It is that season again

Never underestimate the power of training.

At a dog training conference, a trainer boasts that he can train a dog to do anything. To illustrate this, he brings a German Shepherd onto the stage and claims he’s taught it Morse code.

Someone in the audience shouts, “Prove it!”

He gives the dog a nod, and it walks over to a table and, with its paw, taps out the following sequence.

The audience sits in stunned silence for a moment until someone asks, “Well, what did it say?”

“Woof!”

It is that season again. All over the country, management teams are locking themselves in conference rooms, staring at whiteboards, and arguing over next year’s numbers. Strategic planning season has arrived. Targets are being set. Budgets are being built. And somewhere in that budget, almost predictably, a familiar line item gets the first stroke of the red pen: training and people development.

This year, the temptation is stronger than usual. The conflict in the Middle East has rattled markets, pushed up oil prices, and quietly made its way into the cost of almost everything we buy. The peso has felt it. Inflation has crept back. Finance officers are sharpening their pencils, and the instinct in every uncertain season is the same: trim whatever looks optional.

And training, on a spreadsheet, always looks optional.

Here is the problem. It isn’t.

Allow me to paint a simple picture. Imagine a long-distance runner who, worried about the cost of food, decides to stop eating a few weeks before the marathon. He will save money, yes. He will also collapse before the finish line.

Cutting your people’s development during a difficult year works the same way. You save a little now and pay for it painfully later, right when you need your organization to run its hardest.

We forget a basic truth about business. Equipment depreciates. Buildings depreciate. Machines lose value the moment you switch them on. People are the only asset on your books that can appreciate—but only if you keep investing in them.

Neglect them, and they depreciate faster than any machine because discouraged, unequipped, and uninspired people do not simply stand still. They quietly leave – or worse, they stay and stop caring.

Zig Ziglar said it best: “The only thing worse than training your people and losing them is not training them and keeping them.”

In a lean year, that line should be posted on every planning-room wall. A downturn does not ask less of your people. It asks more.

Fewer hands are expected to carry heavier loads. Margins are thinner, so every decision matters more. Customers are anxious, so service must be sharper. Morale is fragile, so leadership must be clearer and steadier.

This is precisely the season when your team’s skills, mindset, and motivation make the difference between an organization that merely survives and one that comes out of the storm stronger than it went in.

History keeps proving this. The companies that emerge from every recession as market leaders are rarely the ones that cut the deepest. They are the ones that remain disciplined about costs while continuing to sharpen their people as their competitors grow dull.

When the recovery comes – and it always comes – they were the ones ready to run.

So, as you sit in your planning sessions and build next year’s budget, may I offer a suggestion?

Do not treat the growth of your people as an expense to be minimized. Treat it as a multiplier to be protected.

A well-designed seminar, a leadership program that develops your managers, a keynote that inspires a weary team – these are not luxuries you enjoy when times are good. They are investments that pay the highest returns precisely when times are hard because they make the same team produce more with the same budget you already have.

I have spent the better part of my life in front of business audiences, and I have witnessed what happens in a room when tired people are prompted about their “why,” when leaders are given practical tools instead of vague pep talks, and when an organization decides that its people are worth developing even in a difficult year.

Something moves. Energy returns. Clarity returns. And that renewed team walks back into the marketplace ready to compete.

If your plan for next year is to win, it must include the people who will actually do the winning. Put a line in that budget for their growth and then, unlike everyone else, refuse to cross it out.

The season is uncertain, the pencils are sharp, and the pressure to cut is real. But the organizations that will own the recovery are the ones deciding, right now in their planning rooms, to keep growing the very thing that grows them.

Choose to be one of them.

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Join Francis Kong for another run of his one-day Level Up Leadership: Agile. Able. Adaptive. seminar-workshop on Aug. 26 at One Rockwell, Makati. This practical and inspiring learning experience is designed for leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals who want to lead with greater clarity, confidence, courage and competence in a disrupted world. Seats are limited. For inquiries and registration, contact April at +63 928 559 1798 or Sylene at +63 976 638 8974.Visit www.levelupleadership.ph