If you won’t Hire Teachers, be a teacher
Every week I see the same questions pop up in public forums—questions that should have been answered internally long ago. These aren’t new puzzles in the field; they’re the same old questions we’ve been asking and answering for decades.
Missed Opportunity
Enablement is treated as a luxury rather than core infrastructure. The assumption is that smart hires will simply figure it out, or that tribal knowledge will somehow circulate on its own. In practice, the opposite happens: external forums become the company’s real knowledge base, while internal repositories are choked out before they have a chance to develop.
Ok, so what?
When companies neglect teaching, the impact is felt every day. Employees waste hours chasing down answers that should already exist. Institutional memory never develops, so the same mistakes repeat. Too often, when someone is promoted, they aren’t told how to succeed in the new role. It’s somehow assumed that an entirely new set of skills will magically appear, without guidance or training. The result is people thrown into deeper water without ever being shown how to swim.
I’ve seen firsthand how frustrating this is—smart, capable people slowed down not by their ability, but by the absence of guidance. Other industries know better. In medicine or academia, teaching is baked into the culture: every generation lifts the next. In business, we somehow expect this to happen for free, and the cost of that delusion adds up quickly.
Blatant Personal Bias
I’ve long believed in hiring enablement roles and creating internal paths for staff to become teachers. I’ve also held a consistent belief that K–12 teachers make some of the best employees—they’ve already done some of the most difficult work there is; B2B Sales is trivial compared to managing a room of children who don’t want to learn about the Industrial Revolution. Yet too ofteth enablement roles and the value of teaching experience are dismissed as overhead or unnecessary.
If You Won’t Hire Teachers…
Then leaders must step up. That means:
Taking the time to explain and contextualize decisions.
Documenting answers so they live beyond the moment.
Turning questions into structured opportunities for growth.
Dedicating time for real training sessions, even if informal—because growth requires planned space, not just ad‑hoc conversations. This could be as simple as running short internal workshops, or scheduling team teach-backs where employees share what they’ve learned. It is not generic office hours.
Teaching isn’t just an People Ops function—it’s a leadership responsibility.
So, please - I implore you...
Enablement is not a luxury; it’s strategy. If you won’t hire teachers, then be one. Teaching in this context explicitly means making space for formal training—not always through a dedicated enablement team, but through deliberate time carved out for internal development. It’s about treating learning as part of the work, not an optional afterthought. Done consistently, these investments compound into a culture of growth rather than dependence. And if you refuse both to hire teachers and to teach yourself, don’t be surprised when your people look elsewhere for answers—and eventually, for opportunity.