The Barrier to Entry
I recently asked someone what the hardest part about running a business is. Their answer?
Finding good employees.
I spend a lot of time thinking from an employee’s perspective because I am an employee, but also because I need to be able to think about what they want to say though they may not vocalize for various reasons. The main thing I come back to thinking about is:
Why do we make it so difficult for employees to learn things that are pretty basic?
I fear failure often. The feeling of not doing something well is not a good one. When we initially do something badly, it’s a negative reinforcement in our minds and we’ve gotten off to a bad start. You might have no incentive to keep moving forward because you can just try a bunch of other things which you could actually be good at. Also, you feel like you’ve let down the person who was training/teaching you.
There are two quotes that come to mind for me here.
Richard Feynman once said, “First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.”
Really, we have to spend a lot of time unthinking how we traditionally teach people (class, study, test, access granted). We have to think about what works for them, which requires getting to know the person a little bit. You are likely the person setting the standard for your role or for a position you want to fill. You have to be able to make things easy for others to understand so that they’ll have an interest in continuing to come to work each day, but also so they’ll share in your excitement and bring their own creativity to the table. Allow people to have initial success through some guidance (like training wheels on a bike), then let them go off on their own and be happy about what comes back to you. Chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised. At the end of the day, we’re setting the table for someone to make a process just a little more efficient than before. It’s nothing groundbreaking or anything, and having more hands on deck is never an issue.
The other quote that comes to mind is from Trey Anastasio.
“I think there’s something like 8 possible places on a guitar to do a C Major scale… Don’t get too complicated. There’s only three kinds of chords. Then, take all of your crazy chord books and throw them in the garbage. Right now. It’s a complete waste of time. If you look, there’s three kinds of chords, right? Major, minor, and dominant. Within those chords, there’s sounds. So, if you were going to do a C 9th chord, you know you go to your C chord, and then add the 9th to it, but that’s still just a C Major chord. That’s just a sound. So, you try to train yourself to hear the sounds. Don’t start thinking, ‘Oh I need to know all of these complicated chords.’ You can, but I just… I think people get scared off. It seems like a mountain of work and it doesn’t have to be. Eventually you’re going to know the C 9th chord just by sound.”
That quote makes me think about the last 8 months I’ve spent working on implementing DocuSign at UAB. I think about how stupid my training was in retrospect and how I thought I had to make sure everyone learned all these things they’d never need to know for their daily job so they’d know what they were doing when they used the tool. This was more for my comfort than it was for their knowledge.
Now, when I train people, I spend maybe 5-10 minutes tops telling them basic information that I need to say (policy stuff, definitions to know, etc.). The rest of the time, I get a form of theirs that they use often, and I make sure they leave my training having a form of their own that they’ve built out as a template in DocuSign.
You know why that works?
Because it’s something they’re familiar with. It’s something that they personally deal with on a daily basis. And it’s something that makes sense to them, or that they’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about. You’re meeting them where they’re at.
When you try to bludgeon someone to learn a tool they’ve never used before, they may walk out thinking that it’s cool and they could potentially see a use for it, but they didn’t literally see how their processes are being used or how they can personally do their jobs after your training. As a result, they just end up overwhelmed. The lightbulb doesn’t necessarily go off.
Meet people where they’re at. Make things easier for them. It’ll make your life easier, and afterwards you’ll likely have more positive relationships.