The Path to Excellence: Training and Empowerment

Some of my team members and I were sitting and talking after church yesterday; we were discussing how to “tighten up” the production of our church services. The conversation came down to two main topics: training and empowerment.

Training team members is always an ongoing discussion. First of all, training is necessary. You have to teach new team members how to perform the functions of their position. That should be straight forward, right? Not really, there are two primary models of training that I have used in my life: centralized and de-centralized.

Centralized would be the model where I as the Tech Director train everyone. This creates great consistency, but is very difficult to do when some of the team members have been here longer than me and the team has grown to more than forty members.

The team members who have been here longer than me will learn from me, but they are already shaped by the habits and patterns they learned when they began in the position. Trying to change habits that have had several years to become ingrained is a lesson in patience and quite frankly banging one’s head into a wall repeatedly.

The team size also affects the dynamic of training. While the team is small, it is easier to stay centralized except that I will usually need to fill in an operational position. So I have to create non on the job opportunities for training. As the team grows I have less responsibility in operational positions, but we have so many positions that I cannot obviously train everyone.

De-centralized is the model of team members training new team members. This works well if you choose the trainer carefully. One caveat, there are usually bits of information lost when the Tech Director doesn’t train someone since every generation of trainer forgets something. However, training can be much more on the job with fewer demands on the team’s time outside of services.

I do not have the definitive word on which works best, but I tend to de-centralize at this point in my career; the team is too big and the positions too numerous. I do not feel like I need to train each and every member. Some of my team members have reached greater excellence through service in certain positions than me. They have picked up tips and tricks through practice that I would not necessarily know. There are pros and cons with either model. Regardless of which model you choose, we eventually reach the second topic of conversation, empowerment.

I hit on the idea of empowerment briefly in my post on cross-training. Simply put, if you are a leader and you train someone to perform in a position, you have to let go of controlling that position. In other words, you have to empower them.

Sometimes, empowerment can be implicit. You do not over direct or interfere in a person’s performance. However, sometimes empowerment has to be explicit. You look at someone and say “You know what you are doing, take it away!”

For people who are heavily cross-trained, empowerment can be really hard. You want everyone to perform the same way you would. That will never happen. Even if you trained that person, they will bring their own unique thought process or vision to what they are doing. They cannot do it the same as you would, nor should they. Settling on what is excellent but not perfect (in other words, just the same way as you) is vital.

You cannot build a team without a thought out training plan and/or if you do not empower people to strive for their own brand of excellence.