Of all the topics, learning and growth opportunities are among the most important, yet they are often completely overlooked. Objectives in this area are frequently the most powerful. This plays to the leaders who believe that people are their most important asset. This is true in all businesses at one level or another. You ve probably heard the old adage that the best managers surround themselves with people who possess better skills than they themselves have. I had a manager years ago that used to define good management effectiveness by a delegation yardstick. He used to say that strong, effective managers could be deceased in their office three days before anybody would find them. The philosophy is true. Sustainable high-performance companies are never made up of less-than-effective or unskilled people. The best companies attract and retain the best people. GE is famous for it. It spends a large component of its annual budget on education and training. As a result, many of GE s top managers have gone on to run other large companies successfully. It is no coincidence.

In the mid-1990s I was consulting with AlliedSignal (now Honeywell). The CEO at the time, Larry Bossidy (a protege of Jack Welch at GE), measured managers in his organization by many topics he deemed important. One of those areas was hours of training and education. At the time, AlliedSignal had a 40-hour minimum requirement for each employee, and each manager had to report his or her department s performance to corporate.