The Quality Life

“Good players do not always make good coaches.”

We usually hear these words in conjunction with sports. When I hear the phrase, I always think of Ted Williams, who may have been the greatest hitter who ever played the game, but failed completely when he managed the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers. Or I might think of Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest player to ever lace up basketball shoes, but whose tenure as general manager of the Washington Wizards was less than successful.

But today I heard the message from a young Asian-American woman who was discussing on-the-job training. As part of our efforts to improve the infrastructure of our facility, we’re holding round-robin discussions with four groups of employees who have been on the job for less than six months. We want to know what went right in their training…and what went wrong.

So we’re holding four sessions (across our four shifts–clever, huh!?) with our new employees, and a couple of sessions with their trainers. We’re hoping to pull the best practices together.

The quote above came about halfway through the first session, when one young woman noted that even though her trainer had been with the company for over 20 years, she really was not successful in explaining the job, in mentoring her trainee. Just because she knew how to do the job well, that didn’t mean she knew how to demonstrate it well.

Among the other comments gleaned from this first session:

• The trainer needs to level-set the training to the needs of the trainee. One young man had been with the company in earlier years, was returning to his old job, with the same supervisor, but was made to again undergo training for something in which he was already proficient, while another new employee was bombarded with  acronyms and terminology for which she was not ready.
• One operator who has been with the company for over four months still isn’t sure what her job is…she knows how to push the buttons, but has no idea what the machine actually does, or where her process fits in the overall scheme of the manufacturing activity.
• The folks in our meeting had been hoping for an opportunity to discuss their training experience. Had we not invited them to do so, they would have (corerctly) assumend we didn’t care.

So over the next several weeks we’ll continue these sessions — six in all.

I’ll keep you posted.