Are your employees on the same page with you?

We inevitably get upset with people who are not doing things the way we would do them ourselves. We expect them to effectively learn after reading a manual or being shown once how to do something. Their lack of consistency loses us customers (both internally and externally). Rarely do we stop to see what is missing from our employees’ perspectives so that they could be on the same page with us. 

1)     Review your training, systems and procedures. What’s missing? The national reading average is 6th grade level. This reflects a person’s ability to adequately comprehend the material and put it to good use. Some people need to talk it out to ensure they understand. Some need to be shown how to do something more than once. Still others need to “try” it themselves first, and then ask for coaching to fill in the gaps.

2)     When hiring and coaching people, we don’t have fool-proof intuitive crystal balls. Use legally and scientifically validated job fit tools for hiring, coaching and managing. This helps us understand objectively why people fail to do work the way we would do it. And it creates an opportunity to provide guidance for skill development (ours and theirs).

3)     Set specific goals, and then manage the milestones to ensure the project and people are all moving forward. When people fail to deliver the necessary results, coach them by focusing on the task at hand. Sometimes you need to be very specific and other times you’ll need to help them understand the bigger picture. Trying to fix the person never works!

 (c)Jeannette Seibly, 2010

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