Which best explains your approach to creating and delivering training for your people? - SmartBrief

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Which best explains your approach to creating and delivering training for your people?

2 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 170,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: Which best explains your approach to creating and delivering training for your people?

  • We always seek external providers of training content and delivery: 3.46%
  • We are biased toward going external but do some things internally: 13.17%
  • We are biased toward doing things internally but sometimes go external: 59.4%
  • We do pretty much everything internally and rarely look outside for help: 23.97%

The false economy of “I’ll do it myself.” 85% of you have a bias toward or only create and deliver your own training using internal resources. I’m sure the rationale is “it’s cheaper for us to do it this way.” The question I’ll pose is would you fix your own plumbing? Or code your own website? Probably not — you would hire a professional to do it right the first time. Training is no different. Sure, some subject matter training on your business must be created/delivered internally but for other topics, you’re likely under-delivering both on the content and delivery which in the long run costs you more. It also sends the wrong message to your people that cheaper is more important than quality. I encourage you to rethink your approach to training — you’ll be better off in the long run.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”