How Many Times Do You Have to Tell Someone Before Training Is No Longer the Answer?

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The Challenge

Early in my career, I was training a young field engineer on one of my projects. Every morning around 6:30 AM, I would meet with my foremen and talk through the day. What changed overnight, where the crews were going, what problems we were expecting, and what needed our attention before everyone got moving.

This engineer would consistently walk into the trailer at exactly 7:00 AM and ask me what changed and what he needed to know. For the first few days, I gave him the recap, but each time I warned him that this was not how the job worked. If he wanted to become a manager, he needed to understand that a manager's day started before the crews were already moving. He needed to be part of those early conversations, not depend on someone else to catch him up afterward.

But the next morning he would walk in at 7:00 AM again. Eventually, I stopped giving him the recap. I figured that would send a pretty clear message. If you want to know what is happening, get here when we are discussing it.

He never got the message.

The Impact

At the time, I thought I was dealing with a training problem. I kept thinking that eventually he would understand what I was trying to teach him and change his behavior. Instead, the project kept moving while he started every day behind everyone else.

That created a bigger problem. The foremen knew what was happening, I knew what was happening, and the crews were already working. Meanwhile, the person I was supposed to be developing into a manager did not have enough information to really manage anything. He eventually became almost dead weight to me during the day because somebody constantly had to fill the gaps created by what he had missed that morning.

This is where one employee's behavior starts becoming a company problem. Someone else picks up the slack. Managers spend time chasing and repeating themselves. Competent employees watch someone else operate below the standard. Eventually, leadership can spend more time trying to save one employee than developing the people who actually want to grow.

Your only as strong as your weakest link.

The Shift

My boss eventually told me to let him go. I resisted because I still believed I could get through to him. My boss had enough experience to recognize something I had not learned yet.

You can’t train willingness into someone.

That lesson has stayed with me throughout my career. I strongly believe in developing people, and a large part of what I do today is helping contractors train and develop their employees. But training cannot become an excuse for leadership to avoid making a difficult personnel decision.

The hard part is determining when that point has actually been reached. Is this employee struggling because nobody properly trained them? Are expectations unclear? Is their manager part of the problem? Does the company have an accountability issue? Or has this person been given the direction, support, and opportunity necessary to succeed and simply refuses to change?

Those problems can look almost identical until you start digging into them. But they require completely different decisions. The bigger leadership challenge is knowing when someone needs more development, when the company itself is contributing to the problem, and when continuing to invest in that person is actually hurting the rest of the team.

The Closing

Looking back, the biggest lesson was not that I should have fired that engineer faster. It was that I should have recognized what I was dealing with faster.

Strong companies should invest heavily in their people, but that does not mean investing indefinitely in every person. Some employees need clearer expectations. Some need better training. Some need stronger accountability. Some may simply be sitting in the wrong seat. And occasionally, someone needs to be rotated out of the company.

The challenge for leadership is knowing the difference before months or years go by.

When you get that decision right, you are doing more than dealing with one employee. You are protecting your managers' time, your company's standards, and the people who actually want the opportunity to grow.

Gerard Aliberti
Pro-Accel, Owner

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Ways We Can Work Together

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