When you are enabling your talent on a new skill, they may express a lack of execution confidence. They may use words like “I’m confused about…” or “I don’t know about…” Your temptation might be to ask, “why didn’t you ask more questions in the training,” but that might be premature.
Principle: slow and methodical practice yields greater long-run returns.
I studied piano in college — music education and music composition. At a collegiate level, music students are taught that slow and methodical practice will lead to faster and more accurate execution. In the music world, near-perfect execution is the bar.
To create a practice similar to how a music student would practice, consider these steps.
Before training:
- Identify the outcome/output required of the process being trained.
- Identify why that outcome is important.
- Break the process down into bite-sized fragments.
- Identify a catchy metaphor that simplifies the process. “It’s like baking an apple pie,” or “it’s like sky diving,” or anything that gives the trainee a framework to understand the process.
Training:
- Explain the outcome and why it matters — steps 1 and 2 above.
- Explain the metaphor.
- Teach each step in the process from beginning to end.
- Teach the process from the end back to the beginning.
- Reiterate the metaphor.
- Ask your talent to teach it back to you.
- Look for the gaps in what they teach.
- Practice the gaps.
- Practice the whole process.
Finally, pick real-world low hanging fruit and push your talent out of the nest.
Talent Revolution 