Learn and grow while working.
Managers work to develop training plans for individual staff, to increase the quality of their work output and satisfaction with their role. Training is around generic skills (such as public speaking, writing, time management, and leadership), as well as role-specific duties.
Professional managers know the importance of obtaining commitment from employees for the development process, knowing that true commitment is essential for their development. Training may be paid and formal off-site, or structured on-the-job, but also, always occurs all the time – smart and passionate employees (the kind we recruit) observe how leaders in the company behave, and follow their approach.
Most training is internal and self driven – the Company allocates time for staff to explore areas of interest where they coincide with the company’s broad goals. Time and again, the Company has made leaps forwards because of innovation that has come from these self-learning periods.
Managers draw a distinction between skills and talents. Skills can be taught and learned, knowledge about how to perform tasks and responsibilities. They can be transferred between employees; whereas talents are more innate, and cannot be transferred – people generally have them, or not. It’s a manager’s job to ensure all staff have the skills they need, and to draw out the talents – and to match their talents with their role.
Lesson plans are developed and delivered for the most menial of tasks, to ensure things are being done right, to the company’s standards (for example, cleaning a video camera, cleaning a stills camera, cleaning a backstage camera would all be separate, short lessons, ensuring that a shoot’s quality is never diminished by a dirty camera). These Lesson plans can be used years in the future, ensuring a good standard is maintained, and providing something for others to evolve as the company’s needs change.
All Lessons are developed using the template, and delivered in a way as to have a measurable impact on staff’s performance. See our Principles of Training document for more detail.
Managers recognise the value of all staff, even if they have flaws, considering the amount of investment the company has made in them to date, and the amount of institutional knowledge that person has.
While exiting staff may seem the easiest approach when there is a problem, identifying the true cause of their poor performance and developing a customised training plan may result in a valuable employee (compared to the costs around recruiting and training a new employee from scratch).
