Empty Desk SuppliesDon’t you detest when that happens?! You go through the hassle of hiring a new person – reviewing an overwhelming pile of resumes, then conducting interviews, half of which are worthless – and you finally make a decision. THEN you spend time on training, and just when you are starting to get your new employee to a point where they can start freeing you up, they quit!

So why does this happen? We’d bet our bottom dollar that your employee shared some rendition of “It simply isn’t a good fit” or “I’m feeling like this job is more than I anticipated and I’m finding I am unqualified,” or our personal favorite, “My X (kids, dog, etc.) is in need of more of my time and attention.” So why does this REALLY happen?

One of our favorite stories about working in a small business is the hiring of Holly. We hired Holly as the key assistant to our entrepreneur and decided it would be a great idea to have her start during the week he was on vacation. That allowed us a week to get her trained on our client management system and such before she would be expected to actually support our entrepreneur.

At the end of the week we were thrilled – we had found “the one!” Holly was doing fantastic, catching on very quickly with a great attitude to boot! Then Monday came around and we began training Holly to support our entrepreneur. On Tuesday she quit. Holly was also rare in her honesty, telling us, “I loved working here until he came back from vacation. He is nice, but I can’t work with him. I have no idea what he is saying or what he wants, and I just can’t keep up. This isn’t a good fit.” THIS is what many great employees who quit right away want to say, but don’t.

Luckily, Holly was honest and we were able to stop and restart her experience in training and working for us. We spent time going over the two key concepts that can support a team member’s immersion into a small business AND keep them from quitting!

Concept One: Kolbe

Everyone who has heard of Kolbe loves Kolbe. It’s fun and helpful to read about your Kolbe and see how you operate. The opportunity most people miss is to use Kolbe as an invaluable tool to help team members, new and old, understand where their point of overwhelm and shut down is and how it leads to missed expectations and miscommunication. In other words, you can have a conversation about how a quick start operates and how a fact finder can handle it. Ninety-nine percent of the time an office communication problem or stress is due to lack of awareness in Kolbe.

Concept Two: The Gap® (The Strategic Coach® concept)

The second concept that can dramatically reduce the possibility of your great new employee walking out the door is having a proactive conversation about The Gap®. This is a concept by The Strategic Coach® that does a wonderful job explaining how we get stressed out and discouraged, or stuck in The Gap between where we are and where we want to be. It is a huge step in the immersion process for a new employee to understand that it is natural to be overwhelmed and discouraged by the place they are starting (new and untrained) and how far they need to go (to have ESP and read your mind to determine your every need). There are also specific strategies you can implement to help a new employee work through The Gap in a less overwhelming way. One of these is to have a specific training plan with target dates for each task or concept being learned. This lets team members know where they should be and whether or not they are on track. If they don’t have this, it is completely overwhelming for them because they feel they have to learn everything, now!

We feel these two concepts are crucial. When we support entrepreneurs in hiring new employees through our Smart Hire™ Solution Process, we include a company wide call to review the Kolbe of each team member and the entrepreneur, what it means to each person and each role, and how to watch out for potential pitfalls.

If you are tired of going through the time, effort and cost of hiring, only to have your new employee quit, implement one of these strategies to support your new team members in their training process.

Don’t miss the last FREE webinar in 2013, Essentials to hire, empower and keep great employees” on Tuesday, December 3rd from 5-6pm ET.  Click here to register.

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