Have you heard the story about boiling frogs?
I’m not sure if it is true, but it is a good strategy to help your team to learn new systems.
Here we go…
Apparently, if you drop a frog into boiling water it will jump out. However, if you drop a frog into warm water, it relaxes and goes to sleep. From there, you can slowly raise the temperature until you boil the frog.
How does this apply to learning new systems?
Applying this to your system
Similar to the frog analogy, if we drop our team members into an overwhelming amount of information about a new system they have a high chance of leaving. This could be mentally, as they switch off and select the few parts of the system they can handle. Or, this could physically as they walk out of your door.
What could the warm water of your business be?
- A slower training plan that takes a few weeks / months to work their way through?
- Periodic training workshops?
- An experienced guide within the business to support them for a period of time?
- Training related to their current workload only, updated as their workload changes?
I’m sure that you can think of other approaches that we could call ‘warm water’.
Avoiding superheroes
One of the reasons that I wrote the book ‘Losing the Cape‘ was to prevent issues like this.
Something that I see all too often are the symptoms of ineffective training for systems and processes. The symptom that is most common is the person running around trying to do more than you can fit into a normal working day because their colleagues don’t know how the business is meant to work. There could be a ton of reasons why this might be, but ineffective training and induction is a repeat offender from my experience.
I hope that you get some ideas from this article on how you can get better results from your own induction and training efforts.
