Last week I told you what happened to me when I got started in the industry. It’s the story of how I learned the spray foam insulation industry; if you missed it, you can find it here.
This week I want to talk about you and your people, specifically, how you learn.
Think about when you learned to hit a ball, work a math problem or the first time you learned about spray foam insulation.
Whether it was as simple as basic math or as complex as advanced building science, it probably started the way it does for most of us, someone had to explain the idea to you first, because you didn’t know what you didn’t know. This first step of explanation gets you past the first stage of the learning curve, unconscious incompetence. (If you are not familiar with the stages of the learning curve, you can find it here.)
Once they explained it to you, then they showed you how it worked, finally they turned it over to you and let you do it for yourself.
One of the easiest ways to understand this is to go back to math class.
In high school, Mrs. Arthur stood at the front of my Algebra class and explained that when looking at this:
2x + 10 = 50
The goal was to solve for x.
If she didn’t explain this, would any of us have known what to do? Probably not.
If someone put you in front of a Graco Reactor E-30, without explaining anything, would you have known what to do? Probably not.
After she explained that the goal was to solve for x, then she showed us how to do it.
After she showed us how to do it and answered questions from the students, and like typical teenagers we had lots of questions, she gave us a dozen similar problems to work on in class, with her help.
And then, the big kicker, we were assigned several dozen similar problems to work on ourselves, at home, they called this “homework”.
This process includes all three of the primary learning styles:
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Learn by hearing
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Learn by seeing
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Learn by doing
It starts with an explanation, then an example performed by the teacher and finally the student takes action themselves.
While classroom teaching sometimes gets a bad reputation, it can be very effective when used properly; that is why it has become so dominant in our society.
Now, it is important to remember, that while combining all three learning styles is most effective, different people favor different learning styles – some of your people will favor learning by hearing, some will favor learning by seeing and others will favor learning by doing. Identify how your team prefers to learn and help them get better.
By the way, for those of you wondering, x = 20.
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