Larry Weidel shares two stories from his construction apprenticeship and early finance work to show how to teach people to actually use what they learn. Breaking tasks into stages, making trainees responsible, and using flowcharts all work. Whoever holds the pen learns.
How to design a great Training Program, Part 2. And we are elaborating on the second point we made in here, and that is to how to get them doing using it. And here's an example. When I started construction, I had a degree from Georgia Tech in building construction. And I got involved with a guy in Atlanta, Georgia to build houses. Joel Blackford, Blackford Associates, Atlanta, Georgia, 1971. I had my Bachelor of Science in building construction, and that meant that I had a degree. I passed the minimum requirements at good old Georgia Tech. And I couldn't build anything beyond a doghouse. With that information. I'm not sure I could have built a doghouse. But I did have the technical knowledge. And like all college degrees, it was good enough to serve as a certificate to get me in the door to get the real job. And after about three months of observing at lunch with Joel, he sat down and he took. He wadded up his paper sack that after he'd had lunch, he kind of unwrinkled everything, got out his pen. He said, okay, you're going to be involved and you're going to take over now from breaking ground all the way to getting it the sheetrock in. So this is building houses. He's going to show me how to build houses. And he went through all the steps. He wrote all this on here we. Which is an excellent way of doing it, by the way. I don't know why I didn't save that. But he went in there and he went through the steps. And first of all, you get it staked out and you get the plans and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You get where you're going to dig your footings. And then you call this guy. He went all the way down through all the steps. Now, once it was over, once I had gotten going on that and he had given me the outline, then I interpreted over the. It took me a few months, but then I in essence got. I turned this, the paper sack into huge boards with, you know, detailed lines. And I had stages all the way down. Everything, you know, I. All the sub steps of everything he put in here and the little extra reminders, I made all those in there. And then we always had about 25 houses going at a time. But I was starting new ones. So these are the ones I was thinking, oh, so every time there was a new house, I'd put like lot, you know, 35C. That's like what you go in construction, like lot 7A. They don't have their street addresses yet. And so then I Would keep up with a progress chart. And I had my own elaborate flowchart that I made from that. But that was me using. He gave me one step was probably too many, you know, it was a lot of steps, but at that point I could do it. I've been around three months. He gave me, not the whole house because that would have been overwhelming, but he cut it in two. And he said, here, this, this, this, this, this. You're responsible for that. Now it was up to me to get myself organized. And as a result of not wanting me discovering that he was a manic depressive personality, he would go absolutely ape anytime. Anything wasn't exactly perfect. Then I, to protect myself, got this elaborate flowchart put together so I could see the nuclear warhead explode as few times as possible in the subdivision when somehow we had committed some kind of indiscretion. And so this was mine, but this is why I started with him. Now, when you teach, when you teach anybody anything, this might be what you teach. And they may take it and do great things with it far beyond what you imagine. I'm just using as an example, not that this is that great, but they're never going to do it unless you let them and give them the opportunity to take charge and kind of set the stage where they can go use it. That was probably one of the greatest things he did in teaching me how to build houses. I've used that diagram flowcharts method of training people ever since. So that's one way, one example of how you can get people to start using the information that you're giving them. The other one is when I started the business, I had a lot of paperwork when I went into financial services. Lots of paperwork and forms. Do you have any of that in your business? Well, what you do is originally, you know, you sit down and you got this complicated form with all this stuff and here and here. And now you're holding the pen. You know, you've got the pen and then you're writing this in here, and you're writing this in and say, oh, go over here. Pay attention. Now. This goes over here. This goes over here. This goes over here. This goes over here. All right, we got another form over here. And you go through. You fill it out and get the pen, and you go in through all of this stuff and explaining in detail and all it is. I mean, they'll have some kind of description for. Think of an IRS form. You know, they have the descriptions on there. All you got to do is fill it in. It Seems so simple. But of course they would mess it up like you can't believe. And I said, why can't they learn it? So I learned a principle from this. Here's the principle. Whoever holds the pen learns. The problem was, as I would go through these forms, I would hold the pen, I would write it down because I want to save time, you know, let's move fast, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Well, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. But then you have to repeat it over and over and over again. So I finally learned, you know, eventually I learn things. Get them to hold the pen, get them to fill it out. Then they learn, you know what that's like. Here's what it's like. If you go into a new town and they pick you up, or for some reason they're driving the car, maybe you go in there together and they drive the car. You, you don't drive, you're a passive. They drive and you drive all over that town and you go to where your destination is. Let's just say next time you go back to that town and you go back by yourself and you drive, you know what happens? You know what you're going to discover? You're lost. You can't remember how to get there. There's something about it. See, if you had your friend there who drove the first time, he'd remember he was driving, he was paying attention, you were just along for the ride. If you. I've been into Washington D.C. about 40 times. Never drive. Somebody always picks me up. I still don't know how that town is laid out, but take me to Los Angeles. For some reason when I go to la, I always get rental cars. I know LA inside and out. And it's far more. Well, it's equally as complex. Let's say it's because I drive in Los Angeles. I've got to pay attention. I'm the one that's got to say, oh, that's the street turn, you know. Yeah, turn there. And I'm the one experiences turning the car there. And all that imagery gets imprinted in my mind as I turn around the corner. Whoever holds the pen learns and whoever drives the car learns. Those are two good ideas that give you idea, gives you the indication of ways you can use people, get people involved in using your information step by step as you teach them. Now that's two of about six points we've got on training. And I'm going to go into point three in the next one.
