Beyond the obvious issues of lower confidence and imagined windmills, inexperience colors the way people respond to instruction. Inexperienced team members and colleagues live in a new world full of information and issues they have never before considered. As a result, they can quickly become lost in the vast set of new ideas and actions required of them.
Re: ...Instead of providing inexperienced team members with the context to succeed, they give them small actions to execute - Brilliant! In their book, Telling Ain't Training, the authors break learning something new down into four steps. The first two are Training and Instruction. The differences between Training and Instruction are - Training allows you to: reproduce exactly what's been taught, act automatically, apply learning without variation, regardless of condition. Instruction allows you to: generalize beyond what has been taught, act thoughtfully, adapt learning to each new set of conditions. In my experience, many managers and trainers skip the crucial Training step and go straight to the Instruction step. When I led an HR Operations Team, there were 70 things a team member would eventually need to be able to know how to do. But for their first few months, all I had them do was review new hire paperwork for completeness and errors, and data entry. That's it. After they'd get 50 to 100 new hires under their belt, I then start teaching them the next thing (easy system updates), then eventually move onto harder tasks (intercompany transfers, non-exempt to exempt promotions, etc.). Within six months, most Associates hired into the role are able to learn the rest of the tasks on their own, with little to no guidance from the manager because they have built such a solid base based on a few principles. BTW - Now that I'm in training, I get a lot of requests from Trainers wanting me to spend $1,000s of dollars to send them off to a week long Design and Development workshop. Instead, I tell them to work with a more experience Trainer and have them fix and/or update existing training courses. Building a new course from scratch is too much for a newer Trainer. Instead, they learn by doing - repeating, copying, imitating the work of the masters first, then once things begin to sink in, they can start building stuff on their own.
To clarify - they review new hire paperwork for accuracy and completeness, and then enter the data into the HRIS. By focusing on just a few basic tasks, I am also able to see what type of working they will most likely be - are they more people, data, or things-oriented? People-oriented - I assign them tasks/responsibilities that deal with employees and managers - e.g., ergonomic assessments, facilitate new hire orientation. Data-oriented - I give them more difficult HRIS data entry tasks, audits, metrics/dashboards. Things-oriented - I find these folks (like to get their hands dirty) to be the best at event planning and starting new projects. Everyone on the team needs to be able to do all this stuff to some degree, but why not have them focus and specialize on what their really good at.
Re: ...Instead of providing inexperienced team members with the context to succeed, they give them small actions to execute - Brilliant! In their book, Telling Ain't Training, the authors break learning something new down into four steps. The first two are Training and Instruction. The differences between Training and Instruction are - Training allows you to: reproduce exactly what's been taught, act automatically, apply learning without variation, regardless of condition. Instruction allows you to: generalize beyond what has been taught, act thoughtfully, adapt learning to each new set of conditions. In my experience, many managers and trainers skip the crucial Training step and go straight to the Instruction step. When I led an HR Operations Team, there were 70 things a team member would eventually need to be able to know how to do. But for their first few months, all I had them do was review new hire paperwork for completeness and errors, and data entry. That's it. After they'd get 50 to 100 new hires under their belt, I then start teaching them the next thing (easy system updates), then eventually move onto harder tasks (intercompany transfers, non-exempt to exempt promotions, etc.). Within six months, most Associates hired into the role are able to learn the rest of the tasks on their own, with little to no guidance from the manager because they have built such a solid base based on a few principles. BTW - Now that I'm in training, I get a lot of requests from Trainers wanting me to spend $1,000s of dollars to send them off to a week long Design and Development workshop. Instead, I tell them to work with a more experience Trainer and have them fix and/or update existing training courses. Building a new course from scratch is too much for a newer Trainer. Instead, they learn by doing - repeating, copying, imitating the work of the masters first, then once things begin to sink in, they can start building stuff on their own.
Did you feel the need to explain your system to new hires who were just reviewing paperwork?
Anybody's complaint ever make you question that task oriented approach?
To clarify - they review new hire paperwork for accuracy and completeness, and then enter the data into the HRIS. By focusing on just a few basic tasks, I am also able to see what type of working they will most likely be - are they more people, data, or things-oriented? People-oriented - I assign them tasks/responsibilities that deal with employees and managers - e.g., ergonomic assessments, facilitate new hire orientation. Data-oriented - I give them more difficult HRIS data entry tasks, audits, metrics/dashboards. Things-oriented - I find these folks (like to get their hands dirty) to be the best at event planning and starting new projects. Everyone on the team needs to be able to do all this stuff to some degree, but why not have them focus and specialize on what their really good at.
"Showing them the mistakes not to make, the traps not to fall into, and the rules not to violate sounds like a recipe for later success.
Unfortunately, this approach zaps their confidence and usually paralyzes their ability to act and learn."
Yup. Love it.
Amen.