Don’t forget your lesson plan for the office
You remember school, and then school ended and you had some training at work, and then you were the boss, and you started your own business.
At some point that formal “learning” ended.
But is “learning” actually complete?
Continuous improvement
If you answered yes then you are probably not a regular reader of this blog. It will be no surprise to all others that my answer is a strong no, your “learning” is never complete.
Nobody’s is.
You should be learning all the time. And your employees should be learning all the time. And you should be creating a workplace in which this is both encouraged and easy.
What to learn
This is your first decision.
What do you want people to learn; today, tomorrow, next year,…?
This is not an abstract question. The point of learning is to do something with that new knowledge. The purpose of knowledge is a new and improved action, skill, ability, and approach.
Decide upfront:
- How do you want your people to behave? What do they have to learn to behave that way?
- What do you want your people to do? What do they have to learn to do those things?
Make a list, check it twice, and update it regularly: be explicit about what you expect your employees to be learning.
How to learn
You want your employees to learn things well, and to learn them quickly.
Here’s the secret: have them teach it.
Assign different topics, or projects, or subjects to different employees, and have them teach the rest of the team.
Define these topics well. Make sure you explain the expected learning outcomes and the scope of the lesson. Each one should comprise no more than a single two-hour training session.
And then set them free to teach themselves the subject well enough to teach it to others.
Create your lesson plan
Working IN your business and ON your business is hard. I know. Because there are so many parts to it.
This is one of them.
Make your company better by making your employees better – and happier in the process.
Get employee buy-in with a mission statement they love… because they wrote it. Hire me for a Mission Statement workshop.