Effectively Leveraging Trainers, Coaches, and Mentors

Contracting is a high-risk sport and the training of yourself, your managers and your craft labor should be as rigorous as a professional sports team.

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Contractors are facing a massive shortage of critical talent yet most contractors spend very little on talent development. 

Talent Development Tools: Effectively leveraging trainers, coaches and mentors. Quote: I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches. Graham Duncan.

A valuable quote from Graham Duncan in the book Tribe of Mentors gets to the heart of continuous improvement. Consider that he invests and manages money for a living.  


Question:  What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?

“I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches.”

Graham Duncan; Co-Founder of East Rock Capital

The highest performing companies, teams and individuals heavily leverage these resources.  Truly effective training HURTS and is not fun because it stretches you. This is the same whether you are training for something physical or mental.  If you are taking the time to invest in training make sure you put 100% of your effort into it; and then some.  


Learn more about how we approach talent development




The Contractor Scoreboard - A Contractor Must Do 3 Things
This outcome-based scoreboard keeps everyone focused on what matters. Avoid metric overload and diffusion of resources. All other metrics throughout all levels of the organization fall into a hierarchy below these with priorities changing over time.
Lean Principle - Value Stream
A contractor’s value stream is every step required to take raw materials and information then deliver a completed project to the waiting hands of a customer. Deep understanding of this value stream is the foundation for major productivity improvements.
Prioritized Development and Improvements
Identifying all the opportunities for development of talent and improvement of the operation for a contractor is overwhelming at best. You can't "punch list" a business like you can a project. Prioritization and sequencing are crucial for success.