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Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith Become an Author

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Training is not new to small businesses or to the Fortune 1000 corporations. Employees must be trained to learn specific skill sets within their job functions as well as policies and procedures. This is especially true in today’s technology driven 24/7 business world.

During the last 100 years, training has been viewed by some as the "necessary" evil cost. The prevailing belief was "We gotta to train them." And when sales plummeted or companies merged, the leadership's or management's belief was to cut the training budgets as well as the human resource department. Now does this really make sense?

If your people are the key to overcoming current challenges, then why cut their resources when you are experiencing significant issues. This is the time more than ever to invest (key word here is invest) in YOUR people. And successful small business owners understand that training and development are investments, not costs.

Slashing the training budget is in many cases a reaction to a symptom instead of the real much larger problem or problems. That problem or those problems may include the following:

1.Inability to define the desired results HINT: If you can't define the desired results that you want from the training, then why do the training? This is now a management problem, not a training problem.

2. No Strategic Plan HINT: If there is no strategic plan (who does what by when), the you and your people are on some one else's plan and the problem is poor planning, not training.

3. Outdated Strategic Plan HINT: If you haven’t revisited your plan within the last 30 days, then the problem is not training, but again poor planning and poor execution.

4. Poor Communication HINT: If 100% of your people cannot tell you what the top 3 goals of the organization are for the current year, you have a communication problem not a training problem.

5. Inconsistent Leadership HINT: If your actions are not consistently focused on the end results and your behaviors are not demonstrating the shared common values, then you have a leadership problem, not a training problem.


Now is the time for you to use your leadership skills to assess what the real problems that you are facing and not just the symptoms. Look to training as an investment in your people and therefore in your organization. For without those most advanced systems (your people) in your business, you wouldn't be able to conduct business, would you?

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