inform. educate. connect. Issue #13 - August 2011

Training Principles Part 3: Individualism & Involvement

By Scott Byorum, Nationwide Real Estate Tax Service, Inc.

Training the body to produce athletic results requires a distinct disciplined approach common in all physical training programs. Each of these principles is practical, logical, and produces measurable results when followed. These same principles can be applied in training programs at banks, whether in teaching job functions, team-building, or communication training and customer service. 

Individualism
Each person has their own unique talents, capabilities, capacities and responses to training. Physically, as one person adapts to and grows with an intended exercise, another might falter or struggle past a certain barrier. And there is no difference in training for other skills, either.

Do you remember grade school and high school? For most, each grade took a whole year to complete and advance to the next. And along the way, there were those who consistently excelled across all subjects, those that struggled with a few subjects, and those who had a very difficult time keeping up with anything.

Then there were those individuals who suddenly “got it” one year. We each have a teacher or mentor that we remember helped us as individuals because they took the time to figure out where we were struggling.

That’s the principle of individualism in training in action. People enter into training programs with different maturities, capacities, skill sets, and receptiveness…and they exit out of training programs the same way. That is also why cookie-cutter training programs rarely work effectively out of the package in groups. 

In order to excel, people need individual attention, guidance, and reinforcement. That’s why one-on-one training works so well.

But how do you institute the principle of individualism when you need to roll out larger training initiatives or programs? That’s where individualism and involvement meet.

Involvement
Did you ever attend an awareness class? You probably heard information about the subject, saw some case examples, maybe even did a little role-play, and exited the class…aware. But awareness isn’t training.

Training is learning the specific techniques and skill sets well enough to pass on that knowledge to others and make them capable of the same thing. The term “training” is thrown around like a used dish towel…which eventually ends up in the wash to be cleaned and used exactly the same way again.

You involve people in their own learning by making them responsible for it. You make people responsible for it by engaging them. You engage them by making it critical to their success. Involvement is the single most important principle for training success.

If you know anything about sports, you know that the majority of players picked from high school and college to participate in the big leagues cannot immediately transfer their success in those grades to the real world of professional sports, and a good deal of them have short-lived careers, if they end up having any.

Those that do succeed involve themselves. They see what success will bring them and they are shown how to achieve that success. That is why sports teams have trainers: to show players what awaits them if they involve themselves and to be there for them on an individual level to help them with learning the skills on the team level. And most of those trainers were once sports professionals themselves.

There is no difference between that and success in business… as long as the principles of training are in place.

Training programs support people physically and mentally and enhance their performance. Think about the training programs of your institution. Are your task training courses designed to build and measure application competency? Are your customer service programs one-shot, throw-away, feel-good sessions? To be a successful organization you need to think of your employees as athletes…athletes in need of solid and ongoing training programs that help them operate at peak performance so that everyone can share in the reward of that success.

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