Take the time to train well

You've hired a great new employee who will help you immensely with your ever-growing workload, and you can't wait to get started. There's just one problem - training is needed.

Do you have time in your schedule to train this new person (and train well)? Of course, you don't! You hired a new employee because you have too much work and not enough people. But, it's incredibly important that you make the time to train your new hire well, because if you don't, you'll be retraining to fix the mistakes that happened when you were rushing though it the first time around.

Here are some tips to remember when you're feeling the time crunch but need to train a new hire.

• Be deliberate: Your boss may be breathing down your neck to get the new person up to speed ASAP, but doing a quality job of training needs to be paramount. Go slow to get him or her up to speed as fast as you can.

• Be patient: People don't usually learn as fast as you want them to. That's because you forget how hard it is to learn something you aren't familiar with. Telling your trainee, "We need to get this done, so I'll just do it, but I'll show you how later," only says that he or she isn't good enough. You will never get good results by being impatient with someone.

• Be prepared: Managers who wing it end up saying things like, "I forgot to mention this, three steps ago." Not having all your ducks in a row leads to a frustrating experience for the people trying to learn from you. Make sure you have all the equipment, resources, established procedures, and guidelines ready to drive the training. If you're not organized, your trainee will be lost and confused.

• Be all in: Training is not just showing, or not just telling. Training is showing, telling, demonstrating, and explaining-then allowing the trainee to show, tell, demonstrate, and explain while the trainer provides feedback and coaching. All these steps must be taken, and if they aren't, you're shortchanging your new hire's potential to thrive at the job you hired him or her to do.

Taking the time to properly train a new hire is the best thing a manager can do to ensure that person's success. In the short term it can be really challenging to find the time to do it right. But in the long run, a well-trained worker will help you, your team, and your organization reach its goals and run smoothly.

• Joseph Feest, CPLP, is a Learning and Development Manager for MRA - The Management Association. Follow MRA on LinkedIn, Facebook: http://facebook.com/MRAmeansHR, or Twitter: @MRA_HR_Pros.