Sometime ago I had the privilege of working for a friend of mine training some his staff.  One of the issues he was struggling with was the fact that athough one of his employees was an excellent worker, he observed that it seemed to take her a long time to get anything done!  At first he thought she was just very thorough but when he kept finding repeated mistakes in her work, he knew there was something else at play. 

I spent half a day observing her work, not instructing, just observing.  I began to notice that, although she didn’t waste time surfing the net or daydreaming (why would she with me there?), she did seem very slow at every task she was doing.  What I soon discovered was that she did not have a good grasp of the software she was using, therefore it took her a long time to figure out each task.  She could open and work in many of the programs in the Microsoft Suite, but she could not perform at the higher level her job often required.  She “knew” the programs, but she was really only at a low level of expertise, and not the higher functioning level that my friend assumed.  Lesson one – never assume.

The moral of the story is that just because someone can identify the icon does not mean they can operate the program.  Just because I know what a tractor looks like, might even be able to make is run, I probably couldn’t till a field with it. 

Lesson two – Productivity, either personally or with someone who works for you, really is dependent on knowledge.  We are often afraid to admit we need to get the knowledge to do a job, and so we “fake it ’til we make it”.  This philsophy may work to build you confidence around people, but in the end it always fails when you need to learn a new skill.

Lesson three – This makes a case for life-long learning.  Is there something that you don’t know how to do that would make you better at your job, and you just have avoided doing it?  Maybe it is time to take the plunge.  Is there something that you could teach someone on your team that would make them better at their job?  Start teaching. 

Once we identified the problem my friend’s employee had, we addressed and she if now one of his best workers.  Had he not taken the time to figure out the problem, her productivity likely would have improved over time, but think of how much more work he gets out of her now, by just investing a few hours of training in her yesterday.