SmartPulse — our weekly reader poll in Smartbrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 150,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Wednesday in our e-newsletter.
Last week we asked: How strongly do your organization’s leaders support training for their teams?
- We mandate training, attend it ourselves and support it afterward, 39%
- We send people to training and sometimes expect them to use what they learned, 27%
- People have to fight to get trained and they get little support, 20%
- We don’t send people to any sort of training, 7%
- We send people to training but model the exact opposite behaviors we expect of them, 6%
Sending someone to training but not attending yourself or expecting your people to use the tools they’re trained on is a waste of time. It sends the wrong message. If you truly believe “people are our most important resource,” then when you invest in them you need to demonstrate that you’re serious about the investment. If you’re going to invest in your people, cultivate that investment with the support of your time, attention, and encouragement.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of ThoughtLeaders.