Whenever a company faces an economic downturn, training is usually the first thing to get cut. Reason: It’s not urgent. However, such thinking is a leading cause of reactionary work environments.

To lean on the concepts made popular by Stephen Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, if we ax training we create an imbalance between production and production capability.

It’s like saying “we’re going to stop doing maintenance on our machinery, but we expect it to keep producing just like it always did.”

The idea of continued investing in a down market appears risky on the surface, but savvy investors know that a down market is exactly when they should be buying more stock! As a matter of fact, in the monograph Advancing Corporate Excellence published by Workforce Chicago, Bill Godwin, Senior Vice President of Merchandising Supply Chain for True Value Hardware, says,

Management is committed to maintaining its educational offerings, even in downturns. … I learned from experience at other department stores, that if you cut people and management training in bad times, you won’t have good managers for the good times.

As a specialist in workforce training and development, I’ve noticed that many people—managers and executives included—don’t fully understand how training contributes to the bottom line.

In other words, they miss the financially beneficial ripple effects that invariably occur.

Reason: These ripple-effects don’t have a line item in the budget, so they’re simply overlooked.

Managers need to think like trainers (Look into my upcoming workshop on this topic). It’s an aspect of management and leadership that gets overlooked in all the developmental programs out there, and yet training—in good times and in down times—is a vital part of creating balanced growth.

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Filed in Work, Business, Opinion, Training, Motivation, Management, Leadership, Workplace, Train the Trainer