Training Employees on a Bell Curve In Retail | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

 

I hope you're taking these tips and training your employees, and one of the things that will help you to understand how we train is to know the bell curve of training. There are four parts to a bell curve, so picture in your mind or a little hill that goes up. At the beginning, your employees are unconsciously incompetent. That means they don't know what they don't know, and they're just moving through whatever they think they should do. When you start training someone, they become consciously incompetent. That means you've taught them, but they aren't really doing it yet. They know that "Oh, that's different than what I first was doing." Number three is they become consciously competent. After you've trained them and you've done a little role play, they can do it if they really think about it.

The final part of training is they become unconsciously competent. That means they don't have to think about it. They just naturally do it. That's where elite athletes are in sports teams and an Olympics or people that play the violin or instruments or those kinds of things. They've practiced so much, they don't have to think about it. That's why so many people, I think, fail with training is because we think that, "Oh, they went to a seminar once or they read a book." The problem is they really just became consciously incompetent. Until you take the time to unpack what they were teaching them into bite-sized lessons, then more than likely you've got to meet with failure. That's why I developed SalesRX, my online retail sales trading program, to zero in and dive deep into those soft skills of how you build rapport with your employees. Until your employees master your training, you've got a lot of work to do.

If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!