In my three decades in the workplace, it’s interesting that most companies don’t pay enough attention to developing their people.

They would even look at it as a cost or expense. In times of financial difficulties, the first budget cut is training. That’s assuming there even is a training budget, to begin with.

The world is evolving so fast that we need to transform our organizations constantly. It means that new skills or upgrading of skills are required. We want to be competitive, yet we don’t invest in our people. How is that even possible?

We claim that our people are our most valuable asset, yet we don’t grow our most valuable asset. We expect them to become better at their work. We expect over and above performance. How is that possible without adequately planned and executed development strategies?

Would you expect your child to be good at a skill without someone teaching him? Would you expect your son to be good at playing the piano but not invest in honing his skills? I should hope not. Would you say, ‘here is a piano, son, learn it? Oh, by the way, I expect you to be the next Piano genius in the country.’

As our economies recover, the more aggressive companies are positioning themselves to be able to capture a more significant cut of the pie. They invest in their people’s ability to sell, provide fantastic customer service, effectively manage projects, and turn out great marketing content.

It’s a great time to grab market share from the slower players. We cannot do that without people. We cannot do that if we don’t develop our people to a higher competency.

Google, Apple, Rustans, Citibank, and other significant players know the importance of people and the criticality of developing them. That’s one of the reasons these companies can outperform their competition. They invest in their most valuable assets. The operative word is ‘invest.’ They don’t spend; they invest.

Companies cannot provide excellent customer service, products, and customer experience with a mediocre workforce. After all, behind these are people.

Our most important asset is our people. Invest in them, and the investment will return with great dividends.

“The doer alone learneth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Time and again, we have a piece of knowledge or information we wish we knew. We are at a loss on how to motivate our team. We can’t figure out how to prepare and execute an effective presentation. Our level of expertise helps propel our careers and life.

When we do get that nugget of knowledge that can make a difference in our lives, we would usually do one of two things.

We continue our fascination with it for a few weeks or even months. After that, we allow it to fizzle out without a fighting chance.

Or we put the knowledge to use. We understand that learning is useless unless it is put into action.

Putting learning into action improves our lives, our careers, and the lives of the people that look up to us.

Let us remember that learning is not the key to a better life. It’s the application of the learning.

Have a great day!

I have been silently watching the bashing that happened during the campaign and now even after our votes where casted.

Here are my two cents.

We should unify and not divide the country. May we all have peace and unify for a better Philippines! It is written that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’.

It is God who position leaders for a reason. Who are we to question Gods wisdom? Let us support whoever God placed for the sake of the country and not for our candidate.

#leaders #leadership #learning #learn

Today, we will be adding mini-lessons on the different aspects of running a business. We will be covering mini five-minute lessons on; starting a business, operating a business, leading a business, and marketing a business. From my experience as a consultant, these are the four areas of challenge in most companies.

Productivity is an important element in all companies. That is why we decided to start making mini-lessons on employee productivity. The reason why the lessons are short is because of retention. We don’t want to bombard you with too many things to remember that you end up remembering nothing. We also understand that you may not have the luxury of sitting down for a two-hour lesson.

Every time we share a lesson, we will make sure that it’s short and focuses on one sub-topic only.

Enjoy and please feel free to let us know if there are topics that you want us to simplify and share.

It seemed like a typical Thursday as I got down from our unit to the basement parking. Ten minutes before going down, we always advise our driver Iyas that we are on the way.

Iyas met me in the basement three waiting area. We walked and got in our Starex almost at the same time. I settled myself in the passenger seat, and Iyas tried to start the car. After pressing the start button, nothing happened. He tried again. Once again, nothing.

I asked Iyas to turn on the headlights. Nothing happened. The car battery is dead. It was a good thing I did not have any meetings that morning. I called the Motolight service to have a replacement car battery delivered and installed.

While we waited, I asked Iyas why the car battery was fully drained; his first reply was he did not know. ‘I don’t know ’ is his default reply for everything. I checked my records, and the battery was less than a year old. It’s not likely that it does not store electricity properly.

I asked him to think harder. After five minutes, he said that he might have left the lights open. The night before was his brother’s birthday. He was in a hurry to catch up on the birthday gathering. He may have left the car lights open.

If we step back, we could have wrongly taken it for granted that the car battery had died. We could have just replaced it without thinking deeper about the actual cause.

The cause was not the car light draining the battery. The real root cause was my driver’s negligence. When we got to the root cause, I informed Iyas that the next time we needed to spend replacing the car battery due to his negligence, he would need to pay for half the cost of the car battery. Since that agreement, we have never had to replace a drained car battery due to negligence.

If we take a helicopter view of what transpired, you will notice the essential elements of a structured problem-solving technique.

1. Information gathering. I dug deeper beyond what ‘seemed’ to be the cause.

2. Define the problem. The problem, in this case, is that my driver was negligent.

3. Options. We could jump-start the car, but that might not be a sustained solution. Getting the battery checked and replaced was more of the proper long-term resolution. The preventive action was the agreement for Iyas to shoulder half the cost of a replacement battery.

4. Solution. Get the battery replaced, and Iyas to agree.

5. Post-event assessment. The incident never happened again.

Solving a problem should not be done in haste. A proper information gathering, problem definition, options identification, solution selection, and implementation helps resolve and prevent the recurrence of a problem.