Jonathan Kabak | Maritime Rhode Island CEO
If you think the business world is unforgiving … try the ocean. Seafaring provides lessons in how to train your crew that provide a valuable framework for educating and inspiring our next-generation workforce.
I often hear grumbling from my colleagues about the frustrations they experience with newer staff or when asking younger employees to step up into leadership roles. “They need constant handholding,” or “they need a manual to do anything, when their job is to write the manual.” We do a disservice to our people when we discount our own role in shaping the training experiences our workforce has had in preparing to go to work.
When you train a crew to go to sea, you think about the skills you need them to possess to perform both their daily tasks and respond to emergency situations. We create drills and training experiences that build their capacity to perform in a high-stakes, high-stress environment. When someone underperforms, we, as leaders, ask ourselves if it was reasonable to expect high-quality performance given what we have provided for training.
As business leaders, we need to embrace this same philosophy when it comes to career training at every level, from high school career and technical education programs to higher education and adult workforce-development programs. We need to become more engaged and play an active role “steering the ship” when it comes to the experiences students have where they can try, and fail, and build the skills that we demand of them when they enter the workforce.