Training is not new to small businesses or to the Fortune 1000 corporations. Employees must be trained to learn specific skill sets within their job functions as well as policies and procedures. This is especially true in todays technology driven 24/7 business world.

During the last 100 years, training has been viewed by some as the necessary evil. The prevailing belief was "We gotta to train them." And when sales plummeted or companies merged, the leaderships or managements belief was to cut the training budgets as well as the human resource department. Now does this really make sense?

If your people are the key to overcoming current challenges, then why cut their resources when you are experiencing significant issues. This is the time more than ever to invest (key word here is invest) in YOUR people.

Slashing the training budget is in many cases a reaction to a symptom instead of the real much larger problem or problems. That problem or those problems may include the following:

Inability to define the desired results
HINT: If you cant define the desired results that you want from the training, then why do the training? This is now a management problem, not a training problem.

No Strategic Plan
HINT: If there is no strategic plan (who does what by when), the you and your people are on some one elses plan and the problem is poor planning, not training.

Outdated Strategic Plan
HINT: If you havent revisited your plan within the last 30 days, then the problem is not training, but again poor planning.

Poor Communication
HINT: If 100% of your people cannot tell you what the top 3 goals of the organization are for the current year, you have a communication problem not a training problem.

Inconsistent Leadership
HINT: If your actions are not consistently focused on the end results and your behaviors are not demonstrating the shared common values, then you have a leadership problem, not a training problem.

With the New Year fast approaching and the quarter quickly ending, now is the time for you as that forward thinking business leader to use your leadership skills to assess what the real problems that you are facing and not just the symptoms. Begin to belief that training is an investment in your people and therefore in your organization.

For without those most advanced systems (your people) in your business, you wouldnt be able to conduct business, would you?