Employees are not your personal properties. Sooner or later, they’ll leave your company in search of greener pasture. You, as the employer, have to contend with that and make up by hiring a new employee. Hiring an employee has issues all on its own and is not an easy task.
Hiring a sales manager is particularly risky. Sales are a very important part of your business, and they cannot be handled just by anyone. You need someone who is capable and knows his stuff. The biggest problem when handling a new sales manager is that, even though he has performed excellently in his previous jobs, he definitely still needs some time to learn the ropes about your business. There is still that learning curve that you need to address.
There’s no way around that. Each employee, no matter how high or low he is in the chain, needs to be trained in what he should be doing. The biggest problem with this comes when they say that they understood the process, only to ask you later on, saying that they did not actually fully understand what you are telling them to do. Non-managerial employees are fine, but with a sales manager, that’s a risk no one should stomach or take. It goes without saying that hiring an insufficiently trained manager can make or break the success of a business you’ve worked so hard to establish.
However, there’s a way to overcome that hurdle. So how does one train a manager sufficiently and know how knowledgeable he has become in your business process? That’s where the “ball of string” approach comes in.
How to Use the Ball of String Approach
The concept lies behind an imagery of a ball made of string. In order to use it, you must pull some of the strings and let them off the ball. In turn, this makes the ball smaller as more and more strings are pulled from it. In management, the imagery represents the uncertainty or the amount of processes that the new manager has to learn.
You might understand now that the “ball of string” represents a torrential and gradual approach to letting the manager handle his tasks. At first, the manager handles only the basic functions of the task so you can let him acclimate or let himself get used to handling sales management. In order to let him learn, you slowly pull some strings off from the ball. This means you gradually let him handle tasks of greater difficulty as a means of testing him if he’s capable of more complicated managerial tasks. After some time, you test him again with yet another difficult task. This process is repeated a lot of times until the figurative ball has lost its shape, and what you have are only strings.
Advantages of the Ball of String Approach
As you could see, the ball of string approach is a very helpful concept. In fact, it is the ideal way of training employees, not just managers, because of its many advantages and benefits.
One main advantage of the ball of string approach is that the risk of the employee making a lot of mistakes that can be quite costly is lessened considerably by the approach. You never let him handle anything that is beyond his capability, but at the same time, you are preparing him to handle those complicated tasks.
The ball of string approach is also helpful in making employee evaluations. Through pulling some strings off the ball, you are putting the employee in a position wherein you can accurately gauge his performance and how far he has gone through in his training.
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