Tom's Talent Blog

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It’s easy when you have a new employee starting and you have an orientation schedule for a new sales person or recruiter.  The goal is to ramp them up for success as quick as possible.  You have this person start from the beginning, learning each internal process and procedure, and then sprinkle in some outside training sources that add variety and promote skills for increased performance.  But, how do you incorporate training with existing employees?

You might think it odd that a company that sells training is telling you not to train.  Although training is extremely useful in onboarding and development, it is not always the answer to underperformance.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen managers waste time and money on training that is not going to fix the problem.  What do you do when you have an underperformer?  How do you know when training is NOT the answer?

Research tells us 60% of who we are we're born with - the other 40% is what we have control of to manifest our destiny. Don't know if you thought these percentages were higher or lower, but it's interesting. To clarify, the stuff we're born with are things such as addictions, physical attributes, pychological idioms, etc. Suffice to say, we can change much and none of this should dimish our chance of living a successful life!

So what then do we do when it comes to hiring or dealing with people in the workplace? In my humble opinion, three things we can do to avoid people mistakes.

Do you ever scratch your head thinking about how the same NFL head coaches keep moving from one team to another, even when they haven’t been particularly successful? Well if you think about it, we do the same thing in our industry. We always want someone with “staffing experience”, which essentially means “I don’t want to train them”.