Speaker 1: Happy Friday, Blackboarders. Last week we talked about some of the different levels of learning, how to understand for yourself or for a team member objectively whether or not they were an expert or an imposter or felt like an imposter in a particular skill. This week I want to take that and apply that to a broader business use. This is one of the most common projects that I do with my mid-sized business clients where we actually build out a training program for the business over the year and to do that we need to start with a training needs analysis. We need to do a couple of things to make that work but it all comes back to having a clear, objective and consistent measure up to the level of expertise that the individuals within that business have. And as a quick refresh of last week, with any skill we start as unconsciously incompetent. We're useless, we don't even know it. We get at some point the inspiration to understand that skill. We become consciously incompetent. We're still useless but now we understand it and then we go into the design process. We get educated, we learn more, we piece it all together and now we understand how to do that skill. We become consciously competent and as we execute that over time we move to a point where we're unconsciously competent, where we can do that skill and we don't even need to actively think about it anymore. So when I go into a business I share the levels, the framework, the conversation we had last week but then we need to define specifically for that business what are the different skills, the different areas that the business may need training in. Now I've got for example a template of 32 different business skills that I believe business owners with growing businesses need to understand at least down to level a design or an execution point. But for your business you're probably going to want to include some technical skills. At Business Depot for example we want to make sure that the team that need some of the specific accounting, the tax skills, have those levels of expertise. The people who need the advisory, the business coaching expertise, get that down to depth. So the second thing you need having defined these layers is work out what are all of those specific skills. Now I always say to clients do this to the level of detail that feels right for you. As a generalisation I find most businesses come up with somewhere between 15 and 25 skills that they want to assess their team in. Now some of those are quite big. You might break something like accounting down into a whole lot of different areas and the reality is most of your training and most of the time spent delivering the work from your team is going to be in that skill. But something equally important for the running of your business might be billing, filing, recording hours. Training in that is going to take a lot less effort but it's just as important a skill to have here. Whether you choose to break down or categorise is up to you and what feels right for your business. Having defined those different headings you can then go through and I recommend doing this as a team. Getting the team to colour it in and I use a couple of different colours. Ask yourselves, am I actually at that level? When it comes to billing, getting invoices out the door, do I understand why that's important? Am I inspired enough to want to know that skill? Do I know what's involved? Have I been educated? Am I aware of the process? And if pressed, could I write down what that process is? And you'll see I start to colour these in and I call these balloons. It's just another way of engaging the team, of interesting and you show that the more green balloons you have the more they're going to be able to lift their career and the more they're going to be able to lift the business. And so if you do this across the business you'll find that different team members have different skills. Indeed, you don't necessarily want everyone in the business having every skill at an unconsciously competent level. It may be that you're always bringing in new people, new to the industry or graduates into your business. They're often going to have a lot of red balloons, areas of expertise that they don't understand. And one thing you can do when you see people colouring in a whole heap of green, assuming you sense check it in there, you actually believe that they are executing that skill well, is you can go these are now the people that I want to run the training program. They're the ones I want to train the people who need to develop their skills. It's a way of handing over some of the responsibility from you while also enhancing the skills and capability of those team members. Because if you've ever taught somebody to drive, for example, you know that that requires a very different level of skill than actually just driving yourself. Lastly, I get all of the individual team members to identify either two or three, depending on how many you've got, areas where they want some specific skills training. Now when you look at this example, you might think, well this person has three red balloons here, they need skills and training in that area. But they might sit there and go well that's an area of the business, that's tax accounting that I'm not interested in at this point, I don't need to know about for years. What I actually want to do is really focus on developing those skills. So getting the team to identify for themselves the training they want, then allows you to go to the fourth step in the process. So one, define, two, list out, three, get the team to complete this, and four is then putting together a training program where you've got a whole heap of team members who've all indicated the same area. That tells you that that training in that area is a priority for your business. Where you've got maybe only one or two people who've said that that's important to them, then you can start to devolve responsibility. Maybe there's an external training course that they could go on to. Perhaps that's some self-paced learning that they need to do. Or at the very least, as you map out your twelve month training plan, to turn as many of those balloons from red to green as you possibly can, you can say, I understand that you want to develop that skill, but holistically, when I look at the training needs of the business, that's just not a priority this year. Remember, great strategy is as much about what you say no to, as it is what you say yes to. And when you run a process like this that involves the team, that has some objective measurements, and has a bit of fun and colour, that you've got the team on board for the training program you put out there, and the training program you put out there will be so much easier to implement.