When is the Moment Employees are Developed? This is Not a Trick Question
“A long journey requires lots of mango.”
Dan and Chip Heath, ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard’
How many of us have heard these questions: 
- "Could you do that training in one day instead of two?"
- "I thought these people had been trained?"
- "Can we get by pushing that training off to the next budget cycle?"
- "Why would I take time to go to an outside development session?"
- "You’re kidding; you think I need a coach? My results are great!"
Have we been discouraged by the attitudes behind these questions? Yes! Will there ever come a day when the rhetoric about employees being valuable assets of any company is matched by the actions when a quarterly objective is in doubt? Maybe! Training budgets have long been among the first things to get sacrificed when the going gets tough. We all know that the mindset enforced by the language of accounting (employees as expense on the balance sheet) continues to hold sway over the reality of employees as assets. For now that is. You can have something to do with how long this view holds its power.
I know a CFO who flatly states that he hates to spend money on anything. I have asked him how he feels about investment. “Investment, why I love investing, it is one of my favorite things to do”, he says. “Nothing makes me happier than seeing an investment grow.” When I follow that question up with another about how he feels about investing in employee development he gets a sour face and says “It’s not the same thing! Employees are an expense of the business.” But I am his coach and he thinks that it is going well.
There is at least one company I know that annually accepts awards because of the percentage of the annual budget that is committed to employee training. If you back out the amount the company spends on new hire training because of high turnover in certain positions and just focused on employee development the same company would be far from award winning. However, the very same company is currently searching for a director of leadership development.
Let me clearly state my own vision: Every employee has the potential to be developed into a more valuable contributor than they are today. I firmly believe that it makes sense to think that any employee’s last day on the job should their most valuable whether they have been with a company one year, ten or even twenty. This is an uncommon view that I have been working to make common for twenty five years.
Today I am more excited about the future of employee development than ever. The very fact of the constant change all our organizations now face gives us the opportunity to realize the fullest value of every employee in ways that the non-global economy never did.
This realization will require a shift in thinking by those of us in leadership positions - especially positions where decisions are made about how best to invest our company’s money.
When we
- ask our trainers to do “hurry up” training,
- we relate to development like it is something that gets “done” rather than something that gets started and sustained,
- relate to coaching like a remedial activity,
- think development is another word for training,
- act as though development is something others might need but exclude ourselves from the need for periodic revitalization,
- or when we decide that training and development budgets can be slashed without consequence,
we are making it clear to our employees that there is still a ways to go before we authentically act like they are the company’s greatest asset. But it is a process we are involved with, one that requires patience and reinforcement when progress is in evidence.
The words in the opening quote to this post refer to a process of animal training described by the authors of “Switch…’. Mango is the treat used by trainers of monkeys learning to ride skateboards. The Heaths are making the point that reinforcement plays a big part in bringing about the learning of complex skills. They could have as easily said “A long journey requires lots of patience” and the quote would have been equally apt but not as intriguing perhaps! Their point, and the point here as well, is that there will be no moment when your company finally recognizes employees as its most valuable asset and begins to habitually invest in development as if this were so. There is a process and those who lead it will need to be persistent and bring along lots of mango.
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Where in your company do you see signs that senior managers, especially those responsible for resource allocations, are inclined more towards employee development now than in the past?
Have you told them that you appreciate what they are doing?
