Supervisor Training: Training Your Supervisors To Train

Supervisors have certainly taken on a lot of responsibilities these days, and now more and more Supervisor training has wiped out the mundane of technology. Still, despite all their responsibilities, perhaps the most important is what they are least prepared to undertake: employee training.

Promotion, marketing strategy implementation, customer service, etc. are all important tasks that supervisors expect to perform perfectly. But are they ready to do so? Training is useful here.

Management fully expects superiors to properly train their employees for consistently high levels of performance. However, management often fails to properly train their bosses on how to train their employees well. So who is really responsible if an employee’s ability to perform their duties is less than expected?

Communicating is not training:

By default, your boss is the only training method you know if your boss isn’t properly trained about how to train your employees. That is, the boss “instructs” the employee what to do. Simply put, telling is not training!

How much your 10-year-old son or daughter would be in hitting baseball if your training method was to have them sit at the kitchen table and provide them with a detailed discussion of batting science. Do you think you will succeed?

You can safely guess what the result will be at the first turn at bat. Their little heads will be spinning trying to remember everything you said to them at the kitchen table: pitcher eyes, keep the bat high, bend the knees slightly, and evenly distribute the weight Let the pitcher step into the ball with his forefoot and rotate his hips towards the pitcher, his hindfoot stabilizes, swings the level and follows through. Good luck Johnny! The odds are good that little Johnny may be overwhelmed and lose all confidence and as a result may want to play baseball quite a bit.

Still, how many supervisors are training their employees? Isn’t it wondering why employees lack confidence and act below their potential? Supervisors primarily receive operational-based training (hard skills), but human capital optimization-based training: few soft skills. This is commonly referred to as the core skill. If you don’t master the core skills, everything else isn’t really important.

Training method:

There are many training methods to adopt, but not one panacea for all training tasks. Depending on the purpose of your training, a mixed approach is the best bet.

Typical training method:

Video / DVD / Audio
workbook
instructor-led classroom
CBT
Mentoring
WBT
Skill practice (role play)
Consider the following when deciding which training method to use:
How people learn:
3% through taste
3% through odor
6% with touch
13% through hearing
75% with eyesight
Retention: People remember:
Read-only 10%
Only 20% of what they hear
Only 30% of what they see
50% of what they see and hear
70% of what they say
90% of what they say and do

Learning loss:

42% after 30 minutes
56% after 1 hour
64% after 8 hours
75% after 1 week

7-step adult learning model:

This is a simple, straightforward 7-step training process that your boss can use when training employees. I’m sure many of your bosses are already using this approach under the “On the Job Training” (OJT) training banner.

There are two keys to success: 1) patience and 2) continuous follow-up