(TIP From Steve: Watch the video AND read the text below. It’ll really help!)

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”  
– Chinese Proverb

If you look at martial arts, when you start getting to the higher in the belt ranking system, typically, you are required to train the younger belts. Especially if you are a black belt. Because what you are doing is you are learning as you are teaching.

Why? Because when you teach someone, you must pay attention to what you have learned, and bring to light, unconscious competence into conscious awareness so other people can benefit from your knowledge and skill. This is what is known as the four levels of learning:

There’s the unconscious incompetence, where you don’t know what you don’t know. This is typically a non-troubling state because ignorance is bliss.

Then, there’s conscious incompetence, where you are aware of what it is you don’t know. This is typically not an enjoyable stage since it’s not much fun being aware of your incompetence. However, it does provide hope and drive to improve yourself.

Then, there’s conscious competence, where at some point, you know you are good at what you are doing.

Lastly, with time, you become unconsciously competent, where you do things so well you aren’t even aware you are doing it well. It just becomes second nature. Just like how fish who swim don’t really pay much attention to how well they swim.

Have you ever seen someone demonstrate their field of expertise, and “WOW” you in a way that they make difficult things look super easy? That’s because they have been doing it a long time. By having this repetition and a process for learning, it allows that to happen.

What’s this got to do with growing your team
and growing your business?

EVERYTHING.

Let me explain …

When you grow your business, you are going to (if you haven’t already) reach a point where you need to start adding people to your team. Whether that is a virtual assistant or someone else helping you part-time, you will need a team of people.

Now, they are going to have to learn a few things to work with your business.

In this post, I’m going to share my simple system to be able to train your team in a way that instills a culture of learning so that as your team grows in number, everyone in your team grows in skill as well!

Hopefully, you have watched a previous episode about systems.

What I typically do, is set a training day for the team, where whoever is the expert who is training (it could be you), is going to share and train others in that expertise.

Let’s assume it’s you. So, there you are. What you are going to do on the first day, is you are going to train whoever needs to learn. This could be an individual or a group of people. You train them in the system you want to learn.

Next, in training day 2, you are going to train a second person in that exact same system. It could be the next day, it could be the next week, but you choose the frequency of this. But you are going to train this other person in the same task using the same system.

The key here is repetition. You are going to have trained the first and the second person in command.

The key thing here is, before you train each person, you must tell them they are going to have to train other people to do what they are being trained at because that entices them to make notes and they are aware that the expectation is they will have to train a group in the future.

So that your team members understand you aren’t just dumping responsibility on them, you tell them that after each training, you are going to give them constructive feedback on:

• What you noticed they did well (celebrate their successes!)
• What you would like to see more of (support their growth edge!)

If you have 15 staff members then over the course of 15 weeks, let’s say you do this once a week, then over 15 weeks everyone has seen the training 15 times, and everyone has trained the training.

What happens is beautiful. Competency in your business goes through the roof. Then over a period, you may not have to train anymore. Your second in command could become the first in command, and now they’re running the training.

The effect of learning snowballs in your organization. This is how you build your culture of learning and a culture of leadership.

Takeaway

1. Identify your biggest complaint or challenge when you look at your staff, team, and your business.
2. Take a note of who needs support right away.
3. Identify what training they need.
4. Identifying who can deliver those trainings.
5. Schedule them. This can be daily, weekly, or monthly. It’s all about repetition and frequency.
6. Inform the trainees that what they learn from these trainings, they are going to train others in the organization to do the same.

Try it out and let me know if you have any questions and if there is anything more I can help you with!

I look forward to continuing to deliver value to you. Until next time remember ….

Choose Gratitude Create Freedom

Steve Napolitan