Kevin East Christian Blog and Commentary

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How to Inspire and Train Your Staff

  • Kevin East
    Kevin East is the President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of East Texas. He formerly served Pine Cove Camps as their Executive Director of Ministries. He writes at his blog, "Following to Lead". Connect… More
  • Published Apr 30, 2012

Communicating vision and mission to your staff or volunteers is a monumental task.  The opportunity for people to hear, understand and then respond is huge.  How you begin the training sets the stage for the entirety of it.  Don't think too small.

We've all been there, sitting through training we were forced to go through.  We know we'd rather be somewhere else, and we know the speaker communicating the message would rather be somewhere else as well.

In the past, I've written about what I think are the three key elements in effective organizations.  The second part of that is how you train your staff.  I think great, effective training begins with setting the stage well.  It starts in the beginning.

As many of you know, I work with a ministry called Pine Cove.  This year, we will hire roughly 1,400 college students from all over the country to work in our various ministries during the summer.  We have a staff manual that we teach everyone through over the span of a week.  For two of those days, we have everyone together, covering the major philosophical elements of this ministry.

The staff manual is called the "Pine Cove Way," or "The Way" for short.  In an effort to protect the process of going through our staff manual from become a boring event, we decided to get creative with how we kick off the training.  It has brought the training to a new level.

What do you like or dislike about the training you are a part of right now?

If you liked this post, check out Kevin's personal blog, Following to Lead, where he regularly writes on following, leading, fostering and family.