Most business owners want their employees to develop new skills while becoming more cohesive as a team. Developing individual skills while moving team effectiveness from adequate to impressive requires that employee retention be high while employee turnover is low. If these goals sound like something you want to implement, below are two teaching models you can use:
Compassion is a crucial ingredient
Depending on which research study you are reading, the #1 or #2 reason an employee voluntarily leaves a company is that their immediate supervisor is a jerk. Consider the following three-pronged approach for bringing compassion to team development and reducing the jerk factor inside your company:
- Caring: Employees intuitively know If you truly care about them as a human being and desire to invest in their development. They will reciprocate your level of caring with their level of effort.
- Adaptability: One size does not fit all when it comes to helping employees reach their full potential. People have different learning styles and learn at different rates of speed. Be willing to try different approaches until you find a methodology that works.
- Patience: Learning does not happen instantaneously. Desire to succeed coupled with frequency of repetition of practice equates to velocity of improvement. Be patient and embrace the process.
Wear your thinking CAP each day and bring the Compassion Model to team development.
The stages of skill acquisition are both logical and sequential
There are three stages of skill development:
- Cognitive stage: Create a mental picture of the new task and teach how to do it
- Associative stage: Create a practice routine, provides lots of feedback, and reward incremental improvement
- Autonomous stage: Through deliberate practice, mastery is developed, and the new skill is performed instinctively
The CAA model works! Don’t expect skill mastery until taking an employee through BOTH Stage 1 AND 2.
Giving credit where it is due
Last weekend, I took two ski instructor clinics through the Outdoors For All program. Dr. Tiffany Green and I were debriefing Day 1 and we came up with the Compassion Model when breaking down the top three emotion driven characteristics of being an effective coach in the program. On Day 2, our instructor Charlie from Steamboat Springs, CO, taught how to logically and sequentially increase skill development.