“We’ve invested months in training this person…why isn’t it clicking?”
It’s a question I’ve heard from leadership teams countless times. Sometimes the answer really is more training, but more often than not, that’s an expensive and frustrating undertaking.
One of my clients learned this when they introduced automated garbage trucks. Instead of having a driver and a collector, every employee now needed to drive a large commercial truck.
They invested heavily in training, and some people became excellent drivers almost immediately but others struggled despite hours of coaching, practice, and encouragement.
The easy conclusion would have been that they needed even more training. The harder conclusion was that some people simply never developed an intuitive feel for driving a large truck.
That experience reminded me why I find the EOS concept of ‘GWC’ so valuable: Get It. Want It. Capacity.
Most leadership teams focus first on building Capacity (skills, experience, and training). Those things definitely matter. But I’ve found the better question is whether someone naturally ‘gets’ the role in the first place.
Training can almost always improve performance, but it rarely changes what someone is naturally built to do.
That doesn’t mean people can’t grow. It means entrepreneurial companies have limited time, money, and resources. The question isn’t whether someone ‘can’ learn, it’s whether investing months trying to make someone average in one role is a better investment than helping them become exceptional in another.
Maybe it’s worth remembering:
- You wouldn’t get frustrated with a monkey being out-run by a gazelle
- You wouldn’t get frustrated with a dolphin that couldn’t climb a tree
- You wouldn’t get frustrated with a gazelle swimming slower than a dolphin
They’re simply built for different challenges. Yet we often get frustrated when a person who is good at one thing isn’t good at another, despite our effort in trying to train and coach them.
How often are we trying to train someone for the wrong seat instead of helping them be exceptional in the right one?
