John Wooden is famous for being arguably the greatest basketball coach in college sports and for propelling many of his players on to stellar careers in the NBA. He's also famous for starting every season teaching his players how to tie their shoes. Remember these were students who'd been recruited because they'd already been playing at the championship level in high school. And those who'd been on his own championship teams in prior years had to learn it again.
But he didn't just say "tie your shoes." He taught his players to put their socks on smoothly from the toes on up. Then how to open the laces so they could ease their feet in without wrinkling the socks. Then how to tighten the laces section by section from the bottom up and finally how to tie a knot. In other words, he broke down the process of putting on footwear into several steps so they wouldn't get blisters or ruin a championship game with a shoe coming untied.
Breaking down processes to the most basic steps is critical if you want to systemize your company. Many of my clients recently have run into problems by thinking at too high a level. That keeps people from delegating. Here's an example.
A CEO wants to hire someone to take some of the pressure off his general manager. The GM isn't sold on the idea. She's tried to hire assistants in the past, and it hasn't worked well. This time the CEO wants to hire someone offshore and that makes her even more dubious. I get it. It's hard to delegate in the abstract. And even harder to train someone without being specific.
On the Job Training is Often Terrible
Most people approach this situation by bringing the new person in to shadow the person they want them to assist. They expect that exposure will allow the newbie to pick up on how things are done and pick it up by osmosis. But people don't pick up on the right things just by seeing them happen. If you want someone to learn something you must break it down into small chunks and be sure they master each one before you give them the next. Good training happens in small chunks. That's what coach Wooden did with the lesson on shoes. Only after people are trained and you're confident they can do a task from the bottom up, does it make sense to delegate.
So we talked about the things the general manager does and which parts of her work could be reliably handed off to a person who wasn't in the same building. Here are two from the list we came up with:
Entering an order into the ERP. (Orders can come via email or phone.)
Customer service requests that involve looking up a previous order in the ERP.
Both of those require accessing an account in the ERP. This is a chunk that can be trained by a video SOP. It's a "recipe" type which is ideal for computer work. But there are other chunks as well. The order entry task requires a complete set of information before the order can be entered. Knowing what information is needed and where to get it is a chunk. That could be trained with a check list. The customer service requests may require some judgement. People think judgement comes from experience. It does. But judgement can often be taught if broken down into chunks. (These chunks often take the form of an IF … THEN diagram.) All the chunks we're discussing can be done remotely with proper training and the right workflow. (Workflows are a different topic - I talked about them HERE.)
That's the level of detail I'm talking about. When the aspects of her job that can be off loaded are dealt with as specifically as that, delegation will be easier. Then she'll be free to do more of the work that demands her level of experience and less of what others can do. The result will be that everyone plays at the top of their game.
5 Stations but Dozens of Training Chunks
Another client was called away from his most important work because a part had been sent to a customer with a defect. He had to stop what he was doing to get a new one made and sent out. We did the Five Why's exercise and determined that the defect was caused by a machine that had not been properly maintained. He was pretty sure the maintenance process had been documented but no one was held accountable to perform it. (If you do the Five Why's properly you almost always end up with a cause that's human error. This is good. It means the problem can be fixed by human effort).
That brought up the larger question of training in that shop. You can't hold people accountable to perform something they're not trained on. This shop has 5 main stations - some with multiple machines. Each machine requires training in at least 5 aspects:
Setup
Running a job
Shut down
Cleaning
Routine maintenance
So we'd already listed over two dozen separate tasks. But I suspected there were more. I asked him how long it would take just to list the names of every SOP he'd need to train his shop team on. He said it might take 5 hours just to compile the list. As I write this, it's a work in progress. We'll see how long it takes him. But it will be a pretty long list because the chunks will be small. John Wooden ran his drills off a set of 3x5 cards. When chunks are so small that they can fit on an index card, you've broken the system down pretty well. Not only will your list be complete, but chunks that small are easy for people to learn without being overwhelmed.
I think this is what Herb Kelleher meant when he told his employees, "Think small and act small, and we’ll get bigger. Think big and act big, and we’ll get smaller.” Kelleher started Southwest Airlines which, until the pandemic, made a profit every quarter. No other airline has that record.
The Training Grid
One of the shortest videos on my YouTube Channel is called The Training Grid. Spend 3 minutes and check it out. It's a very powerful tool but the key to making it work is the list of tasks down the side. Break those down into the right sized chunks and you might just become an all-star basketball coach.
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