Where I believe freedom is the best for your teammates, I’m not convinced the same logic can be applied to customers. Many times it is certainly true, but one big difference is that customers want to get in, learn what they need, and get on their way. That’s true of all humans, but we as leaders have more time with our own employees than we do with our customers.
While I strive to give our customers the freedom to learn and grow, I also work to build our educational, training, and support resources with creating an antifragile minimum viable training. It sounds much more fancy than it really is, but it’s combining the idea of Antifragile (check it out on Amazon.com, essentially building things so they don’t break) and a minimum viable product. But in this case transposing the concept to ask the question: what are the minimum requirements for a person to learn this product? Sure, there are lots and lots of resources we provide and distribute to all our customers, but what are the core pieces a person must know before they can use it? Remember, we want them to explore on their own, but we also don’t want them embarrassed in using our product in a presentation to feel like our product failed them in any which way.
We view ourselves as educating the educators, so why not include teaching how to model teaching, too? So with that, we have a multi-pronged approach to teaching our customers. Though these are our resources, that’s not necessarily what’s best for your business. We train using a combination to help the diversity of customers with an effective onboarding approach. There are many more ways to serve customers. Do what works both for your team and for your amazing customers.
Jeff Beaumont 