There are many roles a business leader must play. One very important role is the role of "Trainer". At every level in every organization there are goals to be met and processes to complete. You could say every step that is taken to reach every goal requires a certain behavior or set of behaviors. To put this simply, an organization has to do a lot of the right things at the right time to be successful. This means each person has to do enough right things in the right timeframe. This requires a trainer at every level.
Someone has to figure out what needs to get done to achieve every step along the way. Someone has to figure out how to teach people to recognize when to do what. And someone has to train people how to do each thing and how to know when it is done right. So the business leader must work as a trainer at a very personal and individual level. At the same time a business leader is the trainer of an entire organization. In order to approach an organization in a manageable manner, you should see your organization as a living, breathing, feeling thing that has tendencies, direction, momentum, drives, fears and motivations.
Wherever you are in the chain of command or in the network of talented individuals, you are responsible for being the trainer of the people who you depend on. This includes the people who report to you, the people you report to and the people you collaborate with. It is not always easy to train people, is it?
For some reason, I have always been a trainer. There was a time I was called "Tron the Trainer". My early interest in life was music. I was so interested in pursuing music that my guitar teacher began giving me his youngest and most inexperienced students to teach. I was a freshman in High School who was a trainer of new musicians. This situation worked out great for everyone. I knew enough about training beginning guitar players, because my teacher had given me a good system to work with. I taught a group of songs that involved certain chord changes, rhythms, strums, figure picking patterns and solo lines that were designed to cover all the basics. By the time the students started getting so good that I was no longer qualified to take them to the next level, my teacher took over their lessons. This was a great arrangement. My teacher got to take over a steady stream of students who were already committed and playing at an intermediate level. This allowed him to have some fun and make some great progress with his students. I got to make a great income as a guitar teacher. Most of my friends were working as stock boys and grocery delivery boys making next to nothing. My students got some great basic training, because I was motivated to be a great trainer of musicians and build my little music business.
A year or so later I met my brother's neighbor who was a trainer of protection dogs and police dogs. I had always been fascinated by German Shepherds. I guess Rin Tin Tin had made a mark on me as a child. I had also seen a working German Shepherd dog trial in East Germany on a family vacation when I was 11 or 12. I was mesmerized. I know; who takes their family to communist East Germany for a family vacation? Well the Jordheims would. My mom had grown up in the area that became East Germany and we went back to see old friends and the old family home. This is a whole other story for another time.
Anyway I know wanted to become a dog trainer. And that's what I did. I found anyone who could teach me. It was a good time for my pursuit. There were many German Shepherd enthusiasts trying to establish the German working dog sport called Schutzhund in the U.S. Local dog clubs would bring over trainers and trial judges from Germany for seminars and working dog tests. I went to every one I could. I soon realized I needed to speak German to get the real story from the experts, because many of the translators who I encountered did not know dogs or dog training and much was lost in the translation. I knew a little bit of German from my mother and got serious about it. I studied it in evening courses and made it my minor in college. I traveled to Germany to seek out the experts I had met and met many more. It wasn't long before I spoke and understood German well enough to pass for a native. I became a favored apprentice to a few old masters and became the translator of choice f or dog clubs in the U.S. who wanted to bring over the old masters and the new innovators of dog training from Germany for seminars. I had a blast.
At the same time I became sought after as a trainer in my own right. I trained many people how to train their dogs and helped many dog clubs develop top notch training programs. I helped people with many, many breeds of dogs gain Shutzhund titles and I was on the training team of the 1981 US National Schutzhund Champion. I was selected as the Team Captain to lead the U.S. team at the 1982 European Schutzhund Championship in Salzburg, Austria. We had a very respectable finish. I had a great time.
As you know, one thing leads to another and before long I was using my trainer skills in the world of B to B sales. I had taken a job with the Great Bear Spring Water company in New York City after college and quickly learned some great selling systems and methods from my supervisors and co-workers. Since I thought like a trainer, I revamped the system and ultimately taught my system to others in the company. We had great successes with it. Ask the people at Beatrice and KKR. These were two companies that profited greatly from our work.
I later found a use for my trainer skills with Culligan Bottled Water. I saw that the local Culligan dealer in my adopted home town of Columbia, MO had a fledgling operation at a time when the demand for five gallon bottled water service was about to take off in smaller markets and "outstate" regions. I showed how my sales system worked and boosted their business. I acted as trainer for the route drivers, the sales rep I hired and for the entire organization as we created the best bottled water franchise in the whole Culligan system. We had the highest concentration of bottle cooler rentals per capita than any dealer in the 900 plus dealer network.
Because of this success, other bottled water companies looked to me to help as their trainer. I shared my system and they saw their businesses boom, too. The success of the bottled water division was one of the big reasons that Culligan was able to sell at such a respectable multiple when The Vivendi Group took over the company.
One of the threads you notice in this story of "Tron the Trainer" is the value that good training brings. This is particularly true when the training involves selling better, creating friendlier customer service models and creating profitable enterprises. None of these things happen without a good eye for training, a good system for training, people who are trainable and people who can be the trainer.
So how do you master the training aspect? First of all, it doesn't matter whether your training subject is a single individual, a department or an entire corporation. Allow me to use dog training as an analogy. How do you think you get a dog to jump over a hurdle, pick up an object, bring it back to its handler and sit in front to present the object?
First your dog has to have the right temperament. In this sense, Temperament is a combination of brightness, courage, handle-ability, spirit and drive. If your dog has no desire to work or to work with a handler, you can forget the whole enterprise. If your dog is too sensitive to take a correction or to handle frustration, you can also forget it. If your dog cannot get over and forget a bad experience, forget it. If your dog doesn't like to carry things or chase things, again you can forget it. My point here is that you have to have the right dog for the exercise you are teaching, or make sure you are teaching an appropriate exercise for what suits the dog's temperament.
OK. Let's assume your dog likes you and you like it. It likes to chase and carry toys. It likes to interact with you and forgets bad experiences. For example, the other day you accidentally stepped on its toe with all your weight and made it yelp. Half an hour later you stepped on its toe by accident again, but this time with very little weight and the dog did not even react.
First you have to teach the components of the exercise. This exercise involves:
1. Sit by your side and stay in spite of interesting distractions happening 2. chase an object 3. jump over an obstacle going away from you 4. pick up an object without playing with it or rolling it around in its mouth 5. bring the object back to you quickly 6. jump over an obstacle coming back to you 7. sit in front of you when you call it to you 8. sit in front of you holding an object calmly 9. releasing the object when you tell it 10. returning to a "ready position", sitting at your side and staying
If you think you can just toss out an object and say "fetch it" and the whole thing just happens, you need to stop drinking so much alcohol on your lunch break.
Each one of these components has to be taught as a separate exercise. It has to be repeated and refined. It has to be taught correctly and consistently. It has to be exactly clear to the dog how and when to do each component. This can take months to get the components working well. Then you have to begin to mix components so the mixture flows well in the dog's brain. The connections have to be clear and you have to help the dog every step of the way. You are giving corrections and making adjustments. You are giving encouragement and trying to keep it fun. You have to celebrate the small successes. You have to know when to stop training and relax. You have to know when to play.
Some days you work on tying all the pieces together. Some days you work on individual components trying to perfect them. You have to recognize when your dog is being lazy and either motivate it or force it into action. You have to recognize when you are being a poor dog handler and giving mixed signals, weak cues and confusing body language. You have to know when you just need to take a day off and do something else, or do nothing.
You need to spend a lot of time thinking about training and only a short time doing actual training. You need to examine every training session and see what you can learn from it.
You also need to set up the conditions under which the training has to take place. Then you have to train under those conditions. The result is something like this: when you walk your dog out onto a grassy area and have it sit 10 or 15 feet back from a hurdle, the dog knows exactly what is coming. It sits by your side until you say "Fetch" and then it runs through the whole routine. It looks easy to the spectators. All they see is the whole picture. They see it in one fleeting motion and think they can duplicate it.
This is why well run businesses are hard to duplicate by competitors. This is also why people who are sloppy and lazy dog trainers get terrible scores when trial day comes. They thought it would be easy, but in the end the dog was only confused and frustrated. So the dog tips the hurdle going over, plays with the object before picking it up, goes around the hurdle coming back to its handler and then drops the object at the handler's feet and starts sniffing the grass. Which kind of organization would you prefer?
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