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As An Employer, If You Don’t Train People, You Also Cannot _______
There are all sorts of articles in the world about “Why don’t companies train anymore?” That type of article doesn’t need to be belabored: they don’t train because training represents a cost of money and a supposed cost of time away from productivity, and the theory has always been that “if we train them, they will leave for others, and thus we paid for our rivals’ employees to be trained.” That’s a stupid line of thinking, IMHO, but it’s persisted for 50+ years now in white-collar America, so it has some resonance for people.
The training thing is an interesting discussion overall. We tend to love military leaders and NFL coaches, often writing long articles or making documentary films about them. At their heart, those jobs are teachers and trainers. That’s what they do — they train others to do a job both individually and collectively in the name of some goal.
Yet at the corporate level, we don’t value training that much. We relegate it to HR, which is the department where any valuable initiative goes to die. We talk often in the last 3–4 years about inclusivity and diversity training. There was some whole culture wars issue this week about Michelle Obama getting paid $741,000 for a diversity talk/training. In short: who cares? But I…
