From Hands-On to Hands-Off: Keys to Scalable Training

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Rebuilding versus starting from scratch: The key to scaling a business (Fast Company)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• She let emotions guide her business decisions, and her company failed. Now she helps owners make more by controlling their feelings.(Entrepreneur)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• Google CEO: Free meals aren't a 'perk', they're a productivity driver (HR Grapevine)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• I've tested a lot of AI tools for work. These 4 actually help me get more done every day (ZDNET)

💡 Hiring Insights

• The 4 interview red flags hiring managers say concern them most (HBR)

👀 ICYMI

• Manage your teams while you manage your growth (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🧱 Laying the Foundation through Learning

The one thing your company’s growth will always inspire is the need to adapt.

A scaling business attracts just as many challenges as it does opportunities, and without the right people at the helm, at times it may feel like there are more challenges than opportunities.

This is because great employees don’t just appear - they’re built by your leadership and investment in them.  In fact, the biggest investment you can make in your company is creating the opportunity for employee learning and skill development.

Strong, skilled employees are the foundation of any company’s growth.

And you build this foundation through effective training and development programs.

Byproducts of a great training experience

There’s no question that providing learning experiences and opportunities for your employees to skill themselves up promotes a motivated workforce that wants to stay.

According to Linkedin’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, while 93% of organizations are concerned about employee retention, providing learning opportunities is the #1 way these organizations are working towards improving retention.

Meanwhile, three of the top five factors people consider when looking for a new job involve some facet of skill building and learning.

The Digital Magic Kingdom

A well designed training program ensures employees are equipped with the skills they need. It also helps with aligning your workforce to your company’s mission and values.

One of the most common ways to offer learning and training opportunities is through e-learning platforms. Tools like Linkedin Learning, Coursera, and Udemy are just some of many options available online to provide to your employees with the opportunities they need to grow their knowledge.

While a plethora of courses live online, a lot of companies will embed a learning management system (LMS) within their HR team to then put together a customized course path for employees based on their job role and company requirements.

Disney is a great example of this as they offer numerous learning experiences for all levels of cast members (employees) globally through “D Learn”, leadership training opportunities through “Disney Ignite” and a broader set of education through Disney Programs.

Embedding the “why” into the training experience

In order to get all of your employees to row the boat in the same direction, your training needs to be clear, concise, and relevant to your employee’s job role.  It also needs to speak to why their job matters and why your company matters.

At Disney, regardless of the job role, all cast members go through the “Traditions” training on their first day.  Disney emphasizes sharing the “big picture” first before any technical training so new cast members truly understand their purpose in the company.

When employees understand where they fit within the bigger picture and how their job impacts the company, this creates a sense of empowerment, further influencing their sense of motivation to perform well.

Peer-to-peer learning

Learning doesn’t just need to be done on its own.  Creating a dynamic environment where employees learn off of each other has scaling benefits beyond just the learning.

Mentorships, lunch and learns, and internal knowledge hubs all play a key role in not only scaling your culture of learning but also peer-to-peer learning provides:

• Practical, realtime insights for new hires from those already excelling in their role

• Stronger team dynamics, creating trust and sense of shared purpose between teams

• Continuous improvement as employees feel empowered to share their expertise, creating a cycle of learning and innovation

Pro tip: I’m a big proponent of building buddy systems for employees who are in a new role. I like to have their 30/60/90 day plan coincide with their learning plan to ensure the hands on experience they get is something they are continuously learning from.

Your own company’s library

It’s also common to scale your company’s learning by using a hybrid approach of live combined with recorded virtual sessions.  In this case every employee has access to the same material, regardless of whether they were able to attend the session live or caught it after through a recording.

By recording sessions, you not only create content that your employees can refer back to if they missed it, but you also create scalable content for new hires who will need learning materials for their job.

For instance, at Accenture employees have access to over 24,000 courses spanning a multitude of topics.  Courses are designed to accommodate various learning styles, with options for self-paced modules, interactive learning boards, and live training sessions. Employees can tailor their learning paths to suit their current role and career goals.

Pro tip: At Uber I built a simple Weebly website for our drivers because regulations state to state were different. As drivers trained, this became a go to resource for them to get specific and local answers to their questions based on the state they were in.

Meanwhile, internally I built a playbook enabling local market teams to update the website themselves with their own specific answers to questions, keep the content library up to date but also scaling the training on its own as a result.

🕊️ Founder Learning (to let go)

When you’re in the early days of company building, knowledge sharing is so powerful, although usually done caveman style - everyone learns through conversations.

At some point the team will get so big that you simply can’t share knowledge individually anymore.  This is where a learning management system will help you scale your messaging.

Aside from the obvious benefits of acquiring new knowledge, having a system of learning modules in your company also helps shift employees to an even level of knowledge, reducing the amount of meetings and conversations needed to explain things throughout the company.

There’s three straightforward things you can do before, during, and after you experience scaling growth:

Before Growth: Document key processes and knowledge

When the company is in its early days you’re building the airplane as you fly it and you’re basically doing everything.  And although you’ve got your hands in everything as the company is being built, this is the best time to start documenting key learnings.

It could be as simple as ensuring documentation is sent to a specific Google drive or recording a Loom video on what the original company’s mission, values, and goals are, all to be shared with future employees.

During Growth: Delegate ownership of learning and training

As soon as you can, remove yourself from training and disseminating knowledge to employees.  When your company hits its growth trajectory, you will only become the bottleneck for employee learning by holding on to knowledge but not having the time to share it.

It’s important that employees have a clear path to get the knowledge and learning they need to do their jobs effectively.  Empower a team member who has the time to become the focal point for knowledge and learning, making it their responsibility to distribute knowledge and learning across the company.

Beyond Growth: Choose and setup an LMS

When you have a foundation set for employee learning and development, you’ll want to move beyond just shared resource folders into a system specialized in managing learning for your company.  Learning management systems are the tools all companies use at scale to make sure their employees are aware of learning and development resources.

The initial use case for an LMS is typically with onboarding new hires.  Start there.  You need the onboarding process to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible as it’s crucial new hires are kept engaged during their first week(s).  An LMS will help because it’s typically the first tool that they can refer back to in order to acclimate themselves with your company.

As the LMS is updated with relevant employee documentation and resources, run a pilot program introducing sections of the workforce to the tool.  Feedback is crucial at this point.  Remember, before the LMS, they were using your old ways of learning, and so you’re now asking them to psychologically shift.

Learning systems, like any other systems you set up, can take time.  If the system doesn’t help employees, they simply won’t use the tool, let alone stay up to date with the resource and documentation LMS has to offer.   Start small, gather feedback, and refine.  Make learning simple and you’ll see how much employees come back for more.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Create a centralized digital space for everyone where learnings and documentation can be uploaded and kept up to date

• Scale Yourself → Document your processes and then hand them off to someone else who can own them on your behalf

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.