Back in the early years of building ActOne, some clients would call us with a specific request. They wanted to hire people who had come through Enterprise Rental Car. Enterprise, at that time, had invested in teaching their people what service meant. Understanding what each car on that lot meant to each person standing in front of you. This brand for this kind of driving. That one for a better cost proposition for short trips. They understood the elements of what they were offering, and how to put it in the hands of the right person. The whole market took notice. Companies were calling us asking for those people by name. Of course, we could not deliver to that specific; however, we could use the quality the requests implied to seek the best candidates to each position being filled. That is what teaching does.
We call it teaching at ActOne, and we were deliberate about the word from the get-go. Whenever companies said they were going to “train” someone, something always pulled at me. You train an animal. Some animals you can teach. Those animals include humans. So, we should be teaching people.
The difference between training and teaching, when my teams asked me to define it, always landed in the same place: you teach by example, applied reasoning, and agreement. You can stand in front of a room and run someone through the system, the process, the measurables. A machine can do that. Teaching is something else. The truest example came from my mother-in-law: your children more attention pay to what you do than what you say. Treat the people with ‘big ages’ around you well. Your kids will notice and learn from your example.
Developing people happens through the behaviors we live in front of them, alongside the investment of structured learning. That is the whole picture.
When the teams at ActOne understood it, a related concern arrived right behind it. Companies were recruiting our employees for the same reason others had gone off to do their own raiding from Enterprise. Our industry rallied to take anyone who had been with us for 18 months.
Those teams would bring me the costs, the hours, the curriculum, all of it. Was it worth it?
“What if we invest all this on development to teach and develop our employees and then they leave?” They would ask.
My answer has been the same since the beginning. What if we don’t develop them and they stay?
A person who grows and leaves carries something you gave them out into the world. That matters. A person who never grew and then stayed: that cost exists in everything, some of which you cannot quite name. In the pace of the work. In the ceiling you keep reaching for and cannot break through. In the culture that has quietly stopped becoming anything at all.
Development is about how much someone enjoys the input, as much as how well they output. How engaged are they in the learning? How invested in becoming more? A person being developed in their work brings something to it that a person merely processed through a training program never will. The difference shows up in how they handle the moment nobody prepared them for.
The people who invest their working lives in building something deserve the same investment before anything is asked of them in return. The large number of team members who have been with ActOne for more than a decade (in some cases, multiple decades), is the return on a mutual commitment made early and never abandoned. From the deepest part of my heart, I value them and appreciate what it means to their time with their families and cares, as much as to their teammates and our company.
Work is where most people invest the weight of their days; it is where we find out some of the stuff of which we are made. The leader who withholds development because the return feels uncertain is making a decision that reaches far beyond a budget line. That decision reaches into who the people around her will be able to become, and into what kind of leader she is going to be.
Developing people IS the work. Every person who walks through the door carries something not yet realized, and how well they grow depends in part on whether we were willing to nurture the circumstance that made it possible. That is a strong element of what it means to lead.