Many of my clients are not very good at training and developing their staff, but to be fair that was also true throughout my career in the corporate world.
I remember being sent on a management training course after my promotion to lead a team, but that it was almost a year after I started in the new role that I went on the course. I’d made my mistakes and learned on the job!
I also remember it was a residential course in London, so we took advantage and the family had a couple of days touring the sites. My son must have been about 8 when he asked me what I had been doing that day and I was able to truthfully reply “playing with Lego”
Why wouldn’t you train your staff? There are no good answers, only excuses. Not enough time, it’s too expensive and so on. It’s not seen as a priority for the business so gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.
There’s an old joke about a conversation between the finance director and the managing director that goes:
FD “What happens if we train them and the leave?”
to which the MD relies “What happens if we don’t and they stay?”
It’s not just the time on the training course though. If you don’t put into practice what you have “learned” you haven’t really learned anything. You may have had an entertaining time (any trainer worth their salt will have made the sessions fun) but that’s all.
That’s a lot like the bookshelf in many offices, groaning with business tomes from the great and good, most of them unread. Take a look around your office – I know I have a few and I am sure you do to. My speaking colleague Nigel Risner calls the phenomenon “shelf development”
If you don’t take time after the training to put it into action, you wasted your time and money. If you don’t read and absorb the lessons from that book, you wasted your money.