Setting expectations then training, training and training.

I have written several posts on the importance for setting clear expectations, making sure your team understands your goals and directions. But for your team to succeed they also need to have the knowledge and skills required. And this cannot be done without training.

Every manager’s priority should be to train their teams, for a simple reason, if their team has the right skills they will succeed and therefore the manager will succeed. If they are not properly trained, they will not deliver and then…

Of course training takes time, but as Ben Horowitz said. “being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.”

This is even more crucial for new hires. I have seen it (and done it) too often, we make a huge effort in recruiting a great candidate, it has been tough, long, painful to find this great candidate… and then once she starts we are too busy to train her, to give her the tools to succeed. And then the new candidate fails and we have to do it again… and bottom line, recruiting again will take 10 times more time than what a good training program would have required, and on top of that we have not been fair with the candidate who failed because of lack of training.

Don’t hire more people than you know you can train well. If you lack time, redirect your effort from recruiting more people to better training your team.

Every manager should ask themselves if they spend enough time :

• sharing their knowledge with their teams

• training them

And then face the reality and take actions.

By the way, training is the goal of my blog!