David Maister points out why he says training is useless.

He sums it up:

So, let’s summarize, I say. You’ve chosen people who don’t want to do the job, who haven’t demonstrated any prior aptitude for the job, and you are rewarding them for things other than doing the job? Thanks, but I’ll pass on the wonderful privilege of training them!

I tend to agree with David. Beyond that, I believe that in order to bring out the best in our people, we should be about doing more than just layering more ‘training’ upon them. We need to unearth the individual strengths and capabilities of our people. Training is for work horses and dog shows. Training is often what keeps people from discovering the greatness within. We condition people to act within conformity (the topic of the day I guess) and to settle for generic mediocrity.

How sad.

It’s about developing people, not just training them.