The CFO of a company asked his CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave the company?”
The CEO answered, “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

I was recently asked to speak at a conference for women in leadership that was extremely well attended. The speakers (of both genders) at the conference were luminaries in their respective fields who brought incredible insights on work place challenges and best paths to navigate for a career woman. I would have loved to have an opportunity to attend such a conference when I was still in employment. I write this because there were a significant number of no-shows, women who had signed up and paid to attend but had “last minute” work related issues that prevented them from investing in themselves.

As a number of them were from one particularly large company, I asked a former employee of that company as to whether this was a corporate culture to sign up for training and then give it a miss. Her answer was as insightful as it was worrying. “The problem with women in senior positions is that they treat their jobs the way they treat their families: life cannot go on without their involvement in every aspect and the family/job will collapse in their absence.” Well, I stopped dead in my tracks. I had never thought about it from that perspective. I asked her to go on. “You see Carol, you will never find men missing out on training. They know that the training will personally help their professional growth and they vigorously take up company sponsored training to improve their skills which can be used at their next job. For men, it’s all about what’s in it for me.” Now, I write this with much trepidation. The last time I tried to opine about the problem that women put themselves squarely in, I was labeled a sell-out to the female gender. But cowards never die, so here goes: “It’s never that serious.”

What is never that serious, you ask? Your job; It’s never that serious! It can, and will, go on without you. A few months ago, I was training some senior executives of a multinational and this very issue came up: how indispensable are staff members. One fellow, who was getting quite agitated with the tangent that the discussion was taking, volunteered a recent experience. The previous week, a colleague had passed away on a Friday. The news was received with the usual shock and sorrow and the team began planning for how they could support the family. When they came to the office on Monday, the colleague’s desk had been cleared, much to their surprise. But that was not the only surprise in store as by 11 a.m. there was another gentleman sitting in their colleague’s seat…working! As the fellow regaled us with the story, expecting the requisite sympathetic clucks of the listening crowd, he was rather surprised by the lukewarm reaction. “Buddy,” one of the other senior executives began, “this is not our company and life has to go on. Did you expect the company to stop?” This was a peer-to-peer checking mechanism in play coming to the same conclusion: It’s never that serious!

Your ‘permanent and pensionable’ employment contract is in practicality a rolling thirty-day contract that starts on the beginning of the month and ends on the date you receive your salary. The contract is then rolled over for another thirty days ad infinitum. The contract ceases to exist at the point where you part ways with your employer, which is increasingly becoming less than the 30 plus years of the baby boomer generation. Within those thirty days, the company might decide to invest in you by sending you for a training program. Your company doesn’t do that as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility goals of educating members of society that lack access to quality education. It does that with the primary goal of adding value to a resource (you) with the aim of extracting a return on that investment sometime in the future via an appropriate application of those very skills that you have been trained in. But here is the secret: those skills you are being trained in can be applied in another organization.

Companies shrink and expand depending on their strategic intent, their life cycle in the industry or the outlook of future financial performance. Tucked within that shrinkage and expansion lie our jobs that are never indispensable contrary to many a self-important thought. We give our best performance –or so we think until we undertake the periodic performance review – at our jobs and are appropriately remunerated for it monthly. Our companies invest in training us to enable a better performance of our jobs that will invariably lead to a better performance on the company’s bottom line.

By training you, the company is pouring a little bit of fertilizer on the cabbage patch of your personal growth. Your colleagues who do not have the same opportunity will either have to self-finance the purchase of that knowledge or just make do without it. You have a distinct knowledge advantage over your colleagues when you are sent for training. That knowledge will not be required to be put in a package and passed on to your colleague at the annual staff Christmas party. It is yours to do with as you please, to apply in whatever future jobs you may hold, now and forever amen.

Missing out on a training opportunity is a crime to oneself. Missing out on a training opportunity because of not being able to tear oneself from the work desk is an even bigger crime. If no one else can do your job for the two or three days that you should be investing in yourself, you are either the best chimney sweeper south of the Equator or very poor at delegating to your subordinates. It’s never that serious.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka