Teach One

I refuse to play the “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me” game but I’ll give you one. That one is that I was trained as a teacher. I know – pretty clear career path from high school English to digital media guru.  Nevertheless, no matter what position I’ve held I’ve always felt that teaching was part of my job.  While some argue that the “See One, Do One, Teach One” philosophy is a ridiculous oversimplification in business, I don’t.  I think it’s an obligation.Good business practices aren’t that far from teaching. We were taught that creating effective learning objectives and formulating lesson plans was how we achieved the desired outcomes. Sound like any MBO exercise you’ve ever done?

It was also about making sure that your staff had more than what educators call “knowledge” – which is just rudimentary grasp of facts. It’s striving for “comprehension” – knowing how to use the facts and then “application” – using the facts and comprehension in new ways. There are other, more advanced levels of understanding to push your people towards but I’ve seen very few managers even get to these.  How often does a manager hand out a check list to a new employee? “This is how we do XYZ” or “please fill in the blanks with data to generate the report?”

We all get caught up in each day’s frantic pace and it’s hard to take the time to train your staff.  The fact is that if we can hire and train workers who are adept at problem solving and building innovative solutions, it’s better for your business and better for the workers. They will find their careers advancing faster and to higher levels than those who know a lot but cannot readily apply their knowledge.  That education doesn’t just find its way into their heads – someone has to make that happen.  That would be you!

Whom did you teach today?