When Morrison Supply was creating its branch manager training agenda, it looked to inject some relevant industry content.

The event, which took place in Carrollton, Texas, this past January, focused on financials, operations and leadership concepts. Morrison President Stan Allen describes it this way: “We like to invest in our people and develop them. At our event this year, the managers really loved the whole P&L side of things and understanding the impact of discounts. But it was really the HR content that people are the most uncomfortable with and human nature is to
avoid confrontation.”

So, the ASA-U Advisory team put together a presentation and activity for the branch managers to use on-the-job behavioral assessments as a way to teach the managers how they can hold people accountable to the role expectations. The documents were customized to Morrison and the managers watched videos of a counter salesperson interacting with a plumber. They used the assessment forms to practice identifying the good and not-so-good behaviors from the counter salesperson.

Allen continues: “ASA-U offers a great curriculum and to try and reinvent it ourselves would be crazy. Bringing in someone of Doug Dillon’s caliber really helped. In particular, the quantifiable measurement of the counter sales behaviors really helped our managers see how it could
be done.”

To illustrate this, each manager could base course selections on things they saw and heard from the employee on a first-hand basis. This helped them to see that employee buy-in to participate in training would be greatly increased. It also removed some of the discomfort Allen referred to since managers could point to the observable behaviors they just witnessed when discussing needed behavioral improvements.