You hold a kick-off meeting, sign them up for training or rollout some next new thing. You provide a buffet of all of this great information and that is where the support ends. The end of the meeting, the end of training or the end of the rollout is the beginning.
It isn’t enough to provide the knowledge you have to provide follow-up to make sure it is adopted and put into practice. Corporate approved those meetings, trainings or new initiatives and they expect you and your team to perform, to make it work and to produce different results.
When you don’t provide support activities that will help your team change their behavior what happens? They revert back to their old, comfortable, tried and true behaviors. Here are 4 ways to support your team after giving them new knowledge:
Preemptive planning
You have first hand knowledge of what is coming down the pipe. Start pre-conditioning your employees, I call this planting seeds. The more seeds you plant today the more your talent garden will grow tomorrow. This is tremendously helpful to get your employees to a place of acceptance more quickly.
Certifications
Certifications are great because they help to confirm their understanding. You can also use certifications as a means of enabling someone to be a subject matter expert or career mapping.
Rewards and recognition
The best way to help change come alive is to reward and recognize the changed behavior. This could be through gift cards, certifications or plaques. Rewarding the good behavior is far more effective than punishing the bad.
Coaching
Coaching should always occur after a change. Coaching enables the level of follow-up that is required to ensure the new knowledge is being used the right way and consistently. It also allows for refining their interpretation of that knowledge. Beyond that it gives you firsthand experience of how that knowledge is being perceived in the market.
Simply offering training, having a kick-off meeting or rolling out something new will only get your team so far. Don’t let the investment fizzle out and fail by leaving your employees to dry afterwards. Plant seeds, certify, reward and coach to put fourth an honest effort to make it a success.
Last updated on March 8th, 2018 at 12:53 pm
