If they don’t know how, that’s on you.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1216 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Ernie Scalabrin.
Here’s the upgrade:
When someone gets it wrong, you may want to blame them, but upgraded thinking first asks, “Did I train them?”
Here’s the story:
Pal’s Sudden Service is a small burger chain in Tennessee. Drive-thru only. Mostly part-time workers. Lots of teenagers. They get your order wrong about once every 3,600 times. Pal’s hires for attitude. That was message 1215. But attitude only gets you in the door. Skill is a different system.
Before you work a station alone, you train for 120 hours. Then you get certified, not in “the job,” but in each station. Grill. Fries. Shakes. Window. One at a time. And it never stops. Every shift, at every store, a computer picks a few names at random for a surprise test on their station. You don’t know when your name will come up. The standard is 100 percent competence. Fail the check, and you get retrained before doing that job again. Sounds harsh. Here’s why it isn’t.
Longtime CEO Thom Crosby put it this way: “People go out of calibration just like machines do.” In message number 956, I told you that you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training. Crosby adds the catch. Your level of training doesn’t hold still. People drift. When a machine drifts, you don’t yell at it. You recalibrate it. Pal’s applies this understanding to its people too.
Crosby’s rule is: “If people aren’t doing something right, that’s not a problem with them, it’s a problem with the training.” So the test isn’t a punishment. It’s a diagnostic. The leaders live by it too. Pal’s executives spend about ten percent of their time teaching. Every day, they pick one subject and one person to teach it to. The whole place is a classroom that happens to sell burgers.
John Wooden ran his program the same way. In message number 1140 I told you how the greatest coach in college basketball spent his first practice teaching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar how to put on his socks. Great leaders are never above teaching the basics. A willingness problem and a training problem aren’t the same thing. If someone doesn’t know how, the leader’s first question should be, “Have I taught them?”
In message number 1191, I told you you’re not bad at something, you’re just untrained. Today, flip it around. When someone around you isn’t doing something the way you think they should, whose job is it to train them? Most of us skip that question. We trained them once, three years ago. When they drift, we call it a character problem. Pal’s assumes competence drifts by default. So they never stop teaching.
You’re a leader somewhere. At work. At home. On a team. Who around you is out of calibration? Pick one subject. Pick one person. Teach it today. The better story to tell yourself is, “I can’t get mad if they don’t know how if I haven’t taught them yet.”
Tell me a story of the best training you ever had to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “When would be a good time for you to teach me the thing you’re best at?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.
