It costs money to provide your people with professional training. The better the training, the more money it costs, as you would expect. The bigger and the more important the outcomes, the more you are likely to spend.
Coaching costs money, too. Really good coaching costs much more than you might expect. But if you want to identify the obstacles (always internal) and blast through to better performance, you have to pay the price. There isn’t anything that produces greater results faster than good coaching, but it isn’t cheap.
But training and coaching are expensive in other ways. To provide people with training opportunities, you have to take them off the field. While your people are being trained, they’re not working. The same is true of coaching; it takes time. It’s hours away from the work you hired people to do.
Change comes with a price, too. As you train and coach people, there is a serious lag time between the interactions and the results. It’s very much like driving on ice; you hit the brakes and turn the wheel, but it takes time for the wheel to catch. The time it takes for your people to produce new results is another cost.
The Real Expense
But if you believe training and coaching is expensive, try not training and coaching your people. The real expense is having assets that aren’t fully developed. What’s expensive is the time you lose not producing the results you are really capable of producing. The opportunity cost far exceeds anything you might pay for training or coaching, regardless of the expense.
You think training and development is expensive? What’s really expensive is not training and coaching your people.
Questions
Why is training and coaching not considered an investment?
What percentage of your income do you invest in your personal and professional development?
How much time do you take off the field and how often?
What do you do to ensure you get a return on your investment?
