Broken telephone can slow down your company’s growth

Do you recall playing broken telephone as a child? The teacher would start by whispering a sentence to someone, and we would go around the room repeating the sentence to our neighbor. The last person would say out loud what they heard, and then we would compare to the sentence that the teacher started with. More often than not, the sentence at the end wasn’t even close to what the teacher started with.

You don’t want to play broken telephone with professionals, especially when it comes to training your staff. Often a company CEO/President will engage a consultant to help them implement a new product or procedure. The CEO will pay the consultant good money to design & implement these new procedures, and then train him/her on using them. The problem thereafter is that the CEO will attempt to save money by opting to train his/her employees themselves, rather than pay the consultant a little more money to conduct training.

This often results in the game of broken telephone; the CEO incorrectly trains the staff, can’t answer specific questions or troubleshoot problems, and hence the implementation is botched. Consequently, the company has to start all over, clean-up the mistakes and re-train the staff, which is a waste of time and a lot of money.

If you ever engage a consultant, allow them to perform training with you present. This way you reinforce their knowledge of the new product/procedure while allowing your employees to express their concerns and ask their own questions.