights, privileges, and responsibilities? We’re advocating that if you really want to maximize your employees’ level of contribution, you treat them the same way the hospital does its doctors, the airline its pilots, the law firm its lawyers, and so forth. In short, you treat them as the professionals they are.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

—Benjamin Franklin

The aforementioned ASTD study reports that American organizations provided an average of 32 hours of training per year per employee in 2010.2 Contented Cow Companies tend to invest considerably more. Chesapeake Energy, for example, provides an average of 54 hours of training per employee per year. General Mills does better than that with 75 hours; Marriott provides 89 hours a year; and NuStar Energy comes in at a whopping 110 hours!

Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based chain that sold more than 282 million of their signature chicken sandwiches from more than 1,600 stores in 2011, is as serious about training and lifelong learning as they are about serving the best chicken sandwich in the country. Lest you think running a profitable quick-service restaurant is a simple matter, consider that this company—with better than $4 billion in annual revenues—regularly sends managers to executive education programs at Wharton, the Harvard Business School, Columbia University, and more than a dozen other schools.

We’ve all seen this classic scenario: someone is technically very proficient in her job, so we naturally assume that she’ll be able to lead and inspire others to do great work. So, one Friday afternoon, we call her into the office and say, “Congratulations! You’re a manager now. You start on Monday, and you’ve got all weekend to get ready.” Not so at Chick-fil-A. One of the company’s most distinguishing qualities is their ability to recognize that leadership is a profession and, as such, is worthy of the same preparation as any other.

“As soon as someone’s job changes from that of an individual contributor to a ‘people leader,’ ” said Phil Orazi, senior director of training and development at Chick-fil-A, “they begin a yearlong ‘leader onboarding’ process.” The program includes an extensive educational component, since—contrary to what some believe—people can learn to lead and can continue to do so by regularly assessing the leader’s skills and practices. Throughout the year, the new leader receives support via one-on-one coaching from more experienced leaders.

Having interacted over the course of two decades with various members of their senior leadership and corporate staff, we can say that this strong emphasis on leadership training—and professionalism—shows in everything Chick-fil-A does. It also puts them a notch above so many others in their industry.

The Hidden Costs of Ignored Training

Let’s look for a moment beyond the obvious benefits of training to the cost of not providing needed training. We understand the protests that begin, “But training is expensive.” And we reply, “Yes. It can be. But have you priced incompetence lately?” The truth is that scrimping on training forces you to pay an added price for rework, lost customers, and the cost of additional supervisors to run around looking over the shoulders of marginally competent employees.

There is a cost far greater and more debilitating than any of these, however. This has to do with what happens to your employees’ psyche and performance when they don’t feel particularly competent or confident in their ability to do their work.

How many times in your life have you started an interaction (where you’re the customer) with a sales clerk, call center operator, waiter, or someone similar who opened with the words “I’m new at this . . . ”? (By the way, how would you like to hear those same words from your neurosurgeon as you’re being wheeled into the operating room?) That pronouncement allows that person to essentially say to you—and more important, to themselves—“I’m probably gonna screw this up, so please be patient and understanding with me.” And we all know that if someone thinks they will screw something up, it greatly increases the likelihood that they will! Moreover, if they screw it up this time, how confident are they going to be the next time? Your potentially contented, productive employee understandably just became a very demoralized one.

Make no mistake about it: people who are proficient in their jobs and who know they will be able to handle the difficult tasks ahead feel confident about themselves and stay calm and poised in on-the-spot crises. As a result, they perform better than employees who never got lessons in the basics.

Training Sends a Message

One of Howard Schultz’s first acts when he returned as CEO of Starbucks in early 2008 was to pour out a bold plan to retrain his company’s employees on the most basic function of their jobs—how to make and serve coffee and espresso drinks. And so on February 26 of that year, Starbucks closed all 7,100 of its U.S. stores for 3 evening hours to give a refresher course to more than 135,000 partners—in a single shot.

The “star” in Starbucks had begun to fade well into the brand’s fourth decade, after years of sustained growth and popularity. Schultz believed the answer to reversing the downward trend lay not so much in new products, pricing, or branding, but in training employees to deliver that perfect shot of espresso. Not only did this represent a sizable outlay in training cost, but the lost revenue—even during the lower traffic evening hours—was enough to give Starbucks stockholders a jolt equivalent to that of a double no-foam latte. Individuals both inside the company and out questioned the value of the actual training that took place during those 3 hours. However, we think immeasurable learning resulted from the exercise. Starbucks employees relearned some crucial lessons. It wasn’t so much how to make a perfect cup of coffee (something they probably already knew how to do), but rather how important it is to do so, in a world of growing competition and cost-consciousness. And Starbucks customers learned that the company about which they’d started to have a few doubts really was committed to being different from the rest.

Training Moves Careers

According to Alejandro Bustamante, president of Plantronics in Mexico, “The best person for almost any job we have is one we’ve grown and developed from within.” That perspective has allowed his team to develop a simple but robust career plan that is fully integrated with the company’s training process. Each of the plant’s 140+ jobs has a prescribed list of competencies, each of which is mapped to the training course or courses necessary to develop it. Anyone who aspires to a new position can use the two huge binders displayed in the factory (and also on the facility’s impressive intranet) to map the exact steps he or she must take to be prepared for any job.

“Our associates know that we prefer to promote from within, and that helps us keep the best people motivated to keep learning,” Bustamante told me as we observed an assembly worker checking her career plan on one of the many intranet screens around the periphery of the massive plant. The Plamex Plan de Carrera, one of the most thorough yet easily administered career development systems we’ve seen, provides real clarity for employees’ career growth. A design engineer in the company’s research and development center told me, “I’ve been here for 11 years, and this is my fourth position. The Plan de Carrera has made it so easy for us to see what we need to do if we want to develop in the company. We still have to do the work, but the plan lays it all out for us. That’s one reason I’m never leaving!”

The company provides the training, either internally or through an outside source. When a particular position becomes available, those who have completed the required courses comprise the pool of candidates considered. As a result, the company fills up to 60 percent of its position vacancies from within.

A man who carries a cat home by the tail learns ten times as much as one who only watches.

—Mark Twain, on distance learning

Beyond the Classroom and Webinar

Extensive technological developments—coupled with the desire for different training modalities on the part of a multigenerational workforce—have spurred the growth of distance learning and other nontraditional ways to deliver training. Although the format that companies use to deliver training is a significant consideration, it’s far less important than what people learn—whether they’re sitting in a classroom, standing at a functioning machine, listening to a podcast, or attending a webinar. Still, because of the variance in adult learning styles, the organizations that have the most to show for their training efforts are going well beyond didactic delivery styles with bulleted PowerPoint slides.

San Antonio–based USAA has held the number one or two spot on BusinessWeek’s ranking of Customer Service Champions every year since the magazine began publishing the list in 2007. They consistently enjoy a customer retention rate of 97.8 percent.3 We can’t help but wonder if part of this success comes from the all-encompassing nature of the company’s training.

Not only are USAA’s customer service representatives trained thoroughly on the technical aspects of their jobs, but they also learn what it’s like to be a USAA customer, many of whom are active-duty members of the military, serving in war zones and other far-off places, and their families. In a typical scenario, reps dine on MREs (meals ready-to-eat), don Kevlar vests and flak helmets, and receive real deployment letters with fictitious names to help them better comprehend the realities of their customers’ lives.

Quicken Loans has made great strides and had lots of fun with its “Quicken’s Got Talent” program, named for the TV talent show America’s Got Talent. As a way to share the best of what mortgage bankers are doing and develop their employees’ phone skills, the contest allows bankers and their leaders to submit recorded customer calls to be considered for the competition. The contest progresses in steps and can culminate in big cash prizes. The fun and prizes motivate people to participate, but the real value has been the 400-plus recorded calls in the “Call Clip Library”—a sort of hit parade that bankers can access online to learn what works best when talking with current and potential clients. More than 69,000 playbacks have been recorded through the company’s learning management system since the game’s inception.4

An Intelligent Learning Process

The Contented Cow companies are deadly serious about the issue of training, with considerations that extend well beyond the amount of money they spend doing it, the impressiveness of their learning facilities, and the breadth of course offerings. What also makes them special is that despite the success they’ve enjoyed or how big they may have gotten, they have not lost sight of one of the most fundamental precepts in the whole workplace arena: that the person who started work for them this morning is as close to a “model employee” as they’re ever going to get. And unlike so many others who no doubt recognize the same thing, they actively (fanatically might be a better word for it) do something about it.

Although we have cited how orientations (or onboarding) are an opportunity for employers to establish open, two-way communication with new hires from the outset, we cannot overemphasize the fact that orientations are primarily for training. Like many companies, Disney requires every single employee to attend a comprehensive new employee orientation, aka Disney Traditions. But the similarity between Disney and other companies ends there. Disney’s focus is not so much on telling people where to find the paper clips, having them fill out forms until their fingers ache, or introducing them to dozens of new people who will likely be forgotten by lunchtime. Instead, they make sure to carefully and methodically introduce each new “cast member” to the company’s traditions, philosophies, and a very different way of life—the Disney way.

Visibility Matters

Organizations too often send people to training without first securing leadership buy-in. Like it or not, people want to know that the training course they’re taking their time to sit through is as important to senior management as it is supposed to be to them. This often requires senior management to ride along with them—not in their own condensed mini-versions, but alongside everyone else. There should be no executive parking spaces when it comes to training. Managers must participate enthusiastically and, more important, be able to demonstrate the skills they expect everyone else to learn. If nothing else, faithful adoption of this one suggestion would make the bozos who appear on CBS’s Undercover Boss show seem a lot more competent.

When conducting leadership training for clients, we observe noticeable differences between groups that are “sent” to training without their bosses’ participation versus groups where the boss is a fellow learner.

One such event involved a series of training sessions we delivered for a southeastern U.S. electrical utility. The training was conducted in a rural training facility about 100 miles from the company’s headquarters. The vice president who brought us in underwent the training along with all of his direct reports, and his presence and participation in the training wasn’t lost on anybody. The other class members truly appreciated his willingness to be observed in a new situation—a vulnerable, untrained state.

A few months later, we returned to provide the same program for a different, more junior group. Although the VP had already completed the training (and, by all accounts, was exhibiting his new skills), he wanted to put his stamp of support on the program for this group—even though the event’s timeframe wasn’t particularly convenient for him. Despite having an important meeting at headquarters, he thought it was important enough for him to kick off the training session that he took a company helicopter from the main office to the training facility early that morning.

At 7:45 am, the VP landed at a nearby small airport. He then drove over to kick off the training program by telling the assembled group of the benefits he had realized since taking the course. Afterward, he and a colleague got in a car and drove south to the budget meeting. He made a 200-mile round trip to deliver a 10-minute message. What the employees gleaned from seeing their vice president standing in front of them—knowing the effort it took for him to be there—was more impactful than anything either of us said that day. He had sent the message loud and clear: “This is important—so important that I went through it before you did. I’m using it, and now I want and expect you to do the same.”

By contrast, we conducted several training sessions for a large midwestern manufacturer. Because of the conspicuous absence of any member of senior management throughout the entirety of this effort, we often heard the question, “If this is so important, where are they?” Months later, an informal survey of attendees indicated that only a few people were using the skills they had learned in the course. It’s possible the senior officers didn’t really need to be there for their personal benefit; however, as we’ve heard so many times before, perception is reality. To us, it’s a little like the difference between parents who send their children to church versus the ones who take them there.

A Quick Self-Exam

Sadly, we seldom go to the trouble of ensuring that the training efforts we’ve paid for and attended have actually taught our people anything. This is precisely why you should ask the following questions with respect to your organization’s training efforts:

The process of establishing a cogent strategy for your training efforts yields some other benefits as well. For one thing, you’ll inevitably consider more carefully the sequencing of training activities. You’ll be forced to answer questions such as “Why don’t we provide some leadership training for people before they move into a management position rather than having them practice on their new charges?”

Chapter Summary

Training is most assuredly a vital part of the enabling process and a factor that can (and should) be exploited as a key source of competitive advantage. Fully 90 percent of the $40 billion or so spent annually on training is being spent by only 0.5 percent of all U.S. companies, with much of that being wasted. You therefore must treat training as something other than a luxury by:

Best Practices:

Notes

1. “The 2011 State of the Industry,” American Society for Training and Development.

2. Ibid.

3. “USAA’s Battle Plan,” BusinessWeek, February 18, 2010.

4. “2011 Training Top 125 Best Practices and Outstanding Initiatives,” Training, January–February 2011, 98.