Training #1216

When someone gets it wrong, you may want to blame them, but upgraded thinking first asks, "Did I train them?" Here's the story.

Pal's Sudden Service is a small burger chain in Tennessee, drive-through only, mostly part-time workers, lots of teenagers.

They get your order wrong about once every three thousand six hundred times.

Pal's hires for attitude.

That was message twelve fifteen.

But attitude only gets you in the door.

Skill is a different system.

Before you work a station alone, you train for one hundred and twenty hours.

Then you get certified, not in the job, but in each station: grill, fries, shakes, window, one at a time, and it never stops.

Every shift at every store, a computer picks a few names at random for a surprise test on their station.

You don't know when your name will come up.

The standard is one hundred percent competence.

Fail the check, and you get retrained before doing that job again.

Sounds harsh, but here's why it isn't.

Long-time CEO Tom Crosby put it this way: "People go out of calibration just like machines do." In message number nine fifty-six, I told you that you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training.

Crosby adds the catch.

Your level of training doesn't hold still.

People drift.

When a machine drifts, you don't yell at it, you recalibrate it.

Pal's applies this understanding to its people.

Crosby's rule is, if people aren't doing something right, that's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the training.

So the test isn't a punishment, it's a diagnostic.

The leaders live by it too.

Pal's executives spend about ten percent of their time teaching.

Every day they pick one subject and one person to teach it to.

When someone gets it wrong, you may want to blame them, but upgraded thinking first asks, "Did I train them?" Here's the story.

Pal's Sudden Service is a small burger chain in Tennessee, drive-through only, mostly part-time workers, lots of teenagers.

They get your order wrong about once every three thousand six hundred times.

Pal's hires for attitude.

That was message twelve fifteen.

But attitude only gets you in the door.

Skill is a different system.

Before you work a station alone, you train for one hundred and twenty hours.

Then you get certified, not in the job, but in each station: grill, fries, shakes, window, one at a time, and it never stops.

Every shift at every store, a computer picks a few names at random for a surprise test on their station.

You don't know when your name will come up.

The standard is one hundred percent competence.

Fail the check, and you get retrained before doing that job again.

Sounds harsh, but here's why it isn't.

Long-time CEO Tom Crosby put it this way: "People go out of calibration just like machines do." In message number nine fifty-six, I told you that you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training.

Crosby adds the catch.

Your level of training doesn't hold still.

People drift.

When a machine drifts, you don't yell at it, you recalibrate it.

Pal's applies this understanding to its people.

Crosby's rule is, if people aren't doing something right, that's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the training.

So the test isn't a punishment, it's a diagnostic.

The leaders live by it too.

Pal's executives spend about ten percent of their time teaching.

Every day they pick one subject and one person to teach it to.