What if you don’t train your team and they stay?

I’d love to invest in the team, but we don’t have time really to do that. We have so much going on. People are already spread too thin. Okay, well, in a sense, time is money. So we’re gonna talk about the same time. What if we use this time and like someone leaves? And the answer is the cost of not doing it, the cost of having an ineffective person, the cost of having someone working in an unideal way, suboptimal way is so much higher, right?

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, most of all stress. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.

Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kinda hate it and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. So I was getting coffee with a friend last week and we were talking about, you know, where I’m focusing with my trainings and manager development work and things like that.

And he asked me, you know, what’s one of the common objections folks have or what are some of the reasons that folks maybe wouldn’t sign up? And I said, well, you know, it’s funny. A lot of times a business owner or even a team leader might say, well, I would love to invest in my team, but, you know, I’d hate to, you know, spend money on trainings or getting someone coached or whatever it is and then have them leave the team.

Like what happens then? And this friend stopped me and he said, well, they should be thinking about not what happens if the person leaves. What if that team member stays? What if that person doesn’t get training and they stay and they continue underperforming or they continue being stuck with whatever issue is going on with them or they continue, you know, having not being effective as a manager, whatever’s happening. Isn’t the cost of not getting training way, way higher than spending a little bit of money on getting your team members up to speed?

And my jaw hit the floor. I was like, I’ve literally never heard it explained better than that in my life. And I said, okay, I’m gonna do an episode about this. I have to. Because this is something that I don’t think we’re totally thinking through. Okay, we’re thinking about, hey, you know, I got a limited budget. I got to allocate some things to, you know, if you’re a small business, you got to allocate some things to marketing, to advertising, to software, all these different things, maybe team.

You’re in a big company. A lot of times the objection is on time. Okay, if you’re like, I’d love to invest in the team, but we don’t have time really to do that. We have so much going on. People are already spread too thin. Okay, well, in a sense, time is money. So we’re gonna talk about the same time. What if we use this time and like someone leaves? And the answer is the cost of not doing it, the cost of having an ineffective person, the cost of having someone working in an unideal way, suboptimal way is so much higher, right?

Because if we have someone and there’s an opportunity that like a training or two or some coaching or mentorship or taking a class or attending a conference, if that has the opportunity to re-engage that person at work, upskill them in a certain way, help them get over a hurdle that they’ve been wrestling with. If we have an opportunity to help them in that thing, then we are gonna be benefiting our business or company, no matter how long that person stays.

Now, the other part of all this is the more we show our teams we’re investing in them, the more loyal they are and actually the longer they stay. Okay, so this is not about training people to like have some other company benefit from it. This is so while they are there, they are the best they can be for your benefit. And we can never guarantee how long someone’s gonna stay in a company. There’s all sorts of reasons people would leave.

They might wanna move somewhere else. They might want a different level of flexibility. They might’ve lost interest in this sort of field and they wanna pursue something new, okay? And those things aren’t because they hated the job, they just, it may not be a fit. And if we avoid upskilling and upleveling people because we think, well, they better sign a contract in blood and their life is gonna be spent in this company, that just doesn’t make sense.

Now, if you’re worried about investing in your team because you have lower performers and they’re being managed out, that’s something else that I’ve heard, especially when I was running my special ops accelerator. So this was a program training ops managers to be their best, to really support that business owner and setting up the systems on a team to really help the team reach its full potential. And if you had an ops manager that was really struggling, you might be wondering, well, if I don’t really know if this person’s a good fit or not, why would I invest money in them?

Well, every single day that that mediocre performer is performing mediocrely or whatever, okay? You know, if they’re not performing great, every single day, that person is not performing at their best, that is costing you money. Wouldn’t you want this person to get the skills while they are here? Because unless you are managing that person out, yeah, no, you’re maybe not gonna, if you’re in the middle of a managing out situation, but if you’re not sure about someone, there is a high likelihood that if you gave them the tools to be more successful and that person wants to do better, then they’re gonna do better and it was worth the investment.

Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show with large companies like Google and also with startups and small businesses like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas? Whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty making us all, well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners.

I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at hello at leahgarvin.com or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company and let’s make all this team stuff easier and a lot more fun. So we gotta think about investing in our teams as a longer, like through a longer time horizon. It’s not about are they gonna get the ROI at the end of this training, like, and boom, it’s finished.

No, it’s about how do I create a team that can withstand change, that is like future-proof to be able to have new sets of skills that they’re gonna be needing for all the changes that are coming, people that are adaptable and flexible to be able to do that. And again, how do I demonstrate in my teams proactively that, hey, I’m investing in you and to plant seeds that create stronger loyalty. And no, it’s not a guarantee.

That’s another thing that I’m often asked like, well, what guarantee? I don’t have a guarantee. We’re talking about humans. Okay, there’s no guarantees with humans. But the more that we demonstrate that we care about our teams, the more we invest in them, the more we recognize great work, the more we give feedback, right? Show them, hey, I’m invested in your success. I want you to be, you know, I see a path for you. You help them chart that course.

The more we do that, the better results they deliver. So it doesn’t really matter if they’re on your team for another year or five more years because you want to get the best version of that person for however long they’re there. And you also created a team where you are a destination manager to work for. You become a destination company because you’re showing you’re investing in your people. The opposite of that is being like, oh, stay away from there.

They send you into a sink or swim situation. People talk, the internet talks, right? We know the kind of companies that people aren’t really bothering with their team members. We all know about it because people are sharing that experience. But if you want your team to be somewhere that people want to be on, both to join in the first place from a recruitment standpoint and to stay on from a longevity standpoint and a retention standpoint, and the more we show our team members, I’m investing in you, and I’m not just like waiting to hedge if you’re going to quit or not.

The whole mindset’s, it’s not where we want to be. You know what I mean? We don’t want to live as managers, as leaders in this fear of trying to look two steps ahead and only investing someone if it’s like a total sure thing. Because again, it’s people we have no idea if it’s a sure thing or not. Instead, put it forward. Invest in people, show them I’m here for you because the cost of, okay, let’s say you spend $5,000 investing in a coach for a team member, and they attend, they go through a coaching program three or six months, whatever, and that person at the end of the day, they really discover, yeah, I don’t love it here.

I think, I do want to move on. Really, is that going to bring your business down that $5,000? No, because if that person’s heart wasn’t in it, maybe their performance was going to start dipping, and that costs you so much less pain for them to realize it themselves than for them to kind of start not delivering results, and then you’re having to spend all this time kind of figuring that out, and then maybe eventually they really don’t deliver, and then you’re managing them out.

It’s so much easier for you. That $5,000 that you spent on that person has already saved you so much more time in having to figure out someone that realized like, oh, I don’t like it here, and then they stay because they are stuck, and they don’t know what to do about it. It’s always worth it. It is always less expensive than the alternative. You’re investing in things like training your managers. I mean, you all are listening to your managers, and you look around, and you see a lot of folks don’t get manager training.

A lot of managers do not listen to this show, so let’s change that, but a lot of us start our jobs as managers, and we get no training at all, and then it’s harder to give feedback. It’s harder to have hard conversations. It’s harder to navigate conflict. It’s harder to set expectations, and so the work productivity goes down, and we’re slower, and we’re muscling through it, and we are figuring out how to navigate this whole world of a manager ourselves by reading maybe some books or piecing it together, watching YouTube videos or whatever, talking to friends.

If we were given the resources of some kind of programming, some kind of coaching something, say, hey, first-time managers, new managers, like here are some of the fundamentals to really help you get over these hurdles, what an easier job we would have, and we’re not learning at the expense of our teams, right? If your team member is in a new, they start in a new kind of job, like let’s say they get promoted, and now this new title is a little bit out of their, there’s a lot of learning to it, and there’s an opportunity to send them to a class or a training that’s gonna make that easier, or they need to really have industry knowledge and there’s a really great conference that could be coming up, but it’s $1,000 a ticket and it’s in Europe or something, so you gotta spend a lot of money to get them out there.

This, we’re talking, we’re talking trivial expense in the grand scheme of things for someone to be able to deliver better results. They really don’t want us to think about nickel and diming every single expense because the reality is, people, this is your currency, your team is the most important resource in your team, so that is where we always should be investing first because without a team, you’ve got no business. Without a team, you have no one to deliver the results that you need to deliver, you have no one deliver your 2025 plan, you have nobody.

So I encourage you, whatever it looks like, to think about how can I proactively invest in my team? So not only do they feel like, yes, I am here, I am believing in you, I am putting it forward, but you’re identifying maybe their interest from their career goals, right? Maybe they’re really empowering and reinforcing their strengths, maybe you’re helping them really close a gap in their skills so that they can be a high performer. Whatever that looks like, making those investments will always pay off in spades because even if that one team member leaves that you’ve invested in, other team members see, we are a team where we invest in our people, right?

And then that elevates their performance. So there’s never a downside. And I’m telling you, it is a trivial cost, whatever you’re investing in the development of your team, compared to the cost of folks working ineffectively. That’s always gonna cost more because the ineffective workers, that makes high performers not wanna be on the team and then they start leaving, okay? And that makes your customers frustrated because they’re not able to deal with the challenges that come up.

And that makes your stakeholders not believe in you as a manager, right? The consequences are too high. So I want you to think about that question. Not what if I train my team and people leave, but what if I don’t train them and people stay? See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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