At a recent conference, there were many presentations on several training, development and associated topics. One of the Keynote addresses narrowed in on the foundation aspects of building a solid business. That foundation was rooted in organizational culture framed by the entity’s core purpose, values, and principles.
Although the presentation gave examples of the importance of investing in your people’s skills and knowledge, the more important takeaway was that even if you have best-in-class training and development tools and systems, they generally never contribute to the level desired if your culture is flawed from the beginning. So many organizations put great efforts into the training and development of their people but are challenged as to why they only get a marginal return on their time and dollar investment. They do get skills developed through training on skills. They do get some improvement when they develop leadership skills. The challenge is that without a solid foundation, the business being built is on shaky ground.
Having spent considerable time in the construction world as a journeyman carpenter (putting up sticks) and civil technology engineer ( soils, groundwork, concrete, etc.), the criticality of a solid foundation to the project’s overall success went without saying. If the foundation engineering was flawed, then everything on top of it would also be questionable.
Building your business is no different. Your foundation is your organization’s Core Purpose, Values, and Principles. These are the few critical elements that under no circumstance will you or your business bend or twist to move forward. From our perspective, many organizations never take this step as seriously as they should. Yes, they take time to come up with words and verbs that not only sound great and get people excited for a period of time but over time, do they hold themselves accountable to the real integrity of the intent of those statements?
When an organization’s foundation is either undefined or not upheld to its highest standards, the efforts to build an organization with training and development continue to fall short of expectations. We are great encouragers and supporters of investing in your people to get them the training and development they need and deserve to be able to contribute to the organization’s objectives. Where we raise our challenge is in the foundation the training and development is being built upon.
Over the years, business development, training, consulting, coaching, and any number of supporting cast of characters have caused problems for organizations when they bring people together to capture the vision, mission, purpose, values, etc. and do not take the time to boil them down into the finest and rarest of precious metals. It becomes a let’s feel good outcome rather than defining who we really are or should be and then appreciating we have substantial work to get the foundation right.
Over the past 30+ years, JKL Associates has been privileged and honored to have worked with organizations that have arrived at a solid foundation on which they first build their culture and then train and develop their teams to be all they can be. It takes real work and lots of perseverance to set strong purpose, values, and principles in motion and never waver from them. Those who make the commitment find they eliminate a whole bunch of problems other organizations deal with on a recurring basis. Such as employee disengagement, which leads to higher turnover rates. Customer dissatisfaction leads to a higher loss rate, thus causing a demand for replacement sales rather than growth sales. When the foundation is solid, every investment in people elevates to a higher level.
Have we got you thinking? Reach out to JKL Associates and let’s have a conversation about building your future upon a solid foundation. Call us at MI (313) 527-7945 or FL (407) 984-7246.
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