127. Offensive Education At Work
There are two types of ways that companies can help educate their employees: defensive training and offensive training.
Defensive training is…. well…. I talked about it in Part 1. Just go read that. It’ll take 2 minutes and it’s better than me explaining it all over again.
The Two Ingredients That Make A Company
Every business, no matter how small or large, must have two ingredients:
Sellable product(s) or services, and
People who can create, market and sell those products or services
Product and people. It’s that simple.
Here’s a basic fact for y’all to chew on:
The more sellable the product, the better growth potential for the company
This is why you spontaneously see umbrella salesmen magically appear on New York City streets the moment it starts raining. The rain makes their product extremely sellable.
Easily sellable product = opportunity for growth
Hard-to-sell product = challenging growth trajectory
This same basic idea can be applied to people.
Having great employees is critical to a company’s success. But a company is not just a collection of individuals, it’s about how they all work together.
A company is only as good as its people and how well they collaborate.
The more productive, effective and collaborative employees are, the greater the growth potential for the company.
How do you encourage positive collaboration?
Heck, I thought you’d never ask.
How To Create Positive Collaboration
The levels of productivity and collaboration in a company are a direct result of the company’s culture.
Let me explain.
A culture that is transparent and supportive, that focuses on employee happiness and healthy discourse, is one in which collaboration and productivity thrive.
Happy employees make better companies.
There are a whole variety of studies around this topic. They prove time and again that happy employees are 12% more productive than the less happy variety. Sometimes even 13%.
Studies ranging from the Journal of Applied Psychology to Google have found that healthy discourse, productive collaboration and general employee happiness is improved with empathy.
Empathy is an important value of highly productive companies.
In fact, if you haven’t heard about the Basecamp fiasco, it’s a good lesson on how lack of empathy negatively impacts company culture.
People and Empathy
Let me recap what we’ve talked about so far…
Every company’s success is fully reliant on two things:
1. the PEOPLE who are hired and
2. the level of EMPATHY and productive collaboration within the team
Because a company is just the amalgamation of its people and how they interact, interviewing and hiring the right people is critical.
Hiring the best people gives a company a significantly better chance at success.
People matter.
And this, my pretty little petunia, is the whole point of where I’m getting to.
It is exactly why we had that previous discussion about my cousin-the-former-dentist.
It is the problem inherent in almost every company... well, everywhere.
Offensive Education
Let me repeat, the two critical elements that directly impact any company’s success, no matter how small or large the organization, are:
Great hires
Empathetic and collaborative environment
This brings us right back to the ideas of defensive training and offensive training that I mentioned way up top. You already read about defensive employee training.
Offensively training employees is about providing education that improves the employees skillset and brings value to both the employee’s and the company’s growth potential.
Last January I hired a Salesforce admin. He didn’t have much knowledge of the Salesforce b2b marketing platform so we paid $2k for him to learn the platform. It helped him, it helped the company. Win-win.
That’s offensive education.
Get it?
The Things They Don’t Teach You At Work
Lots of companies provide offensive education opportunities for employees. That’s awesome. I know employees who had companies fund courses to help them learn about coding or project management or how to use photoshop or whatever the heck was relevant to their career growth.
But there’s still a big problem.
Remember, the two most important traits that have a direct impact on a company’s growth are:
Great hires, and
Empathetic and collaborative environment
So what is one hugely important skillset that could have massive impact in a company’s success? Interviewing.
Sure you can find lots of nifty interview questions through a simple google search. But great interviewing is less about the questions asked and more about the space within the answers.
When was the last time your company taught you how to be a better interviewer?
My guess is your answer is “never”. I mean, in my 30 years of the workforce, I’ve never had a company that taught me how to be a good interviewer.
In fact, I have never heard of any company anywhere that trains their employees on how to be great at interviewing potential candidates.
Sure, HR will do the first round of interviews, but it’s not the HR team that makes final hiring decisions.
Bad employees usually hire other bad employees.
And this is exactly why my cousin-the-former-dentist makes a good living helping companies recruit top talent.
Every single company needs their employees to have this skillset yet nobody is teaching it.
Training Empathy
Don’t get me started on training employees about empathy. Which, by the way, you just did. Way to go.
Having empathetic employees has a meaningful impact on a company’s success. It has a direct and immediate impact on the health of a company’s culture.
Heck, the number one reason people leave jobs is because their managers lack empathy. There is an entire goshdarn study every year called the State of Workplace Empathy that analyzes this very subject. That’s how critical the importance of empathy is to every company.
Yet this skilllset is rarely - very rarely - extremely rarely - maybe, like, never - taught in any type of proactive way at companies.
So I ask the question again.
Why, in the name of all things good in this world, are companies not training their employees in the two most important elements that have a direct impact on company growth and long term success?
I mean, WTF.
Ammiright?