Developing an Eye for Good Staff

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Recruiting good instructors is a lot like recruiting a student. The potential staff member must clearly see and understand the benefits of devoting their time, energy and a portion of their career to you. You also must develop a solid training program to grow your staff members along a rewarding career path.

Like any good program from white belt to black belt, this requires lots of planning. Good staff training and retention does not happen by accident. If both of you are going to invest the time and effort required for training, then make sure is worthwhile for both of you. By showing the instructor exactly what benefits he will receive from you over a period of time, you will increase your chances of success.

Why would someone want to become a martial arts instructor? Seems like an easy question to us, since that's what we chose. But it helps to understand that people train for different reasons and you can be sure they become instructors for different reasons as well.

Benefits as an instructor might include:

1. Making a good living doing what they love.
2. Long term job security.
3. Respect from peers.
4. Potential advancement to becoming a head instructor in charge of several schools or their own school.
5. The opportunity to advance their martial arts skills.

When To Start Looking For Staff

You can actually begin to plant seeds with new students within weeks of them joining the school. You will have some students that seem to be like a fish in water at the school. Everything about the school and the arts appeal to them. They are always present and giving 100%.

Sometimes that's because they have nothing else going on. They have not yet found their calling, but may very have in your school. How do you find out? You ask.

Periodically, you plant seeds with questions such as:

1. Joe, what do you do for a living? How do you like that?
2. Joe, that's our leadership team. They take special classes and learn how to teach martial arts. We've found that the skills really help them in work also. Do you think that would interest you?
3. Joe, if we were having this conversation in three years, and everything had gone the way you want it to, what would you be doing?
4. Joe, how do you like your job? Is there anything you would rather be doing?

Odds are you will not ask these questions at the same time. As you can see, they are progressively more probing, which means you will need to build some trust with your student first.

But, we've had many cases where we were able to hire a four-month Orange belt to teach intros and enroll people. The key is to keep your eyes out for potential staff regardless of their rank. It's not where they start, it's where they end up that matters.