Personnel Development: 7 Keys to Aiming Your Talent in the Right Direction
by Adele Sommers, Ph.D.

When businesses invest in their personnel, they’re taking a far-sighted view of success. Continually increasing the expertise of your staff can help your enterprise remain flexible, energized, and profitable.

This article reveals seven ways you can help your personnel grow, beginning with aiming their talents in the right direction. In so doing, you can make “co-visionaries” of your employees by enabling them to:

• Turn their strongest aptitudes into their most valuable expertise

• Understand cause-and-effect relationships in the business, and

• Learn to use highly effective performance-building techniques

Don’t Depend on Luck!

In good, plentiful times, it may seem reasonable to “hire and forget” — either when gaining new employees or utilizing contract help. With this approach, you would hire or contract someone to fill a particular need, apply a dollop of orientation and maybe a dab of training, send them into action, and presto! Problem solved! Or is it?

Certainly, a short-term advantage of a “hire and forget” philosophy is that it’s a fairly fast and convenient way to plug a human being into a socket of temporary need. But with this perspective, you’re not considering the negative effects of high turnover.

When significant turnover or downsizing occurs, it means that many of the company’s intellectual assets — people with precious, even priceless knowledge and expertise — are simply walking out the door, perhaps never to return. Some organizations don’t recover from such losses, and suffer the painful consequences.

Here’s A More Proactive Approach

Rather than depending on assumptions about whether your labor supply will remain plentiful, you can adopt a more insightful position. You can realize that conditions in existence today can evaporate tomorrow.

You can also recognize that the invaluable assets you have in the form of personnel can best serve the company’s goals when their talents are nurtured. The key is to aim these talents along each individual’s greatest strengths, since these will provide the ultimate benefit to the company.

Indeed, assuming that your organization can survive and thrive without a program to bring out the best in its people can have long-term ripple effects. And personnel can include both regular employees and contract workers recruited to fill fluctuating needs.

Therefore, obtaining the payoff you desire from your people, products, and services may depend on considering the needs of the entire staffing picture.

Companies sometimes fret about whether to invest in training their personnel, since those people might later leave with their newly acquired skills. I heard Rick Barrera, author of Overpromise & Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty, propose the following rebuttal. He said, “Some companies worry, ‘What if we train people, and they leave?’ The more important question should be, ‘What if we don’t train people...and they stay?”

Here are options for encouraging the development of expertise in your organization:

In conclusion, your staff will be much more productive and your customers more satisfied when you apply far-sighted personnel development instead of shortsighted luck. Your personnel comprise your greatest intellectual assets, and you can nurture their strengths into potent specializations using a variety of learning resources and support systems. In this fashion, your staff can become a formidable force capable of catapulting your business far beyond your competition.

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About the Author

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is author of “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance: 12 Ways to Profit from Hidden Potential.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more free tips like these, visit her site at www.LearnShareProsper.com

This article may be distributed freely on your Web site, as long as this entire article, including the links and full “About the Author” section, are unchanged. Please send a copy of, or link to, your “reprint” to Adele@LearnShareProsper.com.

Copyright 2005 Adele Sommers, The Enterprise Prosperity Guild, All Rights Reserved.

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