5 Training Mistakes

Hey, everybody, Kenny Chapman here, the blue collar coach, your partner in profitability coming to you. We're here. Just got home the week after Comfort Tech, going through all the training and talking to so many progressive contractors from all around the world. We had Canada, we had Australia, we had all over the US and one of the things I just want to touch base with today, I want to remind you of the five training mistakes that I see companies make the most. And in talking to contractors and about our instant meeting maker solution to that and going through, what are the mistakes that we see? Well, I want to share five of them with you quickly here today. Number one, what we see is failure to prepare for weekly meetings. We need to have weekly meetings. If you're not having weekly meetings, you're leaving money on the table, you're not representing your brand effectively. You've got to really dive in and pay attention and do it on a day in or week in, week out basis. But it takes a little bit of preparation and service managers have a lot of stuff on their plate. So sometimes all of a sudden, my Tuesday morning meeting's coming, it's 10 o' clock Monday night. What am I going to do? Oh, my gosh. Make sure that you're prepping, have an agenda, be prepared for these things. Second thing, I see too much content. We try to cover this and that and what happened this time and oh, then we have housekeeping we need to get into and all these different things. Narrow it down, chunk it down. I work with John a lot on this. Just get down one topic, one takeaway. If I was standing at the back of your meeting room and as your technicians walked out and I said, what did you get today? What's one thing that you would want them to tell you? Third thing, trainer dominated. It's lecture basis. It's service manager standing up there, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp. That's not what this is about. This is about effective communication. This is about driving behavior and performance. We've got to be mindful of these types of things. We have to have facilitation. It's not just about the trainer in the front of the room. It's about having the technicians talk and get feedback from them. It needs to be interactive. Most of us have training meetings in the morning. These guys are up early, they're tired. We need to get them involved and get them moving and going. 4. Failure to inspire, failure to motivate. Now you've got to, you know, you can't motivate another individual but all you can do is create an environment for them to motivate themselves. And we need to do that. If you're the trainer, your service manager's training or you're big enough that you have a training manager, whatever it is, and they're just sauntering in there. Hey, okay, guys, Tuesday morning. We're going to do this today. I mean, come on, you got to bring it. They have one of the toughest jobs in the industry. You got to acknowledge that and bring some fire to it. They need that. You got to be the gasoline to create the Spark 5. The last thing that I see is lack of follow up. We train something on Tuesday, then what happens to it? Oh, next Tuesday comes and we're on to something else. Next Tuesday. What about that? So one of the things we do is we train twice a week. We train something on Tuesday and then we might reinforce something on Friday. Keep it alive. If you train something, it's important enough for you to be spending the time and energy and investment on it. Don't train it once and let it go. If you're not talking about these things ongoing, you're not changing behavior. There's your five things that I think we see a big mistake that companies make. Hopefully you can take a nugget from that and improve your training. Until we talk again, have a better than fantastic week and I'll see you soon.