What You Lose with Half-Hearted Training and Development
- Dr. Chip Roper
- Jan 30, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 7
Executive Training Development is treated as a necessary evil that often leaves decision-makers doubting its worth and participants weary of meaningless content and busy work. Senior leaders often choose the “let’s just do something” strategy instead of carefully viewing their leadership training as part of their grander strategy and talent plan. In my prior post, we identified eight fail factors that doom many a training effort. Here in the following paragraphs, we explore what is lost with a half-hearted, underdeveloped approach to “investing in your team.”
Here are five things you lose when you don’t do executive development right.
Hours: We have yet to encounter a client with time to burn. Since the pandemic, knowledge workers are clocking more hours. Anyone in a growth company knows they cannot just maintain the status quo. More is required. When you bring your team together for something that is not relevant, and not going to end up positively impacting their work, you are burning hours. There’s no way to recover collective time wasted on training that doesn’t move the needle.
Money: There are several costs associated with putting your managers in a training room. Here’s a list:
The training vendor: $5,000 to $10,000 per trainer per day.
Travel and meals: $1,000 per day per person (vendors and team members).
Training venue (Even if you have your own space, there may be a cost to taking it offline): a few hundred dollars for a hotel conference room to thousands per day for a more inspiring location.
The cumulative compensation for all staff participating for that time: Say you have 10 people in training, each makes $100,000 per year. That annual salary nets out to $50 per person per hour, or in our case, $500 per hour just to be in the room. A week of training costs you $20,000 in their compensation.
The opportunity cost: Say two trainees are salespeople. They usually each generate $10,000 to $20,000 in topline revenue per week. At a 10% profit margin, you have a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 per participant.
A training week for your top ten employees: easily could cost over $100,000. Multi-cohort, multi-level programs are more. Wisely designed and skillfully executed training will make you money. But when it’s uninspiring and irrelevant, it’s a complete waste of money.
Trust: A poorly conceived or poorly delivered training program decreases your employee’s trust in you. How much can reports count on you to discern properly in your vendor choices? How well do you respect the value of their time? It’s one thing to have them come begrudgingly to an experience that blows them away. It’s quite another to leave them thinking, “Why did she bring this trainer in? That was torture.”
Internal enthusiasm: While a terrible training program may provide some shared memories (bad ones), in the end, it is a momentum killer. It doesn’t increase enthusiasm for your firm—it tanks morale.
Integration and Collaboration: A great training program is your opportunity to multiply the winning qualities of your corporate culture. This helps newly hired and newly acquired team members to understand your way of doing things, connect with peers, and build the relational foundations of collaboration. Poor training design, like the information dump approach, will squash the interconnectivity your team members need to start sharing intel, cross-selling, and brainstorming how to keep customers happy.
No Training is Better Than Bad Training
At the end of the day, with so much at stake, it’s fair to say that no training and development is better than bad training and development. But the best plan is training that is wisely designed and effectively delivered. With good training, there’s huge potential for a demonstrable return on investment (ROI). We’ll cover that in our next post.
See how RKE Partner’s executive development training will help you build momentum for business growth. Schedule a consultation today.
