Train For Trust
How to Train for Trust (and trust your team)
“People when rightly and fully trusted will return the trust.
~Abraham Lincoln
To be able to trust a team enough to delegate responsibility, you need to be sure they will do the work assigned to them the way you expect them to do it and that the result will be what you were aiming for. To achieve this, you need to train for trust and there are five steps to do this:[i]
1. You do the work;
2. You work with the trainee;
3. The trainee works with you;
4. The trainee works alone;
5. The trainee trains someone else.
The first step is that you yourself, or an experienced member of staff you already trust, do the work and are observed by the trainee. This is to set the ground rules and have the trainee understand what will be expected of him or her.
Then in step two, you work with the trainee. You still do the work, but now also ask the trainee questions to check understanding and, step-by-step, involve him or her more and more in the work.
When ready for it, you move to step three in which the trainee works with you. At this level, the trainee will do the work but is observed by you (or an experienced team member). Every now and then, the trainees at this step should be spot-checked to see if they can explain what they are doing, why they are doing it and if they are able to justify any choices they made that differ from what they were trained to do.
When a trainee seems confident enough and has passed most of the spot tests, you can move to step four and let them work mostly unsupervised.
Finally, when trainees have built up some experience, they should be allowed to train someone else to prove they have mastered their work and are worthy of your trust. This is a crucial step because, once they’ve earned your trust, they will do anything to not disappoint you.
Let’s look at an example of the Back House Department of the Naked Espresso Café in Hong Kong to see how this might work out in practice.
The Practical Path from Trainee to Trained
When new staff join his team the cafe’s kitchen manager, Chef Pierre, will give them a quick tour of the kitchen and assign them their own workspace. As all staff are cross-functional, they won’t be getting a specific station, just a place to put down their knives.
Once settled in, their in-house training begins in all earnest with the ‘philosophy and system’ of the mise en place, the workplace setup required before cooking.[ii] Chef Pierre himself will show the new staff where to find all the tools and ingredients and then set up his own area for service, explaining the reasoning behind his particular mise choices as he goes along (step one).
Next, the newbies will be buddied up with an experienced member of staff and for the next couple of weeks they will religiously set up their own workspaces exactly like Chef Pierre’s, supervised by their buddy. Every now and then, Chef Pierre or one of the experienced staff might help them expand their mise setup depending on what they are required to work on (step two).
Once they’re able to set up the mise en place figuratively blindfolded, they will be assigned work requiring extra tools or ingredients. As they add these to their workplace, Chef Pierre will ask them to talk him through their choices (step three).
Should they manage to pass the chef’s prying cross-examinations, they will be given more freedom in the kitchen and more challenging recipes to cook (step four).
After an appropriate time, as they would have built up some relevant experience, they will be promoted to proficient and become the buddy of a new greenhorn (step five) and the circle reinstitutes.
To me, this internal training for trust procedure sounded good, but I was curious about what the staff thought about this. When I had a chance, I took Evelyn Ng, who had only recently been promoted, aside to find out.
[Evelyn Ng Ngaa-kei]: “To be honest, in the beginning it was extremely stressful. Everything I did was just wrong and Chef Pierre isn’t a very patient man. He shouts a lot, but I guess that’s just kitchen life, right? After some time it gets easier, though because you do the same thing over and over again.
“Probably one of my proudest moments was when the chef finally let me prepare the Wind Sand Chicken* for lunch by myself, and everything went just fine. We even got a happy emoji card with a 95% happiness score from the customers who had ordered it.
“Also quite nice with this way of training is that you kind of can go at your own pace. The chef won’t move to the next level until you’re ready for it. And because we’re always having to explain why we do what we do, I really feel like I’m learning. You know, the kind of hands-on stuff they don’t teach you at culinary school.
“Next week I’m supposed to take over from Carmen as Zhifeng’s buddy. I’m quite nervous about that but I guess the chef has put me in this position because he thinks I’m ready. I’ll try not to disappoint him.”
With a bit of discipline, it isn’t that hard to train for trust. Also, be aware that discipline = freedom and helps to avoid micromanagement because, “when individual members of the team are highly disciplined, they can be trusted, and therefore allowed to operate with very little oversight.”[iii]
[T]here you are.
* A crispy yet tender roasted chicken with a ‘wind sand’ texture because of fried garlic sprinkled atop, originally form Guangdong in China and well-loved by Hong Kong people.
Sources:
[i] Maxwell, J. [P PG] (2013) The 5 Levels of Leadership. [Video] Youtube: https://buff.ly/3673Izo [ii] Charnas. D. (2016) Work Clean. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books [iii] Feloni, R. (2015) Former Navy SEAL commander explains the philosophy that made his unit the most decorated of the Iraq War. Business Insider: https://buff.ly/3elbDfn
