When budgets roll by and new growth/profit is demanded, or when times look like they might get hard at some time in the future, folks at head office have been known to put the squeeze on - training budgets get cut, talk of utilisation increases, people are told to “do more with less.” What’s the downstream impact?

If the training that was being provided were effective, stopping it means that moving forward the staff will be less skilled, less effective. If people are focusing on utilisation, they are focusing on results that have already happened, rather than the behaviours that produce the future utilisation. Asking people to do more work infers that they have free time to spare already, which they could now be using to do more. Engagement drops and the grind takes over, making the staff less motivated and less effective.

"...organisations are not like machines, they are like gardens. If you squeeze the nutrients out of the system, you get less growth, not more."

It’s not hard to see the deleterious impact that these kinds of trickle-down messages have, so why does it keep happening? If bosses in organisations treat that organisation like a machine, you could see that cutting budgets and squeezing more out of less might make sense, at least in the short term. However, organisations are not like machines, they are like gardens. If you squeeze the nutrients out of the system, you get less growth, not more. To get the best out of a garden requires a knowledge of how to create the right environment for things to flourish and be successful.

Maybe it’s a case of thinking of what can be put into the system to generate growth, rather than what to take out?