Now, I hope that we are all agreed that investing in training and developing your people is essential for the growth of your business. Right?

When we think about training, most businesses will think about training for job-based skills as their training requirement and they will either book members of their team onto an open course or commission a course from an in-house or external organisation. That’s great when the business makes a commitment to training its staff, things are going well and budgets are not tight. But, in today’s world things are not so rosy and this type of training can be one of the first things to be cut.

In addition, this is only one type of training and there are many other areas that businesses should be investing such as culture development, innovation, team building, communication skills, supervisory, meeting management etc etc.

You can get people to attend courses on all of these but, I believe, invariably this type of knowledge is better gained through experience rather than learnt in a classroom.

All of theses training needs sounds expensive, right? What if you satisfy many of these training needs at the same time for a small ongoing investment and some commitment? I think you can. How about this for an idea?

The Business Book Club

Imagine a company where the CEO, the front-office receptionist, the finance manger, the project manager, the admin assistant and a few others from all different levels in the company all got together every couple of weeks over lunch to talk about a business-related book that they were all reading. Can you imagine it? Where each member of the group would takes turns in chairing the discussion and leading the group. Where the company would have a list of suggested books but the group would, ultimately, take responsibility in researching and picking their own books based on what they saw as their own training needs and the company would order and buy the books. Imagine that.

Now, think about the benefits:

• Better internal networking
• Improved communication across the company
• Team management and leadership development across all levels
• Meeting management skills
• Peer supported learning
• Very cost effective

Need I say more?

What do you think? Do you know any business that utilises this sort of idea in their business?

Thanks to Paul Lowry for the image.