Effectively Leveraging Trainers, Coaches, and Mentors

Contracting is a high-risk sport and the training of yourself, your managers and your craft labor should be as rigorous as a professional sports team.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
D. Brown Management
February 21, 2018 2 minute read
Share

Contractors are facing a massive shortage of critical talent yet most contractors spend very little on talent development. 

Talent Development Tools: Effectively leveraging trainers, coaches and mentors. Quote: I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches. Graham Duncan.

A valuable quote from Graham Duncan in the book Tribe of Mentors gets to the heart of continuous improvement. Consider that he invests and manages money for a living.  

Question:  What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?

“I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches.”

Graham Duncan; Co-Founder of East Rock Capital

The highest performing companies, teams and individuals heavily leverage these resources.  Truly effective training HURTS and is not fun because it stretches you. This is the same whether you are training for something physical or mental.  If you are taking the time to invest in training make sure you put 100% of your effort into it; and then some.  

Learn more about how we approach talent development

Balancing Exploration and Exploitation
Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system which may be incomplete or misleading. Exploration involves testing new options that could lead to better future outcomes but drawing resources away from exploitation.
Related Article
Rigorous Questioning Develops Critical Thinking
Thinking is really just about asking ourselves then answering a series of questions to help us make a good decision. Critical thinking is quite simply asking ourselves a more complex set of questions then answering them from a larger base of knowledge.
Related Article
Bill Walsh - Planning the First 25 Plays
Construction success depends on both the ability to rigorously plan as well as the ability to quickly react to changing field conditions. This is similar to sports and a lot can be learned from the disciplines of great coaches.
Related Article