Guest post by Kenneth McCall of www.storage.com
Managers sometimes have a thankless job. They can be as conscientious as the day is long, work harder than anyone, do the greatest job in the world, and yet if the people that work under them fail to perform, guess who gets all the blame. You got it. The buck always stops at the top.
A manager is challenged on multiple fronts. He needs to be responsible for his own performance, of course. But he also needs to figure out how to maximize the performance of each of his subordinates too. This is far from an easy task and one which has cost many managers many sleepless nights. Improving the performance of other people is always a challenging and stressful undertaking, simply because people are different and every individual has his or her own reason for underperforming.
The first step in fixing the problem is identifying what the problem is. In some cases, people fail because they lack the skill sets to do the work. More often, employees underperform because they lack a basic understanding of how to do one or more parts of their job. It's up to the manager to find out what each of his employees needs to learn in order for them to succeed, and then he needs to train them.
Training can take many forms. What some employees need is the basic classroom, where they can focus on learning and/or improving their proficiency in specific aspects of the job. For this, the manager might hire (or appoint from within) someone with the right kind of expertise. But very often training takes on a completely different look. It becomes more of a day-to-day coaching and mentoring exercise, where an employee develops and improves in a steady, incremental fashion. For this, it is often the manager himself who must conduct the training.
But regardless of who conducts the training, the manager still has a huge stake in the outcome. And the success or failure of a training initiative is very much dependent on the trainee. When the trainee is a willing and cooperative student, there is a good chance of a positive outcome. But managers can find themselves facing a huge obstacle when an employee doesn't respond to training. That obstacle can be nearly insurmountable when the reason, as is often the case, is that the employee is simply not "trainable."
Let's look at what this means. Sometimes employees are deficient in knowledge or skill in one particular area but they refuse to admit or acknowledge it. So they resist being trained. Or maybe they go along with the training but do so with little enthusiasm or interest. Either way, the training turns out to be a dismal failure and the employee continues to underperform. The problem is not an uncommon one. Employees like this are very often intelligent and experienced. But sadly, they are also “untrainable.”
People like to talk about things like experience, education, and talent when the subject of new employee hiring is raised. Trainability is a consideration you seldom hear about. Yet when you think about it, trainability is every bit as important as the other characteristics in assessing the makeup of a potential new hire. For sure, it's a little tougher to measure because it doesn't lend itself to quantification in neat terms like years of experience or degree levels of college diplomas. But that doesn't mean there aren't signs you can look for. It's all a matter of knowing what they are. Here are some questions a good hiring manager can ask himself about any job candidate he is interviewing:
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Does the candidate show a history of flexibility and a willingness to adapt to change?
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Is he the type of person who is able to check his ego at the door?
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Does he display eagerness and passion about the job?
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Is he a quick learner?
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Is he open-minded?
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Has he shown himself to be dependable and committed?
If you can answer yes to most of these questions with a fair amount of certainty, then very likely you have yourself a trainable candidate.
A manager's performance is only as good as that of his team. His employees can have tons of experience and multiple educational degrees, but these things can't guarantee that they will be able to learn the new business techniques or skills they may eventually need. But when a person is trainable he or she already has what it takes to be a successful learner. Make no mistake about it. The trainability factor is real. And when it becomes a priority during the hiring cycle, the manager doing the hiring is the clear winner.
About the Author:
Kenneth McCall builds creative and innovative tools for customer seeking self storage units. Kenneth is the director of operations at storage.com which provides Miami self storage listings, and storage units in many locations across the country. In his spare time he likes to get outside, ideally with a boat and waterskis.
