Why Training Is the Boss's Job

Andy Grove is the former CEO of Intel. This essay is chapter 16 of Andy Grove’s management classic High Output Management.

Recently my wife and I decided to go out to dinner. The woman who took reservations over the phone seem flustered and then volunteered that she was new and didn’t know all the ropes. No matter, we were booked. When we showed up for dinner, we quickly learned that the restaurant had lost its liquor license and that its patrons were expected to bring their own wine if they wanted any. As the maitre d’ rubbed his hands, he asked, “Weren’t you told this on the phone when you made your reservations?” As we went through our dinner without wine, I listened to him go through the same routine with every party he seated. I don’t know for sure, but it’s probably fair to assume that nobody instructed the woman taking calls to tell potential guests what the situation was. Instead, the maitre d’ had to go through an inept apology time and time again, and nobody had wine—all because one employee was not properly trained.

The consequences of an employee being insufficiently trained can be much more serious. In an instance at Intel, for example, one of our sophisticated pieces of production machinery in a silicon fabrication plant—a machine called an ion implanter—drifted slightly out of tune. The machine operator, like the woman at the restaurant, was relatively new. While she was trained in the basic skills needed to operate the machine, she hadn’t been taught to recognize the signs of an out-of-tune condition. So she continued to operate the machine, subjecting nearly a day’s worth of almost completely processed silicon wafers to the wrong machine conditions. By the time the situation was discovered, material worth more than one million dollars had passed through the machine—and had to be scrapped. Because it takes over two weeks to make up such a loss with fresh material, deliveries to our customers slipped, compounding the problem.

Situations like these occur all too frequently in business life. Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.

For the already overscheduled manager, the trickier issue may be who should do the training. Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others, perhaps to training specialists. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.

Let me explain why, beginning with what I believe is the most basic definition of what managers are supposed to produce. In my view a manager’s output is the output of his organization—no more, no less. A manager’s own productivity thus depends on eliciting more output from his team.

A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in. It is generally accepted that motivating employees is a key task of all managers, one that can’t be delegated to someone else. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the other principal means at a manager’s disposal for increasing output?

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

This assumes, of course, that the training will accurately address what students need to know to do their jobs better. This isn’t always so—particularly with respect to “canned courses” taught by someone from outside. For training to be effective, it has to be closely tied to how things are actually done in your organization.

Recently, some outside consultants taught a course on career development at Intel. Their approach was highly structured and academic—and very different from anything practiced at the company. While they advocated career plans that looked ahead several years, together with carefully coordinated job rotations based on them, our tradition has been more like a free market: our employees are informed of job opportunities within the company and are expected to apply for desirable openings on their own initiative. Troubled by the disparity between what was taught in the course and what was practiced, the participants got a bit demoralized.

For training to be effective, it also has to maintain a reliable, consistent presence. Employees should be able to count on something systematic and scheduled, not a rescue effort summoned to solve the problem of the moment. In other words, training should be a process, not an event.

If you accept that training, along with motivation, is the way to improve the performance of your subordinates, and that what you teach must be closely tied to what you practice, and that training needs to be a continuing process rather than a one-time event, it is clear that the who of the training is you, the manager. You yourself should instruct your direct subordinates and perhaps the next few ranks below them. Your subordinates should do the same thing, and the supervisors at every level below them as well.

There is another reason that you and only you can fill the role of the teacher to your subordinates. Training must be done by a person who represents a suitable role model. Proxies, no matter how well versed they might be in the subject matter, cannot assume that role. The person standing in front of the class should be seen as a believable, practicing authority on the subject taught.

We at Intel believe that conducting training is a worthwhile activity for everyone from the first-line supervisor to the chief executive officer. Some 2 percent to 4 percent of our employees’ time is spent in classroom learning, and much of the instruction is given by our own managerial staff.

We have a “university catalogue” that lists over fifty different classes. The courses range from proper telephone manners to quite complicated production courses—like one on how to operate the ion implanter, which requires nearly two hundred ours of on-the-job training to learn how to use correctly, almost five times the hours of training needed to get a private pilot’s license. We train our managers in disciplines such as strategic planning as well as in the art of constructive confrontation, a problem-solving approach we favor at Intel.

My own training repertoire includes a course on preparing and delivering performance reviews, on conducting productive meetings, and a three-hour long introduction to Intel, in which I describe our history, objectives, organization, and management practices. Over the years I have given the latter to a sizable proportion of our professional employees. I have also been recruited to pinch-hit in other management courses. (To my regret, I have become far too obsolete to teach technical material.)

At Intel we distinguish between two different training tasks. The first task is teaching new members of our organization the skills needed to perform their jobs. The second task is teaching new ideas, principles, or skills to the present members of our organization.

The distinction between new-employee and new-skill training is important because the magnitude of the tasks is very different. The size of the job of delivering a new-employee course is set by the number of new people joining the organization. For instance, a department that has 10 percent annual turnover and grows 10 percent per year has to teach 20 percent of its staff the basics of their work each year. Training even 20 percent of your employees can be a huge undertaking.

Teaching new principles or skills to an entire department is an even bigger job. If we want to train all of our staff within a year, the task will be five times as large as the annual task of training the 20 percent who represent new members. Recently I looked at the cost of delivering a new one-day course to our middle-management staff. The cost of the students’ time alone was over one million dollars. Obviously such a task should not be entered into lightly.

So what should you do if you embrace the gospel of training? For starters, make a list of the things you feel your subordinates or the members of your department should be trained in. Don’t limit the scope of your list. Items should range from what seems simple (training the person who takes calls at the restaurant) to loftier and more general things like the objectives and value systems of your department, your plant, and your company. Ask the people working for you what they feel they need. They are likely to surprise you by telling you of needs you never knew existed.

Having done this, take an inventory of the manager-teachers and instructional materials available to help deliver training on items on your list. Then assign priorities among these items.

Especially if you haven’t done this sort of thing before, start very unambitiously—like developing one short course (three to four lectures) on the most urgent subject. You will find that skills that you have had for years—things that you could do in your sleep, as it were—are much harder to explain than to practice. You may find that in your attempt to explain things, you’ll be tempted to go into more and more background until this begins to obscure the original objective of your course.

To avoid letting yourself bog down in the difficult task of course preparation, set a schedule for your course, with deadlines, and commit yourself to it. Create an outline for the whole course, develop just the first lecture, and go.

Develop the second lecture after you have given the first. Regard the first time you teach the course as a throw-away—it won’t be great, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll have to go through one version that won’t be. Rather than agonize over it, accept the inevitability of the first time being unsatisfactory and consider it the path to a more satisfactory second round. To make sure that your first attempt causes no damage, teach this course to the more knowledgeable of your subordinates, who won’t be confused by it but who will help you perfect the course through interaction and critique.

With your second attempt in the offing, ask yourself one final question: Will you be able to teach all members of your organization yourself? Will you be able to cover everybody in one or two courses, or will it require ten or twenty? If your organization is large enough to require many repetitions of your course before different audiences, then set yourself up to train a few instructors with your first set of lectures.

After you’ve given the course, ask for anonymous critiques from the employees in your class. Prompt them with a form that asks for numerical ratings but that also poses some open-ended questions. Study and consider the responses, but understand that you will never be able to please all members of your class: typical feedback will be that the course was too detailed, too superficial, and just right, in about equal balance. Your ultimate aim should be to satisfy yourself that you are accomplishing what you set out to do.

If this is your first time teaching, you’ll discover a few interesting things:

• Training is hard work. Preparing lectures and getting yourself ready to handle all the questions thrown at you is difficult. Even if you have been doing your job for a long time and even if you have done your subordinates’ jobs in great detail before, you’ll be amazed at how much you don’t know. Don’t be discouraged—this is typical. Much deeper knowledge of a task is required to teach that task than simply to do it. If you don’t believe me, try explaining to someone over the phone how to drive a stick-shift car.

• Guess who will have learned most from the course? You. The crispness that developing it gave to your understanding of your own work is likely in itself to have made the effort extremely worthwhile.

• You will find that when the training process goes well, it is nothing short of exhilarating. And even this exhilaration is dwarfed by the warm feeling you’ll get when you see a subordinate practice something you have taught him. Relish the exhilaration and warmth—it’ll help you to arm yourself for tackling the second course.

— Andy Grove

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