Jim Johnson reflects on his first employer’s culture of investing in employee development—combining intensive sales training with leadership development. He highlights that leaders didn’t just send employees to learn; they attended the training alongside staff to improve together and model continuous learning.
I got really, really lucky in my life. Now, I think Nathan has had some of that type of stuff, too. Where the first company I ever worked for, that was a big part of their thing. It was two sides of a coin. They wanted us to be great salespeople, so we got great sales training. I mean, I've been to anything and everything you could ever be on sales guys. They were also big on leadership. They didn't believe that they were the best leaders, but they believed getting the training from some of the best leaders that existed on the planet out there would make us more effective as leaders in their company and thus grow them, too. And so they would send us to leadership training, but they would attend with us. It wasn't just a, hey, you go learn it and get better than me. They wanted to be great as well.
