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Don Lidster: Pig Handling – Changing Your Ways

May 15, 2012



Source: DNL Farms Ltd.

This week’s blog is by Don Lidster.

Nancy was on the road this week until Friday night, had a Karate Tournament Saturday and we were volunteering at our Community Hall on Sunday for Mother’s Day Brunch so she accepted my offer to put in my “two bit’s worth”.

I will start with a confession. When we were first in the pig production business I was probably one of the worst trainers new staff had ever encountered. My hope is that after taking some training myself on training people that my early errors have been forgiven by “the world”. Since that time I have worked with a lot of Barn Managers and Assistant Managers who were wired like I was but had been thrust into the training role. You know the routine. The good stock person gets promoted to Barn Manager because of their results with pigs and then are expected to train others to be as good at production as they were when really what they liked to do was work with pigs. You get the picture.

How often have you asked someone to “change the way they do a task”, expecting that the change will take place, not now but right now? In my early years as a manager I figured if I explained to someone what I wanted changed, how I wanted it changed plus some good reasons why I wanted the change, presto, we would have a new behaviour. Looking back, surprisingly it often did work fairly well as long as the person I was expecting to change was focused on trying to change. Where it came off the rails was when that person had to react to a situation quickly or rely on their old habits. Does that sound familiar with trying to change your pig handling ways or to change the ways of some of your people?

Getting people to change seemed to get easier for me after I read Stephen R. Covey’s book on 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the book he presents the diagram below:



I think this diagram helps us to get our heads around what we have to have to change a Habit. We need Skills, Knowledge and Desire. Only when these three components overlap do we get true formation of Habits. How many people do you know who had all kinds of Desire to be better Pig Handlers but do not have the Knowledge or Skills to do the job? It is probably most frustrating to these people to want to do better but when the crunch is on they fall back to their old ways. It is probably even more frustrating to people (just back from one of Nancy’s Courses) who are full of Desire, they have this new found Knowledge, but they have not yet developed the Skill to pull off the task successfully. Forming a new Habit is not a quick fix. As Covey says “Creating a habit requires work on all three dimensions”.

Horace Mann an educator who lived from May 4, 1796 to August 2 1859 once said “Habits are like cables. We weave them a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken”. We know now cables can be broken but I think the statement reinforces that every time we repeat a process we are driving that concept into our way of thinking/minds/heads. When it is in our heads, that is what we will naturally do when the pressure is on or we are acting without thinking.

So what does that say about training Pig Handlers? I think it says we not only need the training course but we need some time to develop the “Skills” part of the diagram to really entrench the Habit of good handling. I also think this diagram explains why newly trained handlers can back slide into their old Habits. One, they may have not developed the Skills they need but the second thing that can happen is, their Desire can drop off pretty quickly when they don’t form the Habit because of the lack of Skills. We need to either cut our old cables and replace them with new ones or just build good new cables/habits right from the start.

What do we do going forward? To me this points to:

- the need for coaching, either on site or by reviewing pertinent video

-remembering we have to develop all three circles (just retraining Knowledge won’t do it without the opportunity to develop the Skills)

-being “gentle” with our staff or ourselves when we try to form Habits.

Next time when you decide change your ways or think of asking someone else to change their ways, remember it is not a simple process but definitely achievable and worthwhile.

Nanc will be back next week.

Have a good week

Don Lidster