Redshirt Business

"Success happens when you take the time to develop football players instead of throwing everybody out there." - Ricky Proehl

In college football, it's fairly common for freshman players to be "redshirted" in their first year. The term developed from a case years ago where a young player realized that he wasn't yet capable of cracking his team's starting lineup. Rather than waste one of his four years of football eligibility sitting on the bench, he asked the coach if he could practice and travel with the team, but not play for a year. The coach agreed, giving him a red shirt to wear as an indication of his status.

The redshirt concept has all kinds of promise and good sense. Of course, it doesn't naturally sit well with the freshmen themselves. Often it takes a sales job to convince a player who was dominant at the high school level that he's not yet dominant at the next level.

Business managers can have the same itchiness that these 18-year-olds might. From the time they walk in the door, new employees represent a spinning expense meter of salary that no manager wants to waste. It's tempting to toss them into an assignment right off the bat. The idea of waiting six weeks before getting a productive assignment out of them can be downright mind-blowing.

Still, the concept of a training program is a worthy investment on a couple of fronts. It gives the recruit a chance to learn the all-important vocabulary of the business, including any number of acronyms. And depending upon the structure, the employee may get a chance to meet several other new co-workers in enough depth to get past the awkward names-and-faces matching process whose successful completion makes someone feel more like part of the neighborhood (which carries a special significance, given the motto of my employer). By the time he or she reaches that first unit meeting, they can dive in with the confidence of a well-schooled swimmer, rather than with the uncertainty of someone tossed into a foreign pool.

Training - the investment disguised as an expense.