Why You Need to Learn How to Swim with Your Clothes On

Imagine a boy named Lars, a bubbly, blond ten-year-old living in Amsterdam. On a beautiful winter day, he is walking back from school, when suddenly a bike messenger comes straight at him. Jumping back to avoid the oncoming cyclist, he falls into a canal; the water is freezing, and his ability to swim is hampered by the weight of his clothes and backpack. Lars has 30 to 60 seconds until he goes under, and 3 minutes until he is dead. 

Luckily, it is mandatory in the Netherlands for children to learn to swim with their clothes on. They train not in a swimsuit, but in full gear, so that if they fall into water in a situation like Lars’s, they won’t panic and drown.

Sadly, most companies are not as smart as the Dutch. They train for typical hypotheticals, rather than events that happen in real life. In fact, many start-up companies and small businesses fail to train altogether. 

Why is the Water So Cold?

The cold water in our analogy results from what Ray Kurzweil, a director and futurist from Google, calls The Law of Accelerating Returns. The pace of technological advances gets faster every year, so organizations must also redefine themselves at an ever-faster pace. 

As we look around, it is not hard to see that we are in an age of acceleration, from the defunct Blockbusters of the world, to dying retail stores, to the current shift occurring in the world of media. Predictably, legacy media companies are scrambling to figure out the new digital and mobile landscape. However, more interestingly, even relatively new entrants like BuzzFeed and Vice are also missing targets and having to pivot to keep up. And this is only going to continue into the future.

Basically, the water is never getting warmer. Again. Ever. 

Should We Pay for Swimming Lessons?

A 2014 report from Bersin by Deloitte states that spending on corporate training is up to over $70 billion in the US, and over $130 billion worldwide. Clearly, companies are spending to prepare their organizations and people to cope with the rapid pace of change.

However, it seems that most are spending their money in the wrong places. Instead of creating custom training programs that are strategic and impact important business metrics—the circled quadrant in the diagram below—organizations are spending their training budgets in less impactful ways, mostly in non-strategic areas. 

Three Better Ways to Spend Your Training Budget (from People Much Smarter Than Me)

So what can you do instead? Here are some thoughts from people worth listening to.

1.    Netflix: “Just Teach Them the Business”

In her book Powerful, Patty McCord, the long-time Head of Human Resources at Netflix, advises abandoning most conventional training in favour of teaching all employees about the business. If people have a view from the C suite, they will feel truly connected to the problem-solving that must be done at all levels of the company.

The irony is that organizations pay for so much training and a typical mid-level employee will not be sure of the intricacies of how the business runs. To avoid this problem, new Netflixers hear detailed presentations on the metrics and deliverables of each department. Netflix has the equivalent of earnings calls for employees.

Facebook runs its employees through very similar types of training as well.

As a company grows in size and complexity, coming up with ways to explain every aspect of business to all levels of the company becomes more difficult, but it pays huge rewards.

2.    Google: “Use Your Best People”

Laszlo Bock is formerly the Head of People Operations at Google, and now a co-founder at Humu. He has a handy example in his book Work Rules illustrating the benefits of having your sales training be done by your best salesperson, even though it means taking them out of the field for a period of time. (Gasp!)

His math is simple. Suppose this is the “before” scenario in a department:

Now suppose you pull your top salesperson for 5 weeks per year to train the others. This individual spends time teaching, following the others around, and generally giving them focused advice as they work. And let’s say the result is a 10% increase in the sales productivity of these other 10 salespeople.

Would it be worth it? Here’s the “after” scenario:

If you can get the new habits to stick in the second year—when your top salesperson is back on the job full time—the others will continue to bring in more revenue, bumping the total further to $6,400,000. And you keep these gains forever.

Even if the changes are incremental per person, if the habits stick, the growth of the unit as a whole can become exponential over the years.

Just make sure you test on one unit first before potentially committing career suicide by pulling all of your best salespeople out of the field. ??

3.    Ben Horowitz: “Train or Die”

In his start-up bible The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Horowitz teaches us a lesson that he learned from Andy Grove, Intel Co-founder. There are only two ways to increase the output of an employee: training or motivation. Since motivation is a multi-faceted and complex consideration, training is your best bet at improving performance. In fact, he calls it the single most important managerial job.

When Horowitz ran the server product management group at Netscape, he kept getting frustrated that product managers came up with their own versions of job expectations and varying methodologies. In an attempt to unify performance expectations—and ward off a heart attack—he defined his own expectations in a document aptly named “Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager,” and experienced an immediate upswing in performance. The book also features a great story about a CRO training his SaaS sales force with a custom program. All the training he cites in the book was custom-made and focused on a strategic business problem.

Conclusion: Keep Your Shirt On (and the Rest, Too)

When the time comes to spend your training budget, skip the off-the-shelf “leadership training” and take the crew swimming with their clothes on.

When they fall in the water, they will thank you.