I’m pleased to say that my new puppy Polly, a Border Collie-Poodle X (and therefore very, very smart), passed her Obedience A Training assessment last Sunday. This is the next training above puppy school with 12 more weeks training in Obedience B before she will be ready to tackle the Agility & Ability and Flyball courses.
I’m hoping that this will keep her from totally destroying the backyard which our last Border Collie, Sharnie, managed to do with her roadwork and tree felling projects.
Polly took to the training like a duck to water (strange metaphor for a dog, maybe I should have said “like a dog to a bone”) but, as the assessor pointed out the same could not be said about me. Not that I didn’t try; it was just getting the instructions and gestures right so that Polly could understand them and then do them.
Polly was desperate to learn but I was failing her as her teacher.
And the thought occurred that perhaps that’s the mistake we may make in endeavouring to get our team members to do the things that we want them to do. Often I think it’s a case of showing them what to do without being clear in our instructions or then getting their feedback to ensure they can do it. And, yes, sometimes it’s a case of not showing them and then complaining they don’t do it!
I believe that, like Polly, our team members want to do the things we want them to do but sometimes our instructions are not as clear as they should be and we never take the time to make sure we did it right or made it clear for them.
What do they say? There is only one thing worse than training people and losing them and that’s not training them and keeping them.
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