During my career in forestry, I learned that managing trees is about managing people. Forest resource managers and timberland investors are also human resource professionals. The work gets done through building productive relationships and teams.

As with a baseball coach, a manager “off the field” continually seeks opportunities to upgrade the skills of the team and develop younger talent for future roles within the organization. This requires a clear understanding of your objectives (“begin the end in mind”) and an assessment of whether or not the needed skills and abilities already exist on your team. Once we identify the gaps, then we can decide how to fill them.

To Train or Not to Train

Robert Mager, in What Every Manager Should Know About Training, specifies training for situations where, one, we identify things that people cannot do and, two, they need to be able to do these things to perform in their role. This framework, while obvious, acknowledges the existence of other ways to improve performance. Examples include coaching and feedback, and performance aids.

Coaching and feedback help us reinforce and enable wanted behaviors. If a member of your team does something well or poorly, tell them. They want, and deserve, to know, and it tells them that you’re paying attention. Sometimes they simply need a little guidance, a sympathetic ear or a resource.

Performance aids, to quote Dr. Mager, “cue people to do their jobs right.” Like a vetted checklist, a good aid reminds people to do the things they already know how to do. As a benefit, simple tools or aids can also reduce the need for excess training.

Train or Hire?

At Forisk, our forest industry research firm, we hire AND train OR outsource once confirming the need for additional capacity. When hiring, the person must, first and foremost, share the values of our team and then have the aptitude and interest to build skills that align with the needs of the business. In our experience with human beings, it simply does not work the other way around. 

When you hire a good person that fits the values of your team, it becomes a worthwhile no-brainer to invest in training. Internal training has, at times, important advantages. When people on the team develop and deliver the training to colleagues for firm-specific skills, it grows them as managers and leaders. In those situations, the entire team gets better.

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Note: in addition to the cited and linked sources, this post includes ideas from the article “Here’s How to Assess an Organization’s Education and Training Needs” by Brooks Mendell and Amanda Hamsley Lang.