Shopfloor FOCUS: TRAINING In a retail business 34


everyone has their part to play By Paul Laville, MD, T21 Group


Is ‘training’ one of the most over-used words describing one of the most under-valued services in the CE industry? Back when I started this business one of the first people I pitched to – a retailer I knew from my previous job, a ‘safe bet’ I thought at the time – said to me, “Yeah we really need some training. Don’t think I want to pay for it though. The manufacturers offer it for free.” That response was a bit of a buyer’s game for


sure. We both knew it and after a liquid lunch we laughed it off and struck a deal. After all, it wasn’t manufacturer product training I was offering, but a training programme focused on giving this guy’s business and his staff a more competitive edge by sharpening their selling and customer relationship building skills. Still, it gave me pause enough to consider whether I’d made the right move. I’ve never forgotten that conversation.


However, often the immediate issue is one of mindset, where the people we’re training have the skills but lack the will to apply them. In which case, we need to dig deep and find out why that is. This is where it gets trickier, where the word ‘training’ takes on multiple layered meanings and pulls in lessons from schools other than simply ‘selling’.


Inspiring people to apply themselves, motivating them to adopt a positive mindset and ‘be their best self’ is a huge part of what we bring to our training. But for that to last beyond the training day it needs ‘buy-in’ from both the trainee and the management. If any of those links are broken then it’s going to be difficult to make the training work.


It


stands like a signpost in my head reminding me that whatever training I or any of my team provide, our clients must always understand and see the value that our training brings to their business, their employees and their customers. Sometimes that value takes longer to become visible than we would all like, it depends what the issue is. If it’s just a matter of learning and applying some key skills then it makes itself known relatively quickly. In which case, happy days!


At a shop-floor level the person we’re training just might not care. They’ll sit through the day, they’ll go through the motions, and whatever we do they will not change. Thankfully this is rare. Usually even the most resistant people will pick up on something that works for them and will change their behaviours. More commonly it’s a question of deeply ingrained habits combined with a sort of tunnel vision, where someone has been doing the same thing for so long that they’re unable and unwilling to even consider that they need to change. These people are right


and everyone else is wrong, and the lessons learnt during training can be unpalatable and emotional. But again, most of these people see the light eventually, it’s just a question of being persistent enough to find the triggers that get the synapses firing. The more commonly broken link we encounter is higher up, at Manager level and beyond, and it’s broken because the communication flow from management to the shop floor is dictatorial and non-inclusive, or misjudged and assumptive, chaotic, undisciplined, or (at worst) toxic and fragmented. In this case it’s not the staff who need to change their mindset and behaviours. Here, we’ll do what we need to do with the


staff but we’ll also spend time with the business principals, suggesting restructures and new strategies and ways to go about building them. We’ll try convincing the management to be more inclusive, to involve their staff so that they gain buy-in from the shop floor and we’ll show them what can be gained by doing so. At that point the business can start moving in the right direction. And in the process we’ll get rid of the whole notion of ‘sides’, because in an independent retail business everyone has their value and their part to play. It’s just that sometimes we might need a bit


of ‘training-psychology-inspiration-personality- adjustment-cognisance-and-business- coaching-guidance’ to see that.


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