July - All Star

July Customer Service All Star

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I was reminded of this recently while learning a new job in the Electrical department of Home Depot.

After almost 30 years of working in the jewelry industry, I found myself overwhelmed this summer with: new training materials, employee names, technical terms, acronyms, advice, procedures, passwords, and of all things - locker combinations.

Developing a readiness to learn is the art that all good teachers practice. I’m afraid people tend to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. I know I do at times. Let’s face it, you tend to take for granted the things you do by habit. In hindsight, it’s easy to explain experiences based on your level of knowledge and understanding, rather than a student’s level of mental preparedness. There’s the key - mental preparedness.

Learning a new job is not just having the right attitude towards the job; it’s being able to process the information and DO what’s expected on demand. People selectively remember what they’re ready to when their experience, confidence, and skill levels balance. I call this selective absorption. In the book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell refers to this phenomena as "stickiness."

According to Gladwell, stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can't get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory. When Winston filter-tip cigarettes were introduced in the spring of 1954, for example, the company came up with the slogan, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." At the time, the ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of "like" instead of "as" created a minor sensation. It was the kind of phrase that people talked about, like the famous Wendy's tag line from 1984, "Where's the beef?”

How do you make a memorable impact on a new employee? It’s not just remembering More Saving. More Doing. Or is it? Company facts, projection figures, and department details, can set up mental roadblocks for employees who think they must memorize these things to understand the corporate culture. Memorization does not lead to understanding, in my experience, it’s - doing - that solidifies understanding and builds confidence. Doing means being willing to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, without a loss of self-esteem, and move on.

So, the teacher is the student in you. Students learn best when a mentor challenges them to teach themselves. Like sunlight is to plants, the teacher is a catalyst for the student to discover their goals and then set out a path to achieve them. This requires drawing out what an employee knows in relation to what they need to understand to perform the job.

Being a rookie is a humble reminder that you must create a blueprint to learn new tasks. It’s simply a matter of establishing a plan, trusting the procedure, and building the confidence to be yourself.

By practicing the art of being a student, you can rest assured the teacher in you will appear.