Training Happens Whether You Know It or Not
We’ve all been there: walking into a company with 3 to 5 learning management processes, three checklists with mostly the same content on each one, and a lot of outdated information that a new hire is expected to update when they find it doesn’t work. Leaders rely heavily on tribal knowledge, existing documentation, shared knowledge dumps, and the occasional video walking through the product.
The thing is, each of these methods really does count as training. This might be a controversial statement to make as a Training leader, but training happens whether you want it or not. People will share knowledge, best practices, and policies that are developed on the fly to create a cohesive experience for everyone.
The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want your people trained in this way, with no oversight, no organization, no actual plan? How long does it take for someone to be up to speed on your processes, vision, direction, or purpose? How long until they are productive?
If you don’t design your training process, chaos fills the gap, and poor knowledge transfer means lost productivity, repeated mistakes, uneven performance, and employee frustration.
Leaders are training teams every day; the only question is whether it’s by design or by accident.
Organizational Success Depends on Learning Agility
While working for ServiceNow, I had an amazing mentor who peeled back the business side of training for me. I saw that our customer training program would grow right along with the company’s growth: maintaining 4% (at the time) of the overall company revenue. That growth was just as organic as the company, keeping pace and flexing with the company’s direction.
All other companies for which I’ve worked had struggled with that type of growth: as Start-ups, they saw training as a secondary thing, something that was the responsibility of the Deployment or Implementation teams. The results: struggling adoption and a lot of questions on how to do things on their platforms. The structure of training wasn’t there, the coherent messaging was missing, and resources to develop training were strained. They needed something better.
Early stages of an organization are fast-paced, with quick changes on every pivot. Products change often, policies are developed on the fly to handle more and more common scenarios, and you need your people to keep pace. Structured training programs with information capture processes, single-hosted training locations, and predictable session plans will provide the framework that employees will rely on when ramping up on new products, processes, and procedures.
Having a single vision for knowledge transfer streamlines this experience across the board, standardizing all onboarding, upskilling, enablement, and customer training, keeping pace with the momentum of the company. Without that vision and direction, without structured learning systems, growth velocity will stall.
Onboarding is a Growth Multiplier
If you don’t have structured onboarding, it can increase your new hires’ time to productivity by 30-50%! Think about that for a second: newly hired people, hired because you are growing like crazy, can’t get up to speed as fast as they should.
How fast is that? Well, it generally takes between 90-100 days to be fully onboarded and productive for any new role. New employees will, essentially, suck at their jobs for at least 45-60 days as they ramp up, get trained, and get experience in their new role. Now, if you don’t train them, you increase the growth period by another 30-50 days. Half a quarter longer, because they are not properly onboarded.
Now, Onboarding isn’t just your general compliance training: It’s learning the tasks, proprietary knowledge, and vision that make your company, well, unique. Don’t sacrifice that because you think it takes too much time.
Playbooks, Not Tribal Knowledge
Too often, leaders will point to a senior member of their team and tell a new hire to “do it the way they do it” and expect to rubber-stamp an employee’s knowledge. The thing is, it doesn’t work that way.
Having lived through that more times than I care to count, I can tell you from experience that the senior member of the team is doing their job, and will not have the time to properly train their new co-workers. Instead, they say, “Do this and let me know if you have any questions.” The new hire, then, tries and fails, tries and fails, all the time feeling like they just can’t do the job.
Then, what happens when your senior team member leaves the team? Where does all that knowledge go? Not a good situation, because not everyone creates a knowledge base to brain-dump before they leave, like I did.
Building documented systems early, even when messy, prevents bottlenecks and standardizes knowledge across the team. A good CLO will help turn your tribal knowledge into repeatable, scalable assets.
Your Team Is More Than Sales
The Sales team is a critical team for the growth of a company, and leaders will pump a lot of funds into their enablement, as they should! But what happens after you Close/Won an Opportunity?
While working for a small start-up, we had that problem. The economic headwinds spooked the Board, and hiring freezes were in place for every team but Sales. Sales then had a bumper year, outstanding growth, lots of new customers, who couldn’t get onboarded. We didn’t have the deployment team to support he growth. Prioritizing Sales brought in a lot of new logos, but they weren’t happy when they were waiting 6 weeks to realize value.
Enabling Sales is important, but you need to enable the rest of your teams with just as much passion and urgency. The Customer Success team needs to know what Sales communicates to customers, Professional Services needs to have the knowledge/skill to get those customers launched as quickly as possible, and Support needs to know how to support the customer if something doesn’t work.
A good CLO will support cross-functional learning so silos don’t slow down execution. Sales, CS, Product, and Ops all benefit from unified learning leadership.
Early Learning Culture means Long-Term Competitive Advantage
My favorite employer experience always came with well-organized training programs. Proper onboarding, clear expressions of expectations, documented policies and procedures, and good on-the-job training sessions with a dedicated mentor who was dedicated entirely to my onboarding. I spent more time being productive and building relationships than struggling to find answers, stressing about my performance, and doubting my own skills. It’s such a pity it happened so rarely in my career.
Organizations that prioritize training early on in their growth develop a strong learning culture, generally democratized and collaborative, that naturally work cross-functionally. They recovcer quicker from mistakes, adapt faster to the market, and build stronger cultural ties and practices that resonate across every role in the company.
If you don’t start your learning culture before your Series A funding round, you will forever be playing catch-up. Instead of greasing your growth engine, you will deal with organically grown, tribally driven training systems that are more wiki-driven, fractional, and disjointed than structured.
