Middle Market CEOs face a common conundrum: How to develop employee skills with limited resources. Many fast-growing companies don’t have training budgets, and even fewer have organizational structures to support it. How do you develop your people when your business hasn’t grown to the point where you can invest in training? The answer is simple. You have to approach training strategically.
What Works?
1. Identify Pain Points: Don’t approach training by haphazardly designating someone to “go get some training tools.” While in deal with it mode, your staff might be tempted by off-the-shelf products that can be costly—with potentially little result to show for the investment because these training tools are scaled to a generalist orientation. Instead, strategically identify which skills gaps are causing your firm the most pain. Are your competitors better at sales? Do you have manufacturing inefficiencies? Are workers’ compensation costs rising?
2. Develop the Best Solution: Think in terms of broad, strategic solutions, rather than the specific, tactical problem. For example, if your pain point is a high accident rate, training on safety best practices can cover a lot of ground. If your salespeople could benefit from some polishing, hire a sales coach to refine and elevate their presentation skills. If your problem is getting new hires on-boarded quickly, assign internal mentors to ensure knowledge transfer happens and hold them accountable to the task.
3. Measure Results: Accidents down? Sales conversion rates up? New hires making an impact sooner? Measuring and evaluating your results is the best way to make sure your training dollars are savvy and well executed. When you identify another emerging pain point, it’s time to “lather, rinse, and repeat!”
Putting It Into Practice
For Middle Market CEOs, staff training and development works best when it’s strategic, focused on the pain points and results are measured. One of ROI’s clients wanted to increase manufacturing productivity. Before they made a $10 million investment, we placed a Lean Rapid Continuous Improvement consultant with the firm. He demonstrated how lean-manufacturing processes works and then guided them on execution so that the plant investment was maximized for the highest ROI.
Stop spending unnecessary time and money trying to decide which off-the-shelf training product may work. Start identifying your pain points, focus strategic training efforts against them and then measure results. When you do that, training takes care of itself with a much higher ROI.
So what’s in the Mighty Middle Market for me? — get it right now at www.Go4ROI.com.