She's That Founder: Business Strategy and Time Management for Impactful Female Leaders

048 | Reignite Mentorship: Transform Your Training Culture

• Dawn Andrews • Season 1 • Episode 48

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Feeling the mayhem of training your team? 

In this episode, we tackle the chaos of post-pandemic team training and why it’s driving us all nuts. You’ll discover how to reignite the spark of mentorship and development in a hybrid world, especially if you’re a female leader juggling a million roles. We’ve got killer, real-world strategies to ditch the fatigue.

Plus, you’ll hear the story from my early career days, where starting in the mailroom taught me everything about training and scaling. We’re breaking it all down so you can rebuild a robust training culture and get your team back on track.


In this episode,

  • You’ll learn actionable strategies to revive mentorship and team training and create a thriving people-centered work environment.
  • You’ll take away 3 ways to impart your wisdom, delegate tasks, and scale your business.
  • You’ll discover how to combat training fatigue while strengthening your remote training process.
  • You’ll learn about how structured training systems transform raw recruits into professionals and how you can apply these principles to your team.


This episode at a glance:

[02:13] We can revive and build a robust training culture that fosters growth and resilience and peel some of that stuff off of us so that other people can take it on.

[06:20] I think that people love and need the flexibility that they discovered during COVID. We gotta get creative with how we build these training programs.

[07:44] We're trying to focus on speed and getting things done and not necessarily slowing down to teach people what needs to get done.

[09:46] Don't just leave people to their own devices. Help them set up that mentorship meeting and or the questions to ask the trainee so that they can use their time to its best effect also.


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My Good Woman
Ep. 48 |  Reignite Mentorship: Transform Your Training Culture

Dawn Andrews:

In a hybrid work environment, the thread of mentorship and training is easily lost, amidst the demands for quick results. We need to rebuild a work culture where learning and development are prioritized.  

Welcome to the My Good Woman podcast where we help female founders break past plateaus and get to the next level of business growth by refining their strategy building systems and streamlining operations. 

I'm Dawn Andrews. The founder and CEO of Free Range Thinking Business Strategy Consulting. Join me each week for candid conversations, with culture shifting glass ceiling busting trailblazing women who are leading impactful enterprises and grab their strategies to help your business reach extraordinary levels of growth.

In this episode, you'll learn actionable strategies to revive mentorship and team training and create a thriving people-centered work environment. You'll take away three ways to impart your wisdom, delegate tasks, and scale your business. You'll discover how to combat training fatigue while strengthening your remote training process. And you'll learn about how structured training systems can transform raw recruits into professionals and how you can apply these principles to your team. 

Welcome back to the my good woman podcast, business strategy and time management for impactful female leaders. This is the podcast where we help female founders become confident CEOs. And I'm your host, Dawn Andrews. And in each episode, we dive deep, into leadership strategies and business strategies that enable you to grow and scale so you can make a larger impact in your community.

Today we're talking about a topic that is close to my heart and probably driving you nuts, team training. The pandemic threw out our tried and true ways of mentoring and turned training into chaos. Suddenly the casual in-office learning moments were gone. The picking great tips up around the water cooler, no more water cooler.

Some generations don't even know what water coolers are because they started their work journey during COVID and even the more formal learning moments were gone because we were contending and we still are contending with teams being in the office, out of the office.

In a hybrid work environment, the thread of mentorship and training is easily lost, amidst the demands for quick results. We need to rebuild a work culture where learning and development are prioritized. 

The training cadence just isn't the same and people are already zoom weary and don't want to learn anymore online, or at least not in the volume that they maybe did during the pandemic. 

So it's intense, and leaders are frustrated. We've all felt the impact. Team performance has dipped. Culture has taken a hit. And this particular training issue is especially tough for female leaders who are juggling big roles, trying to grow inside a corporate environment. Or, for female founders especially, who are wearing multiple hats, as well as the training hat, being the person that needs to impart their wisdom.

And if you're a female founder who's trying to grow and scale, you've got to be able to do that. If you can't train others to be able to take parts of your job from you, there's no hope of being able to grow your business. There just isn't. 

We can revive and build a robust training culture that fosters growth and resilience and peel some of that stuff off of us so that other people can take it on. There's hope, we can do it. It's just a thread, a broken thread that needs to be mended or replaced. So how do we do it? I have three down to earth, real world strategies I can share with you. 

And let me just take you back in a little personal story. Is that cool? I'm going to take you back in a personal story so that you get why want you to really understand the magnitude of what we've lost and how easy it is to start rebuilding it. Back in the olden days, I worked for a talent agency called International Creative Management. They no longer exist, they've been absorbed by another big Hollywood agency. 

And all of the agencies at that time, were notorious for starting their new recruits in the mailroom. Didn't matter whether you had a law degree, an MBA, or we're just coming straight out of a BA program in college, maybe this was even an internship. Everyone started in the mailroom. That seemed degrading beneath some at the time, but there really was a method to the madness. It was a deep indoctrinating training program to bring people into the Hollywood way of working, the how we do things in Hollywood. 

Why the mailroom? Because when you're down there in a small sweaty room with a lot of people in a very small space, you are working efficiently because you want to be able to take your break and get out of there. And that trauma, if you will, has you pay close attention to what it is that you're doing so you can get your job done in the most efficient way. And what happened in the mailroom is you learned the names of every single agent in the building, and what areas they were working in, were they working in a motion picture lit and packaging and production and branding? Like, what were they doing? 

So in three short months in the mail room, you would have learned the name of every single person working in the building and what they were responsible for. You would know the names of their assistants, you'd know where they were located in the building because you'd be throwing mail on carts and delivering it to the different spots, and you'd know who they were conversing with or corresponding with because of the types of mail that was coming in.

From there, then you would move into the temp pool and be able to work on a desk for a short period of time, usually filling in for an assistant who was out for some sort of break or vacation. And when you would work on the desk, you would start listening in on the phone calls that the agent was having so that you could be responsible for the action items that came up during the phone call.

And again, you'd get to know in a more deep and intimate way who that agent was working with, the projects they were working on, the collaborators that were parts of those projects, the studios that held those projects. And by doing this, you'd gone from more generalized knowledge to more specific knowledge. 

Once you'd completed your time as a temp, then you were eligible to be hired onto a desk and to work there full time with that particular agent. Think of it kind of like entertainment college, if you will. You started out with a survey course, a 101 course, and would eventually go deeper into a specialty. So by the time you were done with their training program, which usually took about a year, first of all, you know, whether you wanted to stay in entertainment or not, because sometimes the hours were grueling and the pay was really low.

You'd also know what area of entertainment you might be most interested in or best suited for. And then when you were hired onto a particular desk, for me, it was motion picture lit, which is reading lots of screenplays and working with writers and directors. Once you got there, you knew that it was something that you really wanted to invest in and go into more deeply. 

That is the world of what a training system can do for developing people on your team. And that could not have happened if I wasn't physically in the building meeting the people and on their desks. Now I don't want you to take this as a everybody returned to the office mandate. Because I'm a working mom I have two kids who are now teenagers, but I have been working at home in my business via Zoom, Skype, telephone calls since before my children were born.

And I love and need the flexibility that that work life gives me. And I think that people love and need the flexibility that they discovered during COVID. We gotta get creative with how we build these training programs, especially if people aren't able to physically be with us on site all the time.

Let's talk a little bit about pandemic's impact on training in person and informal mentorship opportunities gone, like just not around anymore. Nobody wants to be on zoom anymore. There was a great article I read this weekend about, a woman who has transitioned all of her zoom calls or 90 percent of her zoom calls to phone calls again. 

So you're losing out on some of the social cues or some of the body language cues that you might get from zoom, but now she has a happier team because they're having some of their team calls and they're all taking a walk during the call.

It's not for everybody. I just want you guys to understand like how deep this zoom fatigue runs, and I'm sure you're feeling it. And then of course there are home life distractions that made remote training far less effective. I mean, I'm watching my 16 year old go through his online driver's ed training and supporting him to complete a module at a time.

It's really tough. He just doesn't want to sit still for it. You guys get it, and I just want you to reconnect with your people who may be working with you offline or, or even remote teams. I have team members that are in the Philippines. And so that's what they're contending with, and, or time differences, et cetera.

In the hybrid environment, maintaining communication, connection, collaboration is already challenging. Mentorship is even more difficult because we're trying to focus on speed and getting things done and not necessarily slowing down to teach people what needs to get done. And sometimes comprehensive training is needed and a whole new way of doing it because we haven't been in the office.

Okay. Enough doom and gloom. Let's talk about how we fix it. 

Here are three ways to heal this break in training culture for you and your team. 

Start with structured mentorship programs and start small.

And here are some down to earth strategies, weekly check ins, mentorship circles, and then peer mentoring. Those three things can make a huge difference in somebody being able to go from in the dark, trying to find their way on their own, to being fully supported and becoming more effective more quickly.

With the weekly check ins, instead of just one on one meetings to talk about things that need to get done, did they get done, or didn't they get done, add another layer to discuss the challenges with getting things done. 

So you understand what the thinking was of the person that you're trying to train up. And you understand what the gap in knowledge is, because if you have the gap and the way that they're thinking, then you know where to spend your energy training first.

Another way to help is to create mentorship circles, small groups where team members can share knowledge and experiences. If your remote and hybrid teams are not connected to one another, they need to be, even if it's cross functionally, the people at the top of the food chain in each functional area, make sure that they're talking to each other and meeting on the regular.

The glue that sticks different departments together, different areas together has eroded. People do need to talk cross functionally, even if it's just a quick check in. And if it's deemed a mentorship relationship, or a peer mentorship relationship, then people can talk about, and you can instruct them to talk about what they need to learn.

Where are they vulnerable? What skills would they like to develop? And that leads me to the peer mentoring part. Just pair people up. Put a more experienced person with a less experienced person. But remember that the goal for the more experienced person is to understand where the less experienced person is coming from to find the gap in learning and to help fill the gap.

And if they can do that and check in on a daily basis, everybody will move along much more quickly. Mentorship doesn't have to be complicated or time consuming. Let's just focus on one area at a time that you want to improve and make the learning more interactive. 

Okay, strategy number two, invest in interactive or blended learning solutions.

Micro learning modules, people don't want to be on zoom for an hour at a time, like is there a quick skill that they can learn five minutes at a time? If you're a female founder and you want to pass your knowledge on, loom is your best friend. My tango is your best friend. My tango can help you develop SOPs loom can help you teach whatever it is in a visual way by creating videos and action items to go with it.

If you're a leader who wants to peel responsibilities off, create short learning modules using those tools so that your people can pick up a new skill, a tiny piece of a skill or a tiny piece of a whole project's worth of skills in under 10 minutes at a time, you can also do interactive workshops. 

One of my clients used to do lunch and learns in the office. It was a law office and she was training her lawyers be able to handle certain types of agreements. And monthly she would sit down, present them with one of the documents, walk them through the whole thing, redline the document, and then pass it on to them to be able to do it themselves. They'd come back in a couple of weeks and review whatever those documents were so that they continued their learning process. 

And then the next month there would be their new document or new topic. So interactive workshops either on Zoom or in person with hands on activities and real time discussions can make a huge difference in moving people forward.

Sometimes you've got to slow down and pull over to the side. And teach people the skills that they need so that you can speed up and know that everybody's with you. 

The last thing you can do is put a learning management system together. I use Member Vault with my online training and courses. Uh, learning management system allows you to track people's progress through these learning modules. You can add and subtract the teaching videos and it can give your team an access to a variety of learning materials. 

If they have a moment, want to take a moment or feel like they need a skill in a particular area, they can put it together.

And this can be as simple as somebody curating a list of YouTube videos. You don't have to create your own tools you if don't have something that's really specific to your company. You can have people learn from YouTube videos how to get things done. And these interactive methods can make such a difference, and can break up some of the Zoom fatigue, especially if there's a little bit of a Q& A time for people to share their examples, share their work, and ask you questions.

So, let's talk about the biggest challenge to building back a really vibrant training culture, and that is carving out time for training. 

Listen, girl, I know that running your business has you running all the time, that you have a lot of different things that you're juggling all at once, and the idea of slowing down to train people.

Especially if you think you've hired them ready to go, that they have experience in another company that you're bringing to your company, it can be really frustrating, but people cannot read your mind. Let's talk about a few ways to prioritize time for training and development. 

Set dedicated training days, or create training time blocks, and then encourage skill sharing. 

Here's how these work. 

Dedicated training days. Just like teachers have in service days during the course of the school year where they pull out of their regular school day, either a sub is there or kids even have the day off so that the teacher can learn a new skill to help develop and improve. 

Set aside specific days each quarter or each month where the primary focus is on training and development activities. They could be led by you, they could be led by a third party. That's something that we do for companies big and small, or it could be that they're doing it for each other, that someone in an area is teaching other people in their area.

Another thing you can do is set aside training time blocks. So those are short sessions in the weekly schedule and there needs to be some accountability and consistency with them. But if you set aside those training blocks, that can be time that your team, take a moment to watch some of the YouTube videos that you've curated to help them improve their skills.

And then encourage skill sharing, is there an opportunity for team members to sort of trade to teach each other new skills so that they can foster a culture of continuous learning collaboration and community with each other. 

We covered a lot in a short period of time, but these are ways to get you started with building back that training culture. Pick one of these three and go for it. I gave you a few examples in each, but pick one. There you have it. 

Just to recap, we talked about structured mentorship, we talked about interactive learning solutions, and we talked about setting aside time for training because it's not going to figure itself out on its own. You got to dedicate a little bit of time to it.

These strategies can help you build a culture of training and development that is crucial for post pandemic leadership, especially for female founders who are balancing so much. 

Here's your action steps. Make it happen. Schedule a team meeting to discuss the strategies and start implementing one of them today.

I'm really glad you took the time to listen in. 

Thank you for joining me and if you feel like team training or, figuring out where to start is a challenge, get in touch. Drop us a DM on Instagram or a message on LinkedIn, and let's schedule a time to talk and we'll start sorting out what your team training culture looks like.

I'm here for you. And I want you to go rubber stamp yourself so that you have space to grow and scale your business and make a bigger impact in your community. Until next time my good woman.

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