Management systems that meet International Standards require that you prove, to varying degrees of stringency, that your people are competent to perform the activities that they undertake within your business.  It seems an obvious requirement, really.  After all, you wouldn't let someone who's never driven a car before loose on the roads in your favourite Ferrari, would you?

And yet many people are promoted to positions of management based on the fact that they have shown themselves to be competent as a craftsman, technician, artisan, etc.  Training in the implementation and maintenance of management systems provides, by default, at least some training in the art of management.

The system that we use for understanding training and its application was formulated by Robert L Jolles and allows you to understand where your trainees are in the training process and to assess the efficacy of the training programme.

For whatever training is being undertaken, trainees fall into one of four categories:

• Unconscious incompetent – the trainee is not competent to perform the activity in question, and is “blissfully unaware” of the fact.  It isn’t their fault; they simply don’t know what they don’t know!

• Concious incompetent – the trainee is still not competent, but he/she is now aware of this.  Their acknowledgement of this state and their willingness to change it is crucial to the success of the training.  If the trainee defines themselves by their lack of knowledge, they wear their ‘ignorance with pride’, then getting them to let go and learn anything useful is going to be the first task.

• Concious competent – having undergone training, the trainee is now competent to perform the task and is aware of what it is that they are supposed to be doing and how.  Ideally, proof of competence is provided by a successful demonstration of skill; the completion of an objective and quantitative proficiency assessment.

• Unconscious competent – the trainee is competent, but now no longer needs to think about what it is that they are doing right.  They can instead concentrate on the ‘why’; why are they performing the process in this way?  Further development in this area leads to thinking about why this is the best way to perform the process and how the process can be improved.

However, the point about this sequence is that it is not , in fact, linear; it is circular.  If you no longer think about what you are doing, then the ‘perfect process’ can morph into an imperfect one by the development of bad habits.

This process is easy to see demonstrated if you just watch how some people drive; one hand on the steering wheel, no use of indicators, exceeding the speed limit, standing on the brake pedal when stationary instead of using the hand brake, etc.  None of us were taught to drive that way.  Some of us know that we have developed 'bad habits', and some of us are ‘blissfully unaware’ that we are doing it.

That is why regular competency assessments should be performed.  If you can catch the deviations from competency before the habits themselves become part of someone's 'standard operating procedure', then you can avoid failures of your systems and save the time it'll take to unlearn the 'bad habits'.

Flintloque offers training services which subscribe to the system outlined above.  What is more, by its nature, this methodology will become part of your core competencies and can be used by those who have been suitably-trained to train the next generation of trainers within your business.