Sam, a leader at our SeaArk plant in southern Arkansas, said, “If four years ago, someone had told me how much I was going to learn here, there is no way I would have believed them.”
Capital allocation
As CEO of Correct Craft, a large company operating globally, one of my primary responsibilities is capital allocation; we are fortunate to have many resources, but like all companies, they are not unlimited. After many years of working to make sound investment decisions, I can find no higher return on investment than employee development. Sam’s comment above is valid because we prioritize investing in our team.
Without getting too deep into accounting lingo – even as a CPA, I don’t want to do that – it significantly helps an organization if its leader views employee development as an investment, not an expense. If a leader believes developing their team is an investment with a great return, employee development costs are encouraged even in tough times and are much less likely to become a target for cutting when trying to make the budget work.
Many years ago, I read an article that reported Motorola, the pioneer of Six Sigma in its heyday, had determined that it gets $33 back for every dollar it invests in employee development. That’s a crazy good return, and for most companies, it is the best investment available. When CEOs like me allocate capital, they have a tough time beating a 33:1 return!
At Correct Craft, it helps us to start with the premise that our organization can rise no higher than our people can take us. Every leader knows that at some level, but many are afraid to make investments in their team. I often hear that these leaders are afraid of making big investments in people and then having those employees leave.
“It is better to train people and have them leave than not to train people and have them stay,” Zig Ziglar said at a conference I attended in the early 1990s. Those words changed the course of my career and resulted in my now decades-long commitment to developing people.
However, many leaders either don’t know about or understand the principle Ziglar shared and fear their employees leaving after they have invested in making them better. As with most fears, very rarely is this fear realized. In my experience, it’s the opposite; employees feel a heightened loyalty to employers willing to invest in them. Employees don’t want to leave if their leaders invest in them.
It also helps to understand that if your team is not getting better, they are falling behind.
Entropy
If you are like me and cannot remember every detail regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you may have forgotten about entropy. In a nutshell, entropy is quite simple: All systems in our universe tend to become more disordered with time. We deteriorate. My mind tends to make an association between entropy as a principle of science and entropy in the world of our everyday lives. As leaders, are we and our teams and the systems we create exempt from this scientific law? No, of course not. If we are not learning, we are falling behind.
Entropy can be a perilous—even deadly—force in our businesses. In extreme circumstances, if we are complacent, it will put us out of business. Any segment or aspect of your business that is not continuously improving runs the risk of deteriorating. Not only do you need to stay focused on managing all aspects of your business, but you must always regularly work at improving them. The less you focus on improving your business, the greater the likelihood that entropy will take its toll. And when entropy takes its toll on an organization, it’s not pretty.
Over the last fifteen years, we have developed employees in many different ways at our company, Correct Craft. We have brought in outside speakers, had internal speakers, and I have personally taught many leadership development classes. We had a large group of employees go through a Dale Carnegie customer service course, and just recently, we had about 30 employees working on their Lean Six Sigma Black Belt through Villanova University. We formed Correct Craft University to manage all of this and much more.
Plus, we are readers. Over the years, our team has read dozens of books together, and it is a great way not only to learn collectively but also to build both comradery and a common language. I know we are exponentially better because of our desire to read as a team.
Correct Craft is coming up on its 100th birthday, and I tell our incredible story in the book Making Life Better – The Correct Craft Story. It is the story of a company, but more importantly, it is the story of the people who make the company. The consistent theme of the story is that very talented people were able to make good decisions, often under challenging circumstances. Few organizations survive a century, and no company lasts that long without investing in its team.
