How to Invest in Your Team Without Wasting Time and Money

Ask any business owner if they invest in their people, and the answer is likely to be yes, of course. There's a training budget. People go on courses. Boxes get ticked.

But ask what that budget contains and the picture starts to look a bit different. Technical training. Compliance courses. Health and safety. Accreditations. All necessary, all valid, and almost none of it touching the thing that determines whether your business grows: how your people think, lead, and work together.

Angela Hodgson joined us on What One Thing as our first-ever returning guest, and her one thing was this: invest in your people as much as you invest in your machinery. Not the technical training you're already doing. The other stuff. The stuff with no obvious line on the budget and no easy way to measure whether it's working.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

1. Check what your training budget is paying for

Angela's starting point is always evidence, not instinct. Before you do anything else, open your budget and look at what's in it.

Her prediction, based on years of working with manufacturing and engineering businesses, is that you'll find technical training, accreditations, and compliance courses. What you probably won't find is a single penny allocated to leadership development, management development, or anything that changes how people behave rather than what they know.

Practical step: Split your current training spend into two columns: technical and everything else. If the second column is empty, that's your evidence. Time to look into people development.

2. Start with the goal, not the training

Most businesses approach training backwards. They spot a gap, decide everyone needs to learn something, book the course, and wait for things to improve. Six months later, the theory has faded, the folder is gathering dust, and nobody can work out why nothing changed.

Angela’s answer is to flip the question entirely. Instead of “what do we need to train people on,” ask “where does the business need to get to?” The training comes last, not first, because until you know the destination you have no way of knowing what gaps you’re trying to close.

Angels worked with a client in the rail industry who wanted to break into the energy sector. That became the goal. Everything, the roles, the accountability, the skill gaps they needed to close, aligned around it. They ended up securing a £100,000 contract. The training and Angela’s guidance did not cost £100,000.

That return isn’t unusual when training has a purpose. It’s almost impossible when it doesn’t.

Practical step: Write down one measurable goal your business wants to hit in the next twelve months. Then ask: do you have the people, the capability, and the leadership to get there? Where the answer is no, that’s your training brief.

4. Set the conditions for success before anyone sets foot in a training room

Angela ran a capacity improvement workshop recently where every single attendee started the day insisting they were already as efficient as they could be. By the end, every single one of them had found at least five hours a week they hadn't known they had. One of them found ten.

But if she'd left them there, motivated and full of ideas with no plan for what came next, they'd have absorbed most of those hours into the next thing on the to-do list within a fortnight. The training would have been a good day out and nothing more.

The difference between training that changes behaviour and training that doesn't is what happens before and after the room. What's the goal going in? Who's holding people accountable coming out? What are they going to do with what they've learned?

Hayley said it well during the conversation: she's been on plenty of training courses in her time, and nobody has ever asked those questions. Unfortunately, that’s the norm.

Practical step: Before anyone in your team attends any training, agree on one thing they're going to implement as a result. Set a date four weeks out. Check in on that date. That's it. That's the accountability structure, and it's more than most businesses bother with.

5. Time is harder to give than money

Phil made a point during the conversation that will probably resonate uncomfortably for a lot of business owners. The reason businesses send people on week-long courses and tick the box is that it's easier to spend money than time.

Taking someone off a job, finding cover, protecting that time in the diary week after week, having a conversation with them where you're not entirely sure what you're going to talk about, that's the bit that feels too hard. So it doesn't happen, or it happens once and then disappears when things get busy.

Phil has started a mentorship at Affirm IT, spending regular time with one of his team. His honest account of how difficult it is to protect even that is likely the same difficulty every business owner faces. Phil talked about arranging the cover in advance, not assuming the same time blocked out each week will work, and keeping the conversation on a clear agenda and structure, or it becomes a catch-up on how things are going.

Practical step: If you want to start a regular development conversation with someone in your team, don't put a recurring appointment in the diary. Have a conversation about when it can realistically happen, who's covering their work, and what you both want to get out of it. Treat it like a client meeting, because in terms of what it's worth to your business, it’s just as important.

6. Test the water before you commit to anything bigger

If you're not sure where to start, Angela has a suggestion that's free, takes five minutes, and will tell you more about the state of your business than most consultants will in a day.

Use a polling tool; Slido is a free option, and ask your team three anonymous questions. Do you think we're a high-performing team? Do you feel supported by your manager? Are you clear on our goals?

The anonymity matters. Ask those questions in a room, and you'll get polite nodding. Ask them on a phone with no names attached, and you'll get the truth.

The catch is that you have to be prepared for the truth before you ask for it. Angela is clear on this: decide what you're going to do with the results before you send the survey. If the scores come back low and you try to figure out who gave you a three out of ten, you've made things worse. If you stand up and say you're committed to changing it, you've started a culture change and earned your team's respect.

Practical step: If asking all three questions terrifies you, just pick one from Angela's list. Set it up anonymously before your next team meeting. But first, write down what you'll say to the team if the scores are lower than you'd hoped. That preparation makes a big difference.

The bigger picture

Angela's what one thing sounds straightforward: invest in your people as much as your machinery. But the reason most businesses don't do it is that the machinery is tangible and the people stuff isn't. You can point to a new CNC machine and say that cost this much, and it produces that. You can't always do the same with a leadership programme, at least not until you've done the work to define what good looks like and measure against it.

The businesses that get this right aren't necessarily spending more. They're spending deliberately, on the right problems, with the right measures in place to know whether it's working.

That's a very different thing to sending someone on a course and hoping for the best.

Angela Hodgson works with manufacturing and engineering businesses on leadership development, capability building, and performance improvement. You can find her on LinkedIn or access her free diagnostic tool via the show notes.