You Gotta Wanit!

Yesterday a colleague and I were discussing internal training and processes and the effect we were having on our internal team. While the overall effect has been very positive, we were trying to figure out a way to reach more of our team and help them better understand and become more engaged during the monthly training sessions. You see, every month we bring in all of our field team members, across all of our offices, and we go through internal training on how we can get better with both, technical training and customer service training. This is to help to continue improvement in our efficiency, technical acumen, and providing our customers with the best possible experience in a uniformed and congruent fashion.

Our technicians have become very engaging and help make each training session better, by giving their input and feedback on what they are hearing in the field on the front lines. However, we have not been completely successful, since there always seems to be a few team members that are not fully engaged. That isn’t to say that they are not listening, or learning, just that they are not as engaged as some of their teammates.

It was at this point, that my colleague told me a story he had heard from back in his college days. It went something like this:

At a very well known and high level college campus, the members of the board were meeting to discuss how to attract more students to their college. They decided they were going to send out a survey to existing graduates to find out what they remembered from when they attended the college. The Board’s idea being that they would then take pictures from around the college campus based on the responses and memories of the alumni and then put them into their next year’s marketing campaign.

The results puzzled them. It seemed that the majority of responses they received, in fact more than 70%, were just the simple line, “You Gotta Wanit”. What did this mean? What are they trying to tell us? It seemed the biggest impact on the alumni was a single phrase. But where did it come from?

As it turns out that, Jeremy, the janitor for the college, would go through each class cleaning overnight and once he was done, he would write on the blackboard, “You Gotta Wanit”. (Just the way it sounds with all of the grammatical errors.) You see, Jeremy was working on going back to school to better himself, and he used this practice as a way to let every student know that you have to want it, if you are going to achieve anything in life. All the money and the best instructors in the world can’t help you, if you don’t want to learn.

Who would have guessed that with all the world class professors at this college, the person who would have the most impact on the student body was a janitor named Jeremy? It just goes to show, you never know what is going to have a huge impact on another person.

My collegue and I had a good laugh about the story, but then we also had a moment of silence. We both realized at the same time, that no matter how much we dedicate to training, and no matter how dynamic the class sessions are, it will have no effect if someone doesn’t want it to affect them. We decided that there are different type’s people who react differently to different things. So we will continue to improve the trainings, and do our best to provide interactive, fun, learning sessions and we will just hope that in the end --they will Wanit!