A coach was asked what mattered more when teaching his team defense: technique or attitude.
His answer started with attitude. He wanted players who believed in the mission and what the team was trying to do. Once they were bought in, he could teach them the technique.
I believe the same thing.
We can teach people how to be facility maintenance coordinators. We can teach them how to use a CMMS platform. We can explain the process, walk them through it, and give them a chance to practice.
What I can't do is make somebody want to be part of the mission.
That's something we look for when hiring, and it's something we keep looking for during training. Knowing how to use the software is part of the job, but it doesn't answer that whole question. We want a team of people who are bought in on the mission.
When I'm interviewing, I look for maybe 40 percent job aptitude and 60 percent personality. By personality, I don't mean whether someone is fun to be around. I mean their temperament and how it fits the work they'll actually be doing. That changes real decisions. If I'm hiring someone to look after our people and one candidate has ten years in facility maintenance while another has a year and a half, but I can tell they'll care about the team the way I do, I'm hiring the candidate with a year and a half of experience. I can teach them the work, but I can't teach someone to care about the people they work with.
Being new is different from being unwilling
Being bought in doesn't mean knowing everything on the first day. It's fine if somebody comes in without knowing our system. We have something specific to teach them.
Maybe they're looking at a work order and don't understand what they're supposed to do next. We can go through the steps together. We can explain what they're looking at and why the next step matters. That's a training conversation.
I don't want to confuse needing that help with having a bad attitude.
Asking a question gives us a place to start. I say this a lot: I don't know what I don't know. If you don't tell me, I have no idea. If somebody tells us which part they don't understand, we can work on that part instead of going through the whole explanation again and hoping it makes sense this time.
That matters in training too. I can't help with a question I don't know somebody has. I'd rather have the conversation while we're working through it than have somebody feel like they need to act as though they've already got it.
They're there to learn the work. We need to give them room to do that.
We have work to do too
If I want somebody to believe in the mission, we have to explain what we're asking them to be part of.
What are we trying to accomplish? How does their work fit into that? When we show them a process, are we explaining why it matters, or only telling them which buttons to click? We can't leave all of that unexplained and then expect somebody to understand it just because they're on the team now.
The same goes for teaching the work itself. Wanting a good attitude doesn't get us out of training somebody properly. We still have to explain things clearly and give them a chance to ask questions.
For example, showing someone where to enter a note explains one part of a system. Helping them understand what information belongs in that note gives them more to work with the next time. They need to understand the task, not just remember where the field is.
That's where I think we need to be careful about how we look at progress. Finishing a lesson and understanding the work aren't the same thing. If something still isn't clear, let's talk about it and figure out what needs another explanation.
I plan for that before someone starts. When I had people learning Bluebeam for drafting and plans, I pulled the Bluebeam documents together ahead of time and built a study guide, a test and an answer key. I also schedule two days for orientation, even though I can cover everything in one. If someone needs extra studying, or there are a few things they don't understand yet, that's fine. They get the extra day.
We also need to be clear about what comes next. If we're going to practice something again, explain which part we're working on. That gives the person something useful to focus on instead of leaving them to guess what we thought was missing.
The commitment has to be theirs
The coach still intended to teach technique. He wasn't saying the work would take care of itself once everybody had the right attitude. He wanted people who believed in what they were trying to do together. Then he could work with them on how to do it.
That's the part I connect with when I think about our FM Allies team. We can put time into teaching coordination and helping people learn a system. We can answer questions, explain something differently, and keep working on the parts that haven't clicked yet.
But the person has to want to be part of it too. I can't learn the work for them or supply their commitment.
For a coordinator, I can hear that difference on the phone. A lot of the job is calling contractors who are out on a job or standing at the supply house. I can teach the policies and procedures, even what a fire alarm is. I can't teach somebody to be a good person on the other end of that call: the coordinator who does a little homework before calling, calls back at 4:00 because they said they'd call back at 4:00, and is still friendly when it takes three or four calls to get an update. When I'm training someone, I tell them, "If you have trouble, call me. Let's do this together so I can teach you." The technique I can teach. The care has to come from them.
That's the team I want to build: people who are bought in on the mission, with the training and support to do the work.
