Synopsis

Education is a leaky bucket. You start out with a full bucket of information, but when you train someone else, some of that information leaks out. When they train someone, more information leaks out. By the time you’ve gone through two or three generations, you only have half a bucket.

When the bucket is half-empty, people put their own information in–and it might not be good information. You need to plug the leaks. The best solution is to write everything down and develop a train-the-trainer program. Making training part of a replicable system is the best way to fill leaks.

Never accept anyone onto your chapter’s leadership team who isn’t willing to go to the training. BNI has spent a lot of time making sure that the leadership team gets a good orientation. Without this training, members won’t understand why all the parts of the BNI system are important.

If you keep this in mind as you train employees, your business is much more likely to be scalable.

If you think there might be some leaks in your chapter, listening to this podcast is one way to help fill them.

Brought to you by the Networking for Success Channel on YouTube.

Complete Transcript of Episode 510 –

Priscilla:

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Official BNI Podcast, brought to you by the Networking for Success Channel on YouTube, which features Dr. Ivan Miser and many other networking experts. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello, Ivan, how are you today?

Ivan:

I am doing great today, Priscilla, and I have an interesting topic for me. It is a concept that I have really discovered and developed many years ago. It is called the leaky bucket syndrome. It is about education and teaching lifelong learning. All of these things, teaching end education- it’s a leaky bucket process. You start with a whole bucket of information that you develop or acquire and then when you train someone else in how to do something, a little bit of that information leaked out. When they train someone else, when that information is taught to someone else, some of that information leaks out.

The people being taught only get a limited version of the information based on their understanding and their ability to articulate the material so that by the time you are in the third or fourth generation of people passing along information, you only have about half a bucket of information remaining. You have lost half the information, and there is a sense that something is missing.

When that happens, what do people do? Well, they start putting in their own stuff. They start adding stuff because so early something is missing. The problem is it might not be good content. Very rarely does the material improve over time with this process.

Now, I learned this the hard way in BNI because when I started BNI, there really was no train the trainer – there was no training program per se other than I trained the first generation of leadership team people how to run a meeting. I just explained then, “Take good notes and then you train the next generation and then that generation will train the next generation. ”

I think I talked about this with you on a podcast some time ago. I remember going to a BNI meeting. I watched the whole meeting and I would have had no idea it was a BNI meeting. I mean, they just changed so much stuff. I looked at it and the only reason I knew it was BNI was they were all wearing BNI badges and they kept calling me the Founder. Really, it was like is this BNI? What is this?

That’s when I realized that I can’t do that.