As I look back on nearly three decades of working with companies around the world, I think a few key ideas are fundamental to business success.
Here is one of them:
The success of your business is directly tied to the quality of the people you can get, grow and keep on your team – and the relationships they create with your customers.
I have yet to meet a single business leader that does not strongly agree with this idea. However, I see many businesses that still need to live this idea. Today I want to talk about the growth and development of top talent.
Once you get somebody on your team, there is no excuse for not investing time, energy, and money in helping that person continuously improve.
This is the most important investment you can make in your company. You cannot improve your company without highly talented people who are steadily improving.
Here are just a few of the things that you should be doing:
- Formal mentoring program
- Creating a formal development plan for each employee
- Creating an internal training department
- Training classes taught by qualified outside instructors
- Cross training
- Benchmarking your training efforts against leading companies
- Buying a copy of a book for each of your employees at least once a year
- Creating a lending library of top business books
- Getting your employees a membership to an audiobook service
- Getting your employees a membership to a book summary service
- Bringing in outside experts for a “lunch and learn”
- Taking your employees to visit other companies
- Sending out a newsletter with good information for your employees
- Sending out a list of top podcasts they should be listening to
- Sending out a list of YouTube videos they should watch
- Investing in online/virtual training
- Taking your employees to a major training seminar by an expert
- Bringing your employees to an industry event
- Annual or semiannual company training conferences
- A formal recognition and rewards program
- Team building events
- Regular coaching meetings
- One-on-one meetings with senior executives
- Lunch with the CEO
- Getting high-potential employees a business coach
- Create learning groups
- Give them training on physical, mental, and financial health
These are just a few things I came up with off the top of my head. I’m sure there are several more you could add to this list. But here is my point. If you are not doing all or most of this, you’re not truly serious about helping your people (and company) to be as successful as possible. A good deal of what I have listed is free, much of it is very inexpensive, and only a few things require a significant financial investment. But I can tell you that not doing the items on this list is very expensive.
Please visit my site at https://johnspence.com/contact/ if you want to get in contact with me. I’d love to hear from you.
