July 13, 2016 - Cura Personalis is more than a phrase from a dead language; it is a business motto to live by. Cura Personalis is Latin for “care of the whole person.” Many Jesuit institutions and universities reinterpret this term to mean “education of the whole person.” This might seem a little odd. Aren’t all training programs, whether in academia or in the business sphere, built with this idea in mind? The important distinction to note is the whole person.

Good training programs operate from a transactional perspective, ensuring all employees are knowledgeable enough in a subject matter to carry out their daily responsibilities. This is your bread and butter; it is training a teller in cash handling procedures and feeling confident they know how to manage the cash drawer. Great training programs operate from a transformational perspective, which focuses on educating the whole person and effectively cross trains them in various subjects. It is teaching a teller how to hone their people skills, how to anticipate a customer’s needs, how to communicate exciting sales initiatives to members.

Programs that operate from a transformational perspective are ones that invest time and resources into employees in order to cultivate their potential. They develop professional skills sets that live outside the scope of the job description, and they reap the rewards for doing so as employee turnover rates decrease and employee satisfaction increases.

Want to spice up your training with a transformational approach? Consider adding these topics to your training agenda.

4 Topics to Train Employees on

1. Business Communication and Writing Skills

The ability to communicate clearly is invaluable in the workplace. It creates synergy in the workplace and keeps team members on the same page. With technology trends changing everyday it can be hard to keep up. We recommend training employees on how to effectively use Email and Social Media. Equally important is the face-to-face side of the communication spectrum. You can be a tech wizard, but have zero people skills. Empower your employees by teaching them interpersonal, face-to-face communication skills. Your clients will appreciate your team member’s active listening skills, and your co-workers will benefit from learning effective presentation skills.

2. Microsoft Office Skills

Microsoft Office products are a staple of the business world. Anyone can open a Microsoft Word document and start typing, but at the end of the day you will have a better product to present to your clients if your employees have the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of formatting a document’s appearance and customizing. Open new horizons by offering in depth training take teaches Microsoft Office Skills like incorporating multimedia elements in PowerPoint, filtering cells and creating formulas in Excel, and tracking changes in a Word document.

3. Management and Leadership Development

Equip your employees for success by teaching them how to be effective managers and leaders. Effective managers know how to communicate. According to Forbes author Susan Tardanico, good communication is all about talking in a clear, credible, and authentic way. So teach your management team to lose the technical jargon, and use clear terms coworkers and clients can easily understand and act on. Being clear wins over a fancy vocabulary every time. Start practicing this skill with managers by having them role play or by take online training that focuses on how to clearly convey expectations to their team, how to establish a strategic vision, and how to action plan.

4. Professional Development

Create a space for your employees to grow as a professional and as an individual. We recommend having a strong focus on enhancing an employee’s problem-solving and decision making skills. Employees flourish when their critical thinking skills are reinforcing and trusted in the workplace. When planning your next round of training, think about adding these elements: recognizing and tackling a problem, thinking creatively, brainstorming, and developing emotional IQs.

Edcomm Banker’s Academy is passionate about educating the whole person! We offer Profession Skills training on all of the above areas and more. Please reach out to us if you would like to learn more about our approach to training and how it can benefit your employees.

Sources

Ingram, David. “Transformational leadership vs. transactional leadership definition.” Chron Small Busnesses. N.d. Web. 28 June 2016.

Tardanico, Susan. “5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators.” Forbes. 29 November 2012. Web. 28 June 2016.

by: Madelyn Fagan