Developing Your Team With Learning, Training, and Education

It's easy for teams to get so bogged down in the day-in, day-out of necessary tasks that they can't look forward to the future. Of course, monotony of this sort is a key contributor to low morale, motivation, and retention. It also doesn't bode well for teams and companies that need to stay on their toes and peer ahead in an ever-changing industry.

The assumption that training and education should occur only for new hires is what separates successful companies from mediocre ones. The truth is, people need training, opportunities to learn and grow, and support throughout their careers.

In this article, we'll explore how developing your team members can benefit individual employees, your team, and your company. We'll also outline the actionable steps to determining the best ways to foster development over time.

The Benefits of Developing Your Team Members

Utilizing learning, training, and education to help your team develop can provide a long list of benefits for all parties involved: your individual employees, the team as a whole, and the company at large.

You'll find that investing in developing your team members helps unlock individual and collaborative creativity. It also supports a more goal-oriented outlook, boosts camaraderie, and builds community.

Beyond that, team development can improve employee retention, as people are more likely to stand by a company that invests in their growth and gives them space to think creatively and critically. Given that it's significantly more expensive to hire a new employee than to retain one, this is a compelling argument in its own right.

Developing team members can also mean managers delegate increasingly complex tasks to their direct reports, freeing up more time for their most essential duties. It can even allow them to take on additional value-adding projects. Employees also benefit as their responsibilities grow over time. This can help them feel valued and appreciated, improve morale, and boost retention.

Finally, developing your team members is also an essential part of planning for the future. There will always be some turnover in the office, and one day some of your most valuable employees will retire or move on to other opportunities. By investing in team development through learning, training, and education, you can identify high performers for succession planning and cross-train employees to cover for one another when necessary. This helps maintain normal workflow.

How to Establish the Training Needs of Your Team

Perhaps the trickiest part of helping your team develop is figuring out where to start. The first thing you will want to do is identify your team's developmental needs. Start holding conversations with each team member about development, observe them performing their roles, and review and update their job descriptions individually.

Though this might sound simple, the information you can gain from these tasks is impressive. You can hone in on the essential aspects of each team member's role and discover skill and knowledge gaps that can be addressed. As you continue collecting data, you'll likely notice a glaring performance issue affecting the entire team. That can help you identify the best starting point for your team development program.

If your team doesn't have a performance management system already in place, this process can be particularly useful. It can be difficult at first to identify weaknesses and improve performance, as it may come across as critical of your team's competence. However, you can frame the entire initiative as a positive opportunity for everyone to develop and grow together as a team.

Determining where the best places to begin are when it comes to team development doesn't have to end with your employees, either. There is always room to improve, no matter one's competence or career level. Managers can also benefit from appraising themselves and identifying potential areas for improvement.

Selecting Training Methods That Meet Your Goals

There are many different training methods you can choose from. The right one will depend on the skills you're trying to improve, the knowledge you're working to build as a team, and your team's culture.

For example, you might find that on-the-job training is highly suitable for improving literacy with a recently introduced software program. On the other hand, active training is often a better choice when you want to improve collaboration and teamwork skills. Most managers will find that their teams are best suited to a combination of different training methods.

One popular model for creating training programs is known as the 70:20:10 model. It utilizes the following rule of thumb to best help teams develop:

• 70% of learning occurs through experience
• 20% of learning occurs through conversation with others
• 10% of learning occurs through traditional training methods

It's worth noting that just because traditional training methods only take up 10% of the proposed training ratio, this doesn't mean that you can skip them altogether. Instead, they serve as the foundation on which the other steps stand.

Essentially, people need the opportunity to learn the new skills they are working to acquire through traditional training methods. From there, they can answer questions and expand their knowledge base by communicating with more experienced team members and managers. Finally, they can hone their skills through practical experience.

For more information about selecting and designing training programs, take a look at our recent posts about creating and allocating a training budget, keeping employees engaged and motivated during training, and collecting employee feedback during and after training.

How Communication Factors Into Team Development

Taking steps for developing your team members with learning, training, and education is excellent, but your success will ultimately rely on one essential component of the process: communication.

Improving the lines of communication between management and employees can have a remarkably positive effect on team development over time. You might find that having one-on-one conversations with each team member in a relaxed way does wonders for growth and progress over time. It offers space for issues to be identified and addressed, and for new strengths to be discovered.

Is it time for you to learn more about your communication style? Do you believe your management team would benefit from assessing the methods they typically use to communicate with their teams? If so, make sure you check out our list of the top communication style assessment tools.

Strengthening Your Team Through Effective Delegation

It can always be nerve-wracking to hand over responsibility to other people for tasks and projects you have historically handled on your own. The reality is, though, that there is only so much one person can do. Effective delegation gives managers more space to focus on what is most important while also letting employees have the opportunity to gain experience and learn new skills.

If you feel that this is an area that you could explore with your team, the first step is to list the most important tasks that you know your team has the potential to perform successfully. Prioritize them in order of importance, and start doling them out from the bottom up. This way, you can actively track the success and progress of team members and start working your way up to delegating higher priority tasks as they gain experience and prove their capabilities.

When handing out new tasks for the first time, you'll want to manage the process carefully. At the beginning, ensure you provide all necessary resources, guidance, and support so each team member has what they need to succeed. If individuals don't feel they have what is required to complete a task, they may be reluctant to sign on for new tasks down the road.

Delegating not only gives team members the opportunity to learn new skills and grow in their roles and responsibilities. It also gives managers space to find new ways to add value through their work.

Utilizing Team-Building Activities for Learning and Education

There are countless skills your team could benefit from improving, but not all of them are best learned from a book. For example, you can read about the importance of teamwork all day long. Ultimately, the best way for employees to learn to work together effectively and fluidly is through practice.

That is where team-building activities come in. Not only are they a lot of fun for employees and managers alike, providing a welcome break from regular routines, but they also can be highly effective at helping you meet your training objective.

That being said, you don't want to use any old team-building activity. Instead, it's essential that you identify the challenges you want to overcome and carefully select the exercise based on these goals.

Team-building exercises come in all shapes and sizes. Some are best suited for developing leadership or strengthening problem-solving. Others encourage creativity or help build a sense of community.

Identifying and Managing High-Performers

One of the things that will quickly become clear when you start implementing a team development plan is that some of your employees have skills, knowledge, and potential that were previously unrecognized. You'll find that some of your employees have specific talents that could be further developed with the proper attention, benefiting them professionally and personally, as well as their ability to contribute to the team.

Through the information you gain from these training and development programs, you can also start designing talent development strategies and programs to help your company meet and exceed its goals.

This is also an essential aspect of team development, as it can be used in succession planning. Great managers are always thinking a few steps ahead, and having a plan to ensure that the highest-performing team members can pass on their knowledge, skills, and experience to others before they say goodbye will help make the transition much easier and smoother.

It can also be beneficial to cross-train team members so they are well-versed in their co-workers' tasks and responsibilities. This is particularly important if each team member is working on a highly specialized set of tasks, as you could find that someone simply taking a sick day throws everything out of whack. Cross-training allows your employees to step up to the plate when a colleague isn't available and can also be a useful tool for building relationships, fostering community, and building trust.

Development for Team Leaders

It's often said that a team is only as good as its leader. No matter how incredible your management team is, the best leaders always make room to recognize that there is infinite room to grow and progress.

One of the first steps in improving one's leadership skills is to cultivate self-awareness of one's leadership style. That can help them identify their strengths and weaknesses and create a list of areas where managers can focus their learning efforts.

If you're interested in improving your leadership skills or those of your management team, you'll want to turn your attention to HRDQ's best-selling What's My Leadership Style management development tool, leadership style assessment, and training workshop.

By helping participants to quickly and accurately discover their preference for one of the primary behavioral patterns, managers can gain valuable insight into their current leadership style, help create a practical mental framework, and learn to capitalize on style strengths. Additionally, they can learn effective methods for minimizing style trouble spots and gain insight into how to tailor their leadership style to the circumstances or the individual.

This is an excellent opportunity both as a stand-alone training instrument and part of a more comprehensive program. You'll find that this leadership style assessment can be effective and valuable across a wide variety of topics, including leadership, management, and supervisory skills training programs.

If you're looking for help with developing your team members across your entire organization, take a look at our Reproducible Training Library. This library offers over 90 customizable courses that you can download and deliver today. Simply purchase the license that fits your organization size, and get started.

The Reproducible Training Library is unique in that all materials come unlocked – meaning you can customize all the materials with your branding, add it to other training modules, and adjust however you need to fit the training needs of your organization. With the Reproducible Training Library, developing your team members has never been easier.

Do you have any questions about anything we mentioned in this article? If so, be sure to drop us a comment down below, and we'll get back to you within a day or two! We always do our best to ensure every comment receives a timely reply, and we'd be more than happy to assist you however we can.