Holly Zoba, senior vice president of sales for the hospitality division of Signature Worldwide, a leading provider of training solutions for the hospitality industry, wrote an essay on why training doesn’t stick for Casino Enterprise Management in September 2012. She said:
Training fails almost as often as diets fail, and for the same reasons. Good training is asking people to change their behavior, just like dieting, and that is difficult. We are creatures of habit. We very quickly get set in our ways and actually getting us to change the way we do something is as difficult as swimming against the current — a constant struggle.
Making training stick is as much about leadership as it is about anything else. When a general manager or department manager attends and participates in training, odds of success are the highest. Leadership by example is essential. If your staff does not see that you believe this behavior is important enough to learn and exhibit, they will not feel the same need to learn it either. Like it or not, it just seems to work that way.
If you are scratching your head wondering why it is you have told your staff to act a certain way and they seem to be ignoring you, do not assume you have the wrong people. Assume you might be going about it in the wrong manner. Once you train, how do you measure and celebrate successes? Do you lead by example? Change your own ways as managers and you may see a miraculous change in your employees.
