TWI - It's all about YOU!

Interesting day today...I delivered an "appreciation" session to a team where I presented the benefits of Job Instruction. In our world today, we tend to get hyper fixated on the need for mutual benefits and for good reason. When we work together as a team, we feel good about the results for all involved. That is a BIG deal.

TWI guys will inevitably break BIG things down into their smaller components. How about the notion of mutual benefits? Well, for starters, mutual benefits implies that  more than one person realizes a benefit. O.k., let's look at two people who are using Job Instruction: the leader and the team member.

I'll use the comments I received after the session. First, the leader explained that she was very excited about using JI because now she could see a way to get through to the person she was training. Her explanation was that the team member just wasn't getting it and this would help her, "get it". That sounds like a one-sided benefit. Where is the mutual benefit?

While the team member is most likely to "get it", actually the primary aim of practicing Job Instruction is to make the leader more capable. Capable of what, though? Could she think of any benefit that she might realize by practicing Job Instruction? This question prompted a different discussion, one that lead us to why TWI is a leadership development tool first, and a tool to help people get it - as a result of practicing the skill.

In this world of collective thinking, we cannot forget that groups of people are made up of unique individuals.  Put another way, you cannot have a group without individuals, so do you want your group full of undeveloped people? Who would you prefer develop those individuals? Undeveloped leaders? As much as we would like to do things for others, with no regard for ourselves, we cannot truly see mutual benefit until we have discovered ways to help ourselves first. This is an important concept of leadership that we cannot forget. The unique concept behind TWI J-skills is that they are all about YOU!