Training and Development: The Most Important Long-Term Strategy for Business Leaders

This article was written by Jim Miley and published by Crossroads Professional Coaching.

Most business leaders spent substantial energy considering their best options for strategic priorities.  We’re approaching planning season where every year our clients work on review of current year performance and looking ahead to strategic plans for the coming year and years.  

Sales strategies, operations strategies and finance strategies tend to dominate strategic planning agendas; all critical elements to a strong business and also all completely dependent upon another critical component, the people.  

How Important Are People To Your Strategy?

Having led organizations and now working with business owners every day, I say with confidence that people are the most frequently discussed topic amongst leaders asking for help or guidance.  

There is a common saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  The source of the quote is debated as to whether the father of modern business management, Peter Drucker, or former Ford CEO, Mark Fields, deserves the credit; but, either would be a credible business advisor.  The point of the quote being that you can’t execute the best strategy without good culture alignment with the people.  

Just imagine for a moment how many of your past or present business challenges are rooted in human performance.  Said another way, would you have significantly fewer business challenges if individual performance problems were cut in half?  

For the sake of brevity, I asked about cutting individual performance problems in half.  But the opportunity is much larger than just reducing performance problems.  We need to be considering the powerful impact of leading as many team members as possible to high performer status.  

Common sense and reality tell us that we can’t eliminate human error completely nor can we develop everyone to a high performer.  My point is to highlight how big of an impact human performance makes on your business strategy and to encourage leaders to give your people sufficient space in your strategic plans. 

What Is Your Human Resource Strategy?

Many leaders of smaller businesses believe they don’t have the resources to focus on human resource strategies.  Without putting attention on human resource strategies, any business is relying on new hires bringing most of the skills and capabilities the business needs with them before they’re hired.  Many manager’s views on training focus on basic knowledge required to do a given job; procedures, tools and systems.  

There is a huge consequence to limiting the attention you give to your people strategy.  If you rely too heavily upon staff bringing skills with them when they’re hired, you create organizational feature that limits growth and encourages higher turnover than necessary which tends to hinder progress toward the culture you want to build.  The impact of unnecessary turnover hits the whole organization.  There is frustration at every level arising from skills gaps, friction through performance improvement activities, disappointment at resignations or terminations and no real positive benefit to be found.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.  

L&OD, Training, and Recruiting Are Within Your Reach

Leadership & Organizational Development, L&OD, just sounds like something found in big companies; because it is.  But I’m writing to tell you that L&OD is very available to small business owners, you just have to put it in your plans.  

Rather than thinking you can’t afford to allocate too much resource on L&OD, training and recruiting, recognize the long-term return on your investment.  Assuming one of your objectives is to grow a healthy and sustainable business that runs well without you getting involved in everything forever, you can’t afford not to put proper energy into developing your team.

As this is a relatively short form business post, I’ll be brief and give a few simple but practical applications for the business leader looking to put more people into your strategic plans.  

Leadership & Organizational Development

You must have an organized and consistent performance management process where every employee clearly knows the standards of performance, expectations and how they are performing against expectations.  

As part of the performance management process, every employee should have “Development Objectives” for the year.  These objectives don’t need to have a large time commitment or cost to make a large impact. 

If you have more than one management level, you should consider succession plans for all of your leaders.  Who would be the next person in line for each position?  What gaps are there in capabilities preventing current team members from being ready to advance?  The answers to these questions tell you what needs to be in the individual “Development Objectives.”  

Training

On going training should be a requirement for a good performance review.

Development Objectives usually require some training for the employee to develop in the area(s) you communicate.  

You can assign the action of researching, identifying and proposing appropriate training courses for your approval as part of each team members training requirement.

Recruiting

You should have a published description of your company core values.

All recruits need to match your core values.

You should have a formal job description for every position you hire.

All recruiting should be conducted professionally and on a merit basis; ie no “brother in law hires.”  Candidates must match the core values, the culture and the requirements to succeed at the job.  

Conduct background checks and reference checks on all new hires.  

The actual business expense for implementing all of the bullets above is completely within your control by what you approve in the form of training.  Aside from training, the rest of the bullets which build out a fairly robust people component to your business plans are items you just incorporate into the normal block and tackle flow of operations.  

Practical Application of Personnel Development 

Words to live by: everyone is unique and therefore different; respect that.

“For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them…”  

Rom 12: 4-6

You should tailor your expectations and standards of performance to match a given team member.  Talent, experience, tenure, scope of job, pay and aspirations for advancement should all influence how you review someone and what you assign for development objectives.  

Matching standards of performance to the individual team member works in both directions with regard to “raising or lowering the bar.”  Less experienced, smaller scope of job and lower compensated staff will generally have a lower bar while more experienced, higher impact job scope and higher compensation will have a higher bar to meet and exceed expectations.  

“… Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.”  Luke 12: 48

Building systems of Leadership & Organizational Development, Training and Recruiting is something any business of any size can incorporate into their strategic plans. While often viewed as features of larger companies, small business owners cheat themselves out of substantial company performance benefits if they neglect to give their people the proper space on the agenda of the strategic planning cycle.