There's a CFO/CEO discussion that's made its way to several websites. The discussion is about investing in their people to make sure they have enough training to do their jobs well. The CFO thinks about all the resoruces they are going to routinely exhaust to ensure their staff is capable of being productive and says to the CEO, "what happens if we train them and they leave?" The CEO quips back with a different question to the CFO, "what happens if we don't train them and they stay?"

This terrible argument only focused on one dimension of people-development. Successful or satisfactory training is only a single dimension. With an expectation of some critical production, there is an assumption that the right skills are needed to achieve those results. Do you happen to know someone who works for a company that has a set of skills that allows them to do something of value at work? It's actually harder to consider the opposite of that.

Seth Godin said (or wrote), "If failure is not an option, then neither is success." The sentiment of that statement rings so true to this above discussion between a CFO and CEO. Its this mindset that fails the relationship between institutional leadership and front-line staff.

There's more for another day.