When you invest in your people, you’re revealing what you believe in their potential. When clients spend on you, they’re revealing what they think about your discipline. In both cases, value is not a number. It’s a story about consistency, accountability, and trust.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Everyone talks endlessly about client value, customer experience, and competitive differentiation.
But here’s what most leaders miss: the customer experience is nothing more than an output of the employee experience.
You can’t deliver what Kenneth Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles called “Raving Fans” clients without first creating Raving Fan employees. The best leaders in business have always understood this instinctively. What’s notable is that they didn’t just say people matter; they proved it with their wallets, their calendars, and their decisions. This is a clear distinction worth noting, and I will elaborate on it in today’s post.
The Discipline of Investment in Leadership Development
Steven Bartlett, founder of multiple companies including The Diary of a CEO podcast (which is in my top 3 podcasts that I listen to weekly, and I highly recommend you take a listen as well), puts it plainly: “I consider myself to be the head of recruitment. This isn’t just executive rhetoric. It’s a fundamental business philosophy rooted in a simple truth: the furthest upstream thing in business is the group of people you assemble.”
Bartlett dedicates 20 to 30 hours per week to recruiting. Not reviewing resumes and not signing off on decisions and actually recruiting. That’s where he spends his time because he knows that everything downstream depends on getting this right.
Steve Jobs once said, “I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.”
Jobs interviewed over 5,000 candidates during his career. Think about that. The man who revolutionized personal computing, music, phones, and animation spent thousands of hours sitting across from candidates. That wasn’t a distraction from his real work. That was his real work.
Jack Welch at GE said it even more directly: “Hiring good people is hard. Hiring great people is brutally hard. And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field.”
Welch described his main job as “developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”
Notice the language. Gardener. Nourishment. This wasn’t HR-speak. This was a CEO who grew GE’s market value from $12 billion to $410 billion over 20 years, and he spent more time thinking about people than strategy.
Why Top Leaders Prioritize People Over Strategy
I learned this lesson the hard way early in my career. I joined a firm where I had to build something from nothing and grow it within a very short timeframe. I needed to get operations, marketing, and sales up and running simultaneously. What was in my immediate control was hiring the right person to take some of this off my plate.
Hiring in those early days wasn’t just important; it was mission-critical. The wrong person would set me back, and I would undoubtedly fail. The right person would propel our clients to success.
I interviewed people left and right. No one was extraordinary. No one believed in what I believed in, and instinctively I knew that no one I interviewed shared my core beliefs, could hustle, execute, or have the grit to perform exceptionally well.
That was until I dug into my Rolodex and called someone I trusted. I said I needed someone who had those ingredients. Sure enough, I got a name. Within 30 seconds of speaking with this person, I knew that this was who our soon-to-be clients needed to build what I was building.
My instinct proved 100% correct. That work ethic, that work product, is worth more than a person’s salary and bonus. When it clicks, it clicks, and you know that you have built something amazing — and that no one can compete with that raving fan employee and client experience. For years now, what we built with the right A+ players is a massive force to be reckoned with on every level. But it starts with the client experience in mind —Who are the right people who must absolutely be in place to execute against this strategy?
How Employee Investment Creates Customer Loyalty
You can’t half-commit to this. You either believe that the right person changes everything, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’ll settle. And settling is not just a compromise, it’s an expensive choice. This underlines the importance of maintaining high standards in your hiring process.
Here’s where it gets practical. Let’s talk about what this investment actually produces. Herb Kelleher, who built Southwest Airlines, said, “We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.”
Southwest hired roughly 2% of all applicants. It wasn’t unusual for a single applicant to be interviewed by over 100 people.
That’s not efficient by traditional standards. That’s expensive. That’s slow. And it’s also why Southwest became a consistently profitable airline (since 1973) that never laid off any workers, with consistently high customer approval ratings and the most solid financial stability in a boom-bust, managed industry.
The investment paid off. Every dollar spent on finding people with the right attitude is multiplied into customer loyalty that competitors couldn’t touch. This long-term strategy of investing in people is a beacon of hope for the future, promising sustained success and growth.
Kelleher understood the connection perfectly: “Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.”
Richard Branson said something similar: “If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.”
This isn’t feel-good philosophy. This is cause and effect.
Netflix operates on the same principle but executes it differently. The company pays employees “personal top of market for the role and location” and uses the “keeper test,” asking managers, “if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?” If the answer is no, they part ways quickly.
Netflix believes that to attract and retain top talent, it has to pay them more than anyone else, sometimes offering higher salaries than they might settle for, often before they even ask for more.
Is that expensive? Yes. Does it work? Netflix has 260+ million subscribers paying monthly for content created by that talent. The investment in people became the content library, which became the subscriber base, which became the valuation.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Marc Benioff at Salesforce says, “The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.”
Salesforce built its “Ohana” culture around the Hawaiian concept of family, instilling values in employees: “collaborate, take care of one another, have fun together, and work to leave the world a better place.”
Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Facebook, reflected that she “was going to go hire the best and the brightest, and people who were going to bring their passion and dedication and work hard. And actual experience in the field or related fields didn’t matter. That opens up a lot of hiring, because then you can just look for skills.”
These aren’t isolated examples. These are the people who built the companies that defined industries. And they all understood the same truth: discipline in hiring and developing people creates discipline in execution, which creates value for customers, which creates sustainable success.
What Your Budget Reveals About Your Leadership
Here’s what I want you to think about. Look at your last three months of spending decisions. What story do they tell about your leadership?
If you’re spending more on software than on developing your team, you’re betting on tools over people. If you’re filling roles quickly instead of correctly, you’re prioritizing speed over quality. If you’re paying market rates instead of top-of-the-market rates, you’re hoping to retain talent rather than ensuring it.
Every dollar is a signal, and your people are drawing conclusions about what you actually value.
You can’t buy that. You can’t automate it. You can only invest in it, cultivate it, and protect it.
Building A+ Teams
The companies that win in the long term are the ones that understand this. They don’t treat hiring as an administrative function. They don’t treat development as a line item in the budget. They treat both as the foundation of everything else they’re trying to build.
Because here’s the thing: if you get the people right, the strategy works. If you get the people wrong, the strategy doesn’t matter.
Discipline is what creates long-term sustainable success. And discipline starts with being honest about where you’re actually investing your time and money.
So ask yourself: are you spending like someone who believes people are your greatest asset? Or are you just saying it? Are you continually investing in your people through certifications and development, or are you just placating them during an all-hands call?
Guess what? Your budget has already answered that question. The only question left is whether you’re willing to look at what it’s saying.
