Leaders must steer a wary course between keeping their fingers in every pie, dictating in detail what is to be done by whom, and on the other hand slackening the rein so that assistants learn only by experience and make costly mistakes.
People have great potential if they want to train themselves. Perhaps the greatest challenge in training someone else is getting the person to want to be trained.
The gateway, I believe, is personal relationship. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I’ve never been able to fully motivate a person I didn’t like. The same is true of training. I can instruct someone I don’t like. I can teach a person the expressways of Dallas whether I like him or not, but I could never develop that person’s skills and talents.
I learned this from experience. While working with a certain individual, I wasn’t making any progress, and I wondered why. Finally I realized I didn’t like the man. He was outgoing and had good comprehension skills—but he overrated himself, and that irritated me. I consciously tuned out his bragging, and that prevented me from getting close to him personally.
Finally I realized what was happening, and I began to find other things in him to like. An interesting thing occurred: He began to develop very well.
Before any of us can be trained, we need to believe somebody wants us to do well, believes in us, likes us, respects us.
Train Strengths, Not Weaknesses
In developing somebody, the odds of improving existing strengths far outweigh the odds of improving weaknesses. An individual can improve his weaknesses, but it’s rarely done from the outside.
You can threaten the person. You can make him afraid. But that won’t bring improvement. On the other hand, if you point out strengths and help develop them, you capitalize on the person’s desire to do those things he’s already good at. (He obviously has no ambition for things he does poorly.)
If a certain weakness is so bad you can’t ignore it, you may have to do one of two things: get him to work on it, or admit you can’t utilize this person. This amounts to developing someone through fear (the fear of losing his job)—which is far from ideal.
By taking the positive approach, you may awaken a strength the person didn’t know he had. I’ve seen people discover artistic talent in middle life—a craft, painting, music, or something else. Part of training is testing for areas of additional capability.
Training Is Costly
One of the expenses of training is that you commit yourself to people who make mistakes. Mistakes are simply part of the bill, and there’s no way to prevent them.
Think about giving a person a new job that has a lot of detail. Until he or she gets familiar with that detail, some things are going to slip. This will cost money and aggravation. But it’s part of the training.
When a person first starts to supervise, for example, he often waits too long to handle grievances. They fester. That is why you say, “A grievance has to be handled on time. You can’t postpone them. People are the most valuable part of what we do, and they come before our own convenience.”
Now, if a person repeatedly makes the same mistake, you have to wonder whether he’s in the right position.
If I correct a person, I always want to see the person the next day. If I’m not going to be available the next day, I’ll postpone the correction, because people tend to magnify the break in relationship. A correction isn’t a relational break at all; you’re simply carrying out your responsibility. But that’s hard to remember. If I talk to someone at four o’clock about some problem, I try to see him the next morning, speak to him, smile, and show him that what I said was all I was going to say.
Not Everything at Once
Training also has to be paced. People can make only so much progress at a time. Even though you see several things they have to learn, you are wiser to break them into pieces they can handle. Have the patience to give the other pieces as time goes along.
If you assign six things at once, you break the spirit. You break the person’s concentration, too; he spends so much time thinking about what’s gone wrong or could go wrong that he doesn’t do his job. And if there’s something about a person he cannot improve—family background, for example, or accent, looks, or spouse—don’t even mention it. Development is based on improvability.
In some severe situations, I admit, a spouse’s attitude or behavior may actually threaten someone’s future. That situation has to be faced—but this is beyond what we call training or development. It’s simply a necessary action. You have to say to the person, “If this doesn’t change, you’re not going to be here. I want you to know why. But it’s not my responsibility to change your wife. That is up to you. If at any time you think it would be helpful for me to sit down with you and her and talk it over, I’d be happy to do that. But, since she does not work for me, it’s not my responsibility to develop her.”
Pacing means not only spreading out our topics but treating each topic more than once. People rarely get anything the first time you say it. So you vary the wording each time, even though you’re saying exactly the same thing.
When it comes to actual work, assignment comes first, then delegation. There is a difference. When you assign, you tell a person what you want done, how you want it done, and when you want it done. When you progress to the point of delegation, you are able to say, “What do you think should be done?” The person is experienced enough to start telling you.
Assignments have to be checked regularly, with work-in-process dates. Delegation needs only a completion date.
If you delegate too soon, you put a person in over his head. He could lose confidence. He could run into conflict with you as his boss. He could also lose respect within the organization. I’ve often seen it happen: somebody is brought in, put on the job, and abandoned. The leader expects him to figure out how to do it all alone. He doesn’t always succeed.
Certain types of things should never be delegated to certain people. In business, for example, you never delegate expense accounts to salespeople. They seem to have a blind spot when it comes to spending money, entertaining, and so forth. You have to control that area yourself.
Other people can never really handle the freedom to work outside the office or have flexible hours. They’ll start coming in later and later; somehow they lack the necessary personal discipline.
My personal philosophy, however, is to delegate everything I can, and only when that delegation has been neglected do I go back to making assignments. A lot rides on how I give the delegation in the first place. If I announced it with a lot of fanfare, the person loses face if it’s pulled back. But if I can quietly say, “I believe we can improve this by both of us working on it,” the person is usually spared the feeling he’s going backwards.
Naturally, I don’t like to get into this predicament. It’s much better to delegate realistically in the first place.
All of this increases the assets of the organization. People are our greatest asset. Just as we improve a physical plant, we improve people. I’m as hesitant to fire somebody as I would be to burn down one of the buildings.
Seeing the Big Picture
Frequently, the person we are training has a job that fits into other jobs, but he doesn’t really know how. In the meantime, he becomes a perfectionist. An educational director sometimes thinks the whole church operates just for the Sunday school. It’s part of training to say how a job fits into the whole—not so much to increase the importance of that particular function as to build up the importance of other things.
Otherwise, people start developing little empires of their own that nobody else can break into. One department starts to operate independent of the rest. This is exactly what happens in the human body when cancer develops. A cell starts to operate independently, growing on its own without being coordinated with the rest of the cells.
I know a music minister who was fired because his Sunday morning music kept going too long, creeping into the sermon time—just half a minute at first, then a minute, two minutes, and finally more like five minutes. He was producing bigger and better numbers each week, or he would choose an offertory that far exceeded the time needed to take the offering. Once the music was underway, of course, what was the pastor to do but wait it out?
He talked to the music director and couldn’t get him to control the length. In the end, believe it or not, he had to fire the man.
Whenever I’m with Cliff Barrows of the Billy Graham organization, even in the smallest meeting, I notice he always starts right on time. He has a sense of broadcast and telecast; he knows how ingredients fit into a total program.
For years I’ve also watched Cliff during Billy’s sermons. He’s the most intense listener in the whole stadium. Cliff realizes he’s up front, and any looking around or sleeping would depreciate the message.
Any staff member who sits in view of the congregation must accept his or her responsibility to the listeners. People on the platform ought to be the people who listen most; their endorsement of what is being said or sung is extremely important. The whole meeting is important, not just what one person does.
Five Criteria for Trainers
As training moves along, here are five ways to measure progress:
1. Is this person’s job fitting well with his or her talents? If not, I haven’t got a prayer of developing that person to his potential. He may have to do something temporarily that doesn’t fit, but it’s my responsibility over the long haul to see that the job and the talents match.
For example, you can’t put a loner into a team operation. You may have a person who is irascible. You can’t make an usher out of him.
2. How much willingness to do the job am I seeing? This goes beyond verbal expressions of “I really like this.” I watch to see if the person is basically enthusiastic about opportunity, if this work is more than just something to fill the time. If I catch a sense of Well, I’ll do it if you want me to, but I’m not really keen on it, I don’t expect much. I want the person to have enough willingness to be enthusiastic.
3. How consistent is the person’s effort? Sporadic effort is not what I want. Long-term, consistent, day-in day-out effort is what pays off in an organization.
You don’t want someone who does things only when he feels like it. A friend told me one time, “The amateur performs well when he feels like it. The pro performs well whether he feels like it or not.” Athletes talk about “playing hurt.” The pro expects to play hurt. He doesn’t call in sick. That’s part of being a pro.
4. What are the objective results? A lot of people give you a lot of activity, conversation, excuses—but if you really measure what they’ve done, you find little. Some get by for years without really producing.
I know a fellow right now whom people talk highly of. Yet every time I’ve asked anyone specifically, “Tell me, what are you praising?” all I hear is “Oh, he’s got personality. He’s such a likable guy.” But he’s really never done much.
5. Is this person willing to be evaluated? I’m not going to spend time developing somebody who resists having his results measured. That, incidentally, is one of the problems I have with some educators today; they resist any kind of evaluation. It’s not easy to evaluate a teacher, I admit, but it’s not impossible.
Neither is it impossible to evaluate those we train in the church. This, too, is part of effective development.
Copyright © 1986 by Christianity Today
