Building Team's Competencies and Not Just Training Them

One of the common mistakes that managers in call center do is develop the skills of their team and lessen performance issues. They always do training. Training is defaulted as solution to every problem with little thought given to whether it is right solution to the problem or the right fir for the current development need. 

Training is always only the beginning of the development process of the solution in the call center. It is not the development and sooner, management will rid themselves of the false expectations and attendant frustration they create when they rely too heavily on a training class to enhance competencies of cure performance despair.

When the clients approach the managers of requesting training for their group, they have to ask them if what they are hoping the training will fix. What are they trying to accomplish, their goals and their desired outcomes. What are the things needs to change and look different at the end of it. Get the client to think about future-state outcomes. Training is merely one of the components of the solution process. The point is, to be successful with the development you need to think in terms of outcomes rather than in terms of how much training you want to buy. 

Competency is a combination of skills, knowledge and abilities. But ability comes only when skills are consistently applied and developed in a real world setting. The demands of the job, emerging issues, upcoming deadlines, general stress, etc – and the graduate puts the new skills on the shelf and reverts back to the old familiar way of doing things. Once the crunch time is over, the initial “buzz” of the training has faded and is not strong enough to sustain further development. That is why training can be viewed only as the primary step towards the competency. It has to be followed by a systematic development program that includes a competency model which is the desired outcome, on-the-job training, performance observations and coaching and some form performance test that validates the skills, knowledge and abilities of the graduate against the competency model.

Development goals of the team should be performance and outcomes based, and why stand-alone “training” classes without a competency-based development process are largely ineffective.