Cross Training is Great for Business

When I was a new parent several years ago, I read a lot of research to learn more about the science of parenting and best practices (I definitely did not call them that at the time, but I am a consultant now…). There were a lot of useful things I learned, and my favorite book was “Mind in the Making” by Ellen Galinsky. First, one quick caveat, if you have heard of the “marshmallow study” that is highlighted on the cover of the book, you should know that later research has not replicated the results and instead found that economics explained the conclusions.

But, barring that, it was really the best summary of research on child development I came across. The focus of the book was seven “executive function skills” which are important for managing social, emotional, and cognitive function. For example, one of the skills is called Perspective Taking which describes the ability to understand what others think and feel. Having a good model for understanding other people and their behaviors (even if you would do different things in their shoes) is valuable. What I particularly liked about the book was it emphasized that to teach executive function, you need to have those skills yourself. So, it also included some games / practice for adults to help us succeed with those skills too.

And that is the focus of this post. Often in our work, we see things differently than the person we hand the results to. Perspective taking is useful since it can help you see what that next person will be looking for. That skill helps me check that the things I build for others will actually meet their needs. If I build what they ask for, they might immediately realize that they asked for the wrong thing. If I build the ability to do their job better, they’ll probably be able to use it.

In a broader sense, perspective taking is one of the best reasons to work on cross training your teams. Cross training is mostly seen as useful because it allows you to flex your workforce. If you need more people who can do X temporarily, you can shift some cross trained folks over to do that work. It takes more training time per person to prepare them for multiple things, but the results are more reliability in the system when you need it. And if you have variability in your system, there’s probably some downtime you can use to make that extra training time basically “free.”

So, that’s the usual reason cited for cross training. In my roles as a consultant, I often ask people to show me how they do their work in a way that is very similar to cross training. Not because I will be stepping in to actually do their job when things get busy (occasionally my manufacturing clients joke that the most helpful thing I could do that day is help count inventory / work in manufacturing / etc.). But by knowing how they do their jobs, I am better able to see opportunities to build better tools or streamline their work.

By knowing how to do the end user’s job in addition as my own, I can often create better requirements than they could themselves. I can also review the thing I have produced and know what the next person in the chain will be looking for. Me catching a mistake before it gets passed on to the next stage is faster to fix and reduces the odds of being missed entirely. All of this is conditional on me knowing what I am looking for.

Knowing what a different person will be looking for is very easy if you have already done their job. It is somewhat harder if you have only been taught to do their job and never actually experienced the struggle yourself. But if you listen to the training with the goal of improving how you do yours, even just that training can be enough. If you really have no clue what they need, it makes sense that you would not be able to respond to those needs.

As an example, I am often supporting data analysis projects. The people who input data into a system often do not think about other users of the data, and so I often find it is incomplete or there are errors. The people who pull data out of a system typically do not know much about it, so they may not check if they pulled it correctly. The people who transform that data may also not know how you will use it, so they do not feel it is their responsibility to check the results since all they are doing is what they were asked to. The people who produce an analysis might not know what decisions it is intended to support, and so they do not ensure that the results are informative for that decision.

The more of these roles you have had, the more opportunity to get ahead of errors. If someone asks for an analysis, I always ask what they are trying to do with it. Which informs how the data should be analyzed. And that helps you know which data needs to exist. Having also been in those roles I know common errors in how data is pulled, analyzed, and used. Mostly because I have personally made those mistakes, and my level of expertise helps me look for them in the future.

Understanding what the people I work with do helps me do my own job better. And that is the key value of perspective taking and cross training.