Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time–twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

This assumes, of course, that the training accurately address what students need to know to do their jobs better. This isn’t always so–particularly with respect to the “canned courses” taught by someone from outside. For training to be effective, it has to be closely tied to how things are actually done in your organization.

– Andy S. Grove, High Output Management

Things have been going more smoothly at Barrel than I can ever remember. Sure, we have our occasional fire drills and challenges with clients, employees, and contractors, but overall, there’s a degree of stability, accountability, and consistency that feels… great. The more I think about why we’re enjoying such a period, the more I believe that training has a lot to do with it.

At Barrel, training happens in a number of ways. Each discipline has a lead who owns training for that group and dedicates time each week to ensuring that learning happens. Sei-Wook, Lucas, and Wes have done an amazing job in making sure our Project Management, Design, and Development teams, respectively, are constantly learning new things, reflecting on mistakes/difficulties and turning them into lessons, and building processes to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.

In my case, I oversee our Growth Marketing team. We meet for 90 minutes every Thursday. I typically use that time to introduce new topics in areas such as email marketing, analytics, site optimization, or paid media. Many of these sessions include a great deal of drawing on the whiteboard and use of real client data to illustrate examples. Some sessions are devoted to collaborative problem-solving, where we tackle an especially challenging task together as a group while I also play the role of instructor who asks questions and nudges the students to making the right decisions on their own. I’ve seen over time the impact that training has had on our Growth Marketing team: they’ve grown more comfortable and confident in talking about various topics related to our discipline; they’ve become technically more proficient and adept at getting tasks done; and they’ve started to ask better questions that lead to better outcomes. Outside of my discipline, I’ve seen similar impact across the entire company as we’ve kept up our training.

My only regret is that I haven’t been as consistent in devoting my time to planning and giving full attention to these training sessions. There have been periods of intense training and then, in busy times, some lazier last-second planning that haven’t been as fruitful. This is why I thought it would be good to excerpt Andy Grove’s thoughts on training above. It is indeed one of the highest-leverage activities I can engage in, and something I need to be reminded of every now and then.

Other ways that training happens at Barrel include:

• Peer-to-peer training, where co-workers within a discipline or across different disciplines, help each other learn new skills and processes. As managers, we try to encourage as many opportunities for this to happen as possible, often involving different team members in new employee onboarding or having team members present learning topics to each other.
• External experts, where we bring in someone from outside the company to share their knowledge and to help us better understand topics that are less familiar to us. These engagements require investment and can get pricey, but for the right topics that are directly relevant to our client work, they can be very helpful. In certain cases, the expert may actually just confirm what we already know and have figured out on our own–instead, they help us validate and feel more confident about our abilities.

I think what’s been different recently than in the past is that training as an activity feels a lot more concerted and constant. Sei-Wook and I reflected on how we’ve come around to investing more of our time in the training of our team, whereas in the past, we may have hoped to hire for certain skills and assumed that merely bringing in someone would solve our issues. When I look back on a post written 3 years ago, I can see that I didn’t quite grasp the importance of training, just mentioning it once in passing. To truly build capacity within an organization, I believe what’s required is a commitment to training and real time and resources spent by the management team to foster a culture of continuous learning and growth. It’s not something that we do when client work is slow and people have time on their hands. Instead, it’s a built-in habit that gets reinforced during the weekly discipline team meetings, check-ins with various account teams, and in one-on-one discussions with team members. Any and all problems that come up having to do with execution, project management, and clients’ expectations have clear channels that flow into action. Our weekly meeting among the Partners serves as a very effective forum where we surface client and employee issues and quickly generate To Do’s that make their way into training sessions and new documentation for our processes. Seeing how we operate, our employees have become a lot more comfortable bringing up their observations and requesting that we address issues that they feel are problematic or could use improvement. Every week, there’s potential for everyone on the team to further their training and to become more effective at what they do. To see this in action has been very rewarding. Of course, the work continues and this week is yet another opportunity.