I met with a plant manager a while ago about training his line managers to become proficient at Excel. You know, that fun number crunching spreadsheet program that people love to hate? So we sat down and I started asking questions. What skills do your line managers currently have? How many people? What do you want them to know how to do? So after about 10 minutes, I have a pretty decent idea of the skill level they were at, and where he wanted them to be.
I asked if he was going to be in the classes, and he quickly said, no, I know more about Excel than all of the line managers. I responded no problem, just checking.
Then I asked him to pull up a spreadsheet that he wanted the line mangers to be able to use so I could tailor the training to something they would use every day. He loved the ideas, and quickly pulled up a spreadsheet the mangers would need to use daily and a calculator, punched some numbers on the calculator and said “We take the daily production numbers, divide by hours of operations and plug the hourly rate in this cell right here”.
I stopped.
I stared.
I shut my mouth and tried very hard to be diplomatic. Because this self-proclaimed Excel expert that didn’t need training had missed an easy one. For those of you who don’t know anything about Excel, it is basically a giant glorified calculator with a monster memory. If you have Excel open, you don’t need a calculator, it is the calculator. On top of that, every time you reenter data, you double the chance for data entry error. I responded, “Is there a reason you don’t use Excel for the calculations?” He looked at me blankly and said “What do you mean?” So I showed him how to enter a formula in Excel to do the calculations automatically. He looked at me sheepishly, and said thank you. That was it. Never mentioned it again, never showed up for class.
Here is my question to you: Do you know what you don’t know? Because that’s what can hurt your business.
And if you don’t know what you don’t know, that’s ok. Call us. We can help fill in the gaps.
