Who in your business is responsible for making your employees better at what they do? Hiring them, paying them, and scheduling them are separate jobs, and I’m asking about making them better. If you hesitated, or the honest answer is “they are, I guess,” you’ve found a gap that most owners never look at.
The research shows how common that gap is. In its 2025 survey of U.S. employees, Gallup found that only 31% strongly agree someone at work encourages their development (opens in new tab). In the same survey, 51% said they were actively looking for a new job or keeping an eye out for openings. Those two numbers belong together. People rarely leave a place where somebody is investing in them, and they start watching the door when nobody is. Flip the 31% around and about 69% of your people can’t say with confidence that anyone in the building is helping them grow.
Those mistakes turn out to be training that you don’t have to pay for a second or a third or a fourth time.
— Gary B. Henson, Founder
The employer side of the story looks the same. LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report (opens in new tab) found that only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, down 5 percentage points from the year before. HR industry analyst Josh Bersin described the expectation in that report this way: “Employees are saying, ‘I expect you as an employer to help me keep up, and if not, I’m going to go somewhere else.’” Nothing in that sentence mentions pay. The whole expectation is that the business treats a person’s growth as part of the deal.
In a company with 10 or 50 employees, the cause is plain. There’s no training department, so development belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one. The owner assumes the managers are handling it. The managers assume the owner is, or that people will ask if they want something. The employees assume it isn’t on offer. Nobody is being negligent, and still nothing happens.
Here’s why it happens so reliably. Every business has a culture whether anyone designed it or not, and left alone it takes on the personality of whoever runs the place. About 95 out of 100 owners were never trained to run a business. They’re making it up as they go along, and they learned by trial and error. It’s natural for that owner to assume everyone else will figure it out the same way. That’s a missing habit rather than a character flaw, and habits can be built.
A second cause sits further upstream. Over 90% of the organizations I meet lack a written vision, mission, core values, job descriptions with standards of performance, an org chart, or regular required meetings. Without those, development has nothing to aim at. You can’t coach someone toward a standard that was never written down, and you can’t tell a person they’ve improved when nobody defined what good looks like.
of U.S. employees strongly agree that someone at work encourages their development, according to Gallup’s May 2025 survey. Gallup →
This is where continuous improvement starts, and it starts with expectations. Once the owner’s expectations are clear and in writing, there is a constant process of educating each employee on how to get better at what they do. I favor training people to be more committed to what they’re doing, to live inside of integrity in the organization, to understand the culture and step inside of it, and to build the soft skills that raise results. I don’t necessarily tell employees it will improve productivity, but it has been documented that productivity increases anywhere from 15% to 50% once these tools are in place. That’s the kind of return that is hard to find in a new piece of software.
You can put someone behind this in a month. First, name one person responsible for each employee’s growth. In most companies that’s the direct manager, and in a very small one it may be you. Second, add development to the quarterly review. Start the way I start with owners and ask, “What do you want?” Most people have never been asked that at work, and the answer tells you where to aim the training. Then ask what skill they want to build over the next 90 days and what you’ll do to help. Third, give people room to fail forward. When your expectations and accountability are clear, people start by getting a few things wrong. If you acknowledge the effort, tell them what to do next time, and stay patient, those mistakes turn out to be training you never have to pay for twice.
The same thinking applies from day one, which I covered in The 90-Day Window That Decides Whether a New Hire Stays. The full structure behind it, the written commitments, the job descriptions, the meeting schedule, is what we build in Culture Overhaul™. Until then, go back to the question I opened with. Write down every employee’s name, put one person’s name beside it, and see how many blanks you leave.
