Does Your CU Stink? Look at Your Training

Dan Garrison, MidWest Financial Credit Union
August 8, 2005

Something stinks around here and it’s making me nauseous. Turns out I'm not the only one: staff is feeling sick, managers are feeling sick, and the board is feeling sick. Worst of all, our members are also starting to feel a little woozy.

There are a number of distinctive smells, some of which are tolerable by themselves. When put together, though, they became an unbearable funk-fest.

Stench 1: Employees make the same mistakes over and over and they’re never able to fix them on their own.

Stench 2: Member complaints are increasing because of problems with their accounts.

Stench 3: Morale is down and employee turnover is up.

Stench 4: We start a lot of new programs but none of them take off like we’d planned.

Stench 5: Staff rarely takes ownership of their responsibilities.

Originally we thought the stink was due to our employees. So we got rid of them and hired new, unstinky employees (at least they didn't stink during the interview) who came in talented and full of enthusiasm. But after awhile they also started stinking. So we got rid of them, too, and hired some newer ones. But eventually these people started stinking as well.

We began sniffing around again and eventually got a whiff of our processes and procedures. There definitely was some funk on them, so we tossed out the old procedures and put in new, un-funky procedures. The stink went away for awhile (well, mostly) but eventually the stink returned with a vengeance.

Finally, it dawned on us (or so we thought): Processes and procedures will stink if they aren’t properly wrapped up in clearly written documentation. So we frantically began documenting every step of our procedures, carefully spelling out exactly what needed to be done to complete a job. The employees would hardly have to think about what they were doing because these written procedures were so clearly spelled out. All they had to do was follow the simple steps.

It was now time to test the air again.

But you guessed it. The stink returned once again, just as bad as ever, and it was starting to look as though we’d never be rid of it. Finally, one of the newer members of the management team asked, “Why haven’t we talked with the staff to see if they know where the stink is coming from?” When we did talk to staff, there were several different answers, but there was one response we kept hearing over and over: “The training around here stinks.”

The light came on. And from that point forward our sniffing became much more productive. So far we’ve detected the following five sources of the stench, but there may be more:

1. We don’t give training the important status it deserves. Training is one of the most critical success factors for any organization in any industry. Unfortunately, many leaders tend to think of training and hiring as “overhead” because this is how accountants classify them. They end up delegating these “unimportant tasks” to other departments. This frees up the leader’s time to engage in more “important” things, such as networking on the golf course or attending endless (and often useless) meetings.

The human resources (HR) or training department can provide invaluable assistance in the training process, but often can only make an arm’s length assessment of an individual department’s specific training needs. A leader, therefore, needs to be deeply and regularly involved with training, working in conjunction with the HR or training department, to ensure that the right training is conducted in the best way so the people running the operation thoroughly understand their jobs.

2. Training focuses too much on “how” and not enough on “why.”
Typically, we train people how to do a job without addressing:

• Why am I doing this job?
• What end does it serve?
• Who’s affected by this task once it’s completed?
• Who and what are affected if it isn’t done correctly?

Employees who can answer these types of questions not only will make fewer mistakes, they’ll be better able to correct problems that do occur. Furthermore, they’ll be better able to streamline processes and make recommendations for improving how things are done.

3. We don’t train properly and thoroughly. The typical reason for this is, “We don’t have the time.” You don’t have the time to not train properly. The long-term benefits of good training far outweigh the short-term costs.

Think of it this way. How much time do you or your staff spend correcting mistakes or responding to crises that could have been avoided if the person responsible for the error understood his or her job in the first place? An ounce of prevention prevents a pound of cure.

4. Sales training focuses too much on tricks and techniques without trying to motivate and inspire. The following quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is one of my favorites: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the sea.”

This isn’t to downplay the importance of teaching process steps or techniques, but that alone won’t help staff achieve performance excellence. Effective training, along with its counterpart, coaching, needs to motivate and inspire people to higher levels of performance and point the way to more meaningful and fulfilling work.

Please note that for training of this sort to be truly effective, you need to have employees that are responsive to it. This is where quality hiring comes into play. If you’re from the “let’s get a warm body in here as quickly as possible” school of hiring, this type of training will do little good.

5. The primary arena for training too often is a group setting. One-on-one training sessions usually involve only showing a trainee the processes necessary to complete a task. Rarely is any significant time spent explaining the “whys” behind a particular process or ensuring an understanding of the impact if the process isn’t done correctly.

In-depth training often is relegated to the training room. The problem is that in-depth training should result in a lot of questions so trainees can understand what’s being taught. But in group training sessions many employees, especially newer ones, tend to shy away from asking too many questions for fear of looking stupid to the instructor, their peers, or to their boss (all of whom may be present in the training room).

However, in a proper one-on-one training environment, the trainee is more likely to feel comfortable asking questions, even so-called “stupid” questions. This does, however, require a high level of trust between trainer and trainee, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

The Fumigation Begins

Training, we discovered, acts like a preservative in an organization. You can hire great people, have awesome products, and have top notch written procedures, but without good training, all of those things eventually will start spoiling.

We’ve started the fumigation process and the smell is going away. We’ve also begun revamping our training program to make sure things stay fresh, but there’s still some work to do. But I’m also starting to get a whiff of another noxious aroma and it seems to be coming from our hiring practices.

Dan Garri son is vice president of accounting for MidWest Financial Credit Union in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Contact him at 734-222-8556. This story was originally published in Credit Union Magazine at www.creditunionmagazine.com and is reprinted with permission.