Is your company expending money on training without expecting a ROI? Is the budget expended on training strengthening the employees’ skills allowing them to grow personally and professionally?
There is a difference between training and development. In many circumstances, due to the misinterpretation of these terms, companies expend tons of money providing training to executives and managers who already have the skills and the knowledge, when what they really need is to develop those skills to their maximum potential
Most organizations, when seeking new employees, invest money in newspaper ads, headhunters, job fairs, internet posting to attract and hire those candidates who already have the knowledge and the skills to do the job.
However, does that knowledge or those skills make them successful? How many times have you met individuals with degrees from top schools who can not reach professional success?
Training is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of the teaching; on the other hand, development teaches you how to become more productive and effective at work and how to maintain focus on what really counts in all aspects of your life. In other words, training provides the skill, development maximizes it.
When you invest money in developing your employees, you are helping them use the resources that they have to do a better job. While you have them together in the team arena, you have the opportunity to get them to discover things that they would have never discovered in their day-to-day work.
As you strengthen the individual members of the team, the team gets strengthened. As the team gets strengthened, you will see that the organization gets strengthened.
When we develop people through coaching, the tools we use are different from those we apply when we provide training. Those tools are centered on:
- Attitudes and habits
- Skills, not technical skills, but the soft skills, the personal skills: things like communication, time management, decision-making, problem-solving, etc.
- Goal-setting and goal achievement
- Purpose
Once those tools are applied in the proper way, attitudes and habits turn positive, time strategies are put in place, productivity increases, goal-setting turns into goal achievement, and the feeling of success brings the team members a balance in their personal life and professional careers.
Going back to the article’s title: Is training only for pets? In my opinion no, it is not. Training and education are the main structure of the temple of knowledge, and when we decide to invest in professional and personal development, we are fortifying the temple.
If the most important asset in your organization is your people, and they were hired because of the quality of the skills and knowledge they brought to the company, it is time to think about developing their skills to their maximum potential to propel your organization’s organic growth.
As an Executive and Corporate Team Coach, I provide the tools and methodologies to accelerate team performance. For more information, please review our website at http://www.activategroupinc.com/, call Pablo J. Perez at (305) 722-7215, or send an e-mail to pjperez@activategroupinc.com.
Some Reference and excerpts were taken from Coaching Corporate Teams by David Herdlinger.
